Formerly a sailor, Jorgensen had just finished a two-year prison sentence, although he had served time in borstal beforehand. As a young offender, he met John Gillies in that context in 1951. Crewing on naval vessels, they maintained intermittent contact over the next decade, until they met again in Auckland in 1962. Born in Kaikoura on Upper Canterbury's eastern coast of the South Island to an authoritarian Danish father, Jorgensen had a history of assault and theft in Christchurch, New Zealand. John Gillies also originated from the South Island. In 1956, he had fled trial on a number of criminal offenses to Australia, until a further prison sentence in Melbourne's Pentridge Prison led to his deportation back to New Zealand in October 1963. Both men denied charges of murder, although Gillies admitted acquiring a machine gun for his own protection. Both men were convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. Aftermath While in prison, Jorgensen took up painting and sold a number of his works. He was later paroled under strict conditions, including that he must remain in Kaikoura living with his father for an indefinite period. Jorgensen vanished in mysterious circumstances in 1984 after his car was found wrecked at the bottom of a cliff. Police initially suspected that he had faked his death, but later declared him legally dead. In 2010 an episode of TVNZ's The Missing directed by Tom Reilly traced the life and disappearance of Jorgensen and uncovered several eyewitnesses who claimed to have seen him in Perth, Australia, in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The makers of the show concluded that there is strong evidence Jorgensen faked his own death and fled New Zealand in 1984. A historical account of the crime has since been written. Involved on the periphery of these issues at the time were two New Zealand National Party politicians, Robert Muldoon (a future New Zealand Prime Minister) and John Banks, whose father Archibald was involved in the beerhouse/sly grog milieu and sent his then-teenage son out to provide cleaning services for his father's clients. As for Gillies, he was paroled in the late 1960s, but although he had learned technical drawing within the prison, he soon got into trouble with New Zealand's criminal justice system once again and served further prison sentences before his final release in 1987. He currently lives under a new identity in Wellington, New Zealand. Many New