Hello, it’s been a while. I’m Paloma Migoni, producer and presenter of The Lost. In June this year, The Lost won a Gold Award for Excellence at the prestigious New York Radio Awards.
I just wanted to thank you all for your support, and we hope to bring you another series of The Lost sometime soon. But until then, here’s a different kind of story about another New Zealander who never came home.
My colleagues at RNZ and staff have teamed up to bring you Gone Fishing, about a murder case from 1989, the serious questions it raised then and continues to do now. Gone Fishing is produced by Amy Mass and Adam Dudding.
I’ll let them tell you more about it. The night Dean Fullersands disappeared, he wasn’t meant to be alone. So the fact Dean was fishing on his own when a rogue wave ripped him off the rocks at Whatipu was just horrible, dumb luck. At least, that’s what everyone thought back then.
And as the search for Dean went on, it never crossed anyone’s mind that it could be murder.
I’m Adam Dudding. Dean Fullersands goes missing in 1989. Eight years later, police arrest four people for his murder. There was a knock at the door, so I got up and went into the hallway, and I think I looked first to see who was there, and I thought it was the police.
So I quickly told my flatmate, it’s the police, you know, or maybe I said it’s the pigs.
Meet Gail Maney. She’s a mum with a degree in applied sciences who lives a quiet life. But that wasn’t always the case.
I’m Amy Mass. I met Gail while she was in prison. Awfully getting into a motor vehicle, DIC, driving while disqualified, shoplifting, prostitution, disorderly behaviour, and there might be a couple of common assault charges in there as well.
Gail’s no saint. This born and bred Westie is a former drug addict, a former sex worker, and she did 15 years for the murder of Dean Fullersands.
They gave the scenario of events in which they said that he had sold me drugs, and that then he’d come back and stolen the drugs off me, so I had ordered a hit. The police case has a few problems. There’s no crime scene. There’s no forensics, no blood, no DNA, no murder weapon, no bullet casings, no fingerprints.
There are no phone records, no CCTV recordings, and most of all, no body. It’s not clear that anything happened at all. Despite all this, two juries agreed with the police, and Gail plus three others went down for Dean’s murder.
But for more than 20 years, Gail has been saying she’s innocent. According to her, she never knew Dean. In fact, she thinks he wasn’t even murdered. Mayhem. Murder. Maybe.