8

Who Killed the Crewes?

It was an evil and, in many ways, brutally calculated set of murders that killed a more innocent time in New Zealand’s law enforcement history. In 1970, an apparent double homicide would change forever the way New Zealanders would look at their police force, their judges and their whole justice system.

The events that would follow the discovery of the bodies of a husband and wife from a small Auckland farm led to a bending, stretching and eventual breaking of all the rules and conventions of normal criminal procedure.

Moreover it would force New Zealand from a more naive era into one where the lines between the justice system and criminals, black and white, good and evil, could no longer be as clearly defined.

Before the deaths of Jeannette and Harvey Crewe, it was assumed that, when crimes occurred, criminals were relentlessly pursued by police, the guilty sentenced and society would continue on. However, when their blood-splattered farmhouse was discovered after they’d been missing for five days, with their 18-month-old daughter Rochelle, alone and healthy still in her cot, a chain of events was put into place that would eventually involve an entire nation, its media, the highest reaches of its legal system and eventually, a prime minister.

When the local Waikato River disgorged the bodies of Harvey and Jeannette Crewe a few months later, police had few real leads and only one main suspect. Partly because of the mysterious discovery of the baby and the attendant media coverage, they were under huge amounts of pressure to come up with some answers to some questions. Was it a double homicide? Was it murder-suicide? Was it a professional hitman? Was it the eternal love triangle?

But the most abiding question of them all was: was it Arthur Allan Thomas?

Arthur and Vivien Thomas were farmers whose lives were intertwined with the Crewes in the small, some would say insular, community of Pukekawa south of Auckland. They were married in 1964 and looked forward to spending their lives on the land with children. But in 1970, they went from simple farmers to household names and their lives were shattered forever.

The events surrounding the deaths of Harvey and Jeannette Crewe not only saw the end of the line for one couple, it also destroyed the Thomas’s lives and became a virtual life sentence for all involved.

On the morning of Monday, 22 June 1970, a local farmer went visiting on the house occupied by his daughter and son-in-law and walked straight into a grisly crime scene. No one had seen the Crewes for five days – since the Wednesday previous – and so Jeannette’s father, Len Demler, who lived on an adjoining farm, came to investigate.

According to his later testimony Demler found the house unlocked and the remains of a fish dinner on the dining room table. Two plates had been eaten off and there was a third flounder that lay virtually untouched on a serving plate in the middle of the table. Mail from the previous Wednesday was spread out next to the meal. The carpet in the living room was extensively stained with blood.

Demler said he then went down the corridor to the baby’s room where he found his granddaughter Rochelle in her cot. The child was relatively healthy, and in incredibly good condition if she had been alone for five days. And so began one of the most intriguing elements of the Crewe murder case. What happened in those five days? How did baby Rochelle manage to survive? Did someone look after her after her parents had been killed? If so, who was it?

These were the initial questions which faced Detective Inspector Bruce Hutton, the man who oversaw the investigation and who, like everyone else involved in the case, would be haunted by it for the rest of his life. But in 1970 he was a pragmatic detective with a reputation for hard work. He had a meticulous and systematic approach to crime detection, and a string of successful prosecutions behind him.

His first impressions of the crime scene made his spine tingle. Despite his experience, the eeriness of that house suspended in time and the possibilities of what may have happened during that time unsettled everyone.

There was little doubt that the killings had taken place in the living room. On the carpet there were large patches of blood and a long bloody drag mark that stretched from one of the armchairs across the room. The furniture appeared to be unusually arranged, with the overstuffed club-style armchairs crowded together up one end of the room.

One of the armchairs had bloodstains on it. On the floor beside it lay a woman’s fluffy slipper. There were cold ashes in the fireplace and it appeared that someone had tried to burn a mat and a cushion in there. On the other side of the room, discarded knitting sat on the couch.

On top of the fridge, someone had tossed a pile of soiled nappies, and in the kitchen the sink contained pots and pans that were filled with blood-stained water. There were splashes of blood on the kitchen wall. It was obvious someone had made a shoddy attempt to clean the house after the deaths.

In the main bedroom, it was another scene of a life deserted mid-stride. Clothing was still around the room where the couple had left it – a dirty change of Jeannette’s clothes sat in one corner. A number of screwed-up paper bags sat on the dresser and the bedclothes had been stripped from the bed.

Further on, the baby’s room probably presented the most disturbing of this crime scene still-life. The empty, white wooden cot in which Rochelle had been found was up against one wall. The young child had been taken into care, but it was her involvement that sparked enormous interest in the case not only in New Zealand, but across the world. The thought of a baby left helpless in its cot for five days while its parents are murdered touched the hearts of millions.

Over the next few days of the investigation, a young farm worker by the name of Bruce Roddick told police he had seen a woman outside the Crewes’ house three days after they disappeared. He had a clear view of the house from the field in which he was working and it gave weight to the suspicion that someone had taken care of the child after the killings.

What followed was the largest search for bodies and weapons ever undertaken in New Zealand. Police, army and air force personnel and local farmers made up a search party numbering upwards of 300 men as they combed an area of around 970 square kilometres. The most attention went into the house, its lawns and garden and the surrounding paddocks.

