The Crewe murders

Sometime during the late afternoon or evening of the 17th of June 1970, someone shot David Harvey Crewe in the head, probably as he sat relaxing in his own armchair. That someone then smashed what was probably the butt of the same .22 rifle into the face of Jeannette Lenore Crewe, breaking her nose, dislodging a number of teeth and knocking her to the floor. The murderer then stood over her and shot her in the head.

This murderous rampage occurred in the lounge of the Crewe farm-house, situated in rural Pukekawa, New Zealand. The double murderer then spent a considerable time that night, and quite possibly subsequent nights, attempting to clean up the blood, burning a hearth rug and a cushion that were almost certainly heavily blood-stained and in the process moving some of the furniture from its usual position.

The killer then managed to move both bodies from the farm and successfully secrete them somewhere. This would have been an extremely difficult task, requiring enormous strength, as Harvey Crewe was a big man, six feet one inch tall, heavily built, and weighing sixteen stone.

The first victims, Harvey and Jeannette Crewe, pictured on their wedding day, murdered in their own lounge by a person or persons unknown.

During the next five days, a number of people tried to contact the Crewes by telephone, or in the case of a stock-agent called Jerry Moore, by actually going to the house and knocking on the door, but to no avail. Eventually, on the 22nd of June, another stock-agent, Ron Wright, rang Jeannette’s father, Len Demler, saying that he wanted to send some trucks to pick up sheep but could not contact Harvey to get the O.K. Would Len make contact with Harvey and confirm he wanted the trucks? So after lunch on the 22nd of June, Len Demler drove to his daughter’s farm and walked up to the back door.

He noticed, he said later, that the kitchen and the porch lights were on and the key was in the Yale lock of the back door as was often the case. He considered that apart from the kitchen and porch light being on during the day it was not out of the ordinary for the key to be in the lock. However, when he got into the lounge, he noticed the furniture had been moved around, the hearth rug and a cushion were missing and there was a considerable amount of blood on the carpet and the furniture. He went into his granddaughter Rochelle’s room and found the little girl in her cot looking rather thin with somewhat sunken eyes, dressed in a pyjama jacket and soiled nappy but not seemingly in any great distress at that moment.

Then Len Demler did a most extraordinary thing. He left the Crewe house and went home, leaving his granddaughter in a blood-stained house, with her parents missing in sinister circumstance. Later, when trying to justify his action, he said he “had to get home to ring Ron Wright to cancel the sheep trucks”. Even when he got home and rang the stock agent, and found him out, he waited fifteen minutes for him to return before passing on the message about the sheep trucks. Why he did not pass on the message from the phone in the Crewe farm went unexplained.

Then he went to his friend Owen Priest’s farm and asked him to accompany him to the Crewe farm to help him look for his daughter and son-in-law. Even then on the trip between the Priests’ and the Crewe farm he never mentioned anything about the blood he had witnessed or any suspicion he may have had of foul play. So it wasn’t until Len Demler’s second visit to the Crewe farm that he removed little Rochelle and took her to a place of safety with a neighbour, Mrs Willis.

Before the police were called, word had got out that the Crewes were missing and every neighbour and quite a few nosey parkers had entered the Crewe farm and moved, trampled and fingered every piece of potential evidence. They were probably all well meaning, as rural New Zealand people are, in their efforts to find the Crewes, but in their untrained attempts at helping, they managed to destroy or alter any forensic evidence that may have been there.

When the police became involved, Inspector Bruce Hutton from the Auckland Criminal Investigation Branch evicted all the would-be-helpers and called in a scientist from the New Zealand Government’s Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, or DSIR.

The scientist quickly established that Rhesus positive blood, Harvey’s group, and brain tissue were found on Harvey’s chair. Sufficient Rhesus negative blood of Jeanette’s was also found. This established that both the Crewes must, in fact, have succumbed to their injuries. The scientist speculated, wrongly as it transpired, that they had probably been beaten to death with a piece of wood that was subsequently burnt in the fireplace.

