The Double Murder That Broke New Zealand’s Justice System

In June of 1970, on a remote farm at the edge of New Zealand’s longest river, a young couple vanished from their own living room. They left behind pools of blood, two dinner plates, and in a bedroom down the hall, their 18-month-old daughter alone in her cot. For 5 days, nobody came. 5 days of winter cold, 5 days of silence.

 And when the little girl was finally found crying, freezing, her eyes sunken, and her lips cracked, she was alive. And that was the problem. Because when a doctor examined her the next day, he reached a conclusion that turned a double murder into something far stranger. In his medical opinion, a child her age, left completely alone in those conditions, should have been near death, if she survived at all.

 But Rochelle Crew hadn’t just survived. Someone, he concluded, had fed her days after her parents were killed. And it gets worse. A witness would tell police he saw a woman standing outside that farmhouse two days after the murders. A woman who has never been identified to this day.

 What followed became the most infamous case in New Zealand’s history. A grieving grandfather who behaved in ways no one could explain. An innocent farmer sent to prison twice by evidence his own police force created. A royal pardon. A national scandal that shook the country’s faith in its justice system. to the foundations. And underneath it all, three questions that remain unanswered more than half a century later.

 Who killed Harvey and Janette Crew? Who, if anyone, kept their daughter alive? And why has no one ever paid for it? This being is the story of the crew murders. Pukakawa is a tiny farming district in the Wicato region of New Zealand’s North Island about an hour’s drive south of Auckland on high ground above the Wicato River.

 In 1970, it was a place of sheep, cattle, and quiet lives. the kind of community where families farmed the same land for generations and where everyone knew everyone else’s business. Janette Crew had grown up here. Born Janette Demler in February 1940. She was the daughter of Len and Maisie Demler who farmed in the district.

 Janette was bright and reserved. She trained as a teacher, traveled overseas, and eventually came home to the Wicato because home, as it happened, now included a farm of her own. land left to her and her sister Heather by an uncle who had died in a tractor accident years earlier. In 1966, Janette married David Harvey Crew, a young farmer everyone simply called Harvey.

 He was solid, hardworking, and capable. He bought out Heather’s half share in the property, and the newlyweds settled on the farm right next door to Janette’s parents. Friends described them as a genuinely happy couple, private, but devoted to each other. One friend later put it simply. They were well suited, mature, and completely capable of building a good life together. And for a while, they did.

 In December 1968, their only child was born, a daughter named Rochelle. But here’s the part of the story that most people miss. Long before the murders, something was already wrong at the crew farm. In July 1967, their house was burgled, and it was a strange burglary. The thief ignored anything valuable and instead took small personal items, including a brush and comb set.

 Then in December 1968, while Janette was in the hospital giving birth to Rochelle, Harvey came home to find their house on fire. Clothing had been set a light in a bedroom and much of the home was destroyed. The cause, it was never determined. 5 months later, in May 1969, a second unexplained fire. This time destroying their barn and 800 bales of hay. A burglary.

 Two fires in under two years, all unexplained, all unsolved. Janette confided to people close to her that she was afraid to be in the house alone. Whatever was circling the crew family, it had been circling for years. And in 1970, it closed in. In February 1970, Janette’s mother, Maisie Demler, died of a brain tumor, and her will lit a fuse under the family.

 Maisie was a devout woman, and she had never forgiven her younger daughter, Heather, for marrying a divorced man. So she cut Heather out almost entirely and left her share of the Demler farm to Janette. Janette’s father, Len, was left with a life interest, but the bulk of his late wife’s estate now belonged to his daughter with steep inheritance taxes attached.

 In response, Len changed his own will, leaving what remained of his share to Heather, trying to balance the ledger between his daughters. On paper, it was estate planning. In reality, it meant that Len Demler, a man who had already once sold half his farm to pay off a tax conviction, had watched control of the family land slip away.

 On the evening of June 16th, 1970, Len and the Crews sat down together for their regular family dinner, a weekly tradition since Maisy’s death. By Len’s own account, it was not a pleasant evening. The conversation was dominated by the unresolved will and by the taxes hanging over it. Janette had even inherited her mother’s car, a Morris 1100, and said she planned to sell it just to help cover the death duties, an acrimonious dinner over a contested inheritance the night before the murders. Remember that timing, because

Harvey and Janette crew now had less than 30 hours to live. June 17th was a cold, wet Wednesday. The crews spent the afternoon at a livestock clearance sale in Bombay, about half an hour from home. The rain was heavy enough that Janette stayed in the car with Relle while Harvey did business.

