Grieving For Grace - Don't Take My Sunshine Away

Tears flow for a young woman taken too soon

This is how the story was supposed to go: Pretty backpacker Grace Millane passed through New Zealand on her year-long OE, exploring, meeting people and having a wonderful time before eventually returning home to her loving family in England.

It wasn’t meant to end with a makeshift grave amid a tangle of ferns and manuka trees, a young woman who will never return home to share her stories of her trip of a lifetime and a nation in mourning.

From the moment news broke on December 5 that police were searching for a young British tourist who’d been reported missing, fears began to mount for her safety.

Just six weeks earlier, Grace Emmie Rose Millane had kissed her parents David, 60, and Gillian, 57, and brothers Michael, 29, and Declan, 26, goodbye and set off for a month-long organised tour of Peru before arriving in Aotearoa on November 20.

The recent university graduate was never out of contact with her family for even a day, bombarding them with photos and messages as she travelled around Northland, before returning to Auckland and booking into a central city backpackers’ hostel.

Worst nightmare