Police believe Mike, 11, was kidnapped and killed by his stepdad. His mum isn't convinced.

Mike Zhao-Beckenridge was devastated when the courts awarded his mum Fiona full custody of him after her marriage breakdown with his stepdad, John.

It meant he'd be leaving John's house — a man he knew as Dad, who he'd lived with throughout the 18 months of custody proceedings.

He was immediately loaded into a police car and escorted from the former family home in Queenstown, New Zealand, to move to Invercargill with his mum and her new partner, Peter.

Listen: Are Mike and his stepdad dead, or alive? Post continues after podcast.

From the moment he arrived in February 2015, he was hostile towards them both, despite their best efforts to help him settle into his new life.

Eleven-year-old Mike wasn't having a bar of it. He wanted to live with John.

"How my life is s**t... I hate my mom in fact she is not even my mom she fucked my life up so bad I hate her I have no love for, I hope she die painfully," he said in one of many desperate emails to John.

John Beckenridge came into Mike's life when he was a toddler. A helicopter pilot from Switzerland, he met Fiona in Afghanistan in 2006. Originally from China, she and Mike moved across the world with John and set up their life together in New Zealand.

Fiona was the stricter parent and pretty soon Mike and John became like "peas in a pod".

She thought it was lovely they'd grown so close. She had no idea it would lead to this.

The day Mike was taken.

On Friday, March 13, 2015, just a month after the move to Invercargill, Mike didn't come home from school.

Teachers noted he'd been acting strangely earlier in the day, and don't remember seeing him after music class at 12:50pm. By 4:30pm that afternoon, Fiona was on the phone to police.

She suspected Mike had been kidnapped by John, and her fear was he'd try and take her son out of the country. Police issued a border alert, but told her there was nothing more they could do for now.

As co-host of The Lost Boy podcast Michael Wright told Mamamia's True Crime Conversations, "It took a couple of days for a police investigation or a search… but [over the weekend] more information came to the police that gave them good reason to escalate their actions".

Watch: Mike's final days. Post continues after video.

By the Monday, police had launched a wide-scale search and eventually found two campsites Mike and his stepdad had used in remote areas of the South Island. The last time the pair were heard from was on March 20 — a week after Mike's disappearance from school.

That afternoon, after realising their current camp and belongings had been found by police, John sent a number of "farewell" text messages.

"Thanks my love for being my wife, my partner and my best friend. You are very good at lying and deceiving. You have destroyed our family, my life and Mike's. Happy for what you have done? Me and Mike are leaving now on the midnight express. Three minutes for departure. Bye my love and thanks for everything. JB and MB," he wrote to Fiona.

Mike sent his mum a text too.

"Do you know why this has happened? First, you do not care what I say. You only listen to Peter Cows**t. Second, you lie and you should have agreed about the contract that was going 50/50… three, you have caused this with Peter and you know it. Ps, You do not deserve to be my mum, and you certainly don't deserve my love. From Mike," it read.

Then police discovered tyre tracks about 14km from the campsite, and realised John's car had careened off the very steep cliffs at nearby Curio Bay.

When they finally recovered the vehicle from the sea six weeks later, there were no bodies to be found.

Police were confident they were looking at a murder-suicide. But Fiona isn't convinced. She's confident they're still alive, and the car was just part of an elaborate scheme to fake their deaths and flee overseas.

It's a question that was posed to a Coronial Inquiry into the case in 2023, for which we're still waiting to hear the findings.

The police theory: murder-suicide.

Investigators believe John was a "depressed and desperate man" who had run out of options.

In court, police lawyer Deidre Elsmore argued that the fact this act is unimaginable, "has made the evidence so difficult to accept".

She pointed out that this is a textbook case of filicide, where a parent kills a child, and his motivators were obvious — altruism (a rescue fantasy) and spousal revenge.

While their bodies were never recovered, Mike's backpack and school shoes, and one of John's boots did wash up on the beach at Curio Bay beneath where the car drove off the cliff.

Mike was only 11 when he was kidnapped from school by John. Image: NZ Police.

Due to the vicious nature of the conditions of the sea around that cliff, many experts — including local fisherman — told the court it wasn't unheard of for there to be no human remains left to recover.

The police used the tyre tracks found at the top of the cliff to support their theory.

