LONELY PLANET 26/08/2001 PRODUCER/REPORTER: PHILIP VINE Karen Intro: Most of us come back from holiday with a tale about something that went wrong. Young travellers who go away for months or years have a whole diary full of brushes with discomfort or danger. It's part of the adventure. But they're usually stories that happened to someone else. For Joanne McNish from Christchurch, it happened to her and the love of her life. She was shot and raped. He was killed in front of her. Philip Vine with this report from Honduras. PHILIP (V/O): It's long way to come for a party. An island 50 k's off the Central American coast. The dance floor Caribbean sand. You get here at night by boat. It's not that easy and not that safe, but that's part of the excitement. Risk, one of the traveller's drugs. New Zealander Joanne McNish might have been here tonight with the man she met travelling, but while the rave gets underway the 28 year old Christchurch woman is in a hotel on the mainland helping police track down the bandits who killed him. JOANNE McNISH: Similar, but not the same. It was more, like longer here... PHILIP (V/O): Joanne got together with Israeli Gal Erlich last year while they were trekking in South America. JOANNE: Just the most wonderful man I ever meet: patient, happy, funny, very optimistic, nothing was a problem. It's very rare in life you have what we had, and we had the most beautiful love story, we really did. PHILIP (V/O): The setting for their love story, a group of islands to the north of Honduras, where they came as tourists and stayed to work, Gal as a diving instructor, Joanne in a café. They were planning to go to Israel and marry. (TO CAM): This is the main street of Utila, the Caribbean Island where Gal and Joanne spent their last five months together. It's a magnet for budget travellers. They come here for the diving. It's one of the cheapest places to learn in the world. The guidebook says the only dangers are mosquitoes and sandflies and few of the other travellers have any idea what happened to Gal and Joanne. (V/O): It happened a 20 minute plane ride away at Pico Bonito National Park. JOANNE: It's a beautiful place but I had no idea of any danger, you know. No idea. It's not like in Columbia where people say, 'Don't go there, don't go there, guerilla, blah, blah, bli, blah blah blah. It's not like that. PHILIP (V/O): There may not be any guerillas here, but during the contra war in neighbouring Nicaragua, Honduras was heavily militarised by the US. Most men carry handguns. Couple's browse armouries like jewellery shops and the abject poverty that makes it so cheap for travellers, makes them a target for criminals. Robbing a tourist is the equivalent of holding up a bank. JOANNE: We got the bus at 11 o'clock. We got off the bus at the Rio ?, it’s a dry river bed but it runs up right next to the road, so we're walking up a shingle road and there was two men on a motorbike passed us. They wave, so we waved back. PHILIP (V/O): Round the corner, the two men were waiting for them. JOANNE: We smiled and they pull out their guns and he's asking, "You speak English or Spanish?" "We speak English." So he started yelling at us, "Give us your money." PHILIP: What were you thinking? JOANNE: What was I thinking? ****. That was all that went through my head, was just ****. We give them about a hundred dollars, we put our stuff down and start giving them all the money we have out of our pockets. They start getting nervous, like maybe thinking someone's going to come along, so they make us climb over into the grapefruit plantation. PHILIP (V/O): One man was in his 40's or 50's, the other half that age. They'd been drinking and taking cocaine. At first the older man seemed reasonable, allowing them to keep passports, credit cards and Joanne's ring, a family heirloom. JOANNE: When my Nana died, she gave it to my mum and gave it to me for my 21st. So I explained this to him and he's like, "OK you can keep." PHILIP (V/O): Joanne and Gal kept on handing things over: watches, gold jewellery, a camera, a torch but when there was nothing more they got angry. The older man took her away to rape her. JOANNE: So I had to go away with him and then when... then I hear them start discussing killing us, and he says to the younger guy "Okay, matarmos." Matarmos means Okay we're going to kill them. And I said to him, "Honey they're going to kill us." So I say you know, we have to fight, you know we have to do something. He's like, yeah. I grabbed his gun, and I’m trying to, so stupid trying to shoot him, I just remember hearing a shot, I remember the loud ringing in my ear but I can't remember what's going on, I heard another shot and then they shoot me. PHILIP (V/O): The first shot hit Gal in the head. The second shot hit Joanne in the stomach. She lay on the grass of the plantation pretending to be dead. JOANNE: And I hear the motorbike, their motorbike start so that's when I crawled over to Gal and I see he's not, wasn't looking so great, he was still alive. PHILIP: He was still alive? JOANNE: And I thought it was his last few breaths and I didn't really want to watch him die, you know. PHILIP (V/O): Joanne staggered back to the main road and covered in blood she finally managed to wave down a car. They took her to hospital. After a few hours they brought in Gal, but his head wound was fatal. JOANNE: When they killed, when they killed him they killed me as well, you know. BRUCE McNISH: Two people who were so much in love, just enjoying life. PHILIP (V/O): Bruce McNish, Joanne's dad. BRUCE McNISH: And to be taken away from them in a flash like that, it's just unexplainable. PHILIP (V/O): He and Joan have two daughters. Joanne was the adventurer. She'd been away six years. When they got the call they wanted to fly out at once. JOANNE: I didn't want them to come, at first. My family's not rich you know, they don't have a lot of money. PHILIP (V/O): But friends from their Christchurch bowling club raised thousands of dollars for them to get there from their retirement home in Brisbane. JOANNE: I was so worried. I'm like Wow. They've never been to a third world country before, they never, they didn't have any word in Spanish, not even hello or thank you. PHILIP (V/O): Honduras is a world away. It took them five plane flights to get to the Island. JOAN McNISH: I thought we'd