At around quarter to seven p.m. on Friday, May 15th, 1970, eighteen-year-old Olive Walker left her home on the outskirts of Rotorua, New Zealand to walk to her sister Mary’s house a short distance away. She had agreed to baby-sit Mary’s children that evening.
At about seven-fifty p.m., Olive was spotted near the Odeon Theatre on Pukaki Street, but no one is quite sure what exactly happened to her after that, for she never arrived at her sister’s home.
Later that night, at around eleven-thirty p.m., the body of Olive Walker was discovered by a group of teenagers at a highway rest area about three miles from Rotorua. She was found fully clothed, but covered in blood. It appeared that she had been raped and then savagely beaten to death.
The only other clues found at the crime scene were a set of shoe prints from a pair of men’s size-six construction boots.
The investigation almost immediately ran into problems, as the murder appeared to be a completely random attack of opportunity perpetrated by a stranger. Olive Walker, despite being eighteen, had no known boyfriends, and according to her father, was actually not permitted to date until she was older, thus making the pool of suspects in her murder frustratingly small. Olive was further described as shy and quiet, with few friends, and rarely went out, except on the odd weekend.
Police hypothesized that someone had simply seen her walking toward her sister’s house and had decided to snatch her off the road at around nine p.m. on the night of May 15th.
Though authorities in New Zealand are still investigating the cold case, they have over one-hundred persons of interest with possible connections to the murder, and lament that they have few resources to devote to solving a case that is now more than four decades old.
One of these suspects, an unnamed man identified because of his resemblance to a police sketch generated by the description of a psychic, is already serving time in a New Zealand prison for sexual assault. A comparison of his DNA with that recovered from the scene of the Olive Walker killing has not yet been made, and no charges of any kind against any individual have yet been brought.
Crime Immemorial 