Hutton and his team put together a list of suspects, and right from the start, as is inevitable in such a small community, the locals had been whispering about the behaviour of Jeanette’s father, Len Demler. During the searches he had been seen around the property on horseback, traces of blood had been found in his car, and when asked to produce his gun for examination, he had trouble finding it.

The gun and Demler became the centre of Hutton’s vigorous investigations. Demler was their prime suspect and the police hounded him in an attempt to make a man they thought guilty crack. However, Demler was unfazed. He sought legal advice, continued to be seen around the farm, and even threw a birthday party for himself to take his mind off things.

Six weeks into the investigation police had made little if no headway in the search for bodies and evidence. Pressure was mounting on Hutton and his team.

Then, on 16 August 1970, nearly two months after the Crewes’ disappearance, the flooded Waikato River revealed one of the crime’s big secrets: Jeannette’s body, which 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.

Police were amazed at how well preserved the body was, and it had obviously been completely under water since the time of death. They dragged the body from the water and within minutes the facial features started to decompose and melt in the air, so it was immediately placed back in the water as they waited for the pathologist to arrive. As soon as the body was placed back in, the facial features immediately held back together.

When Demler was brought to the Waikato to identify his daughter’s body, those present said he showed little emotion. Bruce Hutton, perhaps hoping for his suspect to crack, instead got a matter-of-fact, positive identification. Despite the major breakthrough, all he had was still only one of two bodies and a suspect. Evidence linking Demler to anything was thin on the ground.

Then, almost like clockwork, on 16 September, exactly one month after the discovery of Jeannette’s body and almost three months after his disappearance, Harvey Crewe’s body was washed up in a still flooded Waikato River. He too had been shot once in the head, wrapped in bedclothes and bound with wire, but the police also found an old car axle that had been used to weigh his body down.

For the police this piece of evidence as a stroke of luck. For Arthur Thomas, though, it was a complete nightmare, because it would be that axle which would begin to implicate him in the murder.

It didn’t take long for the police to trace the axle to Arthur’s father, Allan Thomas, and a trailer he had owned until 1965. In that year he took it to an engineer to be modified, during which time the axle was replaced and the stubs cut off. A month after the discovery of Harvey’s body police arrived at Arthur Thomas’s farm to search the tip for the missing stubs.

Thomas, as he would be throughout the investigation, was helpful and offered to assist Detective Len Johnson in the search. He even mentioned that a vintage car club had been through his tip a couple of months before and had taken some parts. They found nothing.

The extent to which Thomas assisted police throughout their inquiries, and the extent to which he seemed to trust the system and follow it unquestioningly, in hindsight, and considering modern, more jaded attitudes to police, seems quite naive. Every time police came to his farm, he would down his tools and help. But those were different times – more trusting times – and Thomas felt he had nothing to hide. Two people he knew had been killed, and as far as he was concerned, he was going to do the right thing and cooperate in any way he could, as all honest folk should.

As the police delved deeper into Thomas’s life they discovered he had courted Jeannette Crewe ten years earlier. During their initial search of the Crewe house, police had found an unopened present in the bedroom wardrobe. It was stored up the back, appeared forgotten and had a note attached to Jeanette which was signed with love by an Arthur. Len Demler identified that Arthur to be Arthur Thomas.

The police had soon 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 Jeanette’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.

Despite this background information, Demler was still the prime suspect. The problem was police were finding that evidence linking him to the murder was hard to come by. Eventually, at a conference four months after the murders and under ever mounting pressure to produce results, police decided they did not have enough evidence to charge Demler with anything. They decided instead to focus on Arthur Thomas. After the decision was made, it took them only two weeks to amass all the evidence they would need.

On 20 October 1970, the day after the decision to go after Arthur Thomas, detectives Johnson and Parkes visited Thomas’s farm. They were there to once again go over the tip which had been searched only five days before by Johnson and Thomas. This time, however, they found the missing stub axles.

The stubs they found matched perfectly – like pieces of a jigsaw – to the axle that was used to weight down the sixteen-stone 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 Crewe’s bodies. These matches, at least to the police, all of a sudden indisputably linked the farmer to the body.

Arthur Thomas’s fate was being sealed before his very eyes, yet somehow, he unquestioningly retained his faith in the system and the police, even noting to a friend that they seemed like decent people. Sooner or later, he believed, all of this would be cleared up and life would go on. It wouldn’t.

On 25 October Arthur and Vivien were out until the early hours at a party. At 6 am the police arrived at the farm to take Arthur and Vivien in for questioning. Trying to place his suspects under duress again, Hutton hoped for a confession, but he didn’t get it. It was at that point, Arthur Thomas later told his counsel, Hutton said to him, ‘I have got another piece of information up my sleeve.’

The next day Hutton had officers search the garden near the back door of the Thomas house. This was the third time they had gone over it. Despite the previous thorough yet fruitless searches, Detective Sergeant Mike Charles this time managed to find what was to become the most famous piece of evidence in the history of New Zealand’s courts. It was a spent .22 calibre cartridge case that had been fired from Thomas’s gun. It became known as the Charles cartridge case.

