Crimes NZ RNZ Originals

Today we start the latest series of Crimes NZ...starting with the unsolved murder of Elsie Walker in 1928.

It was a case that shocked the world. A 3-year-old abandoned in an Australian train station, her mother murdered in New Zealand and her father on the run in America.

In January 2008, Gil Elliott received the worst news possible. His 22-year-old daughter Sophie had been stabbed to death. He talks to Jesse Mulligan about those moments, the horror that followed and his fight for change.

The 1928 murder of Elsie Walker is one of New Zealand's oldest cold cases. She disappeared from the Bay of Plenty and her body was discovered by schoolboys, days later, in Auckland.

In 2009, Taito Phillip Field was convicted of bribery and corruption and sentenced to six years in prison. Lockwood Smith was an opposition MP and recalls keeping the pressure on in parliament, to ensure Field was held to account.

In 2007, 20-year-old Emma Agnew put a sign up in her car advertising it for sale. A man answered the ad, but he wasn't interested in buying the car. As Stuff senior reporter Martin Van Beynan describes his intentions were far more sinister.