It was at about this point, day three in the enquiry, that people began to wonder — if, as was assumed, the Crewes died on the 17th of June and that Len Demler and Owen Priest had discovered the situation on the 22nd June — how little Rochelle had stayed alive for five days in the house alone. When the girl had been taken from the house and put in the care of Mrs. Willis, she was hungry, but not starving. Mrs. Willis and a district nurse looked her over and decided that apart from a bit of nappy rash, she was not in need of further medical attention. Later, two pediatricians examined her and found she had lost a little weight during those five days, but had certainly been fed. Evidence at the house also proved that someone had changed her nappy, probably a number of times.

The fact that the baby had been fed during the five days, probably by a woman, seemed to be borne out and confirmed by one of the first witnesses to make a statement, Mr. Bruce Roddick, a self employed farm labourer. He told the police that on the Friday he had been feeding out hay in a paddock opposite the Crewe farm entrance and saw a woman and a car at the Crewe’s front gate. He described the woman as about 5’8″ tall, wearing slacks and with “not blonde but fair hair”. He described the car as a Hillman that he considered he had seen before in the area and it was almost certainly the Crewes’.

It was established that the murderer or a female accomplice had fed and cared for the baby during those crucial five days. However what was just as important, but seems not to have been scrutinized as closely by the police, was that someone, the murderer for sure, had fed the animals. The farm dogs that were chained in the back yard were, when found, “as fat as seals”, indicating that they had not only been fed but over-fed, probably to keep them content and quiet. Also on the 18th, the day after the killings, a neighbour of the Crewe’s noticed as he was feeding out hay to his cows, the Crewe cows came up to the fence bellowing as if hungry. This never happened on the subsequent four days, indicating that on those days the Crewe’s cows had been fed normally.

This sequence of events indicated that whoever killed the Crewes not only cared about Rochelle and ensured she came to no harm but also had a ‘farmer mentality’, ensuring the animals were fed. They also needed to be able to access the Crewe farm without being seen. Len Demler fitted all these categories as his farm adjoined the Crewe property. He could access his daughter’s farm from the rear without leaving a vehicle in the roadway where it could be seen.

From early in the investigation the police let it be known that they considered there was only one suspect and that was Jeanette’s father, Len Demler. They actually told him to his face, that they “knew he’d done it”. There was in fact a mounting list of circumstantial evidence against Jeanette’s father. There was found in the passenger seat of Len Demler’s car a small blood stain of the same group as Jeanette’s. Also, some months before when Len’s wife, Maisie, had died she had left her share of the farm not to Len, as he had expected, but to Jeanette. Only one day before they were presumed to have been murdered, Jeanette and Harvey had been to the solicitor’s office to sign the deeds, transferring half of what Len considered his farm to Jeanette. It was also known that Harvey Crewe was keen to buy out Len’s share of the Demler farm.

It also transpired that in the event of Jeanette’s death her estate would pass to her husband, Harvey Crewe. However, if both the Crewes died, the Crewe farm and Jeanette’s half of the Demler farm would pass to her trustees, to be managed until any Crewe children attained the age of twenty one years, when it would pass to them. It just so happened that Jeanette’s trustees were Maisie Demler, who at the time of the murders was deceased, and none other than Len Demler. These facts seemed to Inspector Bruce Hutton to be a very strong motive for double murder.

Also, Len Demler refused to join in the considerable ground search for his lost relatives, in spite of Army, Navy and Air-Force personnel and most of the local people being involved.

When chided about his lack of searching, Len Demler said something that would later come back to haunt him. He said, “It’s no good searching the ground. They’re in the river.” This may well have been a local man’s astute guess, based on knowledge of the area and the nearby Waikato River, but later it looked to the police as if Len had “prior knowledge”.

Right from the start the police made assumptions that took on the significance of facts. The first was that as the TV had been disconnected they assumed that the murders had occurred after 11pm, when the TV closed down. The dining table was laid with three plates, two of which contained the remains of a fish meal and knives and forks, while the third plate contained an untouched flounder. In front of another chair was the day’s mail, opened and obviously scrutinised.

From this, the police assumed, by linking it to their previous assumptions that the TV was off, that the meal was the evening meal, but it could just as well have been lunch. The assumption that the meal was the evening meal and not lunch does not account for the fact that the Crewes were not answering their phone much earlier in the evening around 7.30pm. They could have died in the afternoon.