 He bought stock, chatted with other farmers, and sometime after 2, the family drove home. Nothing unusual, nothing memorable, just a farming family on an ordinary winter day. Late that afternoon, there are car was spotted parked at the roadside south of the farmhouse near a paddic where a man almost certainly Harvey was seen working with sheep in the distance.

 That evening, the family settled into their nightly routine. Janette fed Rochelle and put her to bed. Then she cooked dinner. flounder, potatoes, and peas. Afterwards, Harvey sat in his armchair by the fire. Janette sat on the sofa to his left, knitting. At 7:00, a stock agent named Joseph Moore telephoned the house about payment for the animals Harvey had bought that day. No answer.

Police would later establish that at some point between 7 and 9:30 that night, someone approached the crew farmhouse in the dark. A neighbor, Julie Priest, would recall hearing what sounded like three gunshots sometime after 8:30. Based on the evidence, investigators reconstructed the attack. Harvey Crew was shot in the head with a 22 caliber firearm as he sat in his armchair.

 Police believe the shot may have come through the louver window behind him. He likely never knew what happened. Janette was struck in the face with enough force to break bones and then she too was shot in the head. And then the killer or killers did something that separates this case from almost any other. They stayed.

 They dragged both bodies out of the house, leaving smears and drag marks behind. They cleaned. Watered down blood was later found on the kitchen cupboards. Someone had wiped surfaces down. And then they transported both bodies to the Wiccato River, weighed them down, and let New Zealand’s longest river swallow the evidence.

 All of this, the shots, the cleanup, the disposal happened while 18-month-old Rochelle lay in her cot down the hall. And when it was done, the killer simply left her there. The curtains were drawn, the doors were shut, and the farmhouse at Pukakawa went silent. What happened over the next 5 days is the part of this case that has haunted New Zealand for over half a century.

 Because for 5 days, nothing happened. The milk deliveries piled up at the gate. So did the bread. So did the newspapers. Lights seen by passers by on different evenings were on in the house. Smoke, some later claimed, had been seen at the chimney. The crews sheep dogs were heard barking unfed. And through it all, in a cold house in the middle of a New Zealand winter, a toddler in a cot cried where nobody could hear her.

 On Monday, June 22nd, 5 days after the murders, a neighbor who had been unable to reach the cruise asked Len Demler to look in on his daughter’s family. It was around 1:00 when Len walked in the back door of the farmhouse. What he did next has been debated ever since. Len walked through the house. He saw the blood stains in the kitchen in the lounge.

 He heard his granddaughter calling out and he went to her. Rochelle was standing in her cot, filthy, freezing, her eyes bloodshot and sunken, her lips dry and cracked. And then Len Demler put his granddaughter back down in the cot and left the house. He drove to a neighbor, a man named Owen Priest, and asked him to come back to the farm with him, mentioning nothing about the blood and nothing about the baby.

 At the house, Demler waited outside while Priest searched the rooms alone. It was Priest, shaken by what he found, who finally raised the alarm. At 2:20 in the afternoon, 1 hour and 20 minutes after Len Demler first walked through that back door, the police constable at Tuoka took the call. The crews were missing. There was blood in the house and a baby had been alone inside it for 5 days.

 Detective Inspector Bruce Hutton arrived that evening to lead the investigation. Remember his name because by the end of this story, it will mean something very different than it did that night. The scene told investigators a great deal. The remains of the evening meal, Harvey’s armchair with evidence of a fatal wound, the drag marks, the clean surfaces. This wasn’t a robbery.

 It wasn’t a fight that got out of hand. It was an execution followed by a careful, unhurried coverup. But it was the report that came in the next day that transformed the case. A doctor named Fox examined Rochelle. She was in remarkably good condition. She’d lost perhaps a pound or two in weight.

 But a child of her age, left entirely alone for five winter days without food or fluids, should have been gravely ill, if she was alive at all. His conclusion was extraordinary. In his medical opinion, someone had most likely fed Rochelle Crew around 48 hours before she was found, 2 days after her parents were murdered.

 And then came the witness, a young farm worker named Bruce Rodic, told police that on June 19th, the Friday, 2 days after the killings, he had seen a woman standing outside the crew house. He was certain of it. He described her. Police never identified her. Put those two pieces together and you have one of the most chilling scenarios in true crime.

