Beyond Reasonable Doubt?, page 9
As the days went by, he was drawn more and more into the police investigation. He rapidly became not merely a trusted confidant of the police but someone they used again and again during the course of their investigation. One of the ways they used him was as a weapon in their attempts to break Len Demler. Ron Chitty recalled this aspect when talking to me:
‘The police used Hewson a great deal. They used him to interrogate Len a fair bit. One thing I could never understand was why they set a member of the public to intimidate another man. And intimidate him he did. I think Hewson thought he had become a detective. He started to act like a policeman.’
Hewson’s recall of that situation is equally clear:
‘Hutton and Hughes continuously spoke of Demler in terms that he was without doubt the murderer. They both said to me: “As soon as we find a body we’ll turn the key on Len Demler.” They were absolutely certain it was Len. Every morning when I came up to the farm from Len’s house, they would ask me what he had said during the previous evening. What his manner was like. If he phoned anyone. Then when Heather and her husband came to stay I would be asked to report on the family conversations. Gates would be deliberately wired up so that when Len came home he would be subjected to the aggravation of having to mess about on a cold winter’s night trying to open them. I came back from Tuakau one day a bit late. “Where the bloody hell have you been?” Demler asked me. I told him that I’d been to see Rochelle, which I had. Then at a suggestion from the police I added a bit, told him there was a policewoman with her and a child specialist and that they were teaching the child to talk. He went white. Harvey was a hell of a good mate of mine and anything I could do in any way, to help catch whoever murdered him and Jeannette I would do.’
In early August, with the investigation at a stalemate and a manager appointed on the farm, Hewson returned to Woodville. On the 16th of that month when he heard of the discovery of Jeannette’s body, he immediately returned to Pukekawa, driving Mrs Crewe back to what was now known as ‘murder country’.
In view of the fact that a manager had been appointed, Hewson offered to assist the police in any way that he could. His offer was accepted and he was invited to join the search party in the gardens of the Crewe farmhouse.
In their search for .22 cartridge shells, they sieve-searched the flower beds, mowed the lawns and carefully examined the grass clippings. On their knees they made a careful inch-by-inch search of the mown lawns, they gave the paddocks outside the enclosed gardens the same treatment; the guttering of the house, even the water tank was searched. The only item found was a complete bullet discovered by Hewson, but that had been deliberately planted by one of the police officers as a joke on their civilian colleague. Of fired cases there was no sign.
Having been advised that the search for a .22 cartridge case on the Crewe property had produced negative results Inspector Bruce Hutton reconsidered the information that had been furnished to him by the DSIR.
The psychological warfare on Len Demler was stepped up by rumours deliberately circulated through Pukekawa that he was a voluntary patient at a nearby mental institution and that his daughter Heather was firmly convinced of his guilt. Neither rumour had even a vestige of truth, but the Demler family were powerless against the mischief within the community. In the light of subsequent events it was perhaps fortunate that Demler did not own a .22 rifle. After the discovery of Jeannette’s body her father’s friends and acquaintances were closely questioned as to whether any of them had loaned Demler a .22 rifle before 17 June. In the event, none had. What was unfortunate for the man at the centre of the storm was that a gun that had been part of the Chennell estate could not be found. Despite intensive and desperate searches of both the Crewe and Demler farms that missing gun remained missing.
Bruce Hutton turned his attention back to the guns that he did have – the two that the DSIR had been unable to exclude. One from the Thomas farm, one from the Eyre farm. The latter one linked to the tragedy a family who were no strangers to violent death. For the Eyres it must have seemed like the replay of a nightmare from the past – from the night of 24 August 1920. That was the night that Sidney Seymour Eyre had the top of his head blown off as he lay sleeping in his bed. His wife’s lover, Samuel Thorne, was charged with the murder and after two trials was found guilty. Protesting his innocence to the last he was hanged at Mt Eden prison. For fifty years the Eyre family had been living with that case. In 1970 it was brought out, dusted over and closely examined by first the police and subsequently by the press. The similarities were uncanny but at this stage of the investigation into the deaths of the Crewes, not readily apparent. In August 1970, Inspector Hutton’s prime concern was not a solved murder from the past but two unsolved murders on his desk. Looking at the Eyre family his attention centred on Mickey Eyre. A man in his late twenties, Eyre had a reputation in some quarters that left a bit to be desired. Police collected statements from residents who gave specific instances of cruelty that the handicapped, deaf young man had perpetrated on animals. Other statements mentioned Eyre being discovered late at night outside a farmhouse with a rifle. Again, there was talk of the time when he had worked for Harvey Crewe and of how Crewe had exploded into rage when he discovered that Eyre had cut the grass in the wrong paddock.
With the exception of the Thomas and Eyre rifles all the guns were returned to their owners. On 7 September, Arthur Thomas got a taste of what Demler had been experiencing since mid-June. Detective Sergeants Seaman and Parkes called at his farm. Parkes was later to say that they asked Thomas to accompany them to Tuakau police station. Thomas was later to say that he did not know where they were taking him until the police car was heading towards Tuakau. There is also considerable disagreement about exactly what occurred once the group arrived at the police station. What is quite clear is that, if Thomas was not given the third-degree treatment, he most certainly received something approaching it.
