Victoria Howell, by all accounts, was a kind woman who had run a nursing home before her death.
In many ways, it made the extraordinary circumstances of her death, burial, then exhumation and reburial even odder.
Victoria had been born in Riverton on Valentine's Day in 1871. Her father was Captain John Howell of the Fairlight station at Lake Wakatipu and her mother Caroline Brown.
Her closest friend was Florence Hall, a nurse. In the papers of the time Florence was referred to as friend and business partner - but given that they lived together and worked together for many years, a case could be made for a different relationship.
When they moved to the Wairarapa they bought a home and turned it into a nursing home. And for a time everything was fine.
Then in 1906, Victoria took ill. Initially it was thought to be influenza and a nasty case at that. But a consultation with a doctor led to a diagnosis of a cancerous growth in her stomach.
He advised them to go somewhere quiet - and the pair moved to a home at Castlepoint.
Florence nursed her diligently but Victoria died on January 23, 1906.
She was buried in the Archer St cemetery.
Normally that would end the story - but it was only the beginning.
Victoria’s brother questioned why her will would name Florence as her beneficiary and not any members of the family. He was suspicious and made a case for Victoria’s body to be exhumed.
It was done and she was examined. But no growths were found. So what did Victoria die of?
Samples were taken and sent for analysis and suspicion began to fall on Florence. And by the inquest it was clear Victoria had died of zinc poisoning and all eyes turned to Florence again.
Poor Victoria’s body was again exhumed for further tests.
A series of investigations came to astonishing conclusions though. Victoria had been drinking water from a zinc tank, new tanks put in at the home in Castlepoint.
At the inquest it turned out a few other people who used the water at Castlepoint had also been ill, just not to the degree Victoria was.
A government analyst told the inquest the water Victoria was drinking contained four times the amount of zinc as other water.
With all the information to hand a jury at the inquest found that Victoria had died from zinc poisoning - made worse by the fact she was already ill.
The jury also found no other person was responsible for her death.
Victoria was again quietly buried, finally to rest.
Florence sued several newspapers who had all but convicted her before the findings of the inquest and moved on going to Wellington to work.
Victoria had been buried in what is called the old ground at the Masterton cemetery and the whereabouts of her grave is now not known.​

Did you know that Kāpiti Island is actually the tip of a huge mountain?
The island has been occupied on and off since Māori arrived in New Zealand, used by whalers and for a while was the centre of the flax trade.
In 1870 it was identified as a possible nature reserve - although by then much of it had been deforested. Farmers also lived there, leasing the land from the Maori who owned it.
The Kāpiti Island Public Reserve Act 1897 prohibited any further private sales of land on the island, and provided the basis for the island being acquired by the Crown, to be set aside as a nature reserve, with the exception of land still held by original Māori owners or their descendants.
One of its fiercest protectors was Ernest Valentine Sanderson.
We know him now as the founder of New Zealand Forest and Bird.
Sanderson was born in Dunedin on February 8, 1866 the son of Jane Sanderson and William Walter James Spreat before the family moved to Wellington. It was Spreat’s behaviour that initially broke up the family and when they returned to live with him, he attacked Val as he was known and his brother Louis, ending up shot to death which was ruled a justifiable homicide.
Val enlisted for the South African War and served before coming back to a clerking job.
When his father’s estate was finalised he had enough money to start his own business, Magnus, Sanderson and Company. Initially they imported bicycles then moved into cars.
When war was declared he tried to reenlist, lying about his age. He was eventually accepted and served as a quartermaster but only served seven months before becoming ill.
He had married Emily Louisa Cooper in 1904 but by the end of the war he was estranged from her and they divorced.
Sanderson was increasingly concerned about conservation and in 1921 he and the Evening Post newspaper went to the island. The resulting publicity about how badly off the island, with no fences for the reserve area or to protect it from the goats and sheep, was created a groundswell of support for better protection for the island.
