Wayne Hendrikse

Focusing on the police photographer who’s seen all aspects of the seamier side of life  - and death

* This profile contains some confronting content

“No one sees more than a forensic photographer.”

Take that as gospel truth from one who knows – Wayne Hendrikse, Rotorua’s recently retired police photographer.

It’s a job he held for 21 of his four-plus decades of police service

A word of warning; never play I Spy with this all-seeing man. He has an award for his meticulous attention to detail. It followed a high profile homicide where he spotted the minuscule clue that irrevocably linked the offender to his victim.

There’s been an even higher Gold Merit award in 1989, recognising his role in disarming and handcuffing a heavily armed man holed up in a Murupara house

A helicopter with heat sensing equipment and three Armed Offenders Squads were on his tail. However it was Wayne and Sergeant Peter Clarke who laid their lives on the line to take him down. Clarke, the first to confront the felon who had a sawn-off shotgun tied to his wrist, was recognised with a Queen’s Commendation for Bravery.

It’s a measure of Wayne Hendrikse’s modesty that he neglected to tell In Profile of his awards when we trained our lens on him. He only mentioned it in passing during  a subsequent conversation. 

Joining the police

Wayne’s unsure what drew him to the police but he does admit to a desire to help people. “It sure as hell wasn’t the money, my annual salary as a cadet was $4185.” 

His brother Nigel and identical twin sisters, Maxine and Pauline, followed him into the job. They served simultaneously for seven years. Wayne notes he was the first to join and last to leave.

If the name Hendrikse has a familiar ring to it it’s because Wayne’s brother Nigel became a household name in 1993 after being stabbed in the neck, chest and thigh by a Mongrel Mobster wielding a sharpened allen key. It was a tragedy that left him so disabled he was forced to quit police work. 

Wayne’s career began as a 17-year-old cadet at Trentham, living in spartan barracks built for First World War soldiers. “We still had their wire wove beds, probably the same blankets too.”

Cadet Hendrikse was one of the worldier of his intake. Never academically inclined, he’d quit school to work as a general hand at the Tauranga Big Game Fishing Club on Mayor Island. “It was a fantastic time. When it was too rough for visitors to land I’d row them ashore, you really learnt to read the waves.  I’d empty out the bar’s dregs and watch the seagulls get drunk. The legal drinking age was 20 but out there I was drinking gin at 16.”

 His police college instructor was Basil Johnson, a long time Murupara and Rotorua copper.

“We’d never have thought our grandchildren would be dating each other forty two years later.”

Trentham was the ideal place for the natural-born prankster Wayne is.

Take the night he decided to take revenge on recruits who’d nuggeted the cadets’ windows, rivalry between the two was traditional.

“I got the fire hose and was filling their rooms. The other cadets were egging me on, suddenly they went quiet, I realised no water was coming out of the hose. I turned and saw a senior sergeant watching me make a dick of myself. I was confined to barracks which wasn’t hard because there was nowhere to go anyway.”

Training was rigorous. “One night we were woken by the fire alarm, I had no idea what time it was, we were told to grab our pillows and head for a bus and were dropped off in the middle of nowhere. Our instructions were to be back by 7am, somehow I made it – just. We wondered if this was the sadistic nature of the senior sergeant, but really it was to get us used to taking instructions.”

On the beat and in the control room 

Once graduated, Wayne was given four station choices. “I wanted to go home to Tauranga (Mt Maunganui) but was sent to Rotorua.” Apart from relieving spells in Murupara he’s been here since, 

He’d wanted to return to Tauranga because his girlfriend, Louisa McTainsh who he’d met on Mayor Island, was there.

When they married Wayne was supposed to get the police hierarchy’s permission. He refused. “I said ‘Get stuffed, if you don’t trust me to marry a decent, responsible woman I shouldn’t be in the police’.”  

He again challenged authority when he was one of four lined up for transfer to Kawerau. “No one wanted to work there so they were forcibly sending staff. I‘d just got married and built a house so wasn’t at all impressed, I dug my toes in. The two who did go ended up loving the place.”    

To backtrack: His police working life began as a beat cop supervised by senior sergeants “of the old school.”

“It was a very different style of policing then, you didn’t have all the tactical options you have today. It was pretty much have a scrap, put the handcuffs on. Often you’d get them [the arrested person] to the patrol car without their feet touching the ground.”

Rotorua’s big booze barns were flourishing in the 80s. 

“They were pretty rough, a lot of those drinking there were hunters, they openly carried knives which were later banned by law. There were some pretty nasty scraps for the cops to sort out. Some lawyers drank there, it’s where they got their work.”

Wayne moved to a less confrontational, but a frantically busy, side of police work, the control room where he was paired with a civilian telephonist.

“You’d answer all the 111 calls, dispatch staff and cars, you knew everything that was going on, it was challenging, mentally exhausting.”  

When control rooms began to be centralised Wayne saw the writing on the wall. “ I’d done some relieving in photography, one of the guys was taking early retirement so I applied.”