On 11 November 1970, Arthur Allen Thomas was arrested for the murders of Jeanette and Harvey Crewe. There was no confession, no witnesses, no fingerprints, no footprints, no tyre marks or blood-stained clothes. The evidence the police had gathered was all circumstantial.

The Thomas family and friends were in shock. The police had called Vivien to tell her they had arrested her husband. What stuck with her was how matter-of-fact they had been, and how much anger and disbelief she felt about it. Her only comfort to cling to was the continuing faith in the fact that it would soon all be sorted out.

Thomas was taken to a psychiatric ward for testing, and then to the remand section of Auckland’s Mt Eden Prison where he was placed in what’s known as ‘the capital cells’, the cells for capital offence prisoners that are totally isolated from other inmates.

The ‘capitals’ exercised alone, ate alone and had no one to talk to, yet through that time, Arthur Thomas, the farmer now penned in and surrounded by concrete, still believed a good defence lawyer and a jury of twelve decent people would prove him innocent. There was little else for him to think.

Thomas spent three months on remand before he went before the New Zealand High Court for trial. Defence Counsel Paul Temm, QC, appeared for Thomas, his opposite number was David Morris, who was known as a brilliant young crime prosecutor and had worked closely with police during the investigation.

It was Morris that shone in court. In the battle for the hearts and minds of the jury, Morris brought great drama and plausibility to the police case. The Crown prosecutor contended that Thomas drove nine miles from his home to the Crewe property, climbed onto a windowsill and shot Harvey Crewe through an open window louvre before ejecting the cartridge case on to the garden, entering the house and shooting Jeanette at point-blank range.

The Charles cartridge, the police said, placed Thomas at the scene. The unopened present, they contended, was proof of unrequited love and therefore deep-seated, murderous, jealousy. The presence of the stub axles and wire on Thomas’s farm provided further evidence he was the killer.

Temm argued that on the night in question there was no way the window louvres would have been open as records showed that cold wind and rain would have driven through them. He also tried to cast suspicion over the Charles cartridge case, and reasons why it had not been found in the first two searches. He also pointed out how strange it was that the cartridge was found containing dry soil after spending a cold, wet winter in the dirt.

These counterpoints seemed to have little effect in raising doubt in the minds of the jury, as did Thomas’s alibi that he was at home in bed with his wife on the night of the murders, and the fact that, had he been out, his neighbours would have heard the distinctive whine of his Hillman.

In fact Morris had done such a job turning the jury against Thomas, that when Vivien took the stand as a witness, she could sense hostility in the courtroom that was directed towards her and her evidence. Morris, it seemed, had already convinced the jury she was the woman seen outside the Crewe house.

In the oration and drama of a courtroom, believable witnesses are vital to a case. Lawyers often ask whether a witness ‘has a good head’. This refers to whether they are good-looking or ugly, likeable or untrustworthy, and whether they are someone the jurors are likely to feel they can trust and would take a shine to in the real world, outside the courtroom. Regardless of the veracity of the evidence a witness gives, this can have a huge impact on the way the facts are interpreted.

Unfortunately, in the slang of legal chambers, neither Arthur nor Vivien Thomas ‘had a good head’. The jury just did not like them.

The defence was on the back foot for the entire trial. Then, on the last day, the prosecution played its ace in the hole. It was jeweller William Eggleton, who claimed that Arthur Thomas had brought a blood-covered watch to him for repair just after the murders. The prosecution alleged that the watch belonged to Arthur Thomas. It was one final nail on a coffin that had closed long before the end of proceedings.

Presiding Judge Trevor Henry was known for his strong magnetism and charisma. He was also known to be very pro-prosecution, and this was all on show during his summing up of the trial. It appeared to some that he was almost instructing the jury on how to find Thomas guilty. In fact Justice Henry’s summing up held such sway, and was of such a tone, that in the later Royal Commission it drew heavy criticism for exerting undue influence on the jury.

Arthur Allen Thomas was found guilty of the murders of Harvey and Jeannette Crewe 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.

Until his life sentence, Thomas’s family and friends had – as they had been brought up to do – trusted the system implicitly. Now they had no choice but to realise that it had failed them dismally. Fuelled by their anger and confusion about the verdict, they immediately decided to form ATAC, the Arthur Thomas Action Committee, and lobby for a retrial.

Headed by Arthur’s wife Vivien and friend Pat Vesey, this group would take on the system they previously felt to be working for them, and harness a groundswell of public support to keep the media and the public focused on the accused man’s plight.

ATAC weren’t the urban radicals, or agitators people were used to seeing demonstrate. They were God-fearing country folk in felt hats and grey trousers. They were people who once would have been the last to question the police or a country’s legal system, but who had developed an acute conviction that the police were in a conspiracy against them.

And while some of them may have appeared as untrustworthy hicks in the witness stand and the highfalutin atmosphere of the courtroom, to a wider public they came across as honest people sticking up for what they believed in.

To wage their campaign for a retrial ATAC needed money to match the endless supplies possessed by the state, and in generating publicity and sympathy they could generate that money. They held meetings and public rallies, and in one huge step they even hired the Auckland Town Hall.