 Someone connected to a double murder returning to the scene to keep the baby alive. Whoever fed Relle Crew, if someone did, knew what was in that house, knew what had happened, and told no one. Every murder investigation starts close to home. And this one had nowhere closer to look than Len Demler.

 Think about how it looked. He lived next door. He had no alibi for the night of the 17th. He’d had a tense dinner with the victims over a contested will barely 24 hours before they died. He was the one who discovered the scene, and his behavior that day defied explanation. He found his granddaughter starving in her cot and put her back.

 He fetched a neighbor, but didn’t mention the blood. He let another man search the house while he waited outside. He never called the police himself. In the weeks that followed, detectives searched his home and questioned him hard. Detective Inspector Hutton eventually put it to him directly, telling Demler he was certain he was the man who had removed Harvey Crew’s body from the house.

 In a marathon interview, Demler denied everything, absolutely and repeatedly, and he would keep denying it for the rest of his life, and there was a problem with the theory motive. The will dispute cut in the wrong direction. Demler had already signed his remaining share over to his other daughter, and with baby Rochelle alive, he stood to inherit nothing from Janette’s estate.

There was no physical evidence against him, nothing to charge him with, just behavior that looked terrible, and an old man’s silence. Meanwhile, the physical investigation ground forward. Police began collecting 22 caliber rifles from farms within an 8 km radius. Dozens of them within days in a district where nearly every farm had one.

 Then the river began giving up its secrets. On August 16th, 2 months after the murders, two men fishing downstream of the Tuaka Bridge found Janette Crew. Her body had been wrapped in a bedspread and curtain fabric from her own home, bound with copper wire, and weighed down. One month later, on September 16th, Harvey was recovered from the same river, weighed down with an old car axle.

 Both had been shot in the head with a 22. The bullets recovered were badly deformed, but testing narrowed the field dramatically. Of all the rifles police had collected, only two could not be ruled out as the murder weapon. One of them belonged to a local farmer named Arthur Allen Thomas. Arthur Alan Thomas was 32 years old, a dairy farmer from a big local family, working lease land about 15 kilometers from the crew place.

He was married to Viven, an English woman he’d wed in 1966. By every account, he was an ordinary, well-liked man with no history of violence. He also had a history with Janette. Years earlier, as a young man, Arthur had a crush on her. He’d asked her out. She declined. When she traveled overseas, he’d sent her letters and gifts.

 She politely rebuffed him. He eventually gave up. They both married other people, and life moved on. In a district the size of Pukakawa, none of this was a secret. And when police heard that a local man had once pestered Janette, the name they were given was Arthur Thomas. So, when his rifle emerged as one of only two that couldn’t be excluded, the machinery of the investigation turned toward him, and it never turned back.

 In September, Thomas was brought in and told flatless that his rifle had fired the fatal shots. He denied any involvement. He had an alibi. On the night of June 17th, he’d been home on his own farm with his wife Vivien and his cousin, tending to a sick cow. Both backed him completely. Then came the axle.

 The car axle used to weigh down Harvey’s body was identified as coming from a 1928 Nash, and police traced it to a trailer that had once been sold to Arthur’s father. In October, detectives searching a rubbish dump on the Thomas farm found wire said to match the wire binding the bodies. One detective searched the dump for the trailer’s remaining axles and found nothing.

 5 days later, the same detective went back, and this time he found them. Keep that detail in mind. Searches that find nothing, followed by second searches that find exactly what the case needs. It’s about to happen again, somewhere much more important. By late October, detectives had searched the garden outside the crew’s kitchen window twice.

Nothing. On October 27th, on Hutton’s orders, two detectives searched it a third time, sifting the soil with their bare hands. And there, a few inches down, they found it. a single spent 22 cartridge case. Forensic examination said it had been ejected from Arthur Thomas’s rifle. It was labeled exhibit 350 and it was the case.

 The axle connected the Thomas farm to the body. The cartridge case put Thomas’s rifle at the murder scene. On November 11th, 1970, Hutton drove to the Thomas farm and arrested Arthur as he was climbing onto his tractor. Arthur’s response never changed. I was home. I told you where I was. Hutton’s reply, as Arthur remembered it, was three words.

