Beyond Reasonable Doubt?, page 8
It is a well-known and established fact that between sixty and seventy per cent of all murders come under the category of ‘domestic murders’, that is murders committed by the spouse or a near relative. Exhaustive research in Great Britain has established this as a fact. Dr Nelson of the DSIR advised me that the percentage is the same for New Zealand. When one realizes that not a single piece of evidence has ever been produced to refute the theory that one of the Crewes killed the other and then turned the gun on themselves, who can deny the possibility of murder/suicide being the explanation of the deaths of Harvey and Jeannette Crewe? If that is the solution, it would of course mean that a third party moved the bodies, cleaned up, and fed Rochelle. Without doubt the little girl was fed. Without doubt someone did clear up and move the bodies. It does not follow – indeed the evidence in my possession directly contradicts it – that the person responsible for those acts is at this moment in Paremoremo Prison.
Much was to be made later of the fact that the Crewes died on the eve of their fourth wedding anniversary. It was to be held that this was all part of a pattern along with the fires and the burglary. It has been stated, quite incorrectly, that each of these events occurred on their wedding anniversary. The dates of these incidents previously given, demonstrate the fallacy of that statement. What has never been the subject of comment, as far as I know, is the absence of presents. Surely a happily married couple, devoted to each other, would exchange gifts on the fourth anniversary of their marriage?
Edith Judge, a close friend of the Crewes, movingly described to me a good marriage:
‘Harvey and Jeannette were always open with each other, completely honest. They had a very real appreciation of each other and a deep respect for each other … A well-suited, wonderfully happy, strong and mature couple, completely capable of working out life in a harmonious, positive manner. Both intelligent, witty, fun to be with if they knew you well, otherwise reserved, but not awkward. Jeannette had a very hearty, deep-throated laugh which lives on always in one’s memory. Good as parents. Could be described as a very private couple.’
Fully conscious that Rochelle Crewe is alive I would normally be reluctant to question that view of the relationship; yet the equally honest views of Clare MacGee, Keith Christie and others inevitably pose such a questioning. The condition of the Crewe farm when it was discovered raises a myriad of questions about their relationship. Is that really the home of a happily married couple?
As Bruce Hutton pondered these and other aspects, his research took him into strange areas. The case was attracting tremendous publicity. Reporters, television teams, radio units roamed all over Pukekawa. Members of the public descended at weekends and drove up and down Highway 22 to get a look at the murder farm. It was ‘somewhere to take the children at the weekend’. Letters by the thousand poured into the police all telling them to look here or arrest this person. Anonymous phone calls, each caller knowing ‘for a fact’ who was responsible. Clairvoyants, mystics, water diviners, psychics, all claimed they knew the answer. Bruce Hutton recalled one clairvoyant who told him she was an expert:
‘This particular woman wanted to come out to the farm and hold something belonging to Harvey and just walk around the house. The day she came out there was a bit of a lull in the local inquiries so I went with her over the house. She then drew a massive plan of the area and said that the bodies had gone down the Waikato river and out to sea. On her plan she drew a cross just where they were out at sea, one was about six and a half miles outside the Waikato Heads, the other was about ten miles north of that. According to her both were drifting at a steady rate of knots. She wanted me to call up one of the helicopters and take her out to sea so that she could more accurately pinpoint the positions. A few days later Jeannette’s body was found. Five miles west of Pukekohe, in the Waikato river.’
It would be more accurate to say that Jeannette’s body found them. It was floating in an area known as Devil’s Elbow, by two men whitebait fishing. This was on 16 August 1970. The body was wrapped in bedclothes and tied with wire. She had been shot in the head with one .22 bullet; there were also serious facial injuries.
So after a search running into millions of manhours and utilizing local knowledge, police expertise, frogmen, divers, potholers, the Army, Navy and Air Force, a body had been found by two men out fishing.
Bruce Hutton moved. He moved fast.
