The wind that swept across the Rangitīkei plains tonight was sharp enough to cut skin and cruel enough to carry the smell of charred timber and melted plastic for miles, yet nothing could match the cold that settled over every heart in New Zealand the moment Detective Inspector Ross Grantham stepped forward beneath the floodlights at 7:42 p.m., forty-eight hours almost to the minute since a modest weatherboard house on Suad Street had erupted into a roaring orange hell, and spoke the words that turned two days of desperate hope into irreversible horror: “We are now treating this fire as a murder-suicide… the bodies of two children have been formally recovered this evening with whānau present to bless them with karakia as they were carried out… work is ongoing to locate the body of a third child… the body of an adult male has already been removed,” and in that instant the clicking cameras froze, the gathered journalists stood silent, and somewhere behind the cordon a woman’s scream rose and broke like a wave against the night because this was no longer a tragic accident, no longer a house fire that claimed a family, but the calculated annihilation of three innocent lives by the one man who was supposed to protect them.

Sanson had always been the kind of village people romanticised in passing, one set of traffic lights blinking amber through the day, a dairy that still sold two-dollar mixtures, a pub where the same old boys propped up the bar every Friday, and streets lined with 1950s weatherboards where children rode bikes without helmets and neighbours left pies on doorsteps when someone was sick, yet at 6:17 a.m. on Wednesday 19 November 2025 that fragile idyll exploded into violence when the first neighbour heard bangs like gunshots or gas bottles rupturing, looked out to see flames clawing at the pre-dawn sky, dialled 111 while running barefoot across frost-hard grass, and watched in helpless terror as the house at number 14 became a furnace so fierce that arriving fire crews from Bulls, Feilding, and Palmerston North were driven back by heat that warped steel and shattered glass, forcing them to fight a purely defensive battle for four long hours before they could even think of entering what was left of the home that had once held Bella Rose Larsen aged nine with her ponytail and netball dreams, Cooper James Larsen aged seven with his digger obsession and gap-toothed grin, and Indie Mae Larsen aged only four who still clutched her stuffed giraffe Raffy every night, three small lives that never stood a chance.

Neighbour Shane Paki would later tell police and then anyone who would listen that he had seen Gareth Alan Larsen, thirty-nine, barefoot and shirtless in the front yard as the flames roared behind him, standing motionless with arms hanging loose as if the fire had already hollowed him out, and when Shane shouted “Gareth, the kids!” the man had simply turned, walked back through the front door and into the inferno without a word, a final, deliberate act that turned suspicion into certainty and transformed every onlooker into a witness to something unspeakable.

Hannah Larsen, thirty-six, a dedicated nurse who had kissed her sleeping children goodbye before leaving for night shift at Palmerston North Hospital at ten o’clock the previous evening believing the argument with her husband was just another storm that would pass, received the police call at 6:45 a.m. and arrived still wearing her scrubs to find the street swarming with emergency lights and her home reduced to smoking beams, collapsing then and there on the cold bitumen while screaming each child’s name over and over until paramedics wrapped her in a blanket and led her away, a sound that neighbours say still echoes in their sleep.

Inside the ruins, specialist Disaster Victim Identification teams worked with the solemn patience of archaeologists unearthing a graveyard, moving bucket by careful bucket under floodlights while sniffer dogs whined and circled, until at 4:10 p.m. on Thursday the first tiny stretcher emerged from what had been the back bedroom and the waiting whānau linked arms and sang waiata that floated across the paddocks like smoke, two hours later a second small body was found curled beneath an overturned bed base and again the family performed karakia, their voices cracking yet unbroken, and tonight as the detective spoke the search went on because somewhere beneath the collapsed roof and the molten remains of toys and schoolbags lay the last child, the one they still could not reach, the one whose absence felt like a fresh wound every time the excavator arm scraped another layer of ash.

Investigators now believe that sometime in the black early hours, after Hannah had left for work and the children were asleep, Gareth Larsen, drowning in debt from lost building contracts and cornered by a protection order taken out two months earlier, made a decision so monstrous it defies comprehension: he spread accelerant through the house, blocked or locked the children’s bedroom doors so no small hand could turn a handle to safety, ignited the blaze, stood outside long enough to watch the flames take hold, and then walked back in to die with the lives he had just extinguished, leaving behind a community that would never again look at a quiet street the same way.

Sanson School opened its hall tonight and four hundred people came, shoulder to shoulder, clutching candles and school photos, while principal Rachelle Pedersen tried to speak of Bella who sat by the window in 5B, of Cooper who lost his first tooth in her office, of Indie who ran to the gate each afternoon waving paintings that were now only ash, and failed, her voice breaking into sobs that needed no translation, and outside the cordon the fence line had become a shrine of teddy bears and chocolate fish and notes scrawled in childish handwriting – “Dear Indie, I saved you a seat on the mat” – stretching fifty metres beneath the indifferent stars.

“How did we miss it?” neighbours keep asking, “Why wasn’t there more help?” and Detective Inspector Grantham has promised a full, unflinching review of every police call-out, every agency contact, every cry for help that went unheeded, because if one more child is ever to be saved then New Zealand must face the truth that sometimes the most dangerous place for a child is inside their own home with the person who is supposed to love them most.

Under the floodlights the search teams keep working, moving slowly, reverently, refusing to leave while one small soul remains lost in the rubble, and somewhere a mother waits with empty arms that will never again feel the weight of her youngest running to greet her, and a nation that has cried itself raw prays for the moment when the last firefighter can finally turn and say, “We’ve brought them all home.”