Beyond Reasonable Doubt?, page 13
Looked at objectively, the first ten days of November 1970 are not unlike the phony period at the start of the Second World War. The police ceased their visits to the Thomas farm, life appeared to be returning to some form of normality. Why the police left the Thomases alone for two weeks after the identification parade is curious. Could it be that they were still uncertain, still unsure that the case they had built against the Thomases would stick? Perhaps they were waiting for the return of Dr Donald Nelson of the DSIR. He had been in Sydney since before the Charles cartridge case had been found. He returned on 6 November and two days later his colleague Rory Shanahan asked him to check his conclusions. He duly did; his findings were the same as Shanahan’s.
On 11 November Inspector Hutton and Detective Johnston called at the Thomas farm. It was late morning. Vivien was on her way out with a cat, her destination the local vet. They asked her where Arthur was and were informed he was working in one of the fields. Unconcernedly Vivien drove away. The two police officers asked Arthur if he would accompany them to Otahuhu police station for further questioning. Ignoring the instructions given to him by Paul Temm, he readily agreed to go.
This was to be the final attempt by the police to obtain the confession. Arriving at the police station, Detective Johnston went into bat first of all. He went over the whole case point by point with Thomas. He told him how all the evidence pointed to him being the murderer. His ‘relationship’ with Jeannette was discussed. If he had been framed, then who had framed him? Who had taken his gun? How had ‘they’ obtained the gun? ‘What about the murder on that particular night?’ whatever that question might mean. Like the police force Thomas was a little short on ready solutions. Perhaps if he had asked for the kind of task force that Hutton had had at his disposal for the period of nearly five months that the inspector had taken to get this far: the facilities of the DSIR; the power of the search warrant; the right to question anyone and everyone at whim and at random; the financial commitment that had been made to this investigation running into millions of dollars – perhaps if he had asked for and been granted all these things he might have been better placed to answer Detective Johnston’s rhetorical questions. As it was, he stumbled blindly from one answer to another. Answers that revealed no guilt, but answers that would be fashioned at his trial into powerful assertions of guilt by the Crown Prosecutor. That was the best that Johnston could extract from him.
Inspector Hutton took over. He repeated all that his colleague had said, then elaborated. He wanted to know why Thomas had not told police officers during the earlier stages of the investigation about the sick Cow 4 and the fact that it had calved on 17 June. Regarding his initial interview with Hughes, Thomas explained that the officer had been concerned with what he had been doing during the night. The calving had occurred during late afternoon and was completed by early evening. He was asked why, then, had he not told Seaman and Parkes when they had interrogated him. His reply was: ‘They didn’t mention it, so I didn’t tell them.’ If that reply can be held up as a sign of guilt I would point out that police officer after police officer, when asked at judicial hearings that followed the initial magistrates’ court hearing why their evidence on particular aspects now contained new aspects, gave as justification precisely the same answer that Thomas gave on 11 November to Bruce Hutton.
During Paul Temm’s initial interview with Arthur Thomas, the farmer from Pukekawa, having discussed with his barrister all the evidence that Hutton had assembled against him, then talked of Hutton’s remark about ‘having another piece of evidence up my sleeve that nobody knows about’. The comment intrigued Paul Temm. He remembers clearly today how Thomas talked of this before 11 November. If Thomas is right in his recollection of that remark made by Hutton at Otahuhu on 25 October, the inspector’s final remark to him at the same police station on 11 November solved the puzzle.
‘Look, Arthur, a .22 shell was found near the rear door of the Crewe house by the police. Scientists say that that shell was fired by your rifle.’
According to Hutton the reply from the man he had been hunting was: ‘The murderer must have got hold of my rifle out of the house somehow. I’m not a fortune teller, I can’t help you with that one. I wouldn’t leave it there if I had shot them as I know shells can be identified by the firing-pin markings. I have been framed and that’s all there is to it.’