Nervous that they had over-extended themselves and worried that no one would show up, they were proved to have underestimated ATAC’s following when, in unprecedented scenes, 2000 people showed up and even queued down the street to get in. The public was beginning to sense something had gone terribly wrong.

What was also incredible was the underlying faith in these actions. For country people not used to life in the spotlight or under public scrutiny, it must have been a huge step, but as they rose to the challenge and began to realise that the crowds were there because they also thought an injustice had been done, their conviction grew.

At one rally Vivien Thomas challenged police in the audience to arrest her then and there. If Arthur was guilty, she said to the crowd, then surely she must have known about it and helped him. If that were the case, she said, then why hadn’t she been arrested?

The police didn’t, of course, but it was moments such as that which gradually built the groundswell of public support. All the while Arthur Thomas stewed in jail. As more people got behind the retrial committee, so too did the media. 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 Arthus Thomas a new trial. A month later, amongst a buzz of interest not seen before, proceedings began.

In his first trial, Arthur Thomas was convicted purely on circumstantial evidence. During the two years spent garnering public support, the retrial committee had also gone over all the evidence, and had come up with some disturbing anomalies. For instance, in the first trial, jeweller William Eggleton claimed Thomas had taken him a blood-stained watch for repair just after the murders. The retrial committee proved that Thomas never owned a watch.

Also, during the first trial, police had claimed that the bullet found in Crewe’s body was extremely rare. They said that just prior to Thomas’s arrest they had searched a shed on his property and found the same sort of rare bullet. That literally meant that, after the hundreds of man hours of vigorous searching, Thomas had only kept three of the rare bullets on his farm – the first two that were fired into the victims, and the third one, was kept in a jar in his shed.

In the eyes of the retrial committee this was a bizarre coincidence so they advertised for people with the same kind of bullets to come forward. Immediately they were inundated with thousands of the same type of bullet from across the country. Even a bikie club from Hamilton, touched by Thomas’s plight, collected up as many of the bullets as possible and delivered them personally to the retrial committee. In a short space of time they had proved that the bullets were not at all rare, and that police had misrepresented evidence.

Even more seriously, the defence believed that the Charles cartridge had been planted. The police claimed that even though the garden had been searched twice before, the job had not been done properly. Hence their ‘third time lucky’ find. Graham Hewson, Harvey Crewe’s best friend, told the retrial committed that he had searched the garden with a sieve two months before, but police denied the search ever took place.

Faced with this official stonewalling, the retrial committee undertook their own research and secretly buried several similar cases at the Crewe house and left them for exactly the same amount of time as the Charles case was supposed to be in the ground. The retrial committee’s cases showed considerably more corrosion and tarnishing than the Charles case.

The retrial committee had spent two years pulling apart the evidence that it took the police only two weeks to put together to get the conviction against Thomas. New defence counsel Kevin Ryan felt that he now had the ammunition to have the conviction overturned and have Thomas freed. Ryan felt that he had the evidence to put sufficient doubt in the jury’s mind. He felt that he had run much more difficult trials in the past, and that those had ended in acquittals.

What he hadn’t taken into account, however, was the ruthlessness and determination with which the Crown would checkmate his every move. What he found, once the trial got underway, was almost a crusade on behalf of the Crown to keep Thomas in jail, and the most blatant of attempts to tip the playing field in their favour.

At the start of a trial such as Thomas’s it would be normal procedure for both the prosecution and defence to vet the list of potential jurors so there is no chance of bias amongst the twelve people. Before the start of the second trial the prosecution gave themselves two weeks to go over the list of jurors. The defence was given the list on the Thursday before the trial’s Monday start.

Over those two weeks the prosecution had met with police, and had the names of the jurors read out so that officers could report on every individual and determine their attitudes towards Thomas’s guilt or innocence. The final list contained nine out of twelve people who were definitely pro-prosecution.

The game was pretty much over before it even got started.

All the evidence the defence thought would cast doubt on Thomas’s conviction was repelled by the Crown. Through Morris’s deft footwork, they changed their evidence on the watch. In the first trial, they said Arthur Thomas owned it. In the second they said it wasn’t Thomas’s at all, rather it was Harvey Crewe’s and that Thomas had callously stripped it from the body before disposing of it in the river.

In the second trial the jury also heard another story about baby Rochelle. In the first, the Crown had presented an expert witness who claimed the toddler had been fed during the five-day period before the bodies were found. They had highlighted farm hand Roddick’s sighting of a woman in the yard and had inferred that it was Vivien. In the second trial a different expert appeared to claim that the baby had not been fed, and no mention was made of Roddick’s supposed sighting of Vivien.

Once again, the prosecution was winning the jury’s hearts and minds. They had nullified most of the defence’s arguments. The cartridge case would be Thomas’s last hope.

While Pat Fesey, the head of the retrial committee, was waiting to give evidence about the cartridge case in the second trial, his mind kept going over all the bullets and material that had been sent in by the public to help with their research. Again and again his mind kept coming back to where he stored the thousands of rounds of ammunition.