‘I’ll tell you what swung me away from Demler and I’ve never revealed this before. I wasn’t making a great deal of headway and then I found Jeannette. At that time I made a decision. I still had my options open, Demler No. 1. Thomas No. 2. Then the others. I then decided, there is only one way. The way I’d been trained by Bob Walton. Whether you are right or wrong, take hold of one of your suspects, you’ve got something tangible now, you can prove a murder. She’s been shot. I just took Demler down and showed him her body when we brought it out of the water, and I was there watching him like a damn hawk, looking for any glimmer of reaction. Then I put him through a very tough interview, immediately on top of that. He didn’t break. I felt then that he wasn’t my man. Bear in mind we were dealing with a totally different kind of murder here. We were almost going around and around in circles. Couldn’t see anything tangible.’
As an insight into the way that Inspector Hutton worked, his thought processes, I find that statement revealing. Some might criticize such techniques, condemning them as overly brutal. I do not. He was absolutely right when he referred to ‘a totally different kind of murder’, if murder it was. Somewhere stalking the land was a double murderer who might at any moment strike again. If putting Len Demler through that ordeal had established his guilt and removed him from society, all would have applauded Hutton. The fact that he did not break Demler does not justify a criticism of the method used, but I would seriously question the quality of the thought processes used by the inspector.
Len Demler was taken to the river without being told the reason for the journey, the premise being that the sudden shock of the sight of his daughter’s dead body would catch him in an unguarded moment. Now this man had farmed in the area since before the Second World War. It would be obvious to him, very quickly, that he was being driven to the river. If he was guilty he would immediately realize why he was being taken there. He would have at the very least thirty minutes to compose himself, to steady his nerves for the ordeal that he would know lay ahead. What price the tactics of shock and surprise then?
I also found his comment about Thomas being No. 2 curious, very curious. He maintained throughout the interview that Thomas was always his No. 2. I do not believe it. A No. 2 suspect in a double murder who is left entirely to his own devices for nearly two months, apart from two brief interviews? Interviews conducted not by the inspector but by two of his detective sergeants who leave after brief discussions with this No. 2 suspect about an abortive courting and a present given to the dead woman many years before? A No. 2 suspect who is then left again entirely to his own devices for over a month?
As for Hutton feeling that Demler was ‘not my man’ after that torrid interrogation, it will be shown in a little while that Bruce Hutton most certainly did not strike Len Demler from the top of his list after that interrogation on 16 August 1970.
Among others that came to the banks of the Waikato to view the body of Jeannette Crewe was pathologist Dr Francis John Cairns. He carried out a detailed post mortem examination the same day. While the blanket, bedspread and wire that held those items around the body were rushed to the DSIR for analysis, Dr Cairns made a careful examination of the fully dressed body.
‘There were two small injuries in the right temple, injuries about the right eye and the nose, and some small injuries to the face which appeared to have been caused after death. Apart from the last injuries, I made a detailed examination of the injuries later, and considered that the injuries to the eye, nose and the right side of the head were probably caused before death.’
Of the clothing on the body which included a cardigan, a check skirt, a singlet, bra, pantyhose and panties:
‘The clothing had not received any prior cuts or tears before I cut them off.’
As a result of his examination he was able to determine that a .22 bullet had entered her head on the right-hand side, in front of the ear and about one and a quarter inches above it, and there was an exit wound in front of the left ear. Further on in his deposition he considered the manner in which she had died:
‘The line of fire of the bullet was from right to left and slightly forwards, and that path and the injuries I saw would be a possibility (sic) that the weapon had been fired from behind her right shoulder whilst seated, that is one possibility but I think it more likely that the weapon was fired when she was lying on the floor with the left side of her face to the floor. From the reconstruction of the bloodstains and from the other injuries she showed, that is to say, the injury to the tissue about the right eye, the injury to the nose and the fracture to the nose, these all suggested to me that she had received a blow to the face with a blunt weapon and that this had knocked her to the ground and while on the ground the shot had been fired. The bloodstain on the carpet suggested that she had been bleeding on the floor, there was a clear area in front of the fire where there were no bloodstains, and this suggested that she had been lying partly on a mat which could have been in front of the fire.’
