On a warm evening in 2019, three-year-old New Zealand boy Lockheed Jones was found deceased

in an oxygenation pond about a kilomet from his house.

Local police quickly declared it an accidental drowning, but the boy's father was unconvinced

and remained so.

He pursued the help of seasoned investigative journalists Melanie Reid and Bonnie Sumner.

The show is called Delve, the Boy in the Water,

and in the most recent season, they took us, their listeners,

inside the coroner's court for a long-awaited inquest.

Melanie Reid and Bonnie Sumner joined us to talk about the case.

This is Australian True Crime.

We acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which this podcast is created,

the Wurundri Woi Wurang people of the Koolan Nation.

And a warning, this episode of the podcast contains graphic descriptions of violence.

It's about a little boy who was found face up in a sewage pond and the police said that he had drowned.

He left home apparently, according to the police,

and went 1.2Ks down the road, over the fence.

And he was found face up, which is highly unusual.

No water in his lungs, highly unusual.

The police dole found no scent. So it became a kind of pretty

intriguing tale. What happened with us is that we just kept getting called by the little boy's

father who's saying, look, something doesn't stack up here. I don't believe. You'll never, in your wildest dreams, you know, be able to tell me or even imagine

that he walked all that way with a full nappy at nine o'clock at night, barefoot, by the way,

...