At that point Inspector Bruce Hutton realized that there was not going to be any confession. He told Thomas that he was under arrest for the murder of Jeannette and Harvey Crewe on or about 17 June 1970.
The vixen was still running free. The fox had been cornered.
That afternoon a newsflash on the wireless told the nation that a 33-year-old Pukekawa man had been arrested and charged with the Crewe murders. Margaret Smith, neighbour of the Thomases, rang Vivien in great excitement. ‘You won’t have to worry about the police any more, Vivien, they’ve arrested someone and charged them with the murders.’
Vivien, still in shock, replied: ‘I know, it’s Arthur they’ve arrested.’
Margaret Smith’s reaction was one that was echoed in many Pukekawa homes that day: ‘It’s unreal. It’s impossible.’
Later Inspector Hutton phoned Vivien to see if she needed help with the milking but by that time the Thomas farm was crowded with neighbours who had come to help. They reassured Vivien, told her of how they had watched him grow up. They talked of earlier happier times.
4
The Farmer’s Son and the Typist
Arthur Thomas, the second eldest of a family of ten, the son of a farmer, was born on a farm and destined like a number of his brothers to become a farmer himself. The Thomas family, like the land they farmed, were poor. Raising the nine children that survived would have been a struggle for any couple but Allan Thomas and his wife Ivy gave their children qualities that are lacking in many wealthier families.
There is about the Thomas family a fierce mutual loyalty that quickly becomes evident as one gets to know them. The children were also taught other qualities. Peter Garratt recalled:
‘The Thomas children were the most respected children in the whole of Pukekawa. They were civil, they were polite, they were friendly. I cannot speak for the younger two, Lloyd and Desmond, they were younger and I have little knowledge of them. Arthur went to school with our children. He was best man for one of my sons and my wife and I attended a number of Thomas family weddings. As a family they were highly regarded in the district.’
These were sentiments that I heard expressed again and again from people who knew the Thomas family from pre-war days onwards. I heard the other side, too. But, again and again, when I checked these statements they simply did not stand up to cold fact. Mischief had been afoot in the land for many years when those latter opinions were expressed and it had taken many courses. As will become clear during the course of this chapter I have no desire to sanctify either Arthur Thomas or his family, but a man and his family deserve to be judged on fact, not unsubstantiated rumour.
‘I wasn’t very brilliant at school,’ Arthur Thomas remarked one day in 1973 while giving evidence at Auckland’s Supreme Court. It was an accurate statement. When author Pat Booth, writing of Thomas in 1965, quoted the Revd William Vercoe’s description of the farmer from Pukekawa: ‘He’s a simple, honest man,’ Arthur Thomas was deeply upset. He wrongly equated simplicity with stupidity. Simple he is. Stupid he is not.
He attended Pukekawa Primary School as did the Demler sisters and all other local children, and left in 1952, when he was between fourteen and fifteen years of age. Popular with his schoolfriends he clearly was not destined to set the groves of academe alight. After a period of work on his father’s farm and another local farm he went to work for a local company, Roose Shipping at nearby Mercer. I can find no-one who worked with him over the five to six years he was at Roose Shipping who speaks other than highly of the quiet, rather shy young man they remember. The men he worked with recall him as ‘someone who was always cheerful. He never complained. No matter how dirty the job he was given, he worked hard and was cheerful.’ These are not, of course, people who can swear where Arthur Thomas was on the night of 17 June 1970. They are, however, people who worked side by side with him in the boiler-making department of Roose Shipping for nearly six years.
I have spoken to many people who knew Arthur Thomas during those six years as he grew to manhood. I have also been fortunate in obtaining access to many private diaries covering this period – entries made at a time of innocence as opposed to recollections years later when men and women stood in the witness box and evaluated a man charged with a double murder.
Pukekawa life and the life of Arthur Thomas at that time emerge very clearly from those diaries. These are the years when if one believes the case for the Crown, the schoolboy crush that Thomas had for Jeannette Demler, as she then was, grew to a deep overriding passion.