 We don’t believe you. The trial opened in February 1971. The Crown’s theory, consumed by an old obsession with Janette, Thomas drove to the crew farm that night, shot Harvey through the window, then confronted and killed Janette. The evidence, the cartridge case, the axle, and a motive built on a teenage crush from a decade earlier.

 the defense, his alibi, his wife, his cousin, and the complete absence of any sign that this ordinary farmer had a reason to destroy a family. On March 2nd, 1971, the jury deliberated for around 2 hours and found Arthur Allan Thomas guilty of murder. He was sentenced to life in prison. Case closed. A jury had spoken.

 New Zealand’s most shocking murder was solved. Except it wasn’t. Because Arthur Thomas was innocent and the proof was sitting in the bottom of that garden the whole time. From his cell in Paramoreo Maximum Security Prison, Arthur Thomas maintained his innocence to anyone who would listen and slowly people started listening. His family never wavered.

 A retrial committee formed and crucially a respected journalist nomine Pat Booth began pulling on the threads of the case and found that almost everything unraveled. Start with exhibit 350. The cartridge case. It had been found in a garden that had already been searched twice. It had supposedly been lying in wet soil for over 4 months.

 Yet, when independent experts in England examined it in 1972, they noted it showed nowhere near the corrosion it should have. The Court of Appeal found the new evidence compelling enough to order something almost unheard of, a full retrial. It began in March 1973, and this time, the defense came armed with science.

 A forensic scientist named Dr. Jim Sprat had studied the ammunition. The bullets that killed the crews were an old pattern, number eight bullets made by ICI, out of production since the early 1960s. And when Sprat compared them to exhibit 350, he found the markings didn’t correspond. He put out a nationwide call for old ammunition and received 22,000 bullets from the public.

The pattern held. In Sprat’s analysis, the cartridge case found in that garden could never have held the bullets that killed Harvey and Janette Crew. Think about what that means. That cartridge wasn’t just unreliable evidence. It was impossible evidence. The Crown, meanwhile, had a new problem of its own making.

 If Thomas was the killer, who was the woman Bruce Rodic saw? Who fed the baby? Their answers stunned the courtroom. They pointed at Arthur’s wife. The prosecution suggested Vivien Thomas had been the woman at the farmhouse caring for Rochelle. There was no evidence for it. Viven denied it under oath. Rodic himself would make clear the woman he saw was not her.

 But the accusation attached itself to Vivien Thomas and followed her for decades. And despite everything, despite the impossible cartridge, despite the alibi, the second jury did the same as the first. In 1973, Arthur Allen Thomas was convicted again and his life sentence was reimposed. Two juries, same evidence, same verdict, and 2,000 people packed into the Auckland town hall to protest it.

 Because by now, much of the country simply did not believe it. Then, shortly after the retrial, something happened that should have ended careers. Detective Inspector Bruce Hutton ordered the destruction of over 130 exhibits from the case. Among the items destroyed was exhibit 350 itself. The sigh is most contested piece of evidence in New Zealand legal history.

 Gone before anyone could examine it again. The campaign refused to die. Pat Booth published his investigations. Then in 1978, a British author named David Yallop took the case international with his book Beyond Reasonable Doubt and wrote directly to New Zealand’s Prime Minister, Robert Mulun, alongside Booth’s dossier of evidence.

 Mulun ordered an independent inquiry by a senior lawyer, Robert Adam Smith, QC, and his conclusion was that the case against Thomas likely could not be proved beyond reasonable doubt. On December 17th, 1979, Arthur Alan Thomas was granted a royal pardon. The next day, after nine years in prison for a crime he did not commit, he walked out of the gates and went home to his farm.

 A pardon set Arthur Thomas free, but it didn’t answer the question the whole country was now asking. If he didn’t do it, how did that cartridge case get into the garden? In 1980, a Royal Commission of Inquiry, the most powerful investigative body New Zealand can convene, set out to answer exactly that. It heard from more than 130 witnesses.

 And in November 1980, it delivered one of the most devastating findings ever made against a police force in the English-speaking world. The commission found that exhibit 350 had not been left by the killer at all. It found that the cartridge had been created using Arthur Thomas’s own seized rifle and ammunition taken from his farm and then planted in the crew garden to be discovered.

 And it named the men it held responsible. Detective Inspector Bruce Hutton and Detective Len Johnston. The report noted evidence that shots had been fired at the crew property while the rifle was in police possession. In the very window of time before the garden’s third miraculous search, the commissioner’s language left no room for doubt.

