The Crewe murders revisited

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.

Arthur Allan Thomas

The passage of time and the deaths of almost all the protagonists (Thomas himself being an exception – he’s still alive at 86) have taken much of the heat out of the Thomas controversy and enabled the authors to take what one hopes is a clearer, more detached perspective than was possible when it was a cause celebre. Nonetheless, the powerful and inescapable impression left by the book is that in its determination to protect itself and preserve the stability of “the system” (the authors’ term), the New Zealand establishment closed ranks.  A gruesome double murder had been committed, leaving a baby orphaned, and a perpetrator needed to be found even if it meant constructing a palpably flawed case and ignoring its multiple failings and contradictions.

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.