Beyond reasonable doubt, p.45
Beyond Reasonable Doubt?, page 45
At the time this book was first published Booth, along with the rest of New Zealand, wanted to know the identity of the woman I had named in my letter to the Prime Minister. The woman who I was convinced had fed Rochelle Crewe. I believed that if there was one man in the country that I could trust with that information it was Pat Booth. I was wrong.
During the course of my investigation I had for a number of reasons become convinced that I knew the identity of the woman that fed Rochelle Crewe. I believed it was imperative to show Roddick a photograph of this woman without indicating her identity and establish whether he could confirm my belief. I referred in the Introduction to this book to the advance I received for writing it. The amount had not even covered our air fares back to New Zealand. Now, nine months later, deeply in debt and overdrawn, I lacked the financial resources to pay for an air ticket from Auckland to Melbourne where Roddick was living. I appealed to my editor, Neil Robinson, and to my publishers, Hodder & Stoughton, to advance the next tranche of money. It would only have been a few hundred dollars, but that was all I needed. They declined, reminding me that no more was due until the book was delivered. I pleaded with Robinson and told him why it was imperative that I made this journey. He understood, he was sympathetic, but they wouldn’t oblige.
As luck would have it, one of the people I had interviewed for this book was at that time about to make a trip to Australia, with three friends. She agreed to act as a courier and interview Roddick on my behalf. The photograph of the suspected woman was placed with photographs of fifteen other different women in a folder. The suspect’s photograph was marked number eleven.
When Roddick was shown the sixteen photographs of different women in his Melbourne home, by the four people acting on my behalf, he picked out two. One of the women was wearing clothing similar to that worn by the woman he had seen on that fateful morning outside the Crewe farm. That was interesting. But the other photograph he picked out produced more than an interesting response. He was certain. There was no doubt. ‘That’s her.’ It was the woman he had seen at about 9 a.m. on the Crewe property on Friday, 19th of June, 1970. The photograph that Roddick had identified and which he then signed was number eleven. I had stressed to the persons showing these photographs to Roddick that at no time either before, during or afterwards were they to mention any names or give any identities of the sixteen women. They followed my instructions to the letter. For Roddick’s evidence to be given the weight it deserved it was crucial that he remain ignorant of whom he had identified until questioned by the Prime Minister’s representative.
Booth simply could not resist the lure of a big story. He flew to Australia, interviewed Roddick and during the course of his interview told Roddick who he had identified to my four representatives.
Confronted with the implications of that identity Roddick, precisely as I had predicted to Booth, began to back-track. In November 1977 he had according to the sworn affidavits of three of the people showing him the photographs on my behalf been certain. ‘That’s her’ he had exclaimed. Asked to elaborate, he said:
‘The lady on photograph eleven is the woman I saw outside the Crewe farm with a car behind her to the left and I am positive.’
Confronted now by the name and the identity of that woman, courtesy of Pat Booth, Roddick began to retreat.
‘She is similar to the woman I saw, I can’t go any further than that.’
And:
‘I’ve never said for certain that that is the woman.’
For any journalist to do what Booth had done would have been grossly unethical. For a man who had himself given years of his life attempting to obtain justice for Arthur Thomas, to do what Booth had done showed self-interest at Olympic level and a stunning lack of morality.
Criminal history is full of instances of witnesses recanting or attempting to recant after becoming aware of the implication of what have been originally confidently asserted statements. Indeed Roddick was only one of a number who would deny saying to me or to my representatives what they had in fact said to me. If Roddick had not been interfered with as a clear vital witness in this manner I have no doubt that when Adams-Smith finally got around to talking to him two months later, and quite why it was two months later and not before axe-grinding journalists has never been explained, Roddick would have again picked without any hesitation the same woman.
