On a squally winter night 21 years ago, 25-year-old Iraena Asher vanished from an isolated beach community, one hour west of New Zealand’s largest city, Auckland.
“It was a terrible night like this,” Julia Woodhouse – one of the last to see Asher – tells the Guardian one afternoon in early July, as the rain lashes the windows of her Piha home.
Asher had been partying at a house in Piha when she called police because she felt unsafe. When the police told Asher a taxi was on its way, she pleaded for them to send officers instead, telling them: “I can’t do this by myself”. That was the last time the police spoke with her. The taxi, meanwhile, went to the wrong address.
Sometime after 9pm, Woodhouse and her adult son picked up Asher, who was unknown to them, walking through the streets, lightly dressed, and took her home.
There, Woodhouse and her late partner, Bobbie Carroll, tried to make Asher comfortable. She showered, put on Carroll’s blue robe, and ate, all the while begging the couple not to call the police. Woodhouse made up the couch – the same one she sits on today – into a bed for Asher, and turned out the lights just after midnight.
“I hadn’t even got undressed and I heard a noise on the driveway,” Woodhouse says. She saw her son waving to Asher, trying to coax her back into the house. “He said, ‘Mum call the cops, there is something seriously wrong with this woman’.” Then, Asher fled.
Another Piha couple last saw Asher raise her naked arms towards a streetlight, kiss the ground and turn towards the roaring beach. And then, the night swallowed her whole.
Sign up: AU Breaking News email
Asher’s story is one of New Zealand’s most enduring mysteries and has left a deep wound in Piha, but it is not the only one haunting the community. Five others have disappeared in the region over the past three decades.
In 1992, Quentin Godwin, a curious and lively 18-year-old with bipolar disorder left his home in Titirangi, 30 minutes from Piha, and was never seen again. In 2012, Cherie Vousden, a 42-year-old mother, disappeared on the Mercer Bay loop track – a trail near Piha. She was last seen walking along the track with a bottle of wine. Three years later, Kim Bambus, a 21-year-old nurse from Auckland vanished on the same track, after telling her flatmates she was going there to run. An extensive search of the area led to nothing.
In 2019, Guoquan (Laurence) Wu’s car was found at Piha, but the 22-year-old has never been seen again. His ex-girlfriend told the coroner he had expressed a desire to end his life, but Wu’s family did not believe he would deliberately harm himself. Then, in 2020, French student and keen hiker, Eloi Rolland, 18, was last seen walking the long road towards Piha, before he vanished. He had booked a flight home to France earlier than planned and had promised to bring home some of Piha’s black sand. Police believe he may have become lost in the bush surrounding the coast.
No clothing or remains of any of the missing people have ever been found.
The coroner found Bambus and Wu likely died by suicide, while Asher most likely drowned and Vousden likely fell to her death. The cause of Godwin’s death was inconclusive and Rolland’s case remains open.
Little has connected the cases beyond the place they occurred, until a true-crime documentary changed that.
Black Coast Vanishings, released in New Zealand in 2024 and now available in Australia on DocPlay, now asks: could these cases be linked? Are sinister forces at play? Do they warrant further investigation?
Over four episodes, co-directors Candida Beveridge and Megan Jones interrogate the disappearances, interview family members and present theories and testimony from Piha locals to paint a picture of a small community grappling with tragedy, while pulsing with a troubling history of drugs, sexual violence and secrets.
But tension has emerged in Piha over the series’ depiction of the cases.
For some in the community, the series provided an opportunity to set their story straight, and reveal an undiscovered truth. But for others, Piha, with its tragedies and moody landscapes, had become the latest casualty of the wildly popular true-crime genre.
On an early July morning, on the road west from Auckland to Piha, large arterial routes give way to narrow winding roads and as houses recede, the vast Waitākere rainforest – cloaked in a low dense mist – closes in.
When the rainforest thins, a smattering of houses appear, perched on the ridge lines, before the expansive west coast suddenly opens up. Lion Rock juts out of the shore, winged by the famous black sands of Piha. Imposing cliffs rear up from the ocean and the horizon fades into the grey-blue of the Tasman Sea.
Any visitor to Piha will describe its majesty and its danger; how the membrane between the earthly and spiritual realms feels porous here.
Standing on the cliffs is a statue, or pou, of Hinerangi, an early ancestor of the local tribe, Te Kawerau ā Maki. In the telling of Piha’s missing people, Hinerangi’s story is often referenced as a haunting echo. After her husband drowned fishing on the rocks, Hinerangi sat on the headland longing for his return. For days she waited until, heartbroken, she too disappeared to join the journey of the spirits.
Roughly 900 people live in Piha. Its residents are an eclectic mix of artists, surfers, people living off-grid, nature-lovers, families and a growing middle-class. Over summer, the population explodes with tourists, surfers and holidaymakers.
Today, the settlement is quiet. A few people walk their dogs, and a group of surf club volunteers train in the pounding waves. The sand, whipped up by the wind, skips over the beach like sprites.
“Piha is a really spiritual place,” shouts Peter Brown, the president of the south Piha surf club, over the elemental roar. “It has a lot of history, a lot of mana [presence].”
It is beautiful and treacherous. Piha ranks as the country’s second-most dangerous ‘black spot’ for accidental drownings. It is “a big piece of water” and “very, very dangerous”, Brown says.