No-one speaking of that period can recall a single instance of Thomas displaying such passion. No-one writing of that period makes mention of Arthur’s interest in Jeannette.
His closest friend during those years was a young man from a neighbouring farm, Mervyn Cathcart, whose mother’s diaries over a six-year period are full of details of everyday life. Clearly the two young men shared a number of interests. Both were deeply involved in this period not only with helping on the farms owned by their parents but also on neighbours’ farms. References abound in the diaries to haymaking and milking, to rotary hoeing and ploughing. The two young men went to the local cinemas frequently. They attended meetings of the young farmers’ club. Apart from going regularly to the church services they also joined the choir. They played tennis, shared an interest in country-and-western music, particularly the songs of Johnny Cash. In view of subsequent allegations that were to be made by one Crown witness, an entry in the diaries of Mrs Cathcart is of particular interest. Part of the entry for 19 March 1959 reads:
‘Merv milked some cows and then he and Arthur went to Pukekohe and left car at garage and went to Auckland by 7.40 a.m. bus from Tuakau. Went to ballroom dancing for first two lessons, 10.30-11.30 a.m. and 2 to 3. Arrived home about 8 o’clock …’
An apparently insignificant piece of information, but it has a direct bearing on later comments by Crown witnesses. Mrs Cathcart’s diary for that year records every dancing lesson that the two young men had, also the subsequent dances they attended.
One Crown witness would later swear on oath that three years prior to those first dancing lessons, Thomas was regularly attending dances, regularly dancing with Jeannette and regularly pestering her. I find it impossible to reconcile that particular witness’s recall of alleged events that occurred some fourteen years previously, with the day-to-day diary entries of a woman writing without a vested interest other than the normal interest of a mother in her son’s activities. March 17 1959, for example. There was that evening a big St Patrick’s night dance at the Pukekawa Hall. One would expect Thomas who, according to the Crown, had been dancing for some four years, to be at the dance. In fact he was babysitting for Ted and Margaret Smith while they went to the dance. That was forty-eight hours before Thomas and Cathcart went to Auckland for their dancing lesson.
Small fragments perhaps, but when one is dealing with a man serving a life sentence for a double murder after having been found twice guilty on evidence as suspect as this, small fragments become important aspects.
In early 1960, Thomas went to work for the Forest Service at Maramarua, some twenty miles from Pukekawa. He had previously, in August 1959 when driving through the area with Mervyn Cathcart, expressed a desire to work for the service. He lived near his place of work, making frequent trips home to see his family and attend local functions in Pukekawa. At one of these functions he met Heather Demler and casually remarked what he was doing for a living. She told him that Jeannette was working in the same area as a teacher and urged him to call on her sister. Arthur Thomas duly did. During the ten months that he was working in Maramarua he called on Jeannette twice at the teachers’ hostel where she lived. Much was to made of this later by Crown Prosecutor David Morris. He saw it as part of the passionate tapestry that he alleged Thomas had woven around Jeannette. Morris contended that Arthur Thomas had followed the object of his affection to Maramarua and that the sole reason he had given up his job at Roose Shipping was to be near Jeannette.
The incontrovertible facts are that Thomas had obtained his job at Maramarua and was already working there before Heather told him that her sister was working in the same area.
He only called on her twice. The only record of those visits comes from Thomas himself. None of the women who were at that time living with Jeannette has any recall whatsoever of Thomas being seen at the hostel. Jeannette, who was at that time commenting to at least one of her fellow-boarders about ‘a man’ who would call around to the Demler farm or would appear at local Pukekawa dances, made no mention of Thomas appearing at the hostel. If his love was so ardent for Jeannette Demler one would expect Arthur Thomas to have been a frequent and noticed visitor at the teachers’ hostel. He was not. Undoubtedly he was attracted to Jeannette. Undoubtedly he did attempt, to use an old-fashioned word, to court her, but two visits in the space of ten months is hardly indicative of overriding passion, even from a member of a so-called passionless nation. The final absurd point in this picture of an eager unrequited lover is that during this time Arthur Thomas began an intimate relationship with another woman, one that lasted for over a year. This, like so much else, was known to the police. This, like so much else, has been suppressed until now.
