The Woman Who Fed the Baby

Thirty six hours after Jeanette and Harvey Crewe were shot dead in their lounge, Pukekawa farm
labourer Bruce Roddick was helping to feed out hay across the road from the murder scene.
He did not know the Crewes were dead at that moment – nor did anyone except the murderer and
a woman associated with the killer.
Roddick was about a metre off the ground, on the deck of a carry-all of a tractor being driven by
Ron Chitty. They were in the small paddock adjoining State Highway 22. The time was about
9am.
Roddick looked up from his work and across to the Crewe house. A woman was standing just in
front of the couple’s car, by the front gate of the house enclosure. The distance between Roddick
and the woman was subsequently ascertained to be 118 strides, or 90 metres.
The woman was about the same height as Roddick – 5 foot 10 inches, about 1.8 metres – and
was as broad across the shoulders as the farm worker himself, definitely not a tall slim woman.
She had fair hair, cut fairly short but not very short, curled up at the bottom and was wearing
dark slacks and a green top. She was watching what Roddick and Chitty were doing, and she did
not attempt to conceal her presence.
Four days later, after the news broke that the Crewes were missing, Roddick went to the newly-
established police field base on the Chitty farm and reported what he had seen the previous
Friday morning. He was interviewed by Detective John Roberts, who later reported that he felt
Roddick’s sighting was accurate. Chitty confirmed that this was the only day that week he had
engaged the farm labourer to assist him with feeding out.
By week’s end, relations between Roddick and the police had however deteriorated markedly,
largely as a result of a particularly invasive interrogation at the hands of Detective Sergeant Mike
Charles, the content and delivery of which both the young farm worker and his parents believed
was unwarranted. The die was cast in that interrogation, and Bruce Roddick never again
willingly offered to assist the police with the Crewe homicide inquiry.
Roddick did however share his knowledge and beliefs with his immediate family, particularly his
parents Elsa and Frank, and his oldest brother Graham. He disclosed some time later, in Court
testimony at the subsequent trials of Arthur Thomas, that he had also seen the same woman
driving the Crewe’s car a week or a fortnight before the killings. He had been driving a tractor
back from Pukekawa and she had driven past him and waved, as country folk often do. The exact
date of this sighting has never been established.
The woman at the front gate of the Crewe house enclosure on Friday 19 June – a day and a half
after the couple were murdered and three days before their disappearance was reported – was
also seen by Roddick at the Lower Court proceedings against Thomas at the Otahuhu
Magistrate’s Court in December 1970, and again at his first Supreme Court trial in February
1971. On the first occasion, Roddick sought out the police officer he knew – Graham Roddick
believes this was Charles – and was told that his new sighting was of no relevance.
At the first Thomas trial in the Auckland Supreme Court, the same woman saw him and quickly
turned away, before hurrying up the stairs.
But it was a sighting of the woman on 15 May 1972 which clinched the issue of who the
‘mystery woman’ was in the mind of Bruce Roddick. The circumstances of this encounter and
the testimony of the witnesses to it, now committed to a duly sworn declaration, are important in
the context of the issue now being addressed.
In early 1972, members of the Thomas family living at Pukekawa heard that Len Demler,
Jeanette Crewe’s father, had a new girlfriend. Two of them – Thomas’ brother Richard and
brother-in-law Buster Stuckey – took Bruce Roddick to Sharpe Road, a cul-de-sac that intersects
the Demler farm.
Richard Thomas: ‘I was by then somewhat desperate to gather evidence that would result in the
freeing of my brother and the clearing of my family name. I’d known Bruce Roddick from my
school days and I was aware that he’d seen a woman at the Crewes’ house before their
disappearance was reported.
‘We waited in the car [in Sharpe Road]. Bruce had binoculars. A woman emerged from Demler’s
car, then went into the house and came out again. Bruce’s hands began to shake. He looked
through the binoculars for a long time and then he told me that the woman he was looking at was
the same woman he’d seen at the Crewe farm on Friday, 19 June 1970’.
Richard Thomas took Roddick to see Malcolm McArthur, the secretary of the Thomas Retrial
Committee, and then to Kevin Ryan, who had taken over from Paul Temm QC as Arthur
Thomas’ legal counsel. Ryan subsequently put him through an observation test. Roddick signed
an affidavit several days later, attesting that the woman he had seen at the Crewe farm on 19
June 1970 was categorically not Vivien Thomas, whom he knew well.