The police also discovered that in the recent past, the Crewes had been burgled. A silver comb and brush set, Jeanette’s engagement ring and her handbag had been stolen. Later still there had been two fires. The first destroyed a pile of new clothes, recently bought for Rochelle, and the second completely destroyed the hay barn.

The assumption the police drew over these three incidents was that someone “had it in” for Jeannette and Harvey Crewe, or was very very angry with them. That person, in the eyes of the police could only be Len Demler, and they held a secret, high-level meeting to consider if they had enough evidence to charge Len with double murder. The outcome of that meeting was that although they had quite a lot of circumstantial evidence, they needed some direct evidence and would delay the arrest in the hope that the search, which was still continuing, would discover the bodies and reveal further forensic evidence.

Meanwhile, the police were doing the rounds of the neighbours within a reasonable distance from the Crewe farm, and on the 2nd July Detective Sergeant Hughes called at the Thomas farm and spoke to Arthur Allan Thomas. In conversation, Thomas mentioned he had known Jeanette from school days, and at one stage had been quite keen on her and had tried to court her, although Jeanette had kept the friendship platonic.

Later still, on the 12th of August, Detective Sergeant Parkes visited the Thomas farm making enquiries about a brush and comb gift set that had been found on top of the wardrobe in the Crewes’ house. The set had been wrapped in gift paper, with a card attached, signed Arthur. Thomas readily agreed that he was the Arthur who had sent the gift to Jeannette some years previously on her return from a trip to Europe, one year before he had married his wife Vivian.

The second victims, Arthur Alan Thomas and his wife Vivian, pictured on their wedding day. Their marriage and lives were also destroyed.

On August the 7th the massive search for the Crewe bodies was called off, the searchers sent away and the police working on the case reduced to four. The murders seemed to be slipping into the unsolved category, simply through lack of any direct evidence.

At this point, just as the case was going cold, Jeannette’s body came to the surface of the Waikato River and was discovered by two men out white-baiting. The body was fully clothed, wrapped in bed clothes and tied up with wire. She had been shot through the head, which destroyed the scientific theory of death being caused by an assault with the proverbial blunt instrument.

Inspector Hutton picked up Len Demler and took him to see Jeannette’s body, and then put him through a gruelling interview. But if Demler was guilty as Hutton suspected, he revealed nothing. The next thing the police did was to collect up most of the .22 calibre rifles in the area, in a radius of five miles. Sixty four rifles were collected and test fired to try to match the bullet fragment from Jeanette’s head with a rifle. All but two were eliminated. Arthur Allan Thomas’ and a rifle from a family called Eyre. What the test showed, was not that the bullet that killed Jeannette Crewe was fired from either of these rifles, but simply that they could not be excluded from the fact that one of them “could” have fired the fatal bullet. Later evidence produced at the trials gave the impression that it was definitely Arthur Allan Thomas’ gun which had fired that bullet, but this was never the case.

About this time the police made a thorough search of the Crewe farm, including sieve-searching the flower beds around the house without turning up anything. However, they made an assumption then that the first shot, which killed Harvey, had been fired from outside the kitchen, through the louvres of the kitchen window. But in assuming this they disregarded the original and normal position of Harvey’s chair, and used the altered or moved position. Much later, with the chair in its normal position, it was proved impossible to get a shot on someone from that window, which totally discredited the window shot theory. But by then it was far too late.

A police evidence photo, clearly showing the altered position of Harvey’s chair.

On the 16th of September, Harvey’s body came to the surface of the Waikato River at a place called the Devil’s Elbow. The body was in a bad state of decomposition and inexorably snagged on obstructions in the river. The police had great difficulty in deciding how to recover it. Eventually they decided, with Inspector Hutton leading the team, to lift the body onto a basket stretcher, cutting away the snags as they went. Even then the body seemed reluctant to be lifted enough to fit into the stretcher and so Inspector Hutton reached underneath and felt what he later claimed was an axle. At the same moment, the axle slipped from Hutton’s hand, the body came up and it was manoeuvred into the stretcher.

Hutton then ordered police divers to search under where the body had been snagged to recover what he claimed had been tied to the body with wire. An axle was recovered, but although the police never admitted it, a witness would later claim that there were at least two axles recovered from the Waikato River during the various searches. The autopsy on Harvey’s body revealed that he too, had been shot in the head with a .22 bullet.

