NZMWP’s Historic File: OLIVE WALKER ~ ROTORUA, NZ
Olive Walker never made it to her sister’s house on Friday, May 15, 1970.
Mary Walker was waiting for her 18-year-old sister, who was going to babysit her kids, but she didn’t show.
The next morning Mary heard on the news that Olive’s body had been found at 11.30pm the night before nearly 5km south of Rotorua.
A group of teenagers found the badly beaten and fully-clothed body about 35m off the highway in a rest area.
Mary was then aged 25. She and Olive hadn’t been close friends – just sisters.
But her death came as a huge shock to the family of 11 children.
Their mother, Ngahuia, is now 86 and still lives in the family home on Leslie St in Rotorua with her son, Trevor.
But the father, Te Pou, died in 1982 at the age of 76.
Mary blames her father’s death on Olive’s murder, saying he was never the same after she was killed.
“The pressure and stress. That killed him.”
Olive was described as a shy girl. She didn’t have many friends and only went out in the weekends.
Her father was quoted in the Daily Post days after her death as saying he did not let his daughter have boyfriends.
“I always told her she had a lot of years ahead of her,” he said at the time.
But Olive did not ever have the chance to have boyfriends or get married.
Some time between leaving her home on Leslie St that Friday night at 6.45pm and about 9pm, the estimated time of the murder, she was picked up by someone and brutally killed.
She was supposed to walk to Mary’s house on Malfroy Rd but was last seen near the Odeon Theatre in Pukaki St at 7.50pm.
In some ways Mary doesn’t want to know what really happened to her sister.
She is now 60 and says too much time has passed to dig up all the pain again.
“It doesn’t make me feel good that no one has been caught for it.
“But if it happens, it happens. I’m sure everyone would like to see justice done – but it’s been 35 years.”
Link: https://www.nzherald.co.nz/rotorua-daily-post/news/article.cfm?c_id=1503438&objectid=10927220
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