Midday Essentials for Friday 13 June 2025
crime world 1:45 pm today
In today's episode, family members and friends of passengers who were on board the crashed plane have gathered in Ahmedabad's hospital for DNA tests to help identify their loved ones, there are reports that Israel is attacking Iran - with explosions heard northeast of Iran's capital Tehran a short time ago, the sentencing for Tingjun Cao for murdering real estate agent Yanfei Bao in July 2023 has got under way in Christchurch, and Indian communities in Auckland are holding a vigil on Friday for the hundreds of lives lost in the Air India plane crash.
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1News
14 hours ago
- 1News
Unlocking the dark secrets of the Yanfei Bao case: detective's 'gut feeling'
'I certainly had a gut feeling that I don't like what I'm hearing here." Watch a revealing interview with Detective Inspector Nicola Reeves on TVNZ+. With Yanfei Bao's murderer Tingjun Cao sentenced yesterday, Detective Inspector Nicola Reeves talks about this disturbing and challenging case. Missing people are reported to the police every day and usually turn up again – but Detective Inspector Nicola Reeves knew this one was different. A Facebook plea from Yanfei Bao's partner Paul Gooch. (Source: Supplied) It was Thursday July 20, 2023 and 44-year-old Christchurch real estate agent Yanfei Bao hadn't returned from work the previous day. Crucially, she'd failed to pick up her nine-year-old daughter from after-school care. 'And everybody's saying there's no way that would happen. It's just so not her,' Reeves tells 1News reporter Katie Stevenson. 'I certainly had a gut feeling that I don't like what I'm hearing here... ADVERTISEMENT 'That didn't necessarily mean that we were talking about foul play at that stage,' she says. 'But it was certainly something that needed a lot of attention by police quickly.' Paul Gooch and his partner Yanfei Bao. (Source: 1News) By 10pm that evening, it looked very much like foul play. Using cell tower polling, police had found Bao's cell phone in some flax bushes at the side of the Southern Motorway. It was damaged. 'Essentially crushed in half,' says Reeves. 'And it didn't get that way by itself.' Yanfei Bao's phone as it was found by police (Source: Supplied) But the phone was repairable and could tell police a lot – if only they could get into it. There are over a million possibilities with a six-digit pin code and an iPhone allows ten failed attempts before it erases its content or locks permanently. The first eight attempts by Reeves' investigative team were fails. The observant neighbour ADVERTISEMENT But the location of the locked phone also led police to a giant leap forward. That part of the motorway backs onto Banks Rd, a cul-de-sac in Prebbleton. That Thursday evening, while police rummaged in bushes with torches, they were approached by a resident. 'He said, are you guys here about the car that was here last night?'' says Reeves. 'And... we were like, 'well, tell us about it'.' Detective Inspector Nicola Reeves one week after Bao's disappearance. (Source: 1News) Resident Neil Clode later told the court: "About 6.15pm on the Wednesday night I was going out for tea and I went out for my car and I saw a car across the other side of the road with its lights on and I saw someone walk around the front of the car. I then went back inside to get my wallet, and as I was standing at the dining table to grab my wallet the headlights of the car were then pointed towards my house with the high beam lights on. I thought that was strange at the time because not many cars usually do that. They usually parked in the cul-de-sac pointing their headlights towards the motorway.' Bao's phone was found in bushes at the side of the Southern Motorway. (Source: TVNZ) Wallet retrieved, Clode headed out with his wife, spotted the vehicle again and, in a move that would supercharge the investigation, he followed it. "I accelerated to chase him, to catch up with him... I thought whoever was driving in the car was up to no good," he told the court. Clode made a note of the car's registration which he duly handed over to police. 'It was registered to Cao,' says Reeves. Tingjun Cao (Source: 1News) ADVERTISEMENT Tingjun Cao, a Chinese national who'd arrived in New Zealand that March, had a registered address at Iroquois Place, the street where Yanfei's Bao's car had already been found. 'That was the first time he became a person of interest,' says Reeves. 