He was then overtaken by an inexplicable urge to leave the court immediately – despite the fact he was due in the witness stand – jump in his car and drive back to the farm. There, as if driven by an invisible force, he went straight to the chest in which the bullets were stored and pulled out a packet. Inside the packet was a fishhook box containing four sealed and numbered envelopes. With them was a letter from a retired policeman and firearms expert, John Ritchie. The letter claimed that the envelopes contained information that would free Arthur Thomas.

Mr Ritchie would turn out to be a one of the true heroes of the Thomas case.

The .22 calibre bullet case police claimed to have found in the Crewe’s garden (the Charles case) had been fired from Arthur Thomas’s rifle. The bullet fragments found in the heads of Harvey and Jeannette Crewe had the number eight stamped on the base. The police’s main argument was based on the fact that one of these bullets had come from the Charles cartridge case.

Even though there were rumours and suspicion throughout the second trial that the police had planted the case, the defence still had to prove that the bullets had not come from the Charles case.

When Vesey got home and opened the package from Ritchie, he read the accompanying letter. It read:

‘I have made observations which I believe are important to your case. So that you can test my observations at a basic level without my influence I am sending you some .22 cartridges in several envelopes. Please open them in the numbered order, read my instructions and I feel that the gist of my research will become obvious to you.’

In each envelope were instructions that he should examine the bullets inside and note his observations. The first thing he noted was that each of the bullets was stamped on the bottom with the manufacturer’s initials ICI and that the C in one of them was different to the others.

Following the instructions further Vesey then separated the bullets from the cartridges and noted that each of the bullets was stamped with a number eight on the base – except for one, which was also the bullet that had the different ICI stamping.

Here was a crack in the police evidence, it appeared, that maybe the Crown could not plug, and if the defence pushed it wide enough, it could eventually destroy their whole case.

Vesey ran back to court and explained to Ryan what he’d found: that if the cartridge case the police had on display was a certain type it could never have held a number eight bullet.

The defence called in forensic scientist Dr Jim Sprott to test Ritchie’s theory. In one of their typically obstructive moves, the prosecution brought in DSRI scientist Dr Donald Nelson to also examine the cases. Nelson said he could find no differences, while Sprott said he could identify clear differences in the sizes of the lettering stamped into the cartridges. Checkmate.

Sprott identified four categories of cartridge case, only two of which had ICI stamped on the base. These became known as category 3 and 4 cases. No category 4 case ever contained a number eight bullet. The Charles case fell into category 4. The retrial committee members finally thought they had proof that the Charles case was planted.

At this point the defence was scrambling. They called a recess and rang ICI in Australia to check Sprott’s findings. The general manager said there were no differences in lettering. Checkmate.

The court was reconvened and the defence appeared to have an advantage they could press home, but the new evidence was complicated and the jury would have had a hard time comprehending all the details. When they finally retired it took them two and a half hours to reach a decision.

Arthur Thomas was again found guilty of the murders of Harvey and Jeannette Crewe and given another life sentence.

When a major decision, such as in the Thomas trial, is handed down, people who are present in the courtroom say there is no atmosphere like it – the tension, the grief, the joy, the vindication, the sudden outpouring of emotions … After all, they are the ultimate decisions about the ultimate truths of life and death.

Many of ATAC’s members were in the court’s foyer when the decision for the second trial was handed down. They heard a cheering inside and assumed Thomas had finally been acquitted. However their elation turned to almost hysterical shock, anger and despair when the doors swung open and the real decision was revealed. People who were in the courtroom that day described the unearthly wail from the crowd as the verdict was handed down as being like that of a wounded animal.

Vivien Thomas ran from the seats at the back of the court to confront the jury and scream, ‘What sort of people are you? He’s innocent!’ Arthur, once again, was struck dumb, simply holding his hands out in a pleading gesture of innocence. Finally, he managed to challenge the court to give him a lie detector test. Inside and out, there was pandemonium. Police reinforcements stormed the courtroom. Those who were there remember that the only constant in all the chaos was the real sense that something terrible had happened in that room that day. Vivien Thomas had been so confident that her husband would walk from the court a free man, she had packed clothes for him to go home in.

One of the people present was journalist Pat Booth. That moment changed his life and that day he vowed to investigate the two trials. He had no connection to Arthur Thomas, and he had reported on plenty of verdicts in murder trials before, but for this one he really felt there was something very wrong underlying it all.

In the eight weeks following the second verdict Booth examined, page by page, the evidence that was given in both trials. The more he read the more amazed he became at the changes between the two – major and minor – and the different emphases that were given to certain facts, and in each case making them work against Arthur Thomas. Such was the difference, he believed, that each of the juries had virtually heard a completely different interpretation of the same set of facts.

For example, everything, Booth believed, had been coloured by the way in which everyone was convinced that Arthur Thomas was capable of committing the crime, and that he had reason to do it. The prosecution made the juries believe that he was obsessed by Jeannette Crewe. Crown prosecutor Morris, in his theatrically slanted questioning, successfully nurtured the idea that Arthur was obsessed, and that he was deceitful.

At one point Morris asked Thomas: ‘Do you know anyone else in the district who was as keen on Jeannette as you?’ Thomas answered, ‘I do not, Sir.’ Morris asked again: ‘Do you know anyone with more reason than you to be jealous of Harvey Crewe?’ Again Thomas answered, ‘I do not, Sir.’