When someone disappears, the club helps scour the coast for clues. Usually, the sea gives up the bodies and Brown knows enough about the currents to predict where they might emerge. If a body is damaged by rocks or sharks it may never surface, but even Brown, armed with this knowledge, cannot fathom the disappearances.
“How can six people disappear and we can’t find them then and there, we can’t find them in a month … we can’t find them in 20 years? How can that ever be?”
With no answers, the community started looking over their shoulders, Brown says. “It changed people’s comfort,” he says. “In a small place, everyone knows everyone, and everyone has a theory.”
Some whisper those theories; others voice them loudly.
Sir Bob Harvey, 85, the former long-running mayor of Waitākere, lifeguard and local stalwart was one of the first to propose a connection between some of the cases, in a piece written for Metro magazine in 2018.
Despite the coroner’s rulings, Harvey is convinced they have been abducted.
“They have gone without a trace – without a shoe, without a bag,” he tells the Guardian. “Someone, or some people, out here know more.”
Harvey features heavily throughout the series, suggesting “they all met foul play” – a theory he bases, in part, on no bodies being found and broad similarities in the appearances of those who have vanished.
“They all look handsome, beautiful, gentle, kind, so if I have to believe there is a serial killer at work – I do, I do,” he says in the documentary.
Speculation like this prompted Beveridge, a Piha-based British film-maker and Auckland-based Jones to make the series. They wanted to understand whether there was any legitimacy to the rumours, to learn how the tragedies had affected the families and the community and examine what the police might have missed.
“It was kind of meant to be a portrait of a community under speculation,” Beveridge tells the Guardian. “This certainly wasn’t a flippant … superficial dive into what happened.”
The directors started questioning whether other people had been involved and if there had been “a cover-up in the community” when four more people disappeared after Asher.
The directors are aware of some community pushback against the series, but say they did not set out to prove there was a serial killer, or a connection between cases “although there were similarities between some of them, not least they all happened in the same small geographical area”.
“What became clear from our investigations – and this is something we didn’t expect to emerge – was a pattern of women being stalked and predated on in the area,” Beveridge said.
The series traversed the history of drug use and gang activity in the community and included accounts from women claiming they were chased, drugged and raped in Piha – testimonies the film-makers hoped would compel police to investigate the disappearances further.
“It is really disappointing the police haven’t followed up a lot of what was in our series,” Jones says.
The police declined the Guardian’s request for an interview but in a statement said they do not believe the incidents are linked and no tipoffs after the show aired warranted further investigation.
True crime has become one of the most popular genres of books, documentary, TV and podcasts. While the public has always had an appetite for dark, “real life” mysteries, the current boom might be traced to the worldwide smash hit podcast Serial, which launched more than a decade ago, and spawned countless other popular crime series.
But when true-crime turns its lens on an issue, communities can suddenly find themselves under a public microscope, watching as their most extreme stories, settings and personalities are offered up for entertainment.
If not done carefully, it risks opening wounds for those who have lived through a tragedy, says Dr Gregory Stratton, a senior lecturer in criminology at RMIT.
“There needs to be a purpose behind it, and if the purpose is just extractive … that can be really problematic for communities,” Stratton says.
True crime can provide justice for victims or exonerate wrongfully convicted people, while allowing families and communities to share their stories, Stratton says. For audiences, meanwhile, the genre can be “sense-making”, and build our understanding of where dangers could possibly lie.
It can also lead to an outsized fear of crime, Stratton says, one that feeds on fear and public anxiety “but is not necessarily about the realities of how crime happens every day”.
Like any small community, rumours are rife in Piha and old grudges surface quickly. But a deeply ingrained sense of care is also evident, and the inference Piha may be harbouring dark secrets has riled people.
Despite her misgivings about the series, Woodhouse does not regret appearing in the show. It was the first time she had a chance to say “out loud, and in public, that the police fucked up” Asher’s case.
But portraying Piha as a dangerous place, she says – “It’s not what Piha is, and it’s certainly not what it is now”.
It is a sentiment shared by others with deep ties to the area. Sandra Coney, a former investigative journalist and local politician said people now think of Piha as “a warped little community on the fringe of the Earth” – but that was wrong.
“Everything is run by people at Piha, there is a huge volunteer ethic …. it’s a good-humoured, forgiving community.”
Coney wrote to the New Zealand Film Commission in 2021 urging it to withdraw funding from the documentary project, warning its speculation was “tasteless and gratuitous”.
“I knew enough about the cases to know that it was a beat up,” she says, sitting in her Titirangi home, surrounded by paintings of Piha.
Further, Coney argues, it glosses over the issues of suicide – tragedies that cast a long shadow in Piha and nationally.
“Because we have policies around not reporting on suicides in New Zealand, it has become hidden,” Coney says, adding that park rangers have responded to a high number of incidents over the years.
New Zealand has one of the highest youth suicide rates in the OECD and a high rate of accidental fatal drownings.
For Pita Turei, a Māori artist, film-maker and local iwi (tribal) advocate, those tragedies and the documentary have affected the community more than the disappearances.
“The inference of the program as a whole is that there is a demon,” Turei says over coffee at the local cafe. “It’s bullshit for the purpose of sensationalism and attention,” he says.
“We have to look at ourselves – not look at the landscape, not for a demon – but at ourselves.”
Black Coast Vanishings is streaming now on DocPlay.
In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org