McArthur: ‘Roddick said that even though this woman [at the Demler property] had slightly
darker hair, he was positive that she was the same woman he had seen in front of the Crewe
house. I asked Roddick if it was not possible that either woman had been wearing a wig, and that
it was possible he was mistaken, but he said that while her hair was slightly darker, she was
definitely the same woman’.
The sighting by Roddick – while in the company of Richard Thomas and Buster Stuckey – of the
woman at Demler’s farm on 15 May 1972, was just 23 months after his sighting of the woman at
the Crewe farm in the crucial five-day period between the murders and Demler’s reporting of the
disappearance. It also came just five weeks after Len Demler married Norma Eastman [her
maiden name was Thomas but she was not related directly to the clan of Arthur Thomas]. The
marriage of the old Pukekawa farmer and the widow of the late Jim Eastman took place in an
Auckland registry office on 7 April 1972. Until Demler sold his farm the following year,
husband and wife continued to live at separate homes – him at State Highway 22 in Pukekawa
and her at Howick in Auckland.
Many New Zealanders believe that the identity of the woman who fed and occasionally cared for
the Crewes’ infant daughter Rochelle in the five days between their deaths and the day their
disappearance was reported to police is the key to these premeditated murders.
New evidence has emerged only in recent years and all of it confirms the credibility of Bruce
Roddick continued to give the same evidence throughout, even in the face of intense attack on
his character and reliability by detectives intent on making Vivien Thomas into the woman who
fed the baby when she clearly was not.
That evidence was not questioned until after May 1972 – and then only by Crewe inquiry head
Bruce Hutton – when Roddick produced an affidavit declaring that he knew Vivien Thomas
personally and the small dark-haired woman was not even remotely similar to the taller, broad-
shouldered and fair-haired woman with the mature figure he had seen at the Crewe farm.
Both Roddick and his various sights of this woman were validated in 1979, when Robert Adams-
Smith QC, appointed as a special investigator by then Prime Minister Rob Muldoon, reported
back. Part of the Auckland lawyer’s brief had been to determine the validity of Roddick’s
sighting of the woman at the Crewes’ and when he reported to Muldoon, the Queen’s Counsel
said he had found the young farm labourer’s version of events to be accurate and believed
everything he had said.
Adams-Smith went further though, stating in a report to the Prime Minister that he was satisfied
there was a woman at the Crewe farm that day and that if there was an innocent explanation as to
her presence, she would have come forward.
Roddick’s credibility has, in recent years, been further enhanced by the statements of other
witnesses to events during the Crewe murder inquiry of 1970.
In response to television coverage of the Crewe case, a witness came forward with evidence that
in the first week of the homicide inquiry, senior detectives told members and friends of the
missing couple that Demler had killed Jeanette and Harvey and that his ‘new girlfriend was the
woman who had fed the baby’.
Former Crewe scene detective Ross Meurant, who went on to become a key member of the
infamous police red squad that savagely dealt to protestors in the hugely-divisive Springbok tour
and then a Member of Parliament, contributed to the issue also. Last year he disclosed that his
superiors on the Crewe inquiry believed that Demler had been in the house well before he
reported the murders and that he had attended to Rochelle ‘and that he had probably been
accompanied by his new female partner’.
Meurant: ‘This opinion eminated from Detective Inspector Bruce Hutton. It was articulated
many times – at evening conferences where all personnel involved with the inquiry convened
and among we scene detectives when Hutton was with us reconstructing events’.
While Meurant does not believe that Demler killed the Crewes, based on the discussions that
took among the scene detectives at that time, he holds the belief that Jeanette’s father was aware
of the murders prior to phoning the police and ‘that he was involved in tending his grand-
daughter, with his girlfriend’.
In 2006, Crewe researcher and author Chris Birt delivered to then Assistant Commissioner Peter
Marshall a comprehensive file detailing his findings on the issue of the woman seen at the Crewe
house by Bruce Roddick three days before their disappearance was reported. That dossier
contained statutory declarations from a number of people who had provided information about
this long-running and vexed issue.
That file included a disclosure from former Auckland CIB boss, Detective Superintendent Brian
Wilkinson, that he had been directed by Police Commissioner Bob Walton not to investigate Len
Demler’s second wife, Norma, in 1979.
