The Crime that shocked New Zealand

At 2.20pm on Monday 22 June 1970, Tuakau police constable Gerry Wyllie received a phone
call from one Owen Priest, a poultry farmer of Pukekawa.
As a result, the officer drove to Pukekawa, collecting Priest at his home. They then both went to
the Crewe farm, just a few hundred metres to the south.
In the lounge a long eerie drag mark, obviously blood, stretched from almost one end of the
room to the other. Numerous bloodstains dotted the carpet, and in front of the fireplace a pool of
blood was obvious. A knitting needle with dropped stitches was on a couch, an upturned
woman’s slipper near an arm chair, separated from its opposite number. The occupants of the
house, Jeanette and Harvey Crewe, were not to be found. Wyllie learned that an hour or so
earlier their infant daughter, Rochelle – tired and dirty but alive – had been taken from her cot by
her grandfather, Len Demler, and delivered to a neighbouring family.
Demler had taken Priest to the house initially, and when the former went to phone the police,
Demler went back to his own home, adjoining the Crewe farm, to advise a transport company
not to send a truck for sheep that were due to be collected that afternoon. He then set about
drafting some of his own sheep, only returning to the Crewe farm much later, after more police
had arrived.
The scene which greeted a contingent of uniformed police, and then a squad of detectives, was
unlike anything they had experienced before. Serious injury or possible death had occurred in the
lounge, involving at least one person, possibly two. Both the adult occupants of the house were
missing.
In the following weeks, extensive land, air and river searches were carried out by police,
civilians from the district and further afield, and military personnel – mainly army and air force.
Blood-typing confirmed that the extensive stains in the lounge had come from two people and a
pathologist determined that both were probably dead. The bodies had disappeared from the face
of the earth.
Despite up to 300 personnel being involved in searches in that bitterly cold winter, it was not
until 16 August 1970 that a breakthrough came. By then the police team had been reduced to a
mere handful, mostly detectives.
On that day, two local men going to a white-baiting stand on the Waikato river, downstream of
Tuakau, found the body of a woman, trussed up in a bedspread and bound with thin copper wire.
A post mortem that evening determined that she had suffered serious facial injuries – the
pathologist concluded they had been made by a rifle butt – and that she had been shot with a .22
firearm. Pieces of a lead bullet were recovered from her head, the biggest of them carrying a
number eight on its base.
An extensive and thorough search of the lawns and gardens within the house enclosure was
carried out, with detectives being told to specifically look for a cartridge case that could have
come from the murder weapon. Nothing was found.
Exactly one month later, on 16 September 1970, police patrolling the river by boat located a
man’s body, partially submerged and wedged against a massive tree. He too had been trussed up,
with both copper and galvanised around his body. Beneath this body, on the river bed, was an
old car axle which a police diver recovered. A bedspread which had obviously covered his head
during its journey down the river, was found wedged against branches of the tree by another
diver.
The post mortem on this man also determined that he had been shot dead with a .22 firearm, and
the heavy bloodstaining on the arm chair he always occupied in the evenings led the pathologist
to determine that he had been shot from just inside the dinette, at a distance of just a few metres.
Police concluded that Harvey Crewe had been murdered first, with his assailant then striking
down his wife with a rifle butt before shooting her after she fell to the floor, just in front of the
fireplace.
Reconstructions of the crimes concluded that the male victim had been removed from the house
the evening he was shot – his blood was splattered on the brick wall just outside the front door –
and it was likely that his wife had also. Their bodies were removed to an unknown place before
taken to the Waikato river, some five kilometres away, for disposal.
What is known now is that there was a great deal of activity around the Crewe house and farm in
the five days between the murders and Demler reporting the disappearance of his daughter and
son-in-law on 22 June 1970.
The back light was seen on at 7.20pm the night of the murders and was still on at 11.45 that
night. The outside light and the kitchen light remained on five days later when police arrived.
A witness also reported the lights of the wool shed, just to the south of the house, being on at 9
o’clock on the evening of the murders.
On the morning after the murders, Thursday 18 June, a woman was seen driving the Crewe car
past Te Ahu Road, just south of their property, at 8.30am. And at 10.30am, a farmer who lived
south of the Crewe’s property saw a woman in their car, driving on State Highway 22.
The next morning, Friday 19 June, a woman was seen at the front gate of the Crewe house
enclosure – just in front of their car – about 9am.
The front windows of the Crewe house were not covered about that time that morning, but by
2pm these same windows were covered, a passerby looking at them and noting that the curtains
had been drawn.
Police determined that a cushion from Harvey Crewe’s arm chair and a carpet square usually
placed in front of the fire had been burnt in that period, and sparks seen coming from the
chimney around 7.30 pm that day attest to that act having taken place at that time.
The following afternoon, on Saturday 20 June, the Crewes’ infant daughter, Rochelle, was
running around in the front paddock, coming close to the roadway, at 1.30pm and again at
4.30pm, a period of three hours. Someone had her out of her cot, dressed and undoubtedly fed in
that three-hour period. At 4.30pm, the blinds at the front of the house were down and they were
still down on the Sunday and Monday, in contrast to the previous 18 months during which the
Crewe’s practice had been to leave them open.
The Crewe car was parked at the house enclosure gate on the Thursday morning, and remained
there until sometime on that Sunday. It was seen in that position by several witnesses over the
weekend. But when two stock agents arrived visited the farm at 9am on the Monday, and when
police arrived late on that afternoon, it was parked in the garage near the road gate.
Despite a young farmer from the other end of the district being arrested on 11 November and
convicted twice for the murders of Jeanette and Harvey Crewe – he was found guilty in February
1971 and at a retrial in 1973 before being fully exonerated and pardoned on 17 December 1979 –
no-one has been convicted for crimes that are considered New Zealand’s ultimate cold case.
In 2010, as a result of a demand from Rochelle Crewe that the Government order a new
independent inquiry into the murder of her parents 42 years ago, and a call that the detectives
who corrupted the investigation into those crimes be prosecuted, then Assistant Commissioner
Rob Pope chose instead to order a review of the tens of thousands of pages of documents
contained in the Crewe homicide file. That review, headed by Detective Superintendent Andy
Lovelock, has not yet been concluded.