No criminal case in New Zealand history has been more thoroughly worked over than the Crewe murders. The killing of Jeannette and Harvey Crewe (above) in their Pukekawa farmhouse in 1970 has been the subject of multiple trials, appeals, inquiries (including a royal commission), books, documentaries, countless newspaper and magazine articles and even a feature film. Could there be anything left to say?
Well, yes. Nothing startlingly new, necessarily – but The Crewe Murders: Inside New Zealand’s Most Infamous Cold Case, is still a gripping read.
The book, by journalists Kirsty Johnston and James Hollings, presents no compelling fresh theories and uncovers little in the way of previously unreported evidence – not surprisingly, given the degree to which the crime has been scrutinised over more than half a century. Crucially, the authors reach no conclusions about who was guilty of the murders, for which Arthur Allan Thomas served nine years in prison before being granted a royal pardon. But it’s a significant piece of work for all that, simply for the painstaking way Johnston and Hollings have reconstructed the crime and attempted to sift known facts from speculation, theory, rumour and scandalously flawed (and even faked) evidence.
As the arguments against Thomas’s conviction became ever more compelling, police, judges, Crown lawyers and even prosecution witnesses resorted to increasingly desperate and shameful measures to cover shortcomings in the way the case was investigated and prosecuted. Cronyism and conflicts of interest repeatedly got in the way. Vital information was withheld from the defence or suppressed outright, police blatantly courted jurors and when serious questions arose about dodgy police exhibits, they were conveniently dumped at a tip and buried forever.
The government eventually so lacked confidence in the integrity and ability of the legal and judicial fraternity that it went to Australia to find a judge who could be trusted to head a royal commission of inquiry. The commission’s report came as a bombshell, describing Thomas’s conviction on the basis of false evidence as “an unspeakable outrage” – a phrase that deserves to be ranked alongside Justice Peter Mahon’s “orchestrated litany of lies” in respect of Air New Zealand’s evidence at the Mt Erebus inquiry.
Detective Inspector Bruce Hutton outside the Crewe farmhouse.
All this came on top of an incompetent police investigation
and multiple glaring inconsistencies and far-fetched scenarios in the evidence.
It’s now accepted that Detective Inspector Bruce Hutton, who headed the murder
inquiry, planted the cartridge case that helped convict Thomas. The royal
commission said so. (Not only was Hutton never prosecuted, but then police
commissioner Mike Bush paid tribute to him as a man of “integrity beyond
reproach” at his funeral in 2013.)
In the end, it wasn’t the institutions that society trusts to uphold the law – the courts and the police – who ensured that justice was done in the Crewe case, but the media and a dogged group of citizen activists. Oh, and a couple of politicians: Robert Muldoon and his young justice minister Jim McLay, who made the courageous decision to issue Thomas with a pardon.
Decades later, all this makes sobering – no, make that chilling – reading. But The Crewe Murders can also be appreciated as an absorbing piece of social history. Pukekawa emerges as a feral sort of place – a New Zealand Ozarks with a history of Gothic murders where dark, clannish feuds, rivalries and suspicions simmered. (As an aside, I once visited Pukekawa in the late 1970s without knowing where I was. I was covering an international motor rally for The Listener and pulled in at an isolated service station to buy petrol and cigarettes. I spoke briefly to two surly men and got the distinct impression outsiders weren’t welcome. I came away with an inexplicably creepy feeling that I’ve experienced only two or three times in my life. It was only when I saw a sign a couple of hundred metres down the road that I realised where I was.)
Ultimately the book doesn’t get us any further, insofar as it doesn’t identify the killer(s) or even speculate on who it might have been, though you sense the authors were hoping they might break the case open, as any investigative journalist would. Notwithstanding his pardon, Thomas still can’t be definitively ruled out. (Hutton may have genuinely believed him to be guilty; what was unforgiveable was the fabrication of evidence against him.)
At the end of the book, I was left with one nagging thought. Harvey Crewe was a big man and his wife wasn’t slightly built. A dead body is an extremely awkward, cumbersome thing, not easily manhandled, yet someone managed to shift the two bodies from the Crewe farmhouse, wrap them in blankets, manoeuvre them into a vehicle, take them to the banks of the Waikato River and dump them in the water. It struck me that all this was highly unlikely to be accomplished unobserved by someone acting alone, yet the book is silent on this intriguing aspect of the case. Perhaps, after all, there’s yet another book still to be written …
The Crewe Murders is published by Massey University Press and sells for $45.
14 comments:
Karl wrote: “Notwithstanding his pardon, Thomas still can’t be definitively ruled out.”
I’m sorry Karl to disagree with you on that point. The Royal Commission ruled him out absolutely. Also defence evidence was that Thomas was home on the evening of the murders.
There were so many sad and moving parts to the Thomas case. From all I was able to read over the years my thoughts were always that the Police happened upon Thomas by accident. They went about fabricating a case to suit their needs against a fellow who at the time did not possess sufficient intellectual capacity to protect himself. It was said he thought he was helping the Police in the investigation. Later on his defence lawyers fell down in some areas but they still had to work against some determined Police trickery. Such as; it was suspected the defence lawyer’s phones were tapped in the days preceding the second trial.