“We have robbed the birds of tremendous areas of bush on the mainland. Are we not patriotic enough to give them a last secure resting place on this small island, seven miles by one mile in area, in order that our children and children’s children may see and learn what New Zealand was really like when their daring forefathers first set foot in this land of ours?” he wrote in 1922.*
Sanderson launched the New Zealand Native Bird Protection Society and built a membership of supporters and in 1935 renamed it the Forest and Bird Protection Society of New Zealand.
He campaigned against things like soil erosion and the menace to our bush by deer.
He married Nellie Milne in 1934 and set up home in Paekākāriki - from which he could watch Kapiti Island.
Sanderson died on December 29, 1945 and was buried in the Otaki Public Cemetery.
But even if his name is not as remembered anymore - his legacy - the Forest and Bird Protection Society continues.
* From the Forest and Bird website.​

Even with her work in the public eye, Emily Cumming Harris - one of New Zealand’s first professional artists - had a hard time letting go.
When asked to submit a painting for the art union at the Wellington exhibition in 1885, she wrote, 'I grow to love my pictures, and after I have worked & thought about & toiled at a picture for a long time I cannot endure the idea of perhaps some half drunken man, who coming into the Exhibition, pays 10/6 and maybe wins my picture.'
Now her beautiful work resides in the homes of private collectors and museums.
Emily was born to Sarah and Edwin in Plymouth, Devonshire, England on April 18, 1837.
Three years later, the family came to New Zealand reaching New Plymouth.
Her hard working parents had decent jobs, her father was a civil engineer and surveyor and her mother ran a school.
Later they moved to Nelson and Emily went to Australia to study art.
On her return, she and her sister Frances and Ellen ran a small school where they gave lessons in music, dancing and drawing.
Emily kept a diary and described the poverty her family lived in. It was a hard life and while she would have preferred to pursue art full time she was unable to due to needing to make money for her family.
She was able to sell some of her work but it was not enough to live on.
Her works were studies of New Zealand flowers and plants but also birds, still lifes and landscapes.
Emily’s work went into exhibitions including into the Sydney International
Exhibition in 1879 where she won a first degree of merit. In the New Zealand Industrial Exhibition in Wellington in 1885 she won first prize and a silver medal for a painted screen and third for a table top.
She was also commended for her work in a London exhibition.
There was a pressure that came with success to exhibit more and sell more which she found difficult.
In 1890 she, along with a Nelson bookseller, published three books, New Zealand flowers, New Zealand ferns, and New Zealand berries (which were published the same year in a single volume, Flowers, ferns, and berries of New Zealand). Each contained 12 lithographs with descriptive text, and some copies were hand-coloured by Harris herself. She also illustrated a children's book, Fairyland in New Zealand, by Sarah Moore (1890).
Emily never married, and continued to work until her death in Nelson on August 5, 1925 after living in poor circumstances for years.
Along with her art, Emily also wrote poetry but very little of her work has survived.
A new book on her work Groundwork: The Art and Writing of Emily Cumming Harris has recently been published.
Emily is buried in Wakapuaka Cemetery.​

Lighthouses are both romantic and tragic places. Often isolated and windswept, they might seem like a dream for those seeking escape from the world—but when something goes wrong, there is no one nearby to help. You just have to cope.
So it was with 12-year-old Donald Young, who found himself thrust into adult responsibilities when tragedy struck the small lighthouse community where he lived. His father was the head keeper on Motuopao Island, a lonely outpost off Cape Maria van Diemen at the northwestern tip of New Zealand’s North Island, just southwest of the spiritually significant Cape Reinga.
The lighthouse had stood there since the 1870s, built to guard against the treacherous seas where the Tasman Sea meets the Pacific Ocean. Alongside it were a few weather-beaten homes for the staff and their families—sturdy structures built to endure constant salt spray, howling winds, and complete isolation.