Behind the lens

Although his mother had a passion for camera work Wayne had no special interest in it.

“I went into it because I knew it would be an extremely varied job. No one sees more in the police than a forensic photographer.

“At a homicide there’s a detective o/c [officer in charge] of the body, another  o/c exhibits, another witnesses and so on.

“The photographer goes to the scene, photographs the body, the exhibits. We go to the mortuary. You are expected to photograph every aspect of the inquiry, We take pictures from witnesses’ viewpoints to show judges and juries exactly what they would have seen.”
Wayne can’t bookmark his first murder scene. “I’ve been to so many in 21 years they tend to blur into one. What I can say categorically is that in New Zealand I’ve photographed 413 dead persons from countless homicides, suicides, sudden deaths, motor vehicle crashes.”

Gory? Not in Wayne’s world, each was integral to the job he was paid to do.

We turn to the numerous post mortems he’s chronicled in intimate detail, shot from over the attending pathologist’s shoulder.

“Certainly over time I’ve become accustomed to body parts and body fluids. It’s the smell that gets you most, it’s extremely difficult to get used to. Human blood in large quantities has a very very peculiar smell to it. Some people can’t stomach it but, no, I’ve never been squeamish. I’ve found it extremely interesting watching pathologists at work figuring out the cause of death.”

Experiencing personal loss

As Wayne puts it, crashes became his bread and butter.

The worst he’s attended? “Definitely the one south of Rotorua in which five members of one whanau died. The weather was so awful my camera and tripod blew over.”

Wayne has also experienced the horror of being related to two road fatality victims.

“I recognised the car, there were two deceased under a blanket on the roadside, one was a baby, I lifted the blanket and recognised the baby. I said to the team ‘This baby’s family are relatives’. They put the scene on hold while I went to the family’s house nearby to break the dreadful news.

Wayne, being the compassionate human he is, drove the shocked and grieving family to his home. En route they had to pass the horrific crash scene.

Leaving them in his wife’s care he switched back into work mode.

Understandably breaking the news of sudden deaths is one of the most stressful jobs a police officer’s faced with. 

“That’s real police work, you have to choose your words very carefully.  You don’t blurt out so and so’s been killed.”

Taking his grieving relatives to his home isn’t the only time this hardened cop’s shown such compassion.

When a neighbour, who was home alone, bled to death after falling through a glass door he and his family spent hours cleaning the house before the man’s family returned to it.

“At least my family did. Five minutes after I arrived I got called to a fatal near  Tauranga.” Such is the life of a police photographer.

Obliterating tragedy’s traces for families’ sakes

Insisting all traces of tragedy were obliterated from his neighbour’s home wasn’t a one-off. It’s a task he insisted on doing. “When someone puts a firearm to their head they leave a terrible mess. I’d say ‘we can’t leave it [the house] like this’. I‘ve spent many hours cleaning up houses.”

He was equally meticulous about crash sites. “Some staff  say ‘the road sweeper will clean it up’ but I worried personal treasures would get pushed into a ditch. I always carried rubbish bags and picked up every piece of debris.”

There’s another aspect of Wayne’s empathy for others. He volunteered to go to Thailand in the wake of the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, spending several gruelling weeks assisting in identifying seemingly unidentifiable victims. His workplace was a temple converted into a mortuary. Even he says the stench was indescribable but there was a job to be done. Wayne was a member of the international team that did it.

Throughout his police photography years he lived by the dictates of his pager, covering an area spreading from Katikati to the middle of the Desert Road and across to Cape Runaway.

“You get very used to waking up quickly when you’re on call.”

Rotorua leads the digital way

On call weeks were alternated with his colleague Nick Voysey. That changed when the Bay of Plenty police region was created, increasing their team.

He and Voysey were the first police in the country to ‘go digital’.

“Nick and I were costing the police $1000 a month buying film, developing and printing images. We convinced the district commander that digital would save time and money. The media were doing it so why shouldn’t we?”

This is said with a long, envious look in the direction of  In Profile photographer Stephen Parker’s high tech equipment. Despite moving to the digital age police gear remained relatively basic. 

Wayne rues photographers are an often overlooked species.

“I’d watch programmes where people were climbing Everest, never a thought was given to the fact someone else was climbing too, filming as well. These days the climbers do it themselves with a camera on their helmet.”

Keeping records went with his job, Wayne extended the brief by compiling albums to help newbies come to grips with sights they’d never previously encountered. 

“I think I have seen everything you can do to the human body, picked up every part, they need to be prepared for the reality of that.”

It’s fair to call this man a workaholic. He always held other jobs  alongside policing.

One was cobble stoning.

“When people asked me what police work was like I’d relate it to cobble stoning by saying ‘With cobbles when you finish laying them it looks great. If it was police work the next day it would appear as if someone had ripped them up and you’d have to start all over again’. 

“Saying that, I have absolutely no regrets, I had the best possible working life. I have nothing bad to say about the police whatsoever.”