Paul Jones stands beside the Gore wastewater pond where his 3-year-old son’s cold, lifeless body was found.
He has made dozens of visits there, and every time, the idea Lachie could have walked there alone becomes less plausible.
The 1.2km journey from his Salford St home on January 29 last year would have started over smooth concrete for the barefooted boy decked out in a Day-Glo yellow vest and his favourite police hat.
But at the turn down Grasslands Rd towards the oxidation ponds he had never before visited, the road quickly gives way to rough gravel, the pot-holed kind you have to weave as you drive along.
Lachie would have had to climb over an 85cm fence beside a gate, scaled a bank covered in thistles, gorse and sheep droppings before even reaching the halfway point of the journey.
Then he would have faced a 700m walk beside the first pond, nearly to the end of the second, where he was found by a police officer and his dog — almost as far from the road as is possible.
And it was not only that.
Lachie had a heavy, soiled nappy at the time.
It was after 9pm — past his bedtime.
He had a cold.
When his body was checked by police, pathologists and funeral directors, no obvious injuries were found, but most significantly, not a single mark on his feet or legs, aside from a couple of fading bruises.
So how did Lachie get there?
It appears it took police only hours to conclude it was a tragic accident after a senior officer swiftly stood down scene guards.
Mr Jones, though, would never be convinced.
"Someone knows something," he said.
There have been whispers in the small community, Facebook posts claiming knowledge but swiftly deleted, and the grieving father has strong suspicions of who may be responsible.
For nearly two years, his life has been an emptiness filled only by unanswered questions.
He is a man hollowed out by the trauma, driven solely by the possibility of justice for his son.
"I need to know. I want to know. I won’t let it rest," Mr Jones said.
"There’s no common sense to any of it."
A few months after Lachie’s death, Mr Jones was allowed a copy of the police file, which only fuelled his indignation and bewilderment.
The dog-eared binder contains hundreds of pages of witness statements, photographs and police notebook entries he has paged through day after day.
"That file’s an embarrassment," Mr Jones said.
After persistently petitioning police to reopen the case and shelling out for an experienced lawyer to put together a scathing review of the investigation, his efforts finally bore fruit.
Police told Mr Jones this week that they would be addressing many of the aspects he found most troubling.
Specifically, a timeline would be constructed, comprising sightings of Lachie and the movements of some of his family members; witnesses would be interviewed and reinterviewed; and further cellphone analysis would be considered.
Top-ranking officers from Dunedin and Invercargill had been called in to run things.
Mr Jones, scarred by months of police inaction, would not get carried away with the news, calling it only "a step in the right direction".
The fatal incident resulted in the Gore District Council being charged by WorkSafe New Zealand over an alleged breach of health and safety.
The council pleaded not guilty, and the Otago Daily Times understands that position was bolstered after a high-profile Queen’s Counsel reviewed he police investigation and was unconvinced the death was accidental.
Mr Jones had broken up with Lachie’s mother in August 2018 when things had become increasingly strained between them.
Custody of their son was a sticking point and during one bleak period Mr Jones went six weeks without seeing the boy.
By January 2019, things had improved.
Mr Jones spent the night with Lachie the day before he went missing but felt something was off.
"He wasn’t happy," he said.
"He had a lot of anxiety all the time ... I was very worried about him."
Just after 9pm the next day, his former partner called him to say Lachie was missing and he rushed back from Invercargill to join the search.
Mr Jones told police he was staggered by what he witnessed when he arrived at the house.
"I got there and could not believe what I saw ... my first impression was that they must have found him because they were all just acting normal," he said.
Mr Jones recalled a woman at the home urging him to "remember the good times" before he became hysterical and was bundled out to frantically search alone.
That night was the last time he had spoken to his ex-partner.
She did not respond to contact from the ODT, but her version of what happened on January 29, 2019 is apparent through her witness statement.
It was about 9pm, the woman said, when she realised Lachie had soiled himself and needed a nappy change.
But he slipped away as she tried to grab him.
"A recent thing he liked doing was to run away from me and hide," the mother told police.
Her older son then called her for help with his weights and during the minutes she was away, Lachie got out of the house.
The woman said she caught a glimpse of him running down the street and chased him to a neighbour’s house.
It was the first time Lachie had ever gone there alone, she said.
After a 30-second chat with the neighbour, the mother said she turned around and her son was gone again.
"I thought I would easily see him as it was such a short amount of time and he had his vest on," the woman said in her statement.
She speculated about his disappearance.