He was asked to account for his movements on the night of 17 June; it was ‘pointed out to him that was the night the Crewes were killed.’ That was how Parkes later referred to the opening moments of that interview. In fact, the opening question was: ‘Arthur, it was your rifle that was used to kill the Crewes. What do you say to that?’ The two police officers were anxious to trap or bluff Thomas into confessing to the murders. They accused him of hating Harvey Crewe. They questioned him about his friendship with the dead woman going back to schooldays. They asked him for details covering his working life up to 1970, of his various meetings with Jeannette. Of the presents that he had given her. Of his reaction when rejected by the woman. Of his knowledge of the Crewe farm. They attacked him for not taking part in the search. They probed into his financial position. Throughout the interview, Thomas protested his innocence. He denied any knowledge of the murders. He offered to help the police in any way possible to establish his innocence. With regard to his rifle being the murder weapon, he accepted their lie as the truth: ‘If you say it was my gun, it must have been, but I didn’t do it.’ When they continued to accuse him of the murders he asked to be given a lie-detector test. They threatened to take him to Auckland and charge him with the murders. When he vehemently protested yet again that he was innocent, the police officers dropped their bluff and told him that they had just been ‘trying you out’. He was driven back to his farm.
The following day, Detective Sergeant Mike Charles called at the Thomas farm. He returned the rifle and advised the Thomases that it ‘was not the one we are looking for’.
On 9 September, the day after Thomas received his rifle back from the police, Pukekawa farmer David Payne was in nearby Tuakau. By the river he saw Inspector Pat Gaines still looking for that second body. They discussed the case. Payne asked the policeman how they could be so sure that Demler was their man. Pat Gaines replied:
‘It’s like this. We assemble all the evidence that we’ve got. We put it together piece by piece and we get one answer. In the event that we may have made a mistake, we dismantle it and attack it from another angle. Then we put it all together again and we come up with precisely the same answer. What would you think?’
One week later, on 16 September, the body of Harvey Crewe was found floating in the Waikato. Like Jeannette’s, it had only surfaced because of a heavy freak flooding of the river producing a sudden tidal surge. Like Jeannette’s there was a .22 bullet in the head. Like Jeannette’s it had been discovered at a time when the police investigations had reached an impasse.
The man who found Harvey’s body was Constable Wyllie, the local officer who had been called to the Crewe farm by Owen Priest. Now nearly three months later he had discovered the second body that Bruce Hutton told me he ‘had dreamed of finding the night before’. Would that second body give the inspector the answers he was seeking or would it merely pose more unanswered questions?
Harvey’s body had been found four miles upstream from where the first gruesome discovery had been made exactly one month earlier. The snagged body was badly decomposed and Bruce Hutton feared that it might break up and vanish before they could get it on shore. A body cradle was rushed to the scene as police frogmen encircled the corpse. Inspector Hutton recalled the scene in his deposition:
‘Whilst a police party in my boat pulled in on the downstream side of the snag and the body, efforts were made on the upstream side of the body by two members of the diving team to slide the cradle under the body. Despite frequent attempts to do this it just wasn’t possible and on pulling my own boat closer in, I was able to observe a thin wire around the body, firstly travelling under the left armpit, across the back and over the right shoulder. A further piece of wire could be seen around the stomach of the body. Whilst Constable Spence was endeavouring to force the cradle under the body, I reached over and placed one hand under the shoulder of the body nearest to me in an attempt to free the body as at that stage we either thought it was weighted or deeply entrenched on numerous snags that were present. At that precise moment, I felt an object under the body and close to it and at the same moment, Constable Spence forced the cradle and tugged at the body itself. The body came free all of a sudden and the object slipped from my grasp. The body itself became more buoyant and surprisingly moved into the cradle with little further effort needed.
‘The object I felt, felt to me like iron or something very solid but the weight was such that I had no chance to pull it towards me. Following the recovery of the body itself, I directed the police diving team to carry out an extensive search immediately below the body for the weight or weights that may have been attached. After searching for a short time Constable Spence surfaced with a car axle which he handed to me and which I immediately had photographed whilst in my possession.
‘That is the axle previously produced as Exhibit 293. I examined the axle immediately and what could be described as the kingpin end of the axle was consistent with what I had felt prior to the wire breaking. I examined the axle further and it was obvious to me that at one point on the axle, wire or some similar substance had been very recently fastened to it.’
If that axle was indeed originally attached to the body of Harvey Crewe as it lay in six feet of water then the police placed a very important aspect of their subsequent case in serious jeopardy by not ensuring that body and axle were recovered together. The fact that it was brought ashore as a separate entity raised the first question of many that were to be subsequently raised with regard to an exhibit that I consider to be the most important in the entire case.