'We've got someone behaving suspiciously at the location of the phone... And coming back to the same address where her car was found... Yeah, he became a suspect pretty quickly.' Tingjun Cao was stopped by police and retrieved his licence from the boot of his car. Later that day he was arrested. (Source: TVNZ) Police could now track the movements of Cao's silver Mitsubishi Diamante via cameras around Christchurch. They also looked at his bank accounts and saw he'd made a purchase at a New Brighton hardware store. CCTV footage shows him talking to the storeowner Denis Shrimpton who would later tell the court how Cao, a non-English speaker, had made a digging gesture and "clearly indicated he wanted to dig a hole". Shrimpton led him to the gardening section where he selected a spade. Tingjun Cao making a digging gesture in the hardware store. (Source: Supplied) Police could learn even more about Cao's movements from his cell phone. 'And we could see very quickly that, oh, interesting, it's in the same location as where Yanfei's phone was on Wednesday... and they were moving around the city together,' says Reeves. Meanwhile her investigative team continued to tinker with Bao's locked phone, every attempted pin bringing them closer to total erasure. 'So there was big, big risk there... But you know, we've got clever people, I trusted their work, trusted their reasoning.' Reeves in her TVNZ+ interview this week. (Source: TVNZ) ADVERTISEMENT The ninth attempt was accurate. 'And obviously being able to get into the phone gave us so much evidence of what actually took place on that day,' says Reeves. A fateful meeting On the day she disappeared Yanfei Bao met Tingjun Cao at a house she was selling in Trevor St, Hornby. The Crown told the court Cao had arranged the meeting, claiming he had a Chinese buyer interested in the house. The house where Yanfei Bao met Tingjun Cao in Trevor St, Hornby (Source: 1News) The pair weren't strangers. They'd met when Bao received money from Cao on behalf of his brother-in-law to whom she sold a house. Cao had recently arrived in Christchurch from Shanghai and was struggling to find work. True to her friendly nature, Bao offered to help him. They exchanged a few messages on the app WeChat. Bao later told a friend that she was being pursued by a man who she'd rejected. She didn't tell the friend his name and his identity was never confirmed at the trial. Last images taken of Yanfei Bao in Wigram. (Source: Supplied) ADVERTISEMENT On the day of the Trevor St meeting, Bao took a video on her phone of herself approaching the address and a male, thought to be Cao, saying in Mandarin. 'You made me wait.' Cao also took, then deleted, a photo on his phone that day. It was of a woman, naked from the waist down, inside a boot of a car. Later it would be revealed that the photo was taken at Yanfei Bao's gravesite. The Trevor St home where they'd met initially appeared immaculate to police – there was even an open home there the weekend after their meeting – but luminol testing later revealed blood belonging to both Bao and Cao and drag marks through the house. Cao was arrested for kidnapping by police just days after Bao's disappearance, after he was seen at Christchurch airport buying a one-way flight to Shanghai with no luggage and all of his money withdrawn from his account. Katie Stevenson and Detective Inspector Nicola Reeves (Source: TVNZ) As Reeves tells Katie Stevenson, the case against Cao was strong. But despite exhaustive searching of farmland, including draining a pond, Yanfei Bao's body remained elusive. Police teams search section of Halswell River in Yanfei Bao case. (Source: 1News) ADVERTISEMENT 'The evidence was overwhelming, and we were more than prepared to go to trial without having found her body,' she says. 'It just meant that we would have to go about proving things in a different way.... I'm really confident that we would have been able to do that with the evidence that we had.' Detective Inspector Nicola Reeves, with a police search crew visible over her right shoulder. (Source: 1News) The search for Yanfei Bao's body Detective Inspector Reeves had clearly spent a lot of time with Bao's grieving partner of five years Paul Gooch. And Bao had left behind a young daughter. Finding her body to allow them some kind of closure was keeping her awake at night. But, despite all the evidence provided by the two phones, it took more than a year. Detective Inspector Nicola Reeves told 1News the focus of the search today and tomorrow will be the Hudsons Rd area in Greenpark, south of Lincoln. (Source: 1News) 'It was a year and ten days,' says Reeves. 'I have goose bumps, actually, just thinking about it, because it was probably one of the most remarkable days that I've ever experienced in police. We just had so much hope. You know, we'd been out there so many times, we felt we were just always so close, always that we were in the right spot. But sometimes it's a bit needle in a haystack.' 'We just had so much hope. We'd been out there so many times.' (Source: 1News) ADVERTISEMENT Yanfei Bao was discovered by police dogs in a shallow grave under some Macrocarpa trees on a farm in Greenpark, south of Lincoln. The health app on Bao's phone, which indicated steps taken, had helped to lead police there. "That phone pretty much took us right to the spot." Reeves says learning that Bao's body had finally been found was "unbelievable". 