Despite Pat Booth, the interim reports from the Q.C. appointed by the Prime Minister indicated the tide was turning. Confronted with Roddick’s retraction and his highly significant reaction, ‘When Booth told me her name, I wanted to crawl under the couch’, Adams-Smith concluded that I had ‘no proper basis’ for asserting that I knew who fed Rochelle Crewe. And yet:
‘I am satisfied that this woman for purposes of gain has before been prepared to break the law.’
Adams-Smith also accepted my contention that the baby had indeed been fed. In this interim report made public in January 1979 he suggested that further enquiries be made in three areas, one of these was to be with regard to the woman I had named to the Prime Minister. A second concerned the need for further investigation as to the precise time the Crewes had died. The third area that the Q.C. was going to enquire into was not specified.
Close on the heels of this interim report the New Zealand clobbering machine got to work again. Julie Priest was identified as one of the mysterious witnesses insisting I had seriously misquoted her. She wrote complaining to Prime Minister Muldoon who, without bothering to seek verification from me, gaily made her complaint public. The new evidence that I had obtained from Mr and Mrs Priest was in two areas crucial. It pinpointed the time of the murders. It powerfully established a strong probability that the police had planted a cartridge case as part of their conspiracy to frame an innocent man.
Because of the profound importance of this evidence I had gone back and re-interviewed Julie Priest a second time. When I allowed an independent lawyer to hear those particular tapes, he subsequently confirmed publicly the accuracy of my version of the interview. Curious how the New Zealand clobbering machine works. The Prime Minister’s disclosure of Julie Priest’s complaint had been carried in every single New Zealand paper. My rebuttal was carried by one Wellington newspaper, The Dominion.
In late November 1979, Adams-Smith delivered his final report. The following month Prime Minister Robert Muldoon called a press conference on December 17th and announced that Arthur Thomas had been granted a Royal Pardon. The Q.C. had concluded:
‘I have real doubt whether it can be properly contended that the case against Thomas has been proved beyond all reasonable doubt.’
Thomas was immediately released, a nation rejoiced and I experienced one of the sweetest moments of my life.
Inevitably the Auckland reporter reared his head again. Pat Booth had ‘arranged’ to spirit Arthur out of the prison to a relative’s home for the night to ensure he had an exclusive story for the following evening’s paper. It also ensured that after nine years imprisonment, Arthur spent one more night away from his home. Later Booth would be awarded an O.B.E. I remember the late Mike Bungay, then one of New Zealand’s leading criminal lawyers, ringing me with this particular news.
‘An O.B.E., David. The legal profession thinks that stands for Other Bugger’s Efforts.’
Muldoon set up a Royal Commission of Inquiry into the circumstances that had led to the conviction of Thomas.
Of the ‘affaire Roddick’ it concluded:
‘In our view it is clear that Roddick has retreated from an initially more positive identification than he gave before us. That having been said we are satisfied that there is insufficient evidence that the woman in the photograph named by Mr Yallop in his letter to the Prime Minister is the woman seen on the Crewe property by Mr Roddick on 19th June 1970. We say that, not only on the basis of Mr Roddick’s evidence, but also on the basis of certain other investigations which were carried out to determine whether the woman concerned could have been on the property that day. It is clear that it is not now possible to establish whether the woman named by Mr Yallop was the woman seen by Mr Roddick.
‘Mr Yallop named the woman in his letter to the Prime Minister in good faith on the information available to him. There is, however, simply no means of justifying to an acceptable standard of proof his statement that the woman he named was the woman seen by Mr Roddick.’
In other areas my allegations met with greater success:
‘We believe, for reasons already detailed earlier in this Report:
(a) That shellcase exhibit 350 was planted by the Police, and that this was known by Detective Inspector Hutton.
(b) The chances of the bullets which killed the Crewes having come from the Thomas rifle were significantly reduced by the factors omitted from Dr Nelson’s evidence. Again, Detective Inspector Hutton knew of these matters, for he referred to them at a Police conference on 19th October 1970.’
