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Who Killed the Crewes?

On the morning of Monday, 22 June 1970, a local farmer, Len Demler, called on a small Auckland farm house occupied by his daughter and son-in-law, Harvey and Jeannette Crewe, and walked straight into a grisly crime scene. No-one had seen the Crewes for five days. The house was unlocked and there were the remains of an unfinished meal on the table. The living room was extensively stained with blood.

Demler said his 18-month granddaughter Rochelle was in her cot, healthy and well despite being supposedly alone for five days. Police launched a wide search for the missing couple but found nothing.

On 16 August, 1970, nearly two months after the Crewes’ disappearance, Jeannette’s body was found in the flooded Waikato River. She had been bashed in the face, shot once in the head with a .22 calibre bullet, wrapped in a bed sheet and bound with wire. A month later Harvey Crewe’s body was also washed up in the Waikato River. He had also been shot once in the head, wrapped in bedclothes and bound with wire. However, the police also found an old car axle that had been used to weigh his body down.

It didn’t take long for the police to trace the axle to a nearby farmer, Arthur Thomas. Police discovered that Thomas had courted Jeannette Crewe 10 years earlier. During their initial search of the Crewe house, police had found an unopened present in the bedroom wardrobe with a note attached to Jeannette which was signed with love from Arthur Thomas.

The police formed a scenario which portrayed Thomas as being infatuated with, and then rejected by, Jeannette. The story went that Thomas had had a present and offer of marriage rejected at Jeannette’s front door, and that he had held a deep grudge over the years as he watched the Crewes get married and start a family.

Axle stubs police found on Thomas’s farm matched perfectly to the axle that was used to weight down the 100-kilogram body of Harvey Crewe in the Waikato River. On the same day the police also took possession of Thomas’s rifle for testing, as well as wire in his shed they believed to be similar to that which was used to bind the Crewes’ bodies. These matches, at least to the police, all of a sudden indisputably linked Arthur Thomas – the mild-mannered dairy farmer who had never had so much as a parking fine in his life – to the murder victims.

The next day a spent .22 calibre cartridge case that matched Thomas’s gun was found in the murder victims’ front yard. The case conveniently turned up after numerous previous police searches of the area and after Arthur Thomas’s gun was in police possession. It looked like an obvious plant but there was nothing that Thomas could do about it.

On 11 November 1970, Arthur Allen Thomas was arrested for the murders. There was no confession, no witnesses, no fingerprints, no footprints, no tyre marks or blood-stained clothes. Plus the fact that Arthur Thomas’s wife Vivien said that he was at home in bed with her at the time.

Despite this, Arthur Allen Thomas was found guilty of the murders and sentenced to life imprisonment. He was so stunned that when asked, on sentencing, if he had anything to say, he simply stared open-mouthed at the jury in disbelief.

It caused an uproar. Thousands of ordinary citizens attended public rallies about the miscarriage of justice and got behind the retrial committee. Television, newspapers and radio took up the cause and it soon became apparent that this was a case that would not go away.

In February 1973 the Court of Appeals granted Arthur Thomas a new trial. Again, mainly on the highly suspect police evidence, he was found guilty and returned to jail for the rest of his life.

Several years later Arthur Thomas was granted another retrial but again was found guilty despite new evidence that police had framed him. In the meantime his wife Vivien decided she couldn’t take it any more and packed up and left. Arthur Thomas was at his lowest ebb.

But he was far from friendless. Public feeling was at a frenzy. It was then the drama’s biggest player stepped in, New Zealand’s Prime Minister, Robert David Muldoon.

Mr Muldoon had always had a keen interest in the case, and had followed it in detail. He also had a keen eye for the public mood. Muldoon commissioned his own report and appointed his own investigator. The result of Muldoon’s inquiry was contained in his statement made on 1 December 1979.

 

Mr Muldoon: We have endorsed a recommendation from the Ministry of Justice that we should recommend to the Governor General that he should exercise the prerogative of mercy and pardon Arthur Allan Thomas of the conviction of murdering Harvey and Jeannette Crewe.

 

After nine and a half years in prison, Arthur Thomas had been granted a Royal pardon and was released into the arms of thousands of waiting supporters.

He was later awarded $1 million in compensation for wrongful imprisonment.

Which begs the question: if Arthur Thomas didn’t kill the Crewes, who did? The most common theory is that after a domestic fight in which Jeannette Crewe was badly bashed about the face by her husband she shot and killed him with his .22 rifle. She left his body where it lay and went about caring for the baby for a few days before she committed suicide with a single shot to the head.

When her father-in-law, Len Demler, found them the following day he decided the most prudent course of action was to dispose of their bodies and the firearm. This would have left him in a situation where both the bodies had been disposed of, but their baby daughter was in the house, so something other than abandoning the scene had to be done. Subsequently, on Monday morning, he faked the discovery of the blood-stained house.

Demler died with what he knew of those terrible five days, and as Arthur Thomas once noted, even if the murderers came out and confessed tomorrow, there would probably still be many who think he is guilty. To that end, probably no one will ever really know who killed Harvey and Jeannette Crewe.

These days Arthur Thomas is still farming outside of Auckland. He has remarried and has a child. Vivien, who campaigned for years to have her innocent husband released, now lives in self-imposed exile in Australia. She has never remarried.