Living there in 1933 were Donald’s family, Henry and Minnie (Betty) Newson, and Frederick Gage with his wife Mary and their two children. Despite the era—well into the age of radio and steamboats—life on Motuopao remained primitive, reliant on sea-based supplies and good weather. When storms came, there was no leaving. There was only waiting.
On October 14, 1933, Henry Newson, his wife Betty, and Frederick Gage went fishing on the rocks below the lighthouse. It was a common pastime and sometimes a necessity, supplementing food rations. But that day, the sea was in one of its darker moods. Betty noticed the massive wave first and cried out—but it was already too late. The wave crashed over them, sweeping all three into the churning water.
Henry managed to reach Betty and pull her to shore, desperately trying to revive her with assisted breathing—what we’d now call CPR. But it was no use. She was gone. Frederick Gage, too, was lost to the sea. His body never recovered, only his memory held by those left behind.
In the immediate chaos, 12-year-old Donald stepped forward. With the weight of grief all around him, he helped his father maintain the light, care for the surviving families, and manage daily operations until help arrived. Newspapers would later describe him as “doing the work of a man,” a tribute to his courage under unthinkable pressure.
A steamer was dispatched from the mainland to collect Minnie’s body, but the sea refused to return Frederick. Mary Gage and her children had to leave without a chance to say goodbye.
Henry Newson eventually remarried in 1935 and lived until 1975. But Motuopao Island changed forever after that day. The lighthouse, once a symbol of safety, now also stood as a quiet monument to loss.
In 1940, the lighthouse was automated, and the last keepers left. Today, the island is part of a Department of Conservation nature reserve. The light still shines, but no one lives there now—only seabirds, salt air, and the silent stories of those who once called it home.
Minnie was buried in Waikumete Cemetery.​

The killing of a mother by a daughter always seems particularly shocking.
The recent case in Wellington echoes a case in Christchurch 60 years ago.
Nola Lorimer was found guilty of killing Reta Jane Coxhead, her own mother.
On December 1, 1965, Dr D J Lough visited Reta at her home about 10.15am in her St Albans home and found her up, dressed and ready to go out shopping.
Two hours later she was found dead, dressed in the same clothes, lying in a pool of blood at the entrance to the bathroom.
A pane of glass in the back door was broken.
She was found by her daughter Nola. Police were quickly called and found she had been beaten about the head with a large wooden barometer that had been on the wall and was now lying beside her broken.
Another weapon had been used to cut her throat.
There were no signs of burglary in the house.
Reta had lived at the house for a few years. She had a son and daughter.
Police searched the home and surrounding area thoroughly but found nothing.
When Nola was charged with her murder six weeks later, it sent shockwaves through the community.
In a court case, Margaret Mundy who worked for Reta had been in and out of the home twice that morning, the last time about 11.15am.
Nola - a land agent - had been at her work until about 11.45am when she left for the day.
Malcolm Moore who lived opposite Reta saw Nola about 12.50pm in the driveway of her mother’s home saying she was worried about her.
He had been the one to break the glass in the backdoor to get in and they had found Reta.
During questioning by police Nola initially said she had pushed Reta during a dispute and she had fallen and hit her head.
Then she said she panicked, got the barometer and bashed her. But Reta was still breathing so she took a knife, cut her throat and washed it and put it back.
She claimed she adored her mother.
Insanity was raised at her trial, her lawyer outlining her parents unhappy marriage, her own two unhappy marriages and working in a high pressure male dominated industry.
It had been, her lawyer claimed too much for her, and she resorted to pills and alcohol.
Nola would sometimes get angry or be unresponsive and had seen a psychiatrist a couple of years before who had given her medication.
The jury heard that she became frenzied on the day of the murder and did not understand the quality of her actions.
Nola’s daughter Kay also spoke of seeing her mother drink and knew she had used some medication.
A doctor called for the defence believed Nola was suffering psychomotor epilepsy.
Other doctors said they did not believe she was responsible for her actions on the day of the murder.
