NZ'S MOST CHILLING UNSOLVED MURDERS

In these shocking cases, the killers may still be out there

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More than 70 people are murdered, on average, in New Zealand each year. For the vast majority of victims' families, their grief is softened by the conviction of the killer. But whether by luck, cunning or gaps in the law, a few cases remain unsolved and for their victims' loved ones, the pain goes on. The cold-case files are never closed and are constantly reviewed by detectives, who hope science or a guilty conscience will one day provide the breakthrough they need.

KIRSTY BENTLEY

Around 4pm on the final day of 1998, 15-year-old Kirsty took her devoted black labrador Abby for a stroll along familiar paths beside the Ashburton River.

After a shopping trip with her best friend Lee-Anne Kerr, the two avid Backstreet Boys fans were planning to start 1999 at the Addington races on New Year's Day.

Instead, Kirsty was never seen alive again, apart from a tantalising but never-confirmed sighting that same evening in a hand-painted green van, in which a farmer claimed he had glimpsed a young girl behind a greasy-haired, intimidating man in his twenties.

By then, her dad, farm irrigation worker Sid, mum Jill and Kirsty's older brother John had raised the alarm with police when she hadn't returned home by six o'clock.

A frantic search revealed no trace until the next day, when Abby was found tied to a tree near the riverbank, with Kirsty's underwear hanging in a bush nearby.

It was the beginning of a decades-long nightmare for the Bentleys, which tore the family apart. Only after 17 days did two cannabis growers stumble across Kirsty's body covered with sticks and bracken in a scrubby forestry plot in the Rakaia Gorge some 50km away.