A detailed inquiry into one of the few remaining pieces of hard evidence to survive police efforts to destroy physical exhibits has shown it “very likely” not to be connected to Arthur Allan Thomas, who was twice convicted then pardoned for the murders.
It is a finding contrary to the police assertion that the axle used to weigh down Harvey Crewe’s body came from a trailer owned by Thomas.
The book, The Crewe Murders: Inside New Zealand’s Most Infamous Cold Case, has also surfaced a potentially key witness silenced for decades by a police officer who told him as a teenager: “You’re a little boy looking for notoriety, aren’t you?”
The book is the result of two years of work by journalists Kirsty Johnston and James Hollings, who is associate professor of journalism at Massey University, where he teaches investigative journalism.
Harvey and Jeanette Crewe were shot dead in their Pukekawa farmhouse in 1970 then dumped in the Waikato River. Photo / Supplied
Former Detective Inspector Bruce Hutton at the Crewe house during the 1970 murder investigation. He was later found to have been involved in planting evidence. File photo / NZ Herald
The Crewes were murdered in rural Pukekawa, southwest of Auckland, in 1970. The case transfixed the nation for its awful brutality and the abandonment of their daughter Rochelle, discovered malnourished and soiled in her cot when Jeanette Crewe’s father Len Demler entered their home five days on from when the murders are believed to have happened.
Jeanette Crewe’s body was found in the Waikato River two months later and her husband Harvey Crewe a month after that.
One key finding in the book came after examining the axle in Archives NZ, where it was kept in a temperature-controlled area with other obscure esoterica from New Zealand’s history.
It was an eerie connection to the case knowing it had come to their hands more than 50 years after being found on the Waikato River bed where it landed after the wire holding it to Harvey Crewe’s body snapped.
With that came the knowledge the person who had disposed of the bodies had also touched the axle and almost certainly knew who the killer was - or was the killer.
During the murder trial, the axle was linked to Arthur Allan Thomas through police matching hubs on which wheels would be mounted that had been found in a tip on the Thomas farm. The link to Thomas came from a photograph alleged to show a trailer that had come into the Thomas family that was apparently built with the axle.
It was an assertion based on the axle on the trailer and the one under Harvey Crewe’s body coming from a 1928 Nash 320.
The Crewe Murders co-author James Hollings with the axle used to weigh down Harvey Crewe's body.
But Hollings and Johnston found a parts manual, also in Archives NZ, that showed the “17600″ serial number on the axle was only for a 1929 Nash 420.
The finding, they argued, distanced the axle itself from the trailer police had always claimed it was part of that was able to be linked to Thomas. The authors said it was “very likely” not from the Thomas trailer.
The axle was further linked to Thomas through the discovery in one of the tips on his farm of the hubs said to have been connected to it. It has been alleged the hubs were planted with the 1980 Royal Commission saying “the most serious inferences … can be drawn”.
And yet the writers found a greater weight of evidence pointed to at least one of the hubs being taken from there and welded on to the axle for use on a trailer before being taken apart.
“The axle was used by the killer. The hubs were then dumped on the Thomas farm by persons unknown. Police then found them either by remarkable luck, through a tip-off, or they planted them.”
The book turned its focus to police officer Len Johnston (no relation to Kirsty Johnston) who was found guilty of corruption - along with Detective Inspector Bruce Hutton - in relation to the planted cartridge cases that led to Thomas’ murder convictions.
The authors extended his corrupt practice to the discovery of the hubs, writing of how unlikely it would be that Thomas would have used the axle to weigh down Harvey Crewe’s body, then return the matching hubs in his own farm tip where they were easily found by Johnston.
The Crewe Murders co-author Kirsty Johnston at the Devil's Elbow on the Waikato River where Jeanette Crewe's body was dumped.
“It is more likely that the killer either planted the hubs himself to incriminate Thomas, or tipped Johnston off as to where they were, and Johnston planted them. Remember, he had searched the same tip five days prior and found nothing.”
The authors’ investigations included evidence from Ross Eyre, who had never spoken publicly about a sighting of the Crewes’ car in the days after the murders before the couple were discovered missing.
He recalled waiting for the school bus at the family farm gate when the Crewe car went past. Waving out, he recalled the driver glaring at him and, continuing on, hitting a pothole on the corner and nearly losing control.
When the Crewes’ disappearance became known, his mother - to whom he had relayed the story - rang the police. Then 16, he told the detective who visited that he “saw the Crewe car”. The reply: “That’s not possible, they’ve disappeared.” The officer closed his notebook and accused the boy of seeking attention.
Eyre said his sighting, along with that by Tutu Hoeta - whose sighting of a car at the Crewe’s was dismissed by police - was evidence with which “they would have nailed” the killer. The Crewes knew the pothole, he said, and would not have hit it. The police review team’s 2014 report was highly critical of the original investigation dismissing Hoeta’s sighting, saying it “resulted in the investigation team failing to link a vehicle to a specific person, and possibly that person to the crime scene”.
Hollings said the evidence in the case could be made to point to several people, although it was possible the guilty party was someone who had never been identified with the case.
Ross Eyre of Pukekawa, whose key evidence was overlooked by police.
“I don’t think enough evidence to say anyone definitely did it. I think what this case has shown is that’s been the whole problem all along, as people have gone down this confirmation-bias track.”
Johnston said shifting the evidence to shape a case around a specific individual was the sort of “tunnel vision” that “ruined” the police investigation.
“You can see they shut off lines of inquiry so early - firstly, by getting focused on Demler then after that on Thomas and there were myriad other possibilities that they never explored.”
Hollings said the idea of the book began when he wrote an obituary of legendary journalist Pat Booth, whose campaigning work at the Auckland Star was instrumental in Thomas being pardoned. In the work done for the obituary, he read up on the axle evidence and “woke up in the middle of the night … and thought, ‘there’s something not right there’”.
Johnston said she believed “somebody knows” who killed the Crewes. “Maybe somebody could come forward, and maybe it won’t be the killer. Maybe it’s that person who helped.”
She said such a person overcoming “feelings of loyalty or fear” would provide an answer for Rochelle, the child abandoned in the cot. “She’s still quite young. It wouldn’t be too late for her to know what had happened.”
Hollings, likewise, considered it possible. If it were someone who had “a moment of rage” followed by “50 years with a sense of guilt … then maybe the time has come to just get it off their chest”.
David Fisher is based in Northland and has worked as a journalist for more than 30 years, winning multiple journalism awards including being twice named Reporter of the Year and being selected as one of a small number of Wolfson Press Fellows to Wolfson College, Cambridge. He first joined the Herald in 2004.