Once again these answers come back to whether a defendant is one which will be warmed to by a jury. In hindsight it is easy to think that someone more sophisticated would have simply said, ‘I am not jealous of Harvey Crewe.’ However, Thomas scrupulously answered yes or no to all the questions as he had been told to do.

The result was a slanted picture. Even in the summing up of the evidence by the Crown prosecutor he reminded the jury that Thomas had said he knew of no one with more reason to be jealous of Harvey Crewe, when in fact, if you examine the grey area between all these truths, he hadn’t said that at all. He had simply answered a leading question as he had been told to do. Those same answers were even repeated three years later to the five judges in the Wellington court of appeal.

So significant were these grey areas between the truth that they had an effect of New Zealand’s legal history, and gone into the history of New Zealand’s jurisprudence. The outcomes of all the trials and appeals, and how they were arrived at will always be debated about.

These days, it is almost commonplace for a lawyer, when addressing a jury, to quote the Thomas case. They will always point out to the jurors that if there is reasonable doubt, they must acquit and then underline their point by saying, ‘Remember the Thomas case.’

As Pat Booth’s research continued, the more he realised how wrong so many statements were. Such as the one by New Zealand’s Chief Justice Richard Wile which, in defending the verdicts, said the juries had heard all the evidence. Booth contended that in fact they hadn’t, and they had only heard evidence that was either half presented or fully distorted.

And while David Morris was a star prosecutor for the Crown (Booth had actually congratulated him on his masterful final address in the first trial), within his drama and eloquence that mesmerised the jury, there were many flaws designed to place light and shade across the whole truth.

Morris was such a high flyer and star of the New Zealand legal system that, at the time, many had already marked him for the bench, and sure enough, in May 1994, he was made a judge in the High Court of New Zealand.

Booth published a series of articles on the case questioning the decision. They continued to stir and fuel support for Thomas’s cause, and at the same time they galvanized the partnership between him and forensic scientist Sprott. It was based on proving the Ritchie theory about the ICI cartridges.

The men would literally work for thousands of hours, often late into the night, on the cartridges. Sprott’s forensic work was meticulous, but despite this they still had problems getting their findings accepted by the Crown. They had to contend with the prosecution’s expert witness, DSIR scientist Donald Nelson, who insisted that he could see no difference in the lettering under the microscope.

Booth maintained that even his wife and children could, untrained, spot the differences with the naked eye. However, he also had to contend with the denial of the General Manager of ICI that there were any differences.

Like men staring at a ghost no one else could see, Booth and Sprott had no choice but to go to Melbourne, to visit ICI and check the company’s manufacturing records. And even then the New Zealand police tried to make life as hard as possible for the two.

On one trip the New Zealand authorities phoned the Australian police to request that Booth not be present in the room during one set of examinations. However, the Australian police didn’t have the same vested interests in the case, and simply allowed Booth to stand outside the open door of the room in which the tests took place. As findings were made, they were brought over for Booth to look at. Technically, therefore, he wasn’t present in the room when the examinations took place.

Finally, the tenacity of Booth and Sprott paid off. They had gathered enough evidence to satisfy Justice Minister Martin Findlay to grant a retrial. By that time, through agitation by Booth’s articles, the mood in New Zealand about the case had moved from being simple public support to a hotly debated, politically charged issue.

However, as far as the police were concerned, the investigation was over. Before the retrial, Detective Inspector Hutton ordered that all the evidence be returned or disposed of. The fact that the case had gained so much notoriety, and had become so charged makes Hutton’s actions even more extraordinary.

That a detective would order the dumping of all the major evidence from one of the country’s biggest trials onto a tip is, these days, almost unbelievable. But that’s where the cartridge cases and most of the exhibits from the trial ended up, on Auckland’s Woodford Tip.

Booth knew this had happened, which is why he had gone to the justice minister and presented his findings; so the minister himself would then make the request for the dumped evidence and be informed personally of what had happened. Findlay was sympathetic to Booth and Sprott’s cause and heard all their new findings, but when police heard about this, their expert Donald Nelson announced that he had discovered a bullet that shattered Sprott’s theory. Booth and Sprott were then forced to enter a game of bluff and counter-bluff.

During their ICI investigations in Melbourne Booth and Sprott researched the production histories of the four categories of bullets identified in the tests. What they found was that the number eight bullet heads like the ones that killed the Crewes stopped being used in manufacturing in October 1963 and that category 4 cartridges like the Charles cartridge were not produced until March 1964. Nelson claimed he had collected a category 4 bullet from the manufacturers in February 1964 – within the crucial five-month gap.

But Booth and Sprott had an ace up their sleeve. They were almost certain that Nelson’s new cartridge had been made with the propellant acturax powder. If it did, they knew that it hadn’t been made at all when Nelson claimed it had because acturax hadn’t come into use until mid-1965, which was more than twelve months after Nelson said that he picked up the cartridge.