‘If we then leave to one side the evidence referred to in the preceding paragraph the only other evidence which the Police had then in their possession and would sustain the arrest and prosecution was as follows:
(a) Motive – We have already considered this in paragraphs 212-220. We reject entirely the notion that any of the evidence put forward in this respect established a motive by Arthur Allan Thomas to kill the Crewes.
(b) Wire – Again we have dealt with this in paragraphs 263-266. At best for the Prosecution, wire attached to the bodies was very similar to wire from the Thomas farm. No positive identification was made, and there was nothing placing the wire in Arthur Allan Thomas’s hands.
(c) The axle – Recovered from the river with Harvey Crewe’s body, matched stub axles found on the Thomas farm. The Police were at that stage justified in inferring that the axle had come from the father’s trailer in former years. There was no evidence that Thomas knew of its existence, let alone had it in his physical possession at any time.’
There was much more. The final report runs to over one hundred pages. Having within its final conclusions torn a nation’s beliefs in its judicial system in half, the Commission turned to the man who had for so many years stood at the heart of the storm. Arthur Thomas. It awarded him one million dollars compensation.
Now, fourteen years later, it is time to refer to this case by its correct name. The name it should always have been given. The name it must be given in the future. This is not ‘The Thomas Case’. It is the murder of Harvey and Jeannette Crewe.
A miscarriage of justice is a double disaster. An obscenity perpetrated twice. As I wrote within the original text:
‘There is no doubt in my mind that a miscarriage of justice has occurred in the case of The Queen v Arthur Allan Thomas. I believe that an innocent man is at present serving a life sentence for crimes he did not commit. New Zealand has a ten-million dollar man in Arthur Thomas, for that is the minimum it has cost to get him convicted and keep him convicted. It was a poor investment because while Thomas languishes in prison the guilty ones walk freely among you.’
So who then killed the Crewes?
I invite the reader to re-read Chapters One and Two, then to study the Appendices. All the clues to solve this case are contained within those pages. Consider:
Len Demler had since 1937 worked the land on his Pukekawa farm. It was extremely hard work but he was a hardworking man. He was also a good farmer. His daughters Jeannette and Heather inherit as young girls the farm adjoining the Demler property in 1950. Subsequently Heather sells her half of the farm to Jeannette’s husband, Harvey Crewe. In August 1962 Demler is fined £10,000 for tax evasion. To avoid the calamity of selling the farm that he has sweated over for decades, Maisie makes over £9,500 available to him. Not as a gift, not as a loan, she takes by way of return half of her husband’s farm. An action that I believe speaks volumes about the condition of their marriage. Demler later perjured himself during the second trial of Arthur Thomas by stating that he never received this money. The documentary proof is within the Appendices. Why would he lie? To cover a greater crime.
In July 1969, Maisie Demler, outraged that her daughter Heather had married a man that she for excellent reasons considered to be unsuitable, cut Heather out of her will and out of her life.
Len Demler retaliated by cutting Jeannette out of his will. Maisie died of a brain tumour on the 26th of February 1970.
Suddenly Demler was confronted with an unacceptable future. Half of the farm – his farm was now owned by a daughter he was hostile towards and a son-in-law he actively disliked. All of the rancour, all of the injustice, real or imagined by Demler, festered until June 16th when Demler as well as Jeannette discovered precisely how much she had inherited from her mother.
Determined to confront his unfavourite daughter and her overbearing husband, Demler visited them on the following evening. With a gun. What followed was not for financial gain. At issue was something as old as man. Land. Demler was not prepared to allow a situation to continue where for example his son-in-law would have a view, an opinion, about the older man moving stock off the land. ‘Those are joint assets, Len. Half of them are Jeannette’s.’