The jury found her guilty after four and a half hours but added a rider to her verdict that her sentence be less than life.
However the judge had no choice, his only option was to sentence her to life. An appeal to overturn that failed.
A memorial to Reta is at the Canterbury Memorial Gardens and Crematorium.​

In the days after the 1931 earthquake all the news was about that. But there was another tragedy only a few days later that is now remembered as the first fatal passenger flight crash.
New Zealand’s first regularly scheduled passenger service began in 1930 when a company called Air Travel launched a service between Christchurch and Dunedin.
But so few people took it that it closed in less than a year.
Dominion Airlines began flying between Gisborne and Hawke’s Bay on December 22, 1930.
The service was valuable in the days after the Hawke’s Bay earthquake, helping to bring people in and getting news out.
It had been started by directors Sir John Luke of Wellington, Arnold Williams of Tokomaru Bay, William Richmond of Hastings, Ivan Kight of Dannevirke, James Kirk of Gisborne and Jack Newman and Henry Duncan, both of Nelson.
They had plans to expand including using amphibious planes to cross the Cook Strait eventually.
For planes to be financially viable in the early days of commercial flight, they often carried mail as much as passengers.
The company raised capital and announced it only needed four paying passengers a day to make it work.
It was, on paper, a good idea. Other than the roads it would be the only method of transport out of the East Coast - the train line did not open until 1942.
It led to a new aerodrome in Gisborne
On February 8 the plane, a Desoutter II, ZK-ACA, left Gisborne about 1.15pm expecting to drop mail in Wairoa. Witnesses saw the bag drop and saw the plane begin to rise again.
The plane then banked and the engines stalled. The plane dropped, nose diving into the side of the road near a Public Works camp about a mile from the Wairoa bridge.
People ran to help and found the plane with the nose buried deep in the ground. Immediately work started on getting to the three men known to be inside. A part of the right wing had to be torn off to get into the plane.
It was however too late, two of the men were dead and a third, who was found to be breathing, died within minutes.
They were one of the company’s founders and the pilot Flight Lieutenant Ivan Louis Kight, Walter Findlay, a well known businessman of Gisborne where he owned a bakery and catering business and William Charles Strand, who was the son of a former Lower Hutt mayor.
An inquiry found the pilot had tried to turn at too low an altitude when the engine failed. However that was challenged in
A legal case was taken against Dominion Airlines by the family of William Strand claiming damages saying the pilot, Kight, had not been the holder of a licence to allow him to fly with passengers. The court judgment awarded the family £3000 plus costs. But that was later overturned in appeal and Dominion Airlines awarded the costs back.
But by then the company was done and was made bankrupt.
The crash, which is barely remembered now, was the first fatal accident involving a scheduled passenger air service in the country.
Kight was buried in the Mangatera Cemetery in Dannevirke, Strand is buried in the Taita Old Cemetery and Findlay in the Taruhera Cemetery in Gisborne.​

The prehistoric world of New Zealand was not filled with herds of roaming dinosaurs or terrible t-rexs.
Instead we had a fairly limited number on land.
But our seas were a different story - it was filled with terrifying monsters, including mosasaurs capable of dragging down a whale.
New Zealand was largely protected from large number of dinosaurs for two reasons - as the land masses moved we were increasingly isolated and the cooler climate was not for dinosaurs.
It wasn’t until Joan Wiffen found the first dinosaur fossil in the Mangahouanga Stream in Hawke’s Bay that the remains that had been missing from New Zealand’s fossil record up until then were discovered.
The first was a tail vertebra of a theropod - a four metre long half tonne carnivorous dino then an allosaur - the smaller version of the T Rex.
After that was an ankylosaur - a heavily armoured dino about the size of a small car.
Along with those Wiffen and her team of other amateur enthusiasts also found plesiosaur - the one the Loch Ness monster is supposed to look like.