This time Booth and Sprott didn’t want to take the chance that the New Zealand police might meddle with their evidence, so they flew to Melbourne for the opening of the bullet case where the Australian police would act as an independent observer. When they did open the case, sure enough the powder that fell out was acturax, totally discrediting the piece of evidence.

Justice Minister Findlay finally granted an appeal.

Over the years that it was debated, tried, retried, researched and campaigned for, the proceedings surrounding the Crewe murders, and Arthur Thomas’s involvement in them, was unique for the fact that it was always a matter of point and counter-point – check and checkmate.

In retrospect, with all the evidence available, the way the police and Crown prosecution continually sought to prove each argument for the defence wrong seems bloody minded. To assume falsehoods in a fact and to set out to prove them is not a way to arrive at the truth.

When the appeal began, five judges sat and the major argument revolved around one thing: was Sprott right or wrong in his theory?

Astoundingly the court found that while, on the balance of possibilities, Sprott’s theory was right, there remained a remote possibility that he was wrong. On that possibility – which is essentially a turning upside down of all the tenets of the modern-day legal system about being innocent until proven guilty – the five judges rejected Thomas’s appeal.

If a feeling of public anger and mistrust had already existed about the case, then this decision galvanized it even further. But so pitched had the struggle between ‘the system’ and those who sought to discredit it become, Booth was even told by his editor at the Auckland Star newspaper where he worked that, in light of the court of appeal’s decision, it would be wise to leave the case alone.

Booth told his boss that if the decisions have been wrong before the court of appeal, then he felt they were still wrong on that day. He told his boss he would continue to campaign and left the office that day unsure if he still had a job.

To the laymen in the street, it looked blatantly to be a case of the system protecting its own at the expense of one man, a simple farmer, and that simple farmer would stay behind bars while the status quo kept protecting itself.

Vivien Thomas, however, had had enough. The pressure of it all had taken its toll on her, as had the enforced separation from her husband. The rejected appeal was the final straw. Just after the appeal, in 1975, Vivien decided that after five years, it was no longer possible for the two of them to take up where they left off were Arthur to be released. Vivien divorced Arthur, who would have then been at the lowest point imaginable for a man.

However, while Vivien felt her marriage to Arthur was over, she didn’t feel the same way about his innocence, and she continued to work for his release by giving radio and TV interviews.

While Vivien continued to campaign, Booth continued to research. Through his investigations he fielded literally thousands of calls from a fascinated public. Many were, of course, merely morbidly curious, but some, however, led to vital information. There were even mysterious tip-offs, such as the anonymous caller who, after four years of investigating, rang Booth at work and simply asked if he was still interested in the Thomas case. Booth said he was, and the caller then asked if he was still interested in the watch. Booth said he was, and the caller simply said, ‘Find John Fisher,’ before hanging up.

Within four hours Booth had tracked down John Fisher, the owner of the blood- and mucous-covered watch that Thomas was supposed to have taken for repairs after the murders. Fisher’s part in the Thomas saga is typical of everything that happened, because Fisher had come forward to police during the two trials to tell police that the watch was his and that the blood and mucous were a result of him wearing it while killing a pig.

The police simply ignored Fisher and sent him away because what he had to say didn’t match with what they wanted to portray. The result was that in the second trial they simply moved the watch to Harvey Crewe’s wrist instead and claimed that Thomas had stolen it.

In 1978 British author David A. Yallop published the book Beyond Reasonable Doubt, which was his examination into the Thomas trials. Yallop’s specialty was examining the role of prosecution in the justice system and, during a visit to New Zealand, he had become fascinated by the Thomas case.

Beyond Reasonable Doubt was a damning examination of everything that had happened in the case. The dust cover claimed that the book contained new facts and evidence that had ‘never been laid before a jury’. On publication the book immediately rekindled public outrage and brought the spotlight back on Thomas, who by that stage had been in jail for seven years. (A film by the same name was also produced from the book in 1980. Written by Yallop, it starred John Hargreaves as Arthur Thomas and famous British actor David Hemmings as Detective Inspector Bruce Hutton.)

Public feeling at this time was so strong, and the matter so politically charged that few could help but have an opinion, or become involved. It was then the drama’s biggest player stepped on to the stage, New Zealand’s Prime Minister Robert David Muldoon.

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. After Yallop’s book hit the stands, he decided enough was enough and commissioned his own report and appointed his own investigator in the form of lawyer Robert Adam Smith.

Muldoon knew by this time that the case would never go away, especially with all the fresh evidence and doubt revealed in Yallop’s book. He also knew that the only way he could put an end to it all would be to order his own inquiry. Muldoon had a reputation as having no real time for the judicial process, and he was also very astute about the mood in his country’s provincial areas, but in the end, many say, he also believed deep down that Thomas wasn’t guilty.

The result of Muldoon’s inquiry was contained in his statement made on the 17 December 1979:

‘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. He was free because ordinary people stood up for what they believed in and persevered against a system hell bent on protecting its own.

On his first night out of prison, Arthur Thomas joked to family members about the poor levels of security in the country and whether they should lock his bedroom door. The farmer was back on the farm.