"At home he watches a clip called the Gingerbread Man where all the people chase after the Gingerbread Man — maybe that’s what he thought would happen."
Other witnesses also painted Lachie as a little tearaway.
One called him "the type of kid you have to keep an eye on all the time", and another said he had climbed a fence and vaulted into an adjoining property.
Mr Jones was bemused by the descriptions.
"The only place he’d go to is the park," he said.
"He knew he was not allowed on the footpath or the road — he knew the rights and wrongs."
Lachie would contentedly sit in his child seat for hours as his dad did his courier run; never hyperactive, the ODT was told.
It was a characterisation that seemed to be backed by the boy’s pre-school teacher.
"During class time Lachie was always working alongside his friends and I never had any issues finding where he was. He was very well behaved and I could tell he had a good grasp of right and wrong," she told police two weeks after his death.
"I hadn’t noticed Lachie playing hide-and-seek-type games while at pre-school and I have never known him to take off from his group. He was always too immersed in play to take off."
The teacher’s only theory was that the boy may have adopted an imaginary scenario where he was a police officer, "saving the day, chasing a bad guy".
The day after Lachie’s death, police officers canvassed residents in Salford St.
There seemed to be a clear thread.
At least four people reported seeing a boy in a reflective vest and police hat walking towards Grasslands Rd.
It was the kind of street kids often ran down, so they thought nothing of it, residents said.
While witnesses were generally consistent on what they saw, police found it difficult to establish an exact time.
A high school pupil, however, said she knew it was 8.30pm because she was speaking to a friend on social media at the time.
However, that contradicted Lachie’s mother’s firm view that it was after 9pm.
Police put it down, somewhat bizarrely, to the possibility the young girl’s phone time was inaccurate because of daylight saving.
What is certain is that the mother called 111 at 9.35pm and within two minutes told the call-taker she was worried Lachie had gone to the sewage ponds.
Dozens of locals were out with torches and spotlights scouring backyards, hedges, the nearby showgrounds as the light drained from the balmy summer night.
Some even told police about searching the perimeter of the northern oxidation pond — the nearest one to the road.
The southern pond, it seems, was almost written off because it was such a trek.
If Lachie wanted to play in the water, why would he have walked along its edge for hundreds of metres in the fading light to get in?
"A boy doesn’t just take off out the door and wander off to a place he’s never been — doesn’t even know exists — and hop over a fence in bare feet," Mr Jones said.
"I’ve probably taken 60 people out there, not one person’s thought he’s walked out there other than the police."
The day after Lachie’s death, police went out to the site with WorkSafe and Gore District Council staff.
A stick crudely shoved into the ground was the only marker of where the boy had been hauled out the night before.
No police tape protecting the scene, no forensic investigators.
It was nearly two weeks before Mr Jones was formally interviewed by police; nine days until his ex-partner was spoken to.
Two key witnesses with connections to Lachie were among the last approached by officers, a month after the death, the police file revealed.
One gave an account entirely out of step with what police were later told.
He told officers he was out searching for Lachie when he was picked up by a friend in Bury St before later being dropped off in Salford St, nearly a kilometre away.
However, when police interviewed the friend, he said the man asked to be collected on the main highway to be taken to an ATM and was returned to the same area.
The inconsistency was never explored by police despite one of the witnesses being among the last people to see Lachie alive.
Two months after the boy’s death, police finally requested phone data from telecommunications providers, only to discover much of it had been erased after 30 days as company protocol.
While they were unable to gather specific text messages from key witnesses, there was unusual cell-tower activity.
A couple of those connected to Lachie appeared to be near East Gore at times they claimed to be elsewhere.
Witness statements do not show any follow-up by police.
Among hundreds of pieces of paper Mr Jones has collected about his only child’s death, one of the most well-thumbed comes from the funeral home where he lay.
"[We] removed his footwear and socks, and pulled his wee sweatpant legs up to double check if we had missed any marks on his body, there were no visible marks on his feet or legs," the directors said.
How?
The question both drives Mr Jones and haunts him every single day it goes unanswered.
He wavers between bereft and impassioned, devastated and animated.
There is the aching hope that someone will come forward with information to blow the case open, but mostly there is the memory of a sandy-haired boy who loved his dad.
"That’s the heartbreaking thing. I held his hand one day in my van and said ‘I’ll never let anything happen to you, boy, I promise that. If anything happens to dad, you’ve made me the happiest person alive’," he said.
"That’s the memories I’ve got. Now I’ve got to lie at home at night, trying to close my eyes wondering what happened to him.
"He was everything to me. I waited all my life to have him, now he’s gone."