Police attention now focused on the axle they claimed had been attached to Harvey’s body, even though no one had seen it so attached and only Inspector Hutton claimed to have “felt it”. Eventually it was traced to be a 1929 Nash axle having once been part of a trailer owned by Arthur Allan Thomas’s father, but which had been replaced on the trailer and discarded.

Police then returned to the Thomas farm and searched it from top to bottom. They also took Thomas to the police station and gave him a gruelling interview in which they openly accused him of the murders. After several hours, by which time the police realised Thomas appeared to be uninvolved, they told him “they were only trying him out”, took him home and returned his .22 rifle.

However, on the 20th of October the police returned to the Thomas farm for samples of wire. They also, for reasons that have never been satisfactorily explained by the police, again took Thomas’s .22 rifle. They then again searched the Thomas farm dump and claimed to have found two stub-axles that fitted the axle. No photographs were taken of these stub-axles in-situ and Thomas was not informed that they had been found or taken. The following day with a warrant the police again searched the Thomas farm and took away many items including old letters, bullets, scrap metal and receipts.

On the 22nd of October, 1970, after four months of trying to establish that Len Demler was the murderer, Inspector Bruce Hutton decided to change his target and called Arthur Allan Thomas in for an extended police interview, to “help them with their enquiries”.

The evidence against Thomas seemed to be mounting, but it was all circumstantial, based on supposition and, it has to be said, a good deal of wishful thinking by the police.

At the interview, Hutton showed Thomas the physical evidence which included Thomas’s .22 rifle and a box of ammunition, the axle that the police claimed was wired to Harvey’s body, and some samples of wire from the Thomas farm, which the police claimed were the same as the wire around the bodies. In fact the wire was “similar”.

The purpose of these revelations to Thomas was in the mind of Inspector Hutton, who believed that once Thomas saw the extent of the evidence against him he would “crack” and confess. Unfortunately, Thomas formed the opinion that the police were telling him that, although the gun was his and the other items came from his farm, someone was trying to put the blame onto him or, in police jargon, “put him in the frame”.

Thomas came away from the interview thinking the police were on his side, while in fact they were hell-bent on charging Thomas with both murders. What they needed was just one piece of good solid, direct evidence. In a very short time, they had obtained that vital, absolutely crucial piece of evidence — or so they claimed.

On the 27th of October, Inspector Hutton ordered two of his detectives to sieve-search the flower bed outside the kitchen window of the Crewe farm. All of these flower beds had previously been searched, but this time the police “found” a .22 calibre cartridge case, which, when tested, was found to have definitely been fired from the Thomas gun. The police now had what they wanted.

In the second week of November, Arthur Allan Thomas was arrested and charged with the murder of Jeannette and Harvey Crewe. Vivian Thomas, his wife, and in fact all of the residents of Pukekawa were in a state of shock.

Thomas was tried in the Auckland Supreme Court on Monday, 15th February 1971 with Mr Justice Henry presiding. Mr Paul Temm led for the defence and Mr David Morris led the prosecution. The trial was not a good example of the British justice system working well. In the words of Paul Temm, “The defence of Thomas was obstructed at every turn by the police and the prosecution”. Any and all evidence held by the police that could have been of use to the defence was withheld or incorrectly given. Even witnesses, who should have been appearing for the defence, were subpoenaed by the police and then never called to give evidence, thereby depriving the defence the opportunity to cross-examine them.

The prosecution introduced into evidence a number of theories that the police claimed connected Thomas to the murders, the overall effect of which pointed the finger at Thomas. However, when scrutinised closely, there was nothing in these various allegations to actually connect them to Arthur Allan Thomas.

The prosecution introduced the two fires at the Crewe farm but failed to connect them in any way with Thomas. They claimed the purpose of the burglary at the Crewe farm was to steal the brush and comb set, so that Jeannette would have to use the one Thomas had given her all those years before. It was also implied that as Thomas was considered the murderer, then Vivian, his wife, must have fed the baby and been the woman seen by Bruce Roddick. But Roddick knew Vivian Thomas and swore on oath it was not her. Also, the police never charged Vivian with being an accomplice to murder, a serious lapse if their case against her husband was watertight.