I believe Len Demler murdered first Harvey, then Jeannette Crewe. I believe he then prevailed upon a woman he totally trusted to feed Rochelle. A woman who in theory had a perfect alibi. She was officially in another country at the crucial time. There is but one flaw in this perfect alibi. Since my book was first published, many, not least Adams-Smith Q.C., the New Zealand police force and God knows how many hack reporters have tried to make that alibi stand up, have tried to demonstrate that I am wrong, have tried to find proof that this woman was indeed in another country. They have all failed. Therefore demonstrably the perfect alibi collapses. There is in truth no alibi at all for this woman, who is of course the woman that in November 1977 Bruce Roddick initially identified with such confidence and such certainty as the woman that he had seen standing by the Crewe farm on the 19th of June 1970.
To my mind, the solution of what occurred both prior to the murders of this young couple and in the days that immediately followed has been established beyond reasonable doubt.
DAVID YALLOP
March 1995
Appendices
APPENDIX 1
APPENDIX 2
APPENDIX 3
APPENDIX 4
APPENDIX 5
Mr Justice Henry’s Summing-up to First Trial Jury
In the final determination of this case you, as the jury, and I, as the Judge, now have separate parts to play. My task is to lay down for you such principles of law as are applicable in the deciding of this case. You are bound to follow and to apply the law as stated by me, but, so long as you do that, and within the framework of the law so laid down, it is for you and you alone to say whether you find the accused guilty or not guilty. That means that all questions of evidence, all questions of the value of evidence or any part of it, are solely matters for your determination. What faith, what trust, what credibility can be placed in any witness is for you. In short, you are the sole judges of all questions of fact and of the final result of this case.
It is important to remind you that you are really the true and final judges in the case because such a role requires you to bring clear, cool, calm and fair judgment on all the evidence that you have heard, and I stress to you upon all the evidence. There are two sides to every criminal trial. First of all it is in the public interest that persons who commit crimes should be convicted and punished, and, secondly, in the interests of justice that the person charged should not be convicted unless his guilt is proved according to law. You must hold the balance between the two, and, making a just and proper judgment, give a true verdict on the evidence as you judge it. You must not lean to one side or to the other unless and until all the evidence is fairly weighed and valued by you. That means, of course, that you must put entirely from your minds all previous notions, thoughts or judgments you may have entertained before you first entered this court room. This, I feel sure, you have done, and that the many hours you have been together concentrating on the case as it has been presented in this Court, will ensure that no outside considerations will intrude themselves into your consideration of this case. Sympathy for the accused or for his wife, or for anyone else, must be resolutely put to one side. So must all or any feelings of horror at the untimely deaths of Mr and Mrs Harvey Crewe. They are both now dead, and Rochelle is an orphan. You accept those things as fact and then proceed to a careful and unemotional appraisal of the evidence. The accused stands charged with the murder of both Jeannette and Harvey Crewe, charged as their killer. It is now your solemn duty, acting judicially, to say whether or not those charges have been proved. It is a matter of reasoning, of judgment, and of the fair and judicial assessment of the whole of the evidence you have heard, strictly applying the law as I lay it down for you, weighing all arguments, all comment you have heard already or may hear on that evidence, and then giving your final verdict on your individual and collective view of the true value of the whole of the evidence. It is perhaps unnecessary for me to say that any verdict, be it guilty or not guilty, must be one upon which you are unanimous. You cannot return any verdict until you reach that state, be it guilty or not guilty.
Now the only question in this case is, does the evidence, as you find on it, prove the guilt of the accused beyond reasonable doubt? If so, you convict him. If not, you acquit him. That is the situation in this case and that is the question even although evidence has been given by the defence. You are called upon to evaluate all the evidence and to give your verdict on your final view of all the evidence. If it proves guilt to your minds so that you are left in no reasonable doubt, then you ought to convict. If it does not bring that state of mind, that state of satisfaction, then you must acquit. There is no question of innocence or anything at all of that nature here. The sole issue is this: Has the guilt of the accused been proved beyond reasonable doubt? And your verdict will follow as to whether your answer is Yes or No to that question.