He went on to suggest that the injuries to the face could have been caused by a rifle butt. The bruising to her left armpit he could offer no explanation for. Her six lower front teeth were missing, also possibly as a result of a blow to the face, but Dr Cairns makes no mention of these in his deposition. Perhaps the omission is because this aspect was covered by a deposition from Jeannette’s dentist.
Apart from having clear and tragic proof that Jeannette Crewe was dead, the police now had invaluable evidence: the bullet fragments recovered from her body and the wire that had been used to bind the blanket and bedspread.
Inspector Gaines and his searchers were pulled back into the area, certain now that the heavy rain that had flooded into the Waikato and caused the body of the thirty-year-old farmer’s wife to surface, could also discover the body of the husband. The CIB moved back with a vengeance. Detective Sergeants John Hughes and Murray Jeffries collected wire samples from the Crewe farm and the Demler farm. From the farm of Arthur Thomas, the No. 2 suspect? Nothing. A curious omission, particularly when one realizes that Thomas’s .22 Browning pump-action rifle was collected. It was one of sixty-four collected. ‘All .22 rifles within a five-mile radius of the Crewe farm, rifles from relatives of the dead couple, from friends, acquaintances and other persons who had become involved in the inquiry into their deaths’ was the brief that Detective Sergeant Mike Charles was given. It was a brief that was to be and still is subjected to scathing criticism. Why merely five miles? Are they sure they obtained all the .22 rifles within that radius? What of the rifles of men like farmer Ted Smith, admittedly as Arthur’s neighbour outside the five-mile radius, but a man who was not only out on the night of the murder but one who went past the Crewe farm twice that night? Another rifle that did not interest the police was that of David Payne, again like Ted Smith a man who lived outside that arbitrary five-mile line, but again like Smith a man who was out on the night of the murders, out at a ratepayers’ meeting about three miles from the Crewe farm, a meeting that finished at 10.40 p.m. The Crown were later to state that the murders took place late in the evening, that the ‘television had been switched off. Closedown time for television was 11 p.m. That put not only David Payne but the other thirty people who attended that meeting within three miles of the Crewe farm at exactly the right time after the meeting closed, to drive to the Crewe farm and commit a double murder. Yet the police displayed a total indifference not only to David Payne’s rifle but to a number of others belonging to people who had been at that meeting. McGuire, the farmer next door to Payne and like him a man at that meeting, is yet another whose rifle to this day remains unchecked. There are others. Yet Detective Sergeant Charles was later to say that rifles belonging to people such as Smith, Payne and McGuire ‘would have been collected if the police had known they were out that night’. Demonstrably the police, having questioned at least two of these men, did know they were out that night.
In view of the fact that several of the rifles collected were not five or nine miles but nearly fifty miles away from the Crewe farm, the omissions became even more inexplicable.
The rifle owned by Heather’s father-in-law was collected from the Auckland North Shore. The rifle owned by the brother of Bruce Roddick was also collected from the Auckland area.
The rifle belonging to Graham Hewson, one of Harvey Crewe’s closest friends, was another that the police requested. In view of the fact that Hewson was living at Woodville this means that the five-mile radius search had in that particular instance been extended to about three hundred miles.
The sixty-four rifles that were collected after Jeannette’s body had been found went to the DSIR. The object of the exercise was to establish if any of them could have fired the .22 bullet, fragments of which had been recovered, that killed the young woman.
A fired bullet has upon it marks as unique as human fingerprints. Just as the whirls and ridges of skin on the fingers leave prints that are traceable to one hand and one hand alone, so do the grooves, twists and marks in the metal of a gun barrel leave impressions that can come from one gun and one gun alone. On the base of the bullet that had killed Jeannette was the figure 8. Initially all that meant was that the bullet was one of 158 million rounds manufactured by one of the subsidiaries of the I.C.I. company between 1948 and 1963. Ultimately that small figure 8 was to have a significance that still reverberates, nearly eight years later.
Having test fired the sixty-four rifles the DSIR concluded that the fatal bullet could have been fired from one of two rifles. Or to put it exactly in Dr Nelson’s words: ‘I was able to exclude all but two rifles.’