They also produced a witness who claimed that, years before, Thomas had gone to dances that Jeannette had attended and “persistently pestered her”. The defence was able to prove that Thomas had not gone dancing, or even learned to dance, until two years after these alleged incidents were supposed to have occurred. At the very last moment in the trial, the prosecution brought into court a jeweller who claimed that Thomas had come into his shop to get a blood-stained gold watch repaired some time after the murders. The defence was able to prove that Thomas had never owned a watch like the jeweller had described, and neither had Harvey Crewe. They also proved that the man who had entered the jeweller’s shop with the watch was definitely not Arthur Allan Thomas.

Overall, the police failed to prove a convincing case against Thomas. The only piece of real evidence they had was the .22 calibre cartridge case, fired from Thomas’s rifle and allegedly found in the flower bed underneath the Crewe’s kitchen window, from where the police claimed Harvey had been shot. However, there was a growing surge of opinion that the cartridge case had been deliberately planted by the police. Unfortunately for Thomas, the jury had no doubts about the evidence presented by the police, and returned a verdict of guilty.

Paul Temm appealed on the grounds that the evidence did not justify a finding of guilty, but without success, requiring Arthur Allan Thomas to be moved to the maximum security prison at Paremoremo to commence his mandatory life sentence.

But all was not lost. There was so much unease about the case that Thomas was granted a retrial.

Unfortunately, the police and the prosecution doubled their efforts to prove they were right, and the second jury, like the first, believed what the police put forward as evidence was truthful, but it was not. Again Thomas was found guilty of double murder, and again his appeal was rejected.

Thomas languished in prison for nine years until eventually an industrial chemist called Jim Sprott took an interest in the cartridge case evidence, and was able to scientifically prove that the bullets that killed the Crewes had not come from the Thomas cartridge case, supposedly found by the police and by definition from the Thomas rifle at the time of the murders.

Thomas, who had over the years lost his farm and his marriage, was eventually released from prison, given a free pardon and an award of one million dollars in compensation, a sizeable amount for those days.

So if Thomas did not do it, who did, and who fed Rochelle? There were other police suspects for the murders, such as number three on their list, Mickey Eyre, who was one person with a motive.

Mickey Eyre was a strong young man with a disability which prevented him from speaking. He had worked for Harvey Crewe but had twice been thrown off the Crewe property by Harvey in a violent rage. Mickey’s mother claimed that because of his disability he never went out at night unless accompanied by another member of the family, but this was not true. Local people reported seeing Mickey out around the area with a gun, late at night. Once he was even discovered on someone’s porch late at night carrying a .22 rifle, the same rifle that scientific tests showed, with the Thomas rifle, “could have” fired the fatal shot. Years later it was proved that the axle that was reputedly attached to Harvey Crewe’s body had been on the Thomas farm but had been taken away by vintage car enthusiasts and later dumped on the roadside close to the Eyre farm, some years before the murders.

On the strength of these facts, it is possible to suggest that Mickey Eyre killed Harvey, because he hated him, and then was obliged to kill Jeannette as she had witnessed the killing. But to then follow the scenario through, Mickey would have had to clean up the blood that night and subsequent nights, feed and care for Rochelle, feed the dogs and feed out hay to the cows. He would also have to have transported the bodies miles, without a vehicle, in order to dump them in the Waikato River. It is safe to say that Mickey Eyre could not be responsible for the Crewe murders, if he had acted alone.

All the written evidence still points to the only other man with a motive, Len Demler. However, there is one other possibility that the police did consider but then dropped, and that is murder–suicide. It could be argued that Harvey killed his wife when he was in a violent rage, to which by all accounts he was prone and then in a fit of remorse, killed himself.

Or a similar, reverse sequence could be argued, Harvey assaults Jeanette causing the broken nose and dislodged teeth found at autopsy. Then Jeannette takes Harvey’s rifle (a rifle that was never found) and shoots Harvey in the head as he sits in his chair. Then, in considerable pain, she takes her own life.