With the aid of a vintage-car enthusiast the police quickly established that the axle recovered from the bed of the Waikato had originally been part of a 1929 Nash motorcar; at least that was the origin of the axle that was shown to the car enthusiast. Whether one accepts that he was shown the same axle that came ashore with Harvey Crewe’s body is another matter. Amongst the men of Pukekawa who were shown an axle was Peter Garratt. Apart from farming and assisting with the running of the local school buses. Peter Garratt, like Mickey Eyre’s father Joff, was a man much in demand in the area because of his expertise at repairing cars and building car-trailers. The police, working on the premise that the axle they had discovered might at some time in its life have been part of a trailer, showed it to this man. At least they showed him an axle. Mr Garratt, now a justice of the peace on Auckland’s North Shore, said to me:
‘Within a day of taking the axle out of the river they brought it to me at the garage in Pukekawa. I was standing by the school bus ready to take off. It was between 3 and 3.15 p.m. when I was shown this axle. There were two police officers, I think one was Parkes. The other was a very tall, slightly built man (I believe this man to have been Detective Sergeant Jeffries). The axle had obviously had welding work done on it at some time. They wanted to know if I could identify the welding as mine; if I could identify the axle as one that I had worked on or handled at any time, that sort of thing. The axle weld was bright and shiny, a different composition to the cast steel of the stubs.’
Mr Garratt asked the police officers what material had been used for the welding, in order to ascertain if it was a metal that he was accustomed to using. At that stage the police had no idea and were advised by Peter Garratt to take the axle to the DSIR for metal trace tests. They never brought the axle back to him. A few months ago Mr Garratt was shown Exhibit 293 at the laboratory of Auckland forensic scientist, Dr James Sprott. He said:
‘The axle I have recently seen at Dr Sprott’s was not the same axle. I can’t swear to it, but I’m pretty sure that was not the one that the police brought to me after they had recovered the body of Harvey Crewe from the river. The one that I saw at the laboratory has got one stub on and the other missing. The axle they showed me that afternoon at Pukekawa either had two stubs or none at all. In either event the ends were uniform.’
I showed Mr Garratt a number of the official police photographs of the axle that was Court Exhibit 293. He studied them carefully then said:
‘That is not the axle I was shown at Pukekawa by those police officers. These photographs are of a different axle.’
As I have already observed Mr Garratt is now a justice of the peace, a man who sits on the bench administering the laws of New Zealand. Bearing in mind the character assassinations that have been perpetrated in this case on a number of people I shall be interested to see police reaction to this particular piece of evidence, now made public for the first time.
I found Mr Garratt’s views about police behaviour in the case equally illuminating. He said:
‘I see a lot of the police in my capacity as a JP and I think they are a fine bunch of people. But in the Crewe murder investigations they were inclined to treat many of the people in the most appalling manner. For instance, they treated young Bruce Roddick as though he was a Greys Avenue dropout. They were using entirely the wrong tactics and techniques. Instead of getting the local people to co-operate by the use of tact they alienated and upset. Despite their methods, rather than because of them, the locals still attempted to help.’
An example of the police using the correct methods was the gesture they made in September. A large party of local schoolchildren were taken to Auckland and shown over Auckland CIB. It was while the children were actually at police headquarters that Harvey Crewe’s body was found.
While the police utilized the press and television in an attempt to obtain information about the Nash axle, Bruce Hutton turned his attention back to Len Demler, who yet again had been obliged to identify the dead body of a member of his family.
‘Then I got that axle and I said to myself, “I don’t believe that Demler is involved, but don’t let’s do it that way, let’s prove with this axle that he’s the murderer, and we’ll hang it on his bloody haystack or somewhere where it’s obviously been used around his farm.” So we set out, just as a team. I brought this team down to a very small group of top-class men and we went into it. It didn’t take long to prove the bloody opposite to what we were trying to prove. To satisfy ourselves, we proved him innocent. That’s what created the wider search. The search of that dump on the Thomas farm again.’
One part of proving Len Demler innocent that Bruce Hutton did not mention during my interview with him was an interrogation of Demler lasting between six and seven hours, an aspect I uncovered months after my interview with Mr Hutton. Another extraordinary fact that I have subsequently discovered is the police conference that took place just a day before Harvey’s body was found. At that conference it was finally decided to arrest Len Demler and charge him with murder. Before that decision could be implemented the second body was found, at which point the police obviously decided to bide their time in the hope that the axle would give them further evidence. It did, against Arthur Thomas.
Less than two weeks after a photograph of the axle had appeared in the national press, the police officer who had been given the task of tracing the owner of the axle received a phone call. For Detective Len Johnston, the officer in question, it was the breakthrough that he and his colleagues had been so urgently seeking. The caller, a Mr Shirtcliffe, informed him that he had once owned a trailer with a 1929 Nash axle on it, but he had sold it in 1958. He did, however, have an old photograph of the trailer. Within two weeks the trail of ownership and re-sale led the police directly back to the Thomas farm. Arthur’s father was the last known owner of the trailer.
On 12 October, Johnston interviewed an engineer, Roderick Rasmussen. He too had a story to tell about the trailer and even more particularly about the axle. It transpired that in the mid-1960s Rasmussen had worked on the trailer for Mr Thomas senior. Part of the work had involved replacing the Nash axle with a new tubular drop axle. According to Rasmussen the original axle and its stubs had been collected by his customer with the modified trailer.