Wilkinson believed that he should do so at that time as the fight to free Arthur Thomas was
reaching a climax and he wished to confirm the possible involvement by two women Robert
Adams-Smith had referred to in his reports to Muldoon – or conclusively rule them out. One of
those women was Heather Souter, the murdered woman’s younger sister, and the other Norma
Demler.
Souter was subsequently eliminated after investigations carried out on Wilkinson’s instructions
in California, where she had been living for more than a decade. Souter did not match Roddick’s
description in any shape or manner and in any event, he knew her from their early years of
growing up in the same district.
In his response in September 2006, Marshall denied that Walton had issued such a direction to
Wilkinson, but this is disproved by the former CIB chief’s own sworn testimony to the 1980
Thomas Royal Commission, and in interviews he gave and faxes he sent just before he died two
years ago. These documents categorically reveal that New Zealand’s top police officer, the
Commissioner, prevented his Auckland CIB regional co-ordinator from investigating Norma
Demler earlier in the year in which Thomas was pardoned.
In 2006 however, Marshall did order that Norma Demler be interviewed, the first formal
questioning she had ever experienced in relation to the Crewe case. This was carried out by
Detective Superintendent Andy Lovelock and a female senior sergeant.
Marshall consequently advised Chris Birt that Norma Demler had categorically denied attending
to Rochelle Crewes in that five-day period, and that she had asserted that when she went to
Pukekawa for the first time, she noticed signs up on the Tuakau bridge proclaiming that Arthur
Thomas was innocent and that he had been framed.
This denial comprised the third variation in Norma Demler’s version of events. Originally
Wilkinson was advised, in writing, that she had said she first went to Pukekawa after 22 June
1970 with her brother Brian Thomas to support Len Demler. Brian Thomas had married
Demler’s sister Noelene in May 1952, linking the two families from that time.
Wilkinson subsequently advised police headquarters that as a result of conversations he had had
with Norma Demler on the side of bowling greens in Auckland, this initial advice was not
correct. He recorded her new assertion that she said she did not go to that district until 1972,
when she claimed to have assisted to help feed the shearers working on the Demler farm.
Her third claim, to the two Auckland detectives in September 2006, contrasted with these two
previous statements, alleging that the her first visit occurred after the free-Thomas signage was
placed on the bridge she had crossed at Tuakau, en route to Pukekawa.
The documentary evidence shows that the Thomas Retrial Committee was formed after the first
appeal was dismissed in June 1971 and held its first formal meeting as a duly-constituted body
on 10 August that year. Norma Demler married Len Demler just eight months later, on 7 April
1972.
In his September 2006 response, Marshall advised Birt: ‘You will appreciate that I have a
responsibility to prioritise investigations in terms of Criminal Investigation branch matters. This
is an on-going obligation and accordingly, after considerable thought, I do not intend to direct
further enquiries arising from your submissions.’
Birt responded: ‘Mrs Demler’s assertion that she did not go to Pukekawa until after the [Crewe]
murders is in direct contradiction with the information provided by the late Beryl Dick, Len
Demler’s own sister. For the sake of clarification, Mrs Dick insisted that Norma Demler – at that
time Norma Eastman – went to assist with cooking for the shearers before Maisey Demler [his
first wife] died in February 1970. Mrs Dick Norma had been asked by her sister-in-law, Noelene,
to help Len as Maisey was very ill by then. I ask you to ponder why Mrs Dick would give
incorrect information of this nature?’
Birt also highlighted the information he had given the police, as relayed by former Taupo farmer
Colin Harvey, who had acted as a trustee [representing Harvey Crewe] in the years following the
murders. Colin Harvey had stated that Norma Eastman, as she was in 1970, had been at a
number of trustee meetings – the first even before Jeanette’s body was recovered from the
Waikato River on 16 August 1970 – and had acted as Len Demler’s spokesman, doing most of
the talking. One of those early trustee meetings was held at her home in Howick.
In 2011, just before his retirement as Police Commissioner, Birt formally requested that Howard
Broad order a new investigation of Norma Demler. This centred on new information received
from a local man who had worked with the shearing gang at Len Demler’s farm during the last
shear of 1969, in October or November that year. This man did not work at the Demler or Crewe
farms after the murders. His evidence verifies that given earlier by Beryl Dick – that Norma
Eastman had been the cook for Demler’s shearing gang at the end of 1969 and that hear meal
was very much appreciated by those in attendance as they often only received pies for their
lunch.