Either of these two suggested scenarios would then require members of the Demler or Crewe family to find the situation and decide to try to hide the facts, which would bring such shame and disgrace to the family, in the close farming community at Pukekawa. The suggestion of a murder–suicide and Demler involvement in concealing it is tenuous, but holds more water than the multi-million dollar prosecution of the unfortunate Arthur Allan Thomas.

After so long, it is extremely unlikely the whole truth will ever be told. The police are no longer actively seeking the real murderer. If, as the police insist, Len Demler (who died in 1992) was not responsible, Mickey Eyre could not have done it on his own, and Arthur Allan Thomas was proven not to have been responsible, then it must follow that a double murderer is still at large in rural New Zealand.

In February 2006 there was a new development in the case, with Desmond Thomas, Arthur’s younger brother, appearing on New Zealand television, claiming he had new evidence. Des had employed an independent ballistics expert called Nick Powell to re-evaluate the rifle and bullet evidence in the Crewe murders.

The new evidence, Des claimed, eliminated Arthur’s rifle as firing the fatal shots, but pointed the finger at the other rifle, that had previously been designated as “could have” fired the bullets that killed the Crewes.

Although, for legal reasons, Des Thomas was unable to mention any names, he must have been referring to the rifle that had been in the possession of the Eyre family. This statement does cause some confusion because, although that rifle was in the possession of the Eyre family, it was actually owned and licenced to a family friend of the Eyer’s, named Brewster.

When Des Thomas and Nick Powell presented their findings to the police, they were told that the matter would be pursued. The police intended to try to locate that other .22 rifle, that could have fired the fatal bullets and also, for reasons not explained, test 22 of the other original 64 rifles.

But at the same time, a senior police officer is reported as saying that “it was time the book on the Crewe murders was finally closed for good”. Obviously, the police do not want the scandal of the planted evidence revisited and would like it to just “go away”.

The other enduring mystery concerning this case is, who was the woman seen by Bruce Roddick outside the Crewe farm on June the 19th? This woman had undoubtedly fed and cared for little Rochelle for the crucial five days after the murders.

After 40-odd years, the identity of that woman is unlikely to ever be revealed, or is it?

Writing in the June 2011 edition of the North and South magazine, investigative journalist Christ Birt has revealed some previously unknown facts that may well answer that question and, by implication, reveal who really killed the Crewes.

After the first Thomas trial, a persistent rumour surfaced that implied the police knew, and had always known, who the mystery woman was. However the police refused to be drawn on the matter, and through the Crown Prosecutor at the first trial implied quite forcefully that it was Vivien Thomas, the wife of the accused, in spite of Bruce Roddick’s assertion that it was not.

However, during the trial Roddick did recognise a woman in the court as the person he had seen on the 19th of June. He reported this to the police but was told his information was irrelevant.

The woman Roddick identified was Norma Eastman, a woman who, in Chris Birt’s words, “has kept under the radar for 40 years”. It was known that she had worked at the Demler farm, cooking for the shearers. She had stated, when interviewed by police, that she “had no association with the Demler farm until after the murders”.

Facts that Chris Birt has uncovered tell a different story. Len Demler and Norma Eastman had known each other for many years, and were in fact related by marriage. Norma had cooked for the shearers at the Demler farm on a number of occasions, and had also helped nurse Len’s wife, Maisey, when she was very ill at home. This was obviously before the murders and gave the lie to the assertion that she had not been associated with the area during the time Rochelle was cared for.

What also raised suspicions later on was that on the 7th of April 1972, less than two years after the murders, Len and Norma were married in a secret ceremony that many of their own relations did not know about. What seems to have kept the secret so well was that Norma carried on living in her house in Auckland while Len carried on living at the farm until he sold it, two years later, and moved in with the new Mrs Demler.

No one has ever suggested that Norma had any involvement in the murders, but the possibility that she was the woman who fed Rochelle does seem likely.

If these facts had been known at the onset and Norma had been put in a formal identification parade where Bruce Roddick had picked her out, and given the police’s earlier suspicions of Len Demler, the outcome of the case may have been very different. The unfortunate Arthur Allan Thomas and his wife Vivian would not have had to endure nine years of his life in jail and the breakup of their life together.

There is a premise in British law which states, “justice should not only be done but should also be seen to be done”. That premise has not been fulfilled in this long-running case.