Even after Thomas was freed, the political fallout continued. In fact it was inevitable. In 1980 a Royal Commission was held into the Thomas convictions. Its conclusions were damming of the police and their methods. It also had to deal with the issue of compensation, and how to give a man back nine and a half years of his life. Towards the end of the report, the commissioner states:

‘Mr Thomas spent nine years in prison. That a man is locked up for a day without cause has always been seen by our laws as a serious assault on his rights. That a man is imprisoned for nine years is a wrong that can never be put right. The fact that he is imprisoned on the basis of evidence that is false to the knowledge of police officers whose duty it is to uphold the law is an unspeakable outrage.’

Arthur Thomas was awarded $1 million in compensation.

Ironically, after all the people that stood behind Thomas, and all the ‘salt-of-the-earth’ support that rallied to the cause of securing his release, the decision about compensation was a divisive one.

The sum in the early ’80s was almost unheard of and there were many farmers who lived off the land and felt they weren’t doing too well who reacted badly to the decision. Some even went as far as to say that they would be happy to spend nine and a half years in jail in return for a $1 million payday. Of course, they had never been accused of double homicide, nor had they probably ever been to prison.

It was this sort of controversy, though, that, after all the public outcry, all the legal manoeuvring and all the political power-broking involved in the Thomas case, obscured the fact that Harvey and Jeannette Crewe were dead, each with a bullet to the head.

But if Arthur Thomas didn’t murder the Crewes, then who did?

Jeannette Crewe’s father, Len Demler, had taken everything he knew about the case to the grave. Between the Wednesday night when that last meal of fish was eaten, and the Monday when Demler said he discovered the scene, there was an undeniable amount of activity at the Crewe property.

To begin with both the bodies were removed, bound (or bound then removed) and dumped in the Waikato River. Then there was the attempt by person or persons to clean up the house. There were the little things, noted by neighbours in the police interviews and trial, like the curtains in the living room being opened on the Friday morning and sparks up the chimney on the Friday night. The fireplace was full of cold ashes and the remains of a mat and cushion. It was obvious someone had attempted to burn evidence, as it was with all the blood-stained water in the sink that someone had attempted to wash away evidence.

It was also obvious that 18-month-old Rochelle had been taken out of the cot, fed and had her nappies and bedclothes changed. A woman was seen in the garden on Friday morning and the baby’s bedclothes were seen being aired on the Saturday morning. All this activity immediately puts paid to the idea that the Crewes were shot on the Wednesday evening and nothing was discovered until Monday morning. It also suggests that people went back there not just once, but a number of times, either to look after Rochelle or rearrange the crime scene.

One rumour that did the rounds of the rural community at the time of the murders was that Demler killed his daughter and son-in-law for money. But police investigations show that there was nothing in that theory as the Crewes had very little that would be worth committing double homicide for.

Another rumour was that the murders were a professional hit and that Harvey and Jeannette had been involved in drugs. The professional hitman theory came about because of the nature of the wounds – one on the front of the head and one behind the ear – that made it look like an execution-style killing. But once again, there was very little evidence to suggest why someone would take out a contract on a young farming couple with an 18-month-old daughter.

Assuming that Arthur Thomas and his wife Vivien are innocent, that leaves one theory looming large over the others, and that is the possibility of murder-suicide. However, there are variations of this that fit and some that don’t.

If you assume that Harvey accidentally shot Jeannette and then killed himself in a fit of remorse, the theory lacks plausibility for the fact that Harvey was a large man – sixteen stone – and he could have done his wife plenty of harm if he had wanted to without having to resort to a rifle.

This leaves a reverse scenario in which there was a large and violent domestic argument between Harvey and Jeannette. Harvey struck a very heavy blow to Jeannette’s face – so heavy that the body was brought out of the river with a smashed nose and six missing teeth. In a fit of rage Jeannette then went into one of the back rooms and came out with the rifle and shot Harvey. But then, having shot her husband, she needed help.

Even in a state of total panic the most obvious thing for her to do would be to turn to her father who lived on the next property. She either went and got, or rang, Len Demler who then came over and helped his daughter to, firstly, dispose of the body and then attempt to clean up the house. Both steps could have happened over several days and the latter acts of cleaning up the house and destroying evidence certainly did.

It also follows that the most obvious person to care for the baby over the next few days would be her mother. The acts of changing and feeding the baby, and airing her cot and bedding on the Saturday are all motherly things to do, and not things a murderous stranger could be relied on to do. Especially not one who had killed a few days previously and was at risk of being spotted at any point.

It bears wondering why, after going to all this trouble, Jeannette would then kill herself. However, you have to consider the frame of mind she could have been in. She had killed her husband and she was probably in extreme pain because of the blow to her face. That combination of emotion and physical stress could have driven her, at some stage over the weekend, after her father had returned home, to decide nothing was worth it anymore and to turn the rifle on herself.

When Len Demler returned, and faced with his daughter’s suicide, he could have considered his involvement in her murder of Harvey, then decided the most prudent course of action was to dispose of her body as well, and then 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. Which also means no one will ever truly know who killed off a much more innocent and naive era and in doing so virtually changed the course of New Zealand legal history.

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 husband, who she knew to be innocent, released, now lives in self-imposed exile in Australia.