He was in his work shed in 1979 when the phone rang with the news that Arthur had been granted a pardon. ‘It was Dad. He said, “Muldoon’s going to release Arthur today.” My wife Kay – my wife at the time – was getting the mail. I ran down to tell her.’ That night, Arthur spent his first night of freedom at Des’s house after nine years of prison but couldn’t sleep. ‘He came screaming in here,’ said Des, sitting at the kitchen table. ‘Kay had made him up a bed with flannelette sheets. He just couldn’t believe how soft they felt.’
Talk of that night made the house feel like a kind of heritage site. The narrow hallway, the kitchen window looking out on to a field of onions – Des’s house acted as the culmination of a story that began the night of June 17, 1970, a night about which only minor facts remain established. Jeanette Crewe had cooked peas and flounder for dinner. She’d bought the fish earlier that week in nearby Meremere. She dusted it in flour and pan-fried it. She and her husband Harvey watched TV – Peyton Place played at 9.37 p.m. Harvey sat in an armchair. Jeanette knitted. Their brains were blown out by a .22. Five days later police were called to the house. The Crewes’ daughter Rochelle, eighteen months old, was found standing up in her cot. She had soiled nappies. Her parents were missing. Justice Robert Taylor would later set the scene in his introduction to the 1980 report of the Royal Commission: ‘A bizarre story of a bloodstained house, empty but for a weeping infant.’
The Crewe murders remain the most famous in New Zealand history, and the most resonant. Something about them continues to touch a New Zealand nerve. Strangely, it’s not because of the people. No one ever talks about Harvey or Jeanette Crewe. There’s sympathy for Rochelle, the ‘weeping infant’, who has grown up not knowing who killed her parents. There’s sympathy, too, for neighbouring farmer Arthur Allan Thomas, who was stitched up by the cops and sentenced to life imprisonment.
More than the cast, though, the murders have stayed in the national consciousness because of their setting: a double killing, at night, in rain and wind in the middle of winter, on a farm near Pukekawa, population 600. On the day he was murdered Harvey Crewe worked on the drains on his farm, went to a stock sale in Bombay, and inspected a bull in Glen Murray. Thomas’s alibi was cow no. 4 – it was crook, in a sling in a tractor shed, and Thomas was busy calving it. There were ten sheep in the Crewes’ paddock. A wheelbarrow was a kind of getaway vehicle: police believed it was used to transport Harvey Crewe’s body out of the house – across the thick carpet, past the china cabinet, the tea wagon, the writing bureau.
The search for the bodies was carried out in heavy Mercer fog. They were found a month apart in the Waikato River. Both had surfaced only because of freak flooding and a tidal surge. Jeanette was discovered by whitebaiters in an area known as Devil’s Elbow. She was wrapped in bedclothes that were tied with wire. ‘I’m convinced in my own mind that she was raped,’ police inspector Bruce Hutton told the author David Yallop. She had been shot in the side of her head; it seemed to have happened when she was lying on the carpet with the left side of her face to the floor. There was an untouched flounder on the round dining table. There were blood drag marks. Jeanette had dropped seven stitches of her knitting. One of the needles was bent. There was blood in a saucepan in the sink.
Arthur Allan Thomas came from a family of ten, was a country music fan, and especially liked Johnny Cash. His motive, police said, was sexual jealousy. They flushed out niggling irrelevant details. At a farewell party for a colleague in a topdressing firm in Dargaville, Thomas had bought someone’s ‘prized collection’ of pubic hairs. He had entertained fellow workers by playing secretly taped ‘love talk’ that had taken place with a girlfriend in his car one night in Maramarua. Then the police got relevant: according to the Royal Commission, they planted evidence.
In his book Beyond Reasonable Doubt Yallop writes of Thomas: ‘His state of mind on hearing announced a verdict he knew to be wrong must have been one of unspeakable anguish.’ His family campaigned for his release. In memory of his jailed son, Arthur’s father created a weird sculpture by his letterbox on Mercer Ferry Road, using car axles and other replicas of court evidence. Investigative journalist Pat Booth got interested; later, so did Yallop, who wrote to the prime minister, Rob Muldoon, asking for Thomas to be pardoned.
Thomas had been arrested on November 11, 1970; he was released on December 17, 1979. To evade journalists, he slipped into Des’s house.
Justice Taylor ordered compensation of $1,096,450.35. The sum included a payment to Des of $5,420 for expenses. But it never actually ended for Des on that night when Arthur arrived at his front door a free man. He continued to badger the police and ask who killed the Crewes. He said, ‘I’ve been pointing the finger at this joker here whom I think did it.’ It was strange to hear him say the man’s name out loud. It was like being told a terrible secret.
He brought out a document he’d typed up. It was a criminal profile of his suspect, who still lived in the district. Des had an archive of documents. They included