Subsequent formal requests to police headquarters to launch a new inquiry into this aspect of the
as-yet-unsolved Crewe murders have failed to draw a response, despite that agency having a
statutory responsibility to investigate all crime in New Zealand.
Police have never explained why they so readily dismissed the information volunteered by Beryl
Dick and Colin Harvey, seemingly preferring to accept memories of events 42 years ago, as
expounded by Norma Demler.
The issue of who fed Rochelle Crewe remains uppermost in the minds of many New Zealanders,
having been raised in the media continuously for more than four decades.
On the evidence now available, it is clear that senior detectives had a view about her identity in
the first weeks of the Crewe inquiry and that they shared those beliefs with members of the
murdered couple’s family and friends from the outset, and with their own junior ranks.
It is also clear that in the weeks leading up to the historic Thomas retrial in 1973, detectives
knew who Bruce Roddick was referring to when he spoke of the woman he had seen outside the
murder scene in the days following the murders. This was recorded by the late Detective Len
Johnston in his work diary. ‘Alvin Potter told [Brad Benton] that Roddick was going to identify
the woman he saw as Mrs [Norma] Demler.’ In the margin Johnston attested: ‘Confirms our
suspicion re identification’.
Thus, before the Crown put Arthur Thomas on trial for a second time for two murders he did not
commit, the police knew that Roddick was telling his friends that Norma Demler was the woman
he had seen at the Crewe house. They did nothing to stop the retrial, even though there had never
been a connection between Norma Demler and Arthur Thomas. Worst still, Crown Prosecutor
David Morris then went on, in his final address to the jury, to put Vivien Thomas in the role of
being the woman who had fed the baby, having knowledge that she was not. It was a stain that
remained with her until she died in April 2011.
The issue of the not-so-mystery woman – the phantom woman of Pukekawa as Social Credit
Political League Bruce Beetham called her in 1978 – is best resolved by Graham Roddick, the
eldest of the siblings of that family. While Bruce Roddick talked freely to his parents about what
he knew, he also shared it with his oldest brother.
Graham Roddick says Bruce talked within the family about the woman he had seen as being
‘Len Demler’s girlfriend’ very early in the piece, although he is not certain now just how early.
‘There has been a great deal of speculation over the years as to the identity of the woman seen by
my brother at the Crewes’ and the fact that Bruce showed some reluctance to publicly name this
woman at the two Thomas trials, the Appeal Court hearings and at the 1980 Royal Commission.
In all my personal discussions with my brother alone, or in the company of my parents, Bruce
always said that the mystery woman was Len Demler’s girlfriend.
‘I am satisfied that he knew this very soon after he went to the police investigating the Crewe
murders on Tuesday 23 June 1970, and certainly long before he was taken to Sharpe Road at
Pukekawa by Richard Thomas to view this woman in May 1972. When my wife and I went to
visit him in Sydney about 1976 and again in 1989, he repeated that he knew the woman he had
seen at the Crewes’ in June 1970 was Len Demler’s girlfriend.
“Although Richard Thomas told him in May 1972 that this woman was Len Demler’s new wife,
Bruce continued to refer to her as Len Demler’s girlfriend. Knowing my brother as I did, had
Bruce been asked at any of these proceedings [involving Thomas] if the woman he saw at the
Crewes’ in June 1970 was Len Demler’s girlfriend, he would most certainly have said that it
was.’
But Bruce Roddick was never asked and he died prematurely, of pneumonia, in Auckland in
1991, at the age of just 45.
Graham Roddick says that Bruce’s evidence remained entirely consistent from the day he first
went to the police to offer information about sighting this woman until the day he died 21 years
later – that he categorically saw the woman he described in detail at the Crewe house that day,
and that it was Len Demler’s girlfriend, as he called her.
Norma Demler was 48 years old when the Crewes were murdered. Len Demler was a very active
60.
Over the years, journalists have frequently solicited formal interviews with Norma Demler. She
has always rejected such requests and on the odd occasion when a microphone or notebook has
been produced, she has always denied being involved with the murders, or caring for Rochelle.
A formal request by researcher Chris Birt for an interview, in April 2010, drew only a stony
silence, although Norma Demler’s daughter, an East Auckland real estate agent, told him that her
mother would never speak with him, and did not wish him to ever make contact again.
Footnote: None of the civilian witnesses who provided sworn declarations detailing their
knowledge of the ‘mystery woman’ affair have ever been contacted by police, despite the
passage of almost six years.