'It's probably quite hard to put into words. It's relief. It's sad as well. But amazing that we could actually find her and bring her home to her family.' The mysterious 'Mr Tang' At the trial, frustrated with his defence team, Tingjun Cao eventually decided to represent himself. In his defence he introduced the existence of a potential employer named 'Mr Tang' to explain his own busy movements around Christchurch on July 23, 2023. Mr Tang was never located by police. Cao's performance in the court room featured bursts of anger, leading to the court taking multiple breaks and requests from the judge for him to stay on track. Tingjun Cao eventually decided to represent himself in court. (Source: Supplied) 'Yeah, it was quite... different,' says Reeves who was questioned by Cao. 'His line of questioning was very unusual as well. There was a lot of criticism suggesting that everything [police found] was manufactured and fake and planted and that every witness had lied. And I think it was pretty obvious that the jury could see through that quite clearly.' ADVERTISEMENT Paul Gooch, Yanfei Bao's partner, and Detective Inspector Nicola Reeves hug following the news of the verdict. (Source: 1News/Ryan Boswell) Yesterday at Cao's sentencing at the High Court in Christchurch, Justice Lisa Preston ordered that he be removed from court, after he repeatedly called out from the dock, then leapt to his feet, waving and shouting in Mandarin. Tingjun Cao (Source: 1News) Sexual component 'abundantly clear' In handing down his sentence of life imprisonment, with a minimum non-parole period of 17 and a half years, Justice Preston said: "The evidence demonstrates there was a sexual component to your offending... certainly the forensic evidence is consistent with this." The judge called the photo recovered from Cao's phone "shocking", and said it made the sexual element "abundantly clear". 'You took my mummy away from me' ADVERTISEMENT Victim impact statements were given at Cao's sentencing from Yanfei Bao's grieving father, sister and partner. "I miss my mummy every single day," wrote Yanfei Bao's daughter. There were moving words read on behalf of Bao's now 11-year-old daughter: "You took my mummy away from me, and my life has not been the same since," she wrote. "I laugh less now as nothing feels as fun as it used to. "I miss my mummy every single day, I miss the way she used to do my hair, cook for me and make me feel safe. I miss her voice, her smell and the way she knew how to always make things better. "Sometimes I just want to cry, but I also don't want to make my dad Paul and everyone else more sad than they already are." Bao's daughter shared how sad she is that her mum won't be part of her future. "I won't be able to tell her about my day or hear her say she is proud of me." ADVERTISEMENT
NZ Herald
18 hours ago
- NZ Herald
Air India crash: Sole survivor's account hints at engine failure
As investigators scramble to understand what brought down Air India Flight 171, experts believe testimony from the sole survivor of the crash offers a vital clue. Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, 40, who miraculously walked away from the Ahmedabad disaster in which more than 240 people were killed, described flickering green and
RNZ News
a day ago
- RNZ News
Air India flight returns to Thai island after bomb threat
An Air India A320 recieved a bomb threat a day after a London-bound Air India passenger jet crashed in the Indian city of Ahmedabad. Photo: AFP/URBANANDSPORT An Air India flight from Thailand's Phuket island to New Delhi made an emergency landing shortly after takeoff because of an on-board bomb threat, the Thai airports authority said. The incident comes a day after a London-bound Air India passenger jet crashed in the Indian city of Ahmedabad, killing at least 265 people on board and on the ground. Airports of Thailand said on Friday on its Facebook page for Phuket that the pilot of the Airbus A320 radioed air traffic control that a bomb-threat message had been found on board. "We received a report of a bomb threat written inside the aircraft's bathroom, so the pilot informed the control tower and decided to divert the flight to Phuket International Airport after circling to burn off fuel," director of Phuket International Airport Monchai Tanode told a press conference. "Police have brought in several suspects, but have not yet been able to identify who wrote the message," Monchai added. Flight tracking website FlightRadar24 showed the Phuket flight making a U-turn over the Andaman Sea soon after takeoff, then circling multiple times off the island's coast before landing. The flight finally took off at 4:28 pm (0928 GMT), the website showed, more than seven hours after its scheduled departure. - AFP