Prosecutor David Morris was a major malignant force in both trials.
What finally broke the case open (after the second trial) was that a number stamped on the base of the bullets from the Crewe bodies could not have possibly matched the serial number engraved/stamped on the cartridge case – that is the cartridge case “found” in the garden. The defence supporters went all the way back to the Australian manufacturers to examine records of matching bullet numbers and cartridge case serial numbers.
As an ex-cop my Dada took great interest in the case from the start. He'd actually been in the same training wing as Gid Tait so that generation was just about all retired but Dad still contacts within the Force.
As soon as he read the trail evidence he was convinced (disgusted) that the Police had planted the evidence of the shell casings, simply because he was sure that the usual painstaking method of sieving soil would certainly have turned up the casings on the first investigation. He just didn't believe they could have been "missed" the first time.
However, via his contacts he also learned that Mr Hutton had a bit of a history, specifically via a burglar he'd put away. Now the crim made no bones about what he was or being guilty of earlier burglaries. But he was adamant that the conviction Hutton got him on was false for one simple reason; the evidence involved a method of blowing a safe that he had never used.
You touch on the main reason why one man had to be involved. There was alot of activity around the farm house and only one person had access and wouldn't have been noticed as being out of place there. Its a rural environment and people would notice others who were out of place. Demlers missing rifle is another red flag. He had time to dispose of it and was known as a highly organised man.
Regarding the planted bullet. In the mid-1980s I was the chief reporter at the Auckland Star. One of the police reporters came to me wide-eyed with excitement one morning, telling me that a prominent police office had drunkenly told him in the police bar the night before that he (this prominent cop) had planted the Crewe cartridge case, not Hutton, who was accused of the planting by the Royal Commission but denied it.
Given the years that had elapsed, I thought this prominent cop was too young to have been involved, but I checked the old files and discovered that he had indeed been a junior constable assigned to the search team that "discovered" the planted cartridge case.
We didn't take the story anywhere, because this prominent policeman was so dangerous, we feared for our lives if we alerted him to the possibility of us writing about it.
(Yes, police stations had bars in that era, and many a journo drank in them late at nights with off-duty cops and yarned about cases).
After my time at the Star, I worked for North & South, where for my first few years, Pat Booth was the deputy editor. Pat had investigated this case more than any other journo (he had discovered for example that the cartridge case number did not match the murder bullets; the day he published this dramatic story, the police dumped the case and bullets in the Whitford tip, never to be found).
Pat's theory was that Jeanette shot Harvey, after Harvey beat her up. He was a wife-beater, and Pat argued that the injuries on her body when found were consistent with a savage beating by Harvey. Pat further surmised that Jeanette's father, Len Demler, helped her dispose of Harvey's body, and that Jeanette then killed herself several days later from remorse at what she had done, with her father disposing of her body too.
In Pat's theory, Jeanette was the "mystery person" who fed her baby Rochelle for several days after Harvey was killed, and also the "mystery woman" seen outside by a passer-by a day or two after Harvey died.
We may never know for certain how Harvey and Jeannette died, as most of the people who could tell us are dead. But the fact is the police planted the "evidence" that led to Arthur's conviction, and nobody should be convicted on the basis of fabricated/planted police evidence.
I won't go there today, but the latter point still gnaws at me re the "Swedish tourist" murders, as the police demonstrably fabricated the case against David Tamihere, including the critical watch they claimed Tamihere had given to his son (and which was compelling for the jury during the trial); when Mr Hoglin's body was eventually found, the real watch was still on his wrist.
I will make a point of reading this new book.
To David mcLoughlin:
I didn't know Harvey Crewe was a wife-beater.
I knew his mother in Pahiatua. She ran the kindergarten across Tyndall St from our house in the 1960s.
She was a lady but one you wouldn't want to piss off.
My mother was one of her friends. She said Mrs Crewe was domineering.
I doubt she would have stood for a son beating his wife.
- Paul Corrigan
I was told by an ex policeman that Hutton was known in the police as "The Gardener" because he was so good at planting things. It wasnt his nickname because it would have been widely known - but among frustrated detectives it was not unknown for someone to suggest 'lets get the gardener'
I remember this case very clearly.
At the time it was given extensive TV coverage.
It was never very clear why Thomas was accused. The evidence against him was very broadly circumstantial and the ridiculous “motive” for killing this couple was that Jeanette had once been Thomas’ girlfriend !
Because there was no direct evidence pointing to Thomas, the police planted gun cartridges from Thomas’ gun in the garden outside the window where the shots were fired.
The Police then did a second search of the garden and lo and behold – they found the Thomas gun cartridge shells. (that they had just planted there)
The problem for the Police was that it was later proven that the cartridge shells had been manufactured after the Crewe murders took place !
David Yallop wrote an excellent book – “Beyond Reasonable Doubt” in which he dissected the shabby prosecution process and this led to Thomas being pardoned.
