As soon as he got home from work, Joe Tumanako instinctively knew something was wrong with his beloved daughter Annabell.
It was about 5pm on June 23, 2007, and the father-of-five had just walked into his Hawke’s Bay home after a hard day’s graft. “Annabell was sitting waiting for me,” recalls Joe, now aged 64. “She wasn’t happy, I knew that. She’d run out of gas and asked if I could give her a ride back to her car in Bayview, Napier.”
Annabell, a 35-year-old mother-of-five, had struggled on and off over the years with mental health problems. She was the middle child and often confided in her father.
But Joe didn’t take Annabell back to her abandoned Toyota hatchback that night. His late wife Lillian thought he was too tired to make the drive, so she ran their daughter across town instead.
Tells Joe, “They walked out of the house and that was the last time I saw Annabell.”
On that bleak winter’s night nine years ago, Annabell Tumanako simply vanished. Her body has never been found and an investigation uncovered few clues. But while police found no evidence of foul play, the Tumanako family refuses to believe that Annabell took her own life.
Long after the police gave up searching for Annabell, her desperate whanau kept looking for their beloved daughter, mother, auntie and sister. “For years, her mother and I drove around all the places we knew she went,” tells Joe. “We looked everywhere.”
Sadly, Joe lost Lillian in 2012 to metastatic breast cancer. “Annabell’s disappearance was hard on her mother,” he says. “It broke her heart.”
A retired bushman and possum trapper, Joe is now a grandfather of nine. He lives in a humble Housing New Zealand home in Hastings with his granddaughter Honey, who’ll turn 12 later this month. He says he will always regret not talking to Annabell that day.
“There was something she wanted to tell me that she didn’t want to say in front of her mother. If she’d talked to me in the car, I think Annabell would still be here today.”
Annabell’s boy Andre Tumanako, then aged nine, was also in the car on the evening that Lillian agreed to take her daughter back to her abandoned vehicle.
Once they started driving, though, Annabell asked to be taken instead to the mental health community house in Maraenui, where she lived with two other people, including her boyfriend.
“I still remember Mum was a bit funny, like she wanted to say something but was scared,” reveals Andre, who is now aged 18.
When they arrived at Annabell’s house, she asked her mother Lillian for money. “Mum said no, so Annabell got out of the car and walked off. Then Nana must have changed her mind, so she gave me $20 and told me to take it inside.”
Nearly a decade later, Andre still recalls the scene in front of him as he walked into the living room. It would be the last time he ever saw his mother.
“There were about 20 gang members in there just sitting around. I gave the $20 to Mum and said goodbye. I was just a kid and I was scared.”
Annabell, seen here with baby Andre, often visited her son at her folks’ home.
In a strange twist, Annabell’s abandoned Toyota was found the next day – not where she left it on the side of the road, but at a petrol station alongside the old Westshore Hotel in Napier.
The night she disappeared was a big night at the hotel. It was the opening race in New Zealand’s America’s Cup campaign and there was also an All Blacks vs Springbok match showing on the TV. None of the patrons remember seeing Annabell and it was never clear who moved her car.
Andre only discovered his mother was missing the day after, when a family member called the house. And although his grandparents tried hard to shelter him from the tragedy, he still remembers the grief of his whanau.
“It was hard to watch my granddad and nana go through it all,” he says. “They never knew what happened and they had no body to grieve over.”
Annabell’s other children – Kingi, Javon, Crystal and Cheyenne – were between the ages of three and 16 when their mum vanished. They were taken in by grandparents and their paternal families soon afterwards.
Even as a young boy, Andre somehow sensed that his mother was dead. “I just knew straight away she would never come home and I’d never see her again,” he admits.
The mum with oldest child Kingi.
Annabell and her four siblings were raised in the isolated community of Ruatahuna, a tiny Tuhoe settlement in the heart of the Ureweras.
“We lived on their mother’s land, in a house I built from scratch, and in a tent and caravan,” recalls Joe. “The kids ran wild and rode horses. The rivers and the bush were our supermarket, and if we were hungry, we caught trout, deer or wild pig.”
The family lived off the land without power or hot water. “We cooked over a fire and bathed the kids in the river,” says Joe, who maintains that Annabell was a happy child with a ready smile. “We nicknamed her Chooki because she ran everywhere, fast like a chicken.”
Although several of Annabell’s children – including Andre – also spent their early years growing up in the bush, they gravitated back to Hawke’s Bay for schooling. For a while, Annabell attended Hastings Girls’ High School, where she was a hard worker and keen netball player.
But her mental health took a turn for the worse in her 20s after she lost a baby during pregnancy. Already a mum to three-year-old Kingi, she was carrying twins at the time but miscarried one of them.
“That changed her for good,” remembers Joe. “Annabell was never the same after that. She started hearing things – she was sick.” Her parents also worried about the company she was keeping, and whether she was abusing drugs and alcohol. “We were scared for her and tried to get her some help,” he says.
Siblings Kingi, Cheyenne and Andre at play.
After Andre was born, Annabell spent six months in a mental health facility at Hawke’s Bay Hospital, a place she would return to several times in the following years. She went on to have more children, and although she loved them and tried to be a good mother, she couldn’t cope, tells Joe.
From his infancy, Andre lived with Joe and Lillian. “I feel very privileged,” he says. “I’ve always been so loved by my grandparents, but I knew who my mother was and I always had contact with her.”
Although Annabell had struggled in her adult years, she never lost touch with her family – and no-one looked forward to her visits more than Andre. “If I was asleep and she lay next to me, then got up, no-one else was allowed to lie in her spot.
I remember even as a kid shooing a fly off her side of the bed. Every minute I had with Mum was special.”
The last decade has been hard for the Tumanako family. Five years after Annabell vanished, her mother Lillian died after her battle with cancer. Then, just two years later, Joe’s daughter Kura died at the age of 41. He is bringing up her daughter Honey.
Andre is now considering a career in social work.
Although Joe no longer drives around looking for Annabell, he’ll never stop wondering what happened to her. And for the rest of his years, he will live in hope that the whanau will one day have a body to grieve over. “I’ve waited and waited, but we don’t have Annabell home yet,” he says.
He has often thought of adding a plaque to her mother Lillian’s grave, just so the whanau has something to remember her by. “But we won’t forget her,” he adds.
While Joe has few answers on his precious daughter’s final movements that night, he likes to think she waded into the sea at nearby Marine Parade and swam off into the Pacific Ocean.
“Sometimes I still go down there and look at the water,” he says.
And although losing his mum has been hard, Andre credits his grandparents for instilling in him a strength and compassion for others. Driven by a desire to help people less fortunate, he is interested in becoming a social worker.
But though he still thinks about his mother – and always will – he is determined not to let her loss consume him.
“I forgive the person or people who took my mum away,” he says. “This little boy forgives his mum’s killers. I want to prove that through loss and tragedy, you can become even stronger.”