One of these rifles belonged to Arthur Thomas. The other had been collected from a family in Pukekawa named Eyre, though it in fact belonged to a family friend named Brewster.
To say that the bullet that killed Jeannette could have been fired from either of those rifles is over simplistic. Given a complete bullet in a reasonable condition one of those two rifles must, by all the laws of science, have been eliminated from the inquiry. It is clear that the DSIR did not have a complete bullet in a reasonable condition, but incomplete fragments. It is equally clear that the Crown conclusions that were subsequently drawn are dangerously misleading. There is no doubt in my mind, neither is there any in the mind of Dr Donald Nelson, that if he had been handed another sixty-four rifles of .22 calibre he would have discovered at least another two that could not be excluded. Yet another sixty-four would have produced yet another two and so it goes on. There is no doubt whatsoever that in New Zealand today, in Pukekawa this minute, are rifles that could have been and could be directly linked with those bullet fragments. The number of rifles that could be so linked runs into hundreds. Such a slender link in the chain of evidence led ultimately to a man being imprisoned for life.
While Dr Nelson was busily engaged establishing a negative, the Crewe house and the surrounding gardens were a hive of activity.
Detective Jeffries had, in the days that followed 22 June, gone through the house and gardens not with the proverbial fine toothcomb but in the case of the interior, with a Hoover, collecting even the fragments of dust. The gardens and paddocks were subjected to a marked-out pattern search. Photographs demonstrate just how detailed that pattern search was.
Now, in the sure knowledge of the weapon that had killed Jeannette Crewe, Detective Sergeant Jeffries returned to the Crewe farm. The first search, thorough and exhaustive as it had been, had not revealed a .22 cartridge case. In June, of course, with pathologist Dr Cairns talking about blocks of wood, tomahawks and axes, a .22 case would not have been uppermost in the minds of the police. Now on 17 August it was the one object, the only object that they were seeking. Amongst those assisting Jeffries on that search was Graham Hewson, the close friend of Harvey, who had previously employed him, watched him play rugby, had both Harvey and Jeannette to stay at his Woodville home, had stayed at theirs, had attended their wedding … In case the reader should wonder why I itemize the obvious involvements of two close friends, I should perhaps explain that certain members of the police and certain people in Pukekawa freely asserted to me: ‘Hewson hardly knew Harvey; they had only met a few times.’
Graham Hewson, this man who ‘hardly knew Harvey’, drove from Woodville to Pukekawa, on 23 June, the morning after it was known the Crewes were missing, and with him was Harvey’s uncle. Upon arriving at the farm, the police, realizing that in Hewson they had an invaluable mine of information concerning the missing David Harvey Crewe, questioned him for some time.
The man ‘who hardly knew Harvey’ then stayed at Demler’s farm, at Demler’s request. When Heather and her husband arrived from the United States Hewson moved to a nearby hotel, staying with Harvey’s mother and brother-in-law. This man who ‘hardly knew Harvey’ was then asked by Len Demler, Mrs Crewe senior and Harvey’s brother-in-law to manage the Crewe farm until a farm manager could be appointed. I could go on for many pages demonstrating that not only was Graham Hewson a close friend, but also a man much liked and highly regarded by those closest to Harvey and Jeannette. The point has to be made if only because of the way his character was smeared later by the police and the Crown Prosecutor. There are many obnoxious aspects of ‘The Thomas Case’. The attack that was mounted on Hewson is one of them.
When Graham Hewson arrived at the Crewe property on 23 June, he had two basic aims: to give whatever assistance he could to the Crewe and Demler families and to find out what had happened to Harvey and Jeannette. His view about their deaths has remained unchanged: ‘If someone murdered them I don’t want that person in prison for life, I want them hung.’ As a shepherd with a lifelong experience of dog-breeding one of the first curious things he noticed was the condition of the three dogs on the farm. After five days, during which, in theory, they had not been fed, they were ‘as fat as seals’. The cattle, too, were in good condition and took only a normal interest in the hay that he fed out to them.
