On his first night as a free man, Arthur Thomas had supper at the rural Auckland home of Auckland Star journalist Pat Booth. Booth’s wife, journalist Valerie Davies, bore witness to Booth’s investigations, from the day he decided to interview Thomas – “assuming that he would be found innocent at his second trial” – to what became an eight-year campaign to have Thomas freed. Davies, retired and living in the Coromandel, is used to seeing Booth’s work referenced in books about the murders – his theory of who did kill the Crewes was a starting point for The Crewe Murders. Here, she writes for the Listener on what Booth believed happened in the Crewes’ Pukekawa farmhouse.
Who did kill the Crewes? Pat answered this question many times. It was a theory first advanced by Paul Temm QC, the respected and able counsel at the first trial at the very beginning of this sorry saga. He later told Pat that if the jury at the first trial had heard all the evidence Booth had since collected, they would have accepted the logic of the murder/suicide theory. On all the evidence, both men believed that the tragedy occurred after the Crewes had had a violent row. Briefly, the scenario at the Crewe house when the police got there on Monday, June 22, 1970, was that in the kitchen were the remains of an uneaten meal and a pile of opened envelopes and bills on the table. The couple had been to a stock sale in Bombay the previous Wednesday, and had opened the mail on their return. After four years of marriage, it was a bleak, comfortless house they came home to.
At the time, Jeannette, who had inherited half the farm (Harvey raised the money to buy her sister’s share), was a comparatively rich woman and had $4640 in her bank accounts. Harvey had $34 in his. They had presumably had a row over the bills and money. Harvey, who had a reputation for a fierce temper and violence, according to members of his family who wrote to Pat, punched Jeannette very hard. When Jeannette’s body was found she had a broken nose, a black eye and several teeth missing. After the assault, Harvey sat in an armchair to read the paper.
Jeannette had inherited a rifle with the farm (it was never found). Temm and Booth believe that she shot Harvey through the telephone hatch from the hall. Distraught, she had then rung her father, Len Demler, who lived on the neighbouring farm.
Demler must have disposed of Harvey Crewe’s body, wrapping it in black plastic and depositing it in the Waikato River. He and Jeannette must have tried to burn the bloodstained cushion and hearth-rug, as the remains were found in the fireplace. Honest neighbours and witnesses, who were later discredited by the police, saw sparks flying that Friday night from the Crewe chimney.
There were bloodstained drag marks on the carpet. And patches of blood in the police photos which indicated where Harvey had been sitting when he was shot. These bloodstains suggested the shot came through the telephone hatch from the hall, rather than a shot through the louvre windows, which was the police theory.
Witnesses saw Rochelle Crewe playing in the drive on Saturday. “Who fed the child?” was a regular refrain. Vivien Thomas [Arthur’s wife] was accused of having done so, even though she had a cast-iron alibi, which included attending a cat show with her prized Siamese cats. Nor was it logical for Vivien to have come and fed the child in daylight when anyone could have seen her – a child who was the daughter of the couple her apparently psychopathic husband had murdered from jealousy, if the police story was to be believed. If she had fed the baby, she would have been guilty of being an accomplice to the murders.
In spite of British author David Yallop’s publicity-seeking assertion that it was Jeannette’s sister, Heather, who fed the toddler – she was in America at the time – it was obviously Jeannette, letting her child play in the drive, who was recognised by witnesses. Yet the police refused to accept this evidence as it didn’t fit their theory.
Over the weekend, Jeannette must have cracked. The meal and bills from the Wednesday were still strewn on the kitchen table, so presumably, with a painful, bruised face and missing teeth, she hadn’t eaten for days. She was unable to get treatment for her injuries in the circumstances, and would have been in pain, increasingly weak. Sometime over that weekend, she must have killed herself, and once again, her father disposed of her body.
As it would be two months before Jeannette’s body was found in the Waikato, and Harvey’s three months, it was difficult to pin-point the exact time each person had died during those five days.
When Demler staged discovering the empty blood-stained house on the Monday morning, he did not ring the police straight away. Instead, he went back to his farm, leaving poor little Rochelle in her cot in the empty house for another 20 minutes. Back at his farm, Demler rang a stock agent to cancel a truck coming to pick up sheep from the Crewe farm, before ringing the police.
These were the calm, deliberate actions of a man who knew what had happened, rather than a father discovering the awful scene and rushing to rescue his abandoned grandchild. He had obviously also been feeding the dogs and feeding out to the cattle during this time, as they were all in good condition.
Under suspicion
Demler was under suspicion for some time, although he had no motive. But after a pep talk from the police commissioner, instructing them to solve the crime, the police manufactured another suspect, Arthur Thomas. They created a scenario and fabricated evidence to involve him in a double murder 10 miles from his farm, when he was tending a sick cow.
Their theory that he climbed onto the narrow sloping windowsill to shoot Harvey Crewe through the louvres, not knowing whether his target would be within range from the window, not knowing if the louvres would be open on a cold, wet, winter’s night and not knowing if Crewe would be sitting there in the full draught, was hardly credible. The police team dismissed, manipulated or created evidence to incriminate an innocent man. They hinted that Thomas had caused Jeannette’s injuries while attempting to rape her.
Demler, of course, knew Thomas was innocent, and must have been astounded when he was found guilty. But by then, he was over a barrel, having committed several crimes himself – he had abetted in covering up a murder, had destroyed or covered up evidence, and he had wasted police time for months. He was also protecting his grand-daughter from the tragedy of the truth.
None of the police named by the royal commission after Thomas was pardoned were ever held to account for causing an innocent man to be imprisoned.
This, in spite of commissioners Justice Robert Taylor, Archbishop Allen Johnston and former Cabinet minister Peter Gordon writing in their report that the shell case was “planted in the Crewe garden by Det Insp Hutton and Det Sgt Johnston”. They also said that Thomas “should never even have been charged … the Police manufactured evidence against him, and withheld evidence of value to his defence.” They described these actions, which resulted in Thomas’s imprisonment for nine years, as “an unspeakable outrage”.
There were others, many good men, who formed the Thomas Retrial Committee, and who, like Pat and forensic scientist Jim Sprott, worked tirelessly for many years to expose that outrage, right that wrong, and establish the truth. Ecclesiasticus speaks for them: “And some there be, which have no memorial … these were merciful men, whose righteousness hath not been forgotten.”
Pat Booth died in 2018. Len Demler died in 1992 and left no explanation of what he may have known about his daughter and son-in-law’s deaths.
