Sometimes I think it’s the setting and not the mystery that explains why our most famous murder, the Crewe killings, has such a hold on the public imagination. The rural New Zealandness of the 1970 double-killing offers a parable of the way we lived — the isolation, the hard work, the pioneer spirit. Jeanette and Harvey Crewe were killed in their farmhouse in obscure Pukekawa. It was Waikato hill country, submerged in dense fog. ‘The talk was of calvings and eczema spores, stock prices and rainfall,’ wrote Terry Bell in Bitter Hill, his 1972 book calling for Arthur Thomas’s release. No one heard the two gunshots. The bodies were mummified in bed linen, bound with pieces of galvanised wire from the farm, and removed in wheelbarrows. It was a murder case in which a cow served as an alibi. Thomas said that he couldn’t have been at the Crewe household because he was with a sick cow, Number 4, which he helped calve that night. The only shot he fired from his rifle that month was to destroy the animal. It took two months for the bodies to surface in the Waikato River; until then, police searched in limestone caves, and also considered the possibility that the Crewes were wandering ‘dazed’ somewhere in that lonely countryside.
The only vivid detail in the very first case of murder tried in New Zealand — Joseph Burns was found guilty of murdering a couple and their daughter in Devonport, on 22 October 1841 — takes you to the scene of the crime. It was also the same exact spot where Burns was hanged. The courthouse on Queen Street was packed during his trial; a fortnight after his death sentence was passed down, Burns was unshackled in his cell, and escorted by armed guard to the Auckland wharf, and across to Devonport by boat. The scaffold was erected at the Devonport naval base, on the same spot where Burns had hacked the family to death, and burned down their house. Dudley Dyne writes in Famous New Zealand Murders, ‘Near the tall scaffold . . . lay the coffin ready to receive the body of the prisoner. Burns sat down for a rest upon the coffin, a sight that moved the chaplain to tears.’
Dead man resting, on his own coffin, on a Saturday morning on the gently lapping shores of pretty Devonport. Then he stood on the gallows trapdoor and had the rope placed around his neck. He asked the hangman to place the knot a little higher. The trapdoor fell. ‘Thus,’ penned a watching reporter from The New Zealander, ‘terminated the first European execution.’ I wonder whether the reporter came back for more. I would have.
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The first time I stepped into a courtroom was in Greymouth. I was 23. I had joined the staff of the Greymouth Evening Star, and made court reporter. It was fascinating and baffling and terrifying, and I never really got used to it; I felt on edge, and didn’t know what to think. I was afraid of murderers and frightened of men who gave the bash — the most common cases were drink-driving, supply of marijuana, and giving the bash. Pat, a very fat man from The Christchurch Press, sat next to me in the press bench. He had seen it all; he sucked on barley sugars, slept, and was extremely helpful.
Most of the time I worried about spelling people’s names right. But I also wondered what those days in court were telling me about life in Greymouth. There was a long trial involving two businessmen, one a former policeman, who drove a young guy off the road one dark night and beat him up. The young guy had been following the ex-cop for weeks and gathering information on him on behalf of a friend, whose wife was sleeping with the former detective. The other businessman pushed me against the wall one day during recess. ‘I don’t like you,’ he said. I didn’t say anything. He had his hand on my throat.
Punks — ‘punk rockers’, as I solemnly described them in the paper — were always in brawls. They had come to the Coast from Christchurch for peace and quiet, or for the easy access to dope, cactus and datura. One day they started a brawl in court. The judge picked up the hem of his robes, and legged it from the courtroom. Police reinforcements grabbed at the marauding punks. A girl with spiky hair and laddered stockings, who was awaiting her charge of offensive language, crossed the crowded courtroom and gave me a note. She’d written her name and phone number. She lived in a cold house next to the cemetery.
A man was fined $250 for assaulting a woman at the Golden Eagle, where I drank. Ken was an okay guy. I saw him the night before he hit her. The river had flooded, and poured into the bar. A guy rowed in through the front door on a canoe, and ordered a beer. The next night, Ken brought his dog in to the bar, and a drunk woman masturbated it. Ken knocked her out cold. His lawyer said: ‘My client was highly upset, and so was his dog.’
Older, fatter, sucking on mints, I thought back to Greymouth when I recently sat in on a day in court at the Auckland District Court on downtown Albert Street. It was the familiar register of petty crime and bashing. A 24-year-old woman from China had shoplifted $43.84 of cosmetics from Farmers. There was something depressing about her address in Queen Street: apartment number 1002. Hairdresser, 21, caught entering a karaoke bar after it had closed. Sales rep, 38, fined $375 for smashing up a mountain bike after drunkenly pointing at a helicopter. Man, 30, hits partner in Takanini. Man, 50,