The tracks showed the car stopped four metres before the edge of the cliff, suggesting the vehicle had to be travelling at least 45km/h to become airborne in those final moments.

At the 12-metre mark they found skid-marks, with the police surmising that someone had to be inside the vehicle at that point in order to apply the brakes and create those marks. If someone had tried to jump out of the vehicle after that point, field tests showed they would have had "insufficient distance" to be able to stop themselves from following the car over the cliff.

John's bank accounts have never been touched and there is nothing to suggest anyone has been helping the pair.

There have been no flags on John's passport, no evidence found of an escape plan, nor any activity on social media.

As far as the police are concerned, there are no signs of life whatsoever.

The family's theory: Mike and John are alive.

There are a number of baffling clues in this story that have led many — including Fiona, Mike's mum — to believe that the pair are still alive and living overseas under different identities.

John's background in military settings and the fact he had multiple passports and at least four known aliases is just the start.

A police investigation into John's movements in the weeks before Mike was kidnapped shows he may have been planning it for some time. He'd liaised with Mike to drop burner phones at his school so they could communicate, and had been counting down the days until March 13 on a calendar. He'd also started selling off some of his possessions and borrowing money from friends (which could explain how he financed the feat).

The inquest heard evidence that the seatbelts in John's car were retracted — that is, pulled tight and still buckled up — but that's not what they're designed to do in a crash when there's someone in them. They're designed to lock on impact to hold a person in the seat, before loosening when the pressure is gone.

A seatbelt expert told police during their investigation, "my gut instinct is the seat belt didn't deploy".

Appearing on behalf of Fiona at the inquest, ex-police officer-turned-private investigator Mark Templeman told the court that this suggests there wasn't anyone wearing the seatbelts when the car hit the water.

Templeman also questioned the car's tracks found at the top of the cliff, and why someone would be braking (creating the skid marks) if they were trying to plunge to their death.

He also pointed towards a stake that was found 10 metres from the edge of the cliff — right where someone might attempt to jump out of the vehicle if that theory is to be believed. Fiona recognised the rope used on that stake as belonging to John's clothing line.

After faking their deaths, Templeman and the family believe John was helped by a friend, and that he and Mike potentially left in another vehicle before ultimately escaping New Zealand on a boat.

"He used to watch those [kinds of movies] with Mike and take great delight in working out how they could actually have beaten the police in any situation, and always considered himself a James Bond personality," Templeman told the court.

John's own Google history prior to the disappearance included entries such as "water-jet landing craft" and "luxury yachts for sale", which was confirmed by police at the inquest.

He was also an experienced and skilled sailor.

Those who knew John Beckenridge think it's possible he could have faked their deaths. Image: NZ Police.

Fiona gave evidence that John had bragged about entering Australia without a passport. And on the topic of the apparent suicide text messages, it was put to the court that a total of seven 'goodbye' texts were sent between 1:41pm and 1:45pm — a feat Templeman said was near impossible to do in real-time. This, he said, suggested the texts were written prior and sent at the allotted time — potentially by someone else, sending them on behalf of John.

There have been two potential sightings of the pair since 2015 — one by a friend of Mike's, who says someone using his specific username on Minecraft tried to contact him via a chatroom in 2016. Experts weren't able verify the account.

Then there is the eyewitness who claims they saw Mike and John a few months after their disappearance on a beach in Bali.

Appearing at the inquest, the woman described "an older European man and a young Asian boy walking towards me".

She recognised them from the New Zealand media reports and was "100 per cent sure" it was them, immediately reporting it to police.

The report didn't really go anywhere, and she was never interviewed in person by New Zealand authorities.

The Coronial Inquest has paused for now and remains outstanding. There is still one day's worth of evidence left to hear that Wright told True Crime Conversations is "going to involve some peer review of some of the specialist reports at the scene where the car went over the cliff.

"After that, the Coroner will have a decision to make — the threshold is balance of probabilities, it's not a beyond reasonable doubt."

And so we wait, with Fiona remaining confident her son is out there somewhere.

As Wright told True Crime Conversations, "Fiona mostly wants Mike to be happy.

"I think she would love her son to come back, but she's not wishing for that the most. She wants him to be alive and well."

Feature Image: NZ Police.