In October 1960, with Jeannette still at the hostel in Maramarua, Thomas went north to Dargaville. Again one would expect this young Lothario to stay near his loved one, but no; he moved 150 miles north to work for a top-dressing company. An interesting footnote to the Maramarua period of the lives of Arthur Thomas and Jeannette Crewe is that if this man was making such a pest of himself in the late 1950s to Jeannette at local Pukekawa dances then why would her sister urge him to call upon her at Maramarua? That allegation about pestering was one to emerge from the Crown’s case.
At Dargaville, Thomas once again acquired a reputation for being a good worker. He also acquired one or two other things. At a farewell party for one of the workers, the guest showed the gathered males a small box. It contained, he said, his prize collection of pubic hairs. Thomas was intrigued; before the end of the evening he was the proud owner of the box.
Subsequently Thomas would with some prompting from his workmates produce the box for them to see. Previously, while at Maramarua, he secretly tape-recorded a conversation in a car with one of his girlfriends. The conversation consisted of ‘love talk’. From time to time he would play this tape to his friends at the top-dressing company. The girl in question had discovered the tape running and had taken it, only to return it after she had listened to it. Whether such behaviour as that described above is normal I do not know. I am still waiting at the age of forty-one for someone to define ‘normal sexual attitudes’ to me. Some undoubtedly would consider such behaviour abnormal or kinky; equally there are some who consider any deviation from the standard missionary position to be abnormal. Oral sex, for example, which is freely practised in this country by many married couples, is considered a criminal act in some of the States of America.
Pubic hairs and a tape-recording were not all that Thomas acquired. Letters from girlfriends were also kept. The love affair that he had begun while working in the Forest Service at Maramarua was with a girl named Lorna. Her letters to him would not give Elizabeth Barrett Browning any competition but Arthur carefully tucked them away. Great significance was to be made of the fact that he had kept a letter from Jeannette written years before. It was held that this was a clear indication of his burning passion for the woman. The police were equally aware that he had kept other letters from other women. They removed them from the farm during one of their searches. Then they suppressed them until after the fate of Thomas had been resolved. After all, to have admitted they existed or to have given them to defence counsel who were ignorant of their existence would have put the letter that he had kept from Jeannette into its proper perspective. The significant would have become insignificant. Suppression was clearly the order of the day when Thomas came to trial. In fact, apart from Jeannette’s letter that the police had failed to find and which he in total innocence had given to them, there was also a Christmas card and another letter from Jeannette. There were also letters like this one from Lorna; this is merely an extract:
‘Would you like to go to a 21st dance with me on Friday 30th September in the Mangatawhiri hall? I got an invitation on Monday, “Lorna & Partner”. If you have nothing arranged? If you have it doesn’t matter I might get someone else to go or go on my own …’
That one is postmarked 13 September 1960.
As a gay young bachelor Arthur Thomas certainly did not let the grass grow under his feet. Another letter he kept, this one dated 4 November 1961, begins with the proclamation: ‘Love you with all my heart.’ Apart from telling Arthur that she had been busy doing the silage and asking him to send her a photograph of himself, it invites him to spend a weekend with her at Hamilton. That one is signed ‘Gert’.
Other girlfriends included a Diane, a Margaret and a young lady I do not intend to name. This last relationship produced a baby, now in its teens. By early 1964 that relationship, like the collection of pubic hairs and the tape-recording, was a thing of the past. The last two items had been thrown away some years before, the letters I have quoted were stuck in a kitchen drawer on the Pukekawa farm. The attempts to court Jeannette had failed. During her stay in Europe between February 1961 and November 1962 Thomas had written several times to her. He had sent her a writing set, beads, stockings, and upon her return had given her in December 1962 a final present, a brush and comb set.