 They called the planting of that cartridge, quote, “an unspeakable outrage. They rejected entirely the idea that Thomas had any motive to kill the Cruz. They found his prosecution had been unjustified from the start, and they found the second trial was a miscarriage of justice.” Arthur Thomas was awarded $950,000 in compensation, the equivalent of several million today, for nine stolen years.

 And what happened to the men the royal commission named? Nothing. No charges were ever laid. The solicitor general of the day decided against prosecution. Len Johnston had died before the commission even reported, and Bruce Hutton lived on for three more decades, denying everything until the end. when he died in 2013, the deputy commissioner of the New Zealand and police stood at his funeral and praised him as a man of quote integrity beyond reproach.

 The family of Arthur Thomas sat with that phrase. So did the rest of New Zealand. A royal commission had found this man planted evidence that took 9 years of an innocent farmer’s life. And his force fareweeld him as a hero. But here is what everyone lost sight of in a decade of trials and inquiries and scandal. Somebody killed Harvey and Janette Crew.

 And once Arthur Thomas was cleared, that somebody had officially never even been looked for. The little girl at the center of it all grew up far from Pukakawa. Rochelle Crew was raised by her aunt Heather, Janette’s sister, partly in New Zealand and partly in the United States. Her name was changed. She has guarded her privacy her entire life.

 And to this day, she has never given a full public interview. But she never stopped wanting the answer. In 2010, now a grown woman with a family of her own, Rochelle formally asked the New Zealand police to take another look at her parents’ murders to finally pursue the killer that the Thomas prosecution had let walk free for 40 years.

 That same year, Vivien, Arthur’s former wife, still living under the shadow of the courtroom claim that she was the mystery woman, wrote to the justice minister asking for the case to be reopened so she could clear her name. The result was a massive 4-year review of the entire case file overseen for independence by a senior lawyer, David Jones QC.

 In 2014, the findings were released, 328 pages, and they rewrote parts of this story one more time. First, the review confirmed in the QC’s words beyond reasonable doubt that the cartridge case was false evidence. The official position of the New Zealand police now acknowledges the key exhibit was fabricated.

 Second, the review formally ruled out Len Demler, the strange, silent father-in-law who so many books and documentaries had accused over the decades. He had died in 1992, denying any involvement to the end. The review cleared him. And third, and this is the finding that stunned everyone who knew the case, the review concluded that there was no mystery woman and that Relle was never fed at all.

 After 44 years, the police position became this. The doctor’s 1970 conclusion was wrong. The child had simply survived 5 days alone, and the woman Bruce Rodic swore he saw was never there. Some accepted that, many did not. Medical opinion on whether a toddler could endure five winter days without care, had been divided from the very beginning, and Rodic never wavered about what he saw.

To this day, the question the case is famous for, who fed the baby, has two official answers from two official inquiries that flatly contradict E. a other either a killer’s accomplice quietly kept a little girl alive or that little girl survived something close to unservivable entirely alone and every path to certainty died with the witnesses.

 As for the murders themselves, the review concluded there was insufficient evidence to charge anyone. It cleared the alternative suspects, and to the fury of the Thomas family, it stopped short of clearing the one man who had been pardoned, leaving Arthur, in their eyes, still under an official shadow that the Royal Commission was supposed to have lifted forever.

 His brother, Dez, has spent years publicly insisting he knows who the real killer was, pointing away from the family entirely. The police review left a list of 80 questions it could not resolve. 80 unanswered questions, two contradicting inquiries, one pardoned man, and zero convictions that stand. That is where New Zealand’s most infamous case rests today.

 More than half a century has passed since that wet June night at Pukakawa. Nearly everyone who touched this case is gone now. Len Demler died in 1992, a suspect in the public’s mind, but never in law. Bruce Hutton died in 2013, condemned by a royal commission and eulogized by his police force in the same lifetime.

 The witnesses have faded away one by one, taking whatever they knew with them. What remains are the facts no inquiry has ever explained. Two good, quiet people were executed in their own living room, and someone spent hours calmly erasing the evidence. A killer walked past a baby’s room twice and left her alive.

 And the justice system charged with finding that killer instead manufactured a case against an innocent neighbor defended the fabrication for a decade and never held anyone to account. Because of what was done in 1970, the planted cartridge, the destroyed exhibits, the lost years, the truth may now be beyond anyone’s reach. The frame up didn’t just take nine years from Arthur Thomas.

 It almost certainly took the answer