never get here. It's just so slow. PHILP (V/O): Joan, Joanne's mum. JOANNE: My mum was sprinting. As soon as the truck pulled up, she was off the side, over the edge, up the stairs. PHILIP: She was running? JOANNE: She was running. It was funny. PHILIP: What did you say when they arrived? JOANNE: Nothing, just cried. BRUCE McNISH: It was just wonderful to see her again. We're just so lucky that we've still got a daughter. PHILIP (V/O): After a week on the island police took Bruce and Joan, with Joanne, back to the National Park. They travelled under armed guard. On the outskirts of the park police talk to a farmer who saw the motorbike parked on the track. His son told detectives he'd heard gunshots, but neither of them had seen the two men. JOANNE: They brought us in, they took us from down here, and they move us in a couple of trees but then they get nervous and they start moving us back more into here. PHILIP (V/O): This is where police found blood and empty gun shells. JOANNE: I had the man in front of me, trying to take me away and the other man was like, behind where you sort of are. So I'm with the man here. I should have just kicked him in the *** nuts or something, you know. BRUCE McNISH: Just looking for something, you never know, we might be able to find something to give us a clue. The grass has grown so long even since it's happened. PHILIP: What did you expect to find here? BRUCE McNISH: Don't know. Sadness but... PHILIP (V/O): Back on the island most of the tourists are oblivious. A few may have read about it in the Honduran papers and when they move on they'll take with them the story of the Israeli who was shot, and the Kiwi who cheated death. BRUCE McNISH: I see them and I look, and the young ones just like Joanne, and I think, my god I hope nothing ever happens to you kids. PHILIP (V/O): The bullet that went into Joanne's stomach severed a nerve in her leg. Doctors say will take six months to heal. Painkillers relieve the physical discomfort. JOANNE: The bullet went in and then came out and went back in again, like this, and then through me. It was very lucky to, it went straight through, it didn't hit any bone or... PHILIP: It could have hit your liver or your spleen or anything, couldn't it. JOANNE: He was a bad shot. You see me today, I go for a walk for maybe five, ten minutes. Literally you can't walk any more after this. It just won't move and the pain is, it's excruciating. PHILIP (V/O): Despite her injury Joanne is well enough to fly home, but she's decided to stay on the island where she's made so many friends. For one thing she wants to keep pressure on police to find Gal's killers. JOANNE: I want to do everything in my power to catch these people, for Gal, for me. PHILIP (V/O): After a painfully slow week, Joanne gets an excited call from police. They want her to fly to the mainland to identify a suspect they've arrested. Finally things are starting to move. JOANNE: I hope it's him. I hope it's them. PHILIP: You must be feeling pretty nervous about it. JOANNE: Yeah. Yeah very. PHILIP (V/O): Out in the police courtyard they show Joanne a motorcycle they've seized from the suspect. Then the motorbike's owner. JOANNE: It's not him. He's too young. I see, I can see exactly why they think it's this guy because he look very similar you know, but I’m a hundred percent sure, certain, it's not this man. I wish I could say that it was him, you know, but it's not. PHILIP (TO CAM): Joanne's trip to the mainland is becoming increasingly confused. Her Spanish is good enough for travelling, but not good enough for this and the police don't speak any English. Bruce and Joan can't understand a word of what's going on. Police are still trying to identify the guns used by the robbers. JOANNE (with gun): I don't like touching. It didn't have, it had a thing here to put the bullets in, you know. There was no thing covering it, I could see in where the bullets were. (I/V): The head detective Senor Ananza has been very, very good to me from the start. He approaches me in a very gentle way. He always has. I'm sure he has a daughter. PHILIP: You know police here are under-resourced. There's many unsolved murders. What hope is there now? JOANNE: For me there's no hope. I don't have a good feeling for this. PHILIP (V/O): It's been enormously disappointing. The wrong motorbike, the wrong suspect and the best guess on the gun is an old Luger. The last stop is the Magistrate's office to pick up the shoes Joanne was wearing that day. JOANNE: They've got blood on them. Mentally I don't know. Still not my reality you know. It's something that happened to someone else. PHILIP: You know your parents just want to take you home. JOANNE: I know. I've got other things I have to do first. JOAN McNISH: You can't stop them, they're adults, even if it's the baby of the nest. PHILIP (V/O): So Joan and Bruce will be heading back without their adventurous daughter and they still have to find six thousand dollars for her medical bills. BRUCE McNISH: She's wanting to go over to Israel, say goodbye to Gal and meet his family, and I'm not going to step in the way of doing that, there's no way. PHILIP (V/O): And that meeting with Gal's parents isn't going to be easy. Joanne's carrying a lot of guilt. She left Gal for dead and didn't get him to a hospital as soon as she could have. JOANNE: I thought he was dead. I'll never forgive myself. I'll never stop feeling guilty about this, not going back, not asking the man in the car to take me back to where he was, because I thought he was dead. And he wasn't. I was sure he was dead. It's so ironic isn't it? I get this stupid little injury, Gal got so much and I got so little, you know. PHILIP (V/O): Perhaps Joanne has another reason for putting off her journey home. She's still sleeping in the bed she shared with Gal, mixing with their friends at the café, and as long as she stays here, he's still alive for her. JOANNE: I think once I leave the island, then I think it will set in. But here I'm surrounded by so many people who keep my mind busy all day long, that it's actually a reality and not just a dream you can wake up from. Backannounce: Joanne's still waiting to meet Gal's parents, who may now fly to Honduras to see her. Meanwhile, she's put up a thousand dollar reward, and police say they have two more suspects under surveillance.