There were also pterosaurs - flying lizards with wing made from skin rather than feathers.
The oceans around us however had 12m long mosasaurs,
And for a while it was thought we had escaped the largest beasts - until the discovery of part of a tail bone of a Titanosaurid - they would have been up to 45m long and weighed over 50 tonnes. It was the first time such a large dinosaur had been discovered.
None of that would have been possible without Joan Wiffen, whose determination led her to discover more and more.
Joan was born on February 4, 1922, in Auckland and adopted by Alfred Ernest and Ivy Pedersen of Mangaweka.
During World War Two she joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force with her first job being a runner, taking files between officers. She trained as a radar plotter and a medical clerk.
In 1948, she returned to Hawke’s Bay then met and married Montague Arthur Wiffen, called Pont.
Their joint interest in collecting led them to join a rock and mineral club and while on a trip to Australia Joan bought a small trilobite fossil.
It was the start of fossil hunting and in 1972 they made their first visit to Mangahouanga Stream where Joan said there seemed to be fossils everywhere.
The first bone was found in 1973 but there was almost no one in New Zealand who could help her identify it.
Eventually they found an almost complete plesiosaur and mosasaur skull. But it was when the Wiffen’s visited an American dino expert at the Queensland Museum in Brisbane that they saw a vertebra on his desk - almost identical to one they had found.
And with that the presence of dinosaurs was confirmed in New Zealand. They went on to find many more.
Pont died in 1992 and Joan in 2009.
Both were cremated at the Hastings Crematorium.​

The beautiful car looked like something from the future.
Long and sleek with a huge fin at the back, it didn’t look like anything anyone in New Zealand had seen before.
It was called Thunderbolt and between 1937 and 1939 it had broken the world land speed record driven by Captain George, E. T. Eyston.
On November 19, 1937, on the Bonneville Salt Flats it went 312.00 mph - 502.12 km/h. Within a year Thunderbolt returned with improved aerodynamics and raised its record to 345.50 mph or 556.03 km/h on 27 August 1938.
That record was broken in a week but Eyston took the Thunderbolt out again reaching 357.50 mph or 575.34 km/h.
The car had been brought to New Zealand to be displayed in the British Pavilion at the New Zealand Centennial Exhibition in 1939.
The exhibition was held in Rongotai in Wellington and thousands came to see the car.
Then in the early morning of September 25, 1946, bales of wool stored in the largest of exhibition buildings caught fire.
Stored with them was the famous car which was destroyed.
Along with the car, the air force lost five planes in the blaze - two Tiger Moths, a Harvard and two instructional machines - and 18 Gipsy aircraft engines.
The airmen sleeping nearby had to get out, leaping from windows.
Fire crew rushed to the scene but all they could do was prevent the flames from spreading to other buildings.
The blaze could be seen across the city and even days later, the wool was still smouldering.
In today’s money, the loss was over $55 million.
Because of the loss, police began an investigation, trying to pinpoint the cause of the fire. There were theories of spontaneous combustion as wool was prone to it, but there were no signs of that.
Nearly two years later, seven former Air Force personnel were charged with arson over the fire.
Four pleaded guilty while the other three were later acquitted.
The group had been members of the fire patrol team at the time and they knew their jobs were to be disestablished once the station closed. They conspired to start the fire which they would then put out and demonstrate how indispensable they were. They were even wearing pyjamas under their uniforms to give the impression of how sudden it all was.
When the fire got wildly out of control they were unable to put it out.
Captain Eyston died on June 11, 1979 and is buried at St Mary’s Roman Catholic churchyard in Oxfordshire, England.​

Watching the mushroom poisoning case in Australia has been fascinating and we thought about all the cases where food and drink has been used to kill.
Poisoning is not always easy to determine and sometimes it’s hard to hard to detect.
Overseas, there have been numerous famous cases, including poisoned curry in Japan, poisoned cakes in Spain, soup in Japan in a nursing home and a serial killer called the Giggling Granny in America who killed 11 of her family members with different foods and drinks.
