In the second of our series looking at the history of police diving, 25-year veteran Peter Thompson talks to Fiona Morris about some of the less glamorous tasks.
Peter Thompson - Tomo to his mates - was in the muster room at the old Wellington Central Police Station when he noticed a couple of guys getting their dive gear together in the yard. ‘That’s what I want to do,’ he thought.
It was 1971 and at 18 Tomo had just graduated from Police cadets in Trentham. He was working in the office, waiting to become a beat constable when he turned 19.
“I had started snorkelling with my neighbour when we were about 12 or 13. We used to go to Makara but never had a wetsuit. We just dived in a woolly jersey.”
One man’s luck is another’s misfortune: after registering his interest, Tomo was called up at short notice - a colleague was injured and Tomo was invited to join the Navy dive training course at HMNZS Philomel, Auckland.
Tomo says it was a major achievement to be one of four who finished the month-long course out of 15 starters, and the only police officer.
“I’d heard it was pretty tough. You had to really want to finish – if you weren’t totally committed there’s no way you could have finished it.
“A couple of months after I finished I ran a marathon, just because I could - I was that fit. Compared to the course it was a breeze.”
It was a Navy-oriented course and a lot of police have questioned the point of police divers learning to search for mines on the bottom of a warship.
“But it didn’t have anything to do with mines. It was all to do with confidence in the water and confidence working in adverse conditions. It was all teamwork diving – trusting the people beside you and having confidence in their ability.”
That trust carried Tomo and his colleagues through cold, dirty water and the recovery of more than 130 bodies and countless pieces of evidence over his 25 years as a police diver.
The squad was established in 1967 in two teams of five or six: Christchurch covered the South Island, and Wellington the Lower North. The Navy covered the Upper North.
Around 1976 the Christchurch squad was disbanded and the two squads centralised as a national squad in Wellington.
“In those days our records consisted of a hard-cover A4 notebook and we got a new one each year. For each job we’d just sort of hand-write the date and where it was.”
Dive squad work was extra duties – on call and on top of normal duties, in Tomo’s case as a Detective Sergeant. He says the biggest difficulty as squad O/C was pulling four or five people away from their day jobs.
The investigation of how Peter Plumley-Walker's body ended up at Huka Falls underlined the hazards divers faced.
“You might be going to do a job in Taupō - making somebody up there very happy, but making somebody down here in Wellington very unhappy. It was a juggling act.”
He says one of the biggest costs was on home life. “I think there was almost six years in a row when I got called out on either Christmas day or Christmas Eve.
“It just so happens at Christmas time or the holidays is when everyone drowns. They’re on holiday, it’s hot, kids probably aren’t getting the supervision they should.
“I remember having Christmas dinner and getting called to a job in Waikanae. There was another one in Te Awamutu that sort of buggered up my Christmas shopping.”
Tomo’s Police diving career reflects a quarter century of New Zealand’s homicide and major crime history.
From murdered gang members dumped in the Whanganui River to the colourful case of Peter Plumley-Walker’s untimely death in a bondage session in 1989, when half the squad got arsenic poisoning after diving past the outflow from a local tanalising mill.
They recovered crucial evidence during six weeks continuous work following the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior in 1986.
They searched for the missing and never found (Amber-Lee Cruickshank; Kirsa Jensen; a recreational diver last seen near the bar in the wreck of the Mikhail Lermontov). They helped return Karla Cardno, and many more.
Tomo says his most satisfying dive came in 1983 when he found John Hutley, a fisherman who spent two days in an airlock in the upturned hull of a fishing vessel off the South Island’s West Coast, alive and well - almost unheard-of in a dive job - and very pleased to see him.
“Looking back some of the things we did were probably crazy, but it didn’t seem like it at the time.”
He recalls one search in 1978. “We went down to Christchurch to recover a body from a cesspit. It was called Ashby’s Pit and it was attached to a dump.
“It was filthy, disgusting. You can smell this place half a kilometre off. But we dived in there and recovered that body. I think about that today.
“You wouldn’t go near there without a hazard suit. I mean, we tried not to swallow water and that.”
Sewage was an
occupational risk.
In a job that was literally 'in your face', he and the team came up with their own health and safety solutions.
“I remember when we did a job in the Whanganui River you could see sewage floating on the surface going down the river – I thought ‘I’m not too keen on that’.
“That’s how the guys got poisoned in Taupō – because you just had a regulator in your mouth which you take out and put back in again.
“We went to the chemist and got these antibiotic ear drops to try and prevent anything. We didn’t get sick but it was probably more just good luck than good management.”
As regards motivation, Tomo is philosophical: "We didn’t have psych debriefs – we certainly did have after-match functions and that was viewed as a bit of a reward and means to put it behind you. It seemed to work.
“I always used to think we had the easy job. I used to say to the guys ‘All we have to do is find the body and get it to the shore’. It’s someone else’s problem then.
“The policeman who has to take it from the shore to the mortuary and all the rest – he’s got the hard job because by then we’re back celebrating success.
“I enjoyed it – that was probably the biggest motivation. I think it was probably the people that were in it. A lot of the work itself wasn’t particularly pleasant but you could still manage to enjoy yourself, with the challenge.
“Finding something you’d put a lot of effort into looking for was rewarding.”
