Joanne Chatfield (Joe)
Joanne Chatfield was a 17-year-old teenager that went missing in Auckland on November 19, 1988. Joe was last seen walking along Princes st towards Wellesley st alone. Joe had just finished watching a band play at the Auckland University cafeteria. Friends believed that she was heading home.
Joe always wore her hair in a mohawk, always in bright colors.
Joannes former employer Mr. Jordan described Joe as someone “whose tough punk image, hid a soft and likable nature.”He described Joe as “being really into the punk image, but she wasn’t a punk in the terms of the aggression side of things”.
Mr. Jordan also remembers that Joe ” had a great sense of humor, and I think she loved dressing up to appear outrageous but more for herself than others”. He continues “I think she loved being a non-conformist. She was really a decent person, intelligent with a lot of prospects. A week before she disappeared we had a disagreement because she’d been walking around Auckland city at night on her own, and she mentioned it to me”. “She said she had the right to do it – she was a woman and women should be allowed to do these things”
Joe was visiting an elderly resident in a retirement home. She was very anti-McDonalds and dreamed of becoming a journalist.
Joe’s parents were separated, she had been living with her mother, but on the night she disappeared, she was excited to be moving into a flat with her father, which was above the bookstore where she was about to start working fulltime.
Police were called when she failed to turn up at the flat that night. Police made extensive inquiries to find joe and had spoken to hundreds of people.
The Mangere-based officer in charge of ‘Operation Chatfield’ Detective Sergeant Len Leleni stated: ” I’m sure that someone has interrupted her traveling on the way home”.
In 1999(19 years after she went missing), police offered a $50 000 reward for a short time, and it was to be given for any evidence leading to the identity and conviction of anyone responsible for any criminal offense committed upon Ms. Chatfield since she was last seen. The reward offered produced no new leads.
In December 2008, (20 years after Joe was last seen alive) she was officially declared dead, presumed murdered by Auckland Coroner Murray Jamieson.
Jamieson said that “he had drawn that conclusion based on the fact that Ms. Chatfield had not made contact with friends and family, did not have the economic resources to survive if she moved in New Zealand and because he found no evidence that Ms. Chatfield had left New Zealand”. Dr. Jamieson concluded that ” Ms. Chatfield had died on or after November 19, 1988, but the cause and circumstances of her death remain unknown”.
Many rumors and speculation circulated throughout the years since Joe disappeared. Some believed that she had run away or moved to Australia, or that she was kidnapped by a cult. There has been no evidence to support these theories, and Joe’s body has never been found.
There is another family out there who has no answers about their loved one.
KEY POINTS
- Her friends have said that, every time there’s a list of unsolved murders or disappearances in New Zealand media, Joanne is never mentioned. Kirsa Jensen, Mona Blades, Amber-lee Cruickshank, they’re all listed. Not Joanne.
- The police did not take her disappearance seriously at the time; they considered her just some young punk chick that had run away and would turn up in some squat somewhere. By the time they took the case seriously, the evidence was long cold.
- “Joe” Chatfield, 17, was last seen around midnight on November 19, 1988, when she left a gig at Auckland University in Princes St.
- Police disclosed that another young woman at the same concert was abducted at knifepoint and raped hours before Chatfield went missing. They believe the incidents are linked.
- We know there are people out there with information that will help us finally solve this case. Relationships and loyalties change over time and our hope is that someone who has knowledge of Joanne’s fate, whether they were connected at the time or told information later, will do what’s best for Joanne and her family and come forward to police. We have not given up hope, and we have been able to solve similar cases in the past where new information is brought to our attention decades later.”At an inquest in 2008, Auckland Coroner Murray Jamieson concluded Chatfield had probably met with foul play and was dead.
- A $50,000 reward offered in 2007and in 2018 failed to produce any new information.
- Friends and family of Chatfield, who was into punk music and animal rights, told North & South, the first inquiry into her disappearance had not been rigorous enough, because she was treated as a runaway.
- Joe’s mother Claire Chatfield says when police called “out of the blue” to say the inquiry was being reopened in the mid-2000s, they told her it had been “mishandled” and “they had found things that should have been done that weren’t. I felt judgement calls had been made because of how she dressed.”
Do you know what happened to Joe Chatfield? Please call any police station – referencing Operation Chatfield; contact Crimestoppers on (0800) 555 111; or phone Detective Sergeant Len Leleni on (021) 191 0626.
Or anonymously online Crimestoppers-nz.org
We are finally going to give Jo the attention that she never got from media and police:
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Sources
http://www.stuff.co.nz/auckland/local-news/33975/Reward-offered-in-search-for-missing-person
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10474347
http://www.stuff.co.nz/auckland/local-news/33975/Reward-offered-in-search-for-missing-person
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