And in New Zealand poison was most often put into drinks, although we have also written about poisoned chocolates and cake.
But it's not often jam roll is the culprit. Although in this case, it wasn’t murder but terrible carelessness.
Walter Nelson was only 25, when he, his wife Anneata and their baby went to visit her grandmother in Freeman’s Bay in Auckland on January 5, 1893.
Like many good hosts, some baking had been done for the guests, among them was a jam roll made by Laura Webb, Anneata’s sister.
The whole family - without Walter who was out - sat down for afternoon tea about 4pm. Most of them ate a bit of the jam roll and became ill.
However, as they began to recover over the next few hours, no one thought about the jam roll being the cause.
Walter returned later that evening and had his own piece of the jam roll.
Shortly after he complained of feeling sick and decided to go for a walk to get some fresh air and visit a tailor’s shop.
But he was worse when he came back complaining about being ill and his throat burning and he was given various things to make him vomit but by midnight it was too late and Walter died.
The police were called in. The only explanation for why there was only one death was that all the others had thrown up and Walter had not.
The jam roll - along with all the ingredients that were used to make it - were taken into custody for examination.
It was quickly discovered the cream of tartar used in the recipe, which was printed in full in the newspapers of the time, contained almost pure arsenic.
It had been bought from a local grocer James Boyle’s shop in Union Street.
A whopping amount of arsenic was found in the jam roll and worse - a current cake baked at the same time but untouched - had even more.
Boyle had bought the cream of tartar from an importer in one big container and had been supplying it to his customers who often brought in their own tins to put it in.
The inquest asked several questions about the container the cream of tartar was in and how the arsenic could have got into it, but it remained unclear. Arsenic was also sold by the same importer. The theory was that one of the stone jars had previously been used for arsenic.
A verdict of accidental death was returned.
And Walter was buried in Waikumete Cemetery. Six months later Anneata gave birth to a son who she called Walter after his father.​

Sadly, New Zealand has a terrible road toll. As long as there have been cars in the country there have been fatalities.
In 1919, there were about 17, 000 in the country and for many were still novel.
In Wellington, there was already a taxi service and trams running back and forth but the roads were still designed around horse and cart. Horses were still used to deliver milk for another four decades.
So a road death was a big deal.
Bevet Barker Williams was a taxi driver. He had picked up his passenger Mary Louisa Powell and was heading down Kent Terrace to Courtenay Place about 2pm. He was turning through the intersection when he hit Mabel Black, running her over. She died at the scene.
The case went to an inquest and then to a Supreme Court trial.
At the inquest numerous witnesses mentioned the speed Williams was going. Several said they thought it was going too fast.
One witness thought Williams was going the grand speed of 15 miles an hour, which he agreed with.
One thought the speed was not too fast for a street but too fast to turn into the intersection.
All thought Mabel had not seen or heard the taxi coming as she was crossing the road. Alice Martin said she only saw Mabel realise there was a car and began to run at the last minute.
Mary Powell countered that evidence. She had been in the taxi and at no point thought it was going too fast.
The coroner at the inquest gave an open finding and Williams was charged with manslaughter and the case taken to the Supreme Court.
The case was extensively covered in the papers - a death by car was rare enough to be fascinating.
Williams had been a taxi driver and had his licence for about six months. He had never before had an accident.
Williams said it was as he got to the intersection that he could see Mrs Black and he sounded his horn several times to warn her.
He said she looked like she was going to stop then kept going, so he sounded the horn again.
But Mrs Black made a mistake and thought she would out pace the car. Williams said he was already slowing but was unable to avoid to her.
The jury was taken to the street to see where it happened and were able to see the close distances for themselves.
It took the jury only an hour to find Williams not guilty of manslaughter.
Mabel Black is buried in the Karori Cemetery.
Picture from Te Papa’s photographic collection.​