Police are keeping mum about the circumstances surrounding the death of a person whose body was discovered in a ditch on Drain Rd in Doyleston, Christchurch.

They haven’t released the gender  or the age of the deceased, which suggests this may be a woman and that she died under extremely violent circumstances. Locals in the small farming community are in the dark over what’s happened. Some say they’ve been told by police not to speak to media (source).

Violence against women has reached epidemic proportions in New Zealand, the country having one of the highest rates within the OECD.

There have been a slew of violent murders, some with sexual motives, of women in New Zealand in recent years. From aged grandmothers to babes in arms, New Zealand’s brutality is no respect for neither age nor gender. Yet it is consistently, and shamelessly, touted as a country that’s great to raise kids, or where women are treated with respect. The reality is so very different:

Todayy Canterbury police are trying to establish the identity of a body found on Drain Rd in Doyleston, south west of Christchurch. They will release details at lunchtime.

Details about the discovery of a body in rural Canterbury yesterday are expected to be released today after detectives worked through the night at the scene.

The body, which was on Drain Rd, Doyleston, south of Christchurch, is believed to have been found by a group of Filipino fishermen about 11.30am, according to media reports.

Due to cellphone coverage issues, the group drove to Christchurch to report the discovery.

Detective Inspector Tom Fitzgerald told the Herald last night the death was being treated as suspicious. He did not say whether the body was male or female, or whether the person had suffered any injuries. Mr Fitzgerald said more information was likely to be released around lunch time.

Earlier in the evening a police cordon was set up a short distance from Lake Ellesmere on Drain Rd where it intersects with The Lake Rd.

Police were treating the incident as a crime scene.

Thinking about moving to Christchurch? take a look at this article in The Listener – What Lies Beneath

“Bizarre and high-profile murders of Christchurch women have spawned the title “Crimechurch”. Is there something uniquely brutal lurking beneath the Garden City’s polished veneer?

The police found the body of Vanessa Pickering towards the end of a sunless Christchurch summer. They searched for the young mother under a monolithic grey sky and found her discarded down a hard bony slope on the dried-off Port Hills, the city’s recreational playground.

Just a few days earlier, the Christchurch High Court had handed down a life sentence to Jason Somerville for the “house of horrors” murders, in which he killed his neighbour Tisha Lowry and later his wife, Rebecca Chamberlain, by strangling them and stuffing underpants down their throats, then having sex with his dead victims and burying them under his house.

Not so many weeks before, the Garden City had seen Ashley Peach sentenced to life for murdering Kerry Downey, an animal rescue worker who had been called to his flat to pick up an unwanted cat. He’d dumped her in the Port Hills.

The list of brutalised women and children goes on: Marie Davis, the 15-year-old schoolgirl raped, suffocated and dumped in the Waimakariri River; Emma Agnew, raped, murdered and dumped in Spencer Park; Mellory Manning, stabbed, savagely beaten and dumped in the pretty Avon River by an unknown killer; Suzie Sutherland, strangled by Jule Burns and dumped in a vacant section.

Even in a country that produces roughly a murder a week, there seems to be something shockingly brutal and depraved about the way Christchurch’s killers slaughter their victims. The Christchurch Women’s Refuge reports an alarming and chilling increase in the sheer viciousness of attacks on women. “There seems to be much more anger attached to the assaults than previously,” says chief executive Annette Gillespie. “We only talk about the women who are murdered, because that’s what comes to our attention, but we see women every day who are only a second away from death but the cases are not reported because they haven’t died…” more

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