The planting of false evidence (cartridge shells) was a national disgrace, and the Police have never admitted to it, and have never made any kind of public declaration that evidence planting is NOT their policy. So that alone has left the public with a clear impression that falsifying or planting evidence is one of the Police options, where needed.
Fast forward to 1998, where Scott Watson has been convicted of the Sounds “murders”. The ONLY actual physical evidence against Watson is 2 hairs of Olivia’s found on Watson’s blanket.
Problem is that the hairs were not found at all on first search, only showing up when Police requested a second search !!
Hairs on blankets/cartridge shells in garden. Soung familiar? Standard Police procedure in N.Z. ??
Meanwhile in the small world that is NZ, the nz rocketry association launch from Arthur Allen thomas' current property at oringi.
It's surprisingly common for attendees to wind up in conversation with the man himself.
Doug,
The book certainly supports the view that the case against Thomas was entirely circumstantial, and flimsy at that when examined in retrospect. However, one clarification: Thomas wanted Jeannette Crewe to be his girlfriend, but she kept him at a distance. The "jilted suitor" scenario was central to the prosecution case.
Thanks Karl.
Yes - I had that point wrong.
Doug
I am in the process of tidying up and cleaning out old paper work – books magazines etc. Came upon a bundle of a dozen or so Listener magazines from 1997. Cleanups in our house take just a little bit of time.
There was a Listener cover story (Nov 1997) on Peter Williams the well-known lawyer who had a lot to do with the Thomas appeals after the second trial. The story written by Tim Watkin was both interview and book review. The book review was of Peter Williams own book (A Passion for Justice). Peter Williams had very harsh words for the police in general. Police had tried to “set him up” on more than one occasion with all sorts of amateurish tricks.
In the interview Williams spoke about the Thomas case. He did not go along with Pat Booth’s theory of murder suicide. This is not to take away from the great work Pat Booth did on the case. I have read Pat Booth’s book – can’t recall the title. Williams points out that Jeanette Crewe was shot from behind and found face down on the carpet in such a way as to exclude a self-inflicted shot.
Williams also made a point regarding bullets evidence. The forensic scientist was found to have altered his evidence prior, to say the Thomas rifle was “consistent” with the bullets fired. His original notes which he supressed had stated “no match”. Williams claimed that “consistent” was the major point which misled the jury.
Interesting point re the Listener. Nov 1997 runs out to 96 pages. Dec 2023 still running at 90 plus pages.
Williams points out that Jeanette Crewe was shot from behind and found face down on the carpet in such a way as to exclude a self-inflicted shot.
Jeanette was shot in the side of her head at point-blank range above her ear. Such a wound is consistent both with suicide and somebody putting a gun right to her head and pulling the trigger.
Her body was found not in her house but in the Waikato River quite some time after her death; as was Harvey's. There were no bodies in the house, though there was blood all over the place, caused by a body or bodies being dragged through it. The toddler Rochelle was alive in her cot but did not seem to have eaten for some time, and her drenched, faeces-filled nappy had been unchanged for days. Various people deduced somebody had fed Rochelle between the time of the killings and her being found, but I am not sure that happened, given her poor condition.
Another infamous death of someone shot in the head in a possible murder-suicide was Robin Bain, claimed by Joe Karam and his supporters to have murdered all his family except David, then framed David, then killed himself. Robin was shot in the top of his head, consistent with being shot from above from a distance from behind the curtain in the prayer space where he was kneeling for his morning prayers. Karam went to great physical contortions to show that Robin could have shot himself in the top of the head with the murder rifle but it didn't impress me. And the murderer then wiped clean the blood-soaked rifle before carefully laying it next to Robin's hand. Robin couldn't have done that because he was already dead.
For David McLoughlin, re Jeanette Crewe. Point taken. I have misquoted from the Listener article and may have done Peter Williams an injustice. An exact transcription from the article reads as:
“Experts, says Williams, showed that Jeanette was shot from behind and probably died with the left- hand side of her face on the carpet.”
That sentence sits at the end of Page 20, Listener November 8th 1997. Williams was referring the pathological evidence.
I won’t go into all of my views about the Bain case except to say the “system” could not accept that Joe Karam, a non-lawyer and untrained detective, managed to unstitch moment by moment every piece of the case. Yes, later on he was assisted by some good legal minds. There were a lot of clocks involved in the Bain case. The police case falls apart where the timelines do not fit.
Clocks as in timelines come into play in other contested cases. Such as the Watson case and Mark Lundy’s case. The Feilding dairy farm murder (Scott Guy) was another instance - where the defence proved via the clock that the accused (Ewen Macdonald) could not possibly have been in two places at once.
Time becomes friend and enemy alternately to accusers and accused.
The prosecution case in Lundy had him killing his wife and daughter about 4 or 5 hours later in the 2nd trial, and yet he was guilty beyond reasonable doubt in both trials. Bain raced round his paper run then killed all his family in trial 1 (guilty) , and killed all the family except his dad, then did the paper run, then killed his dad in trial 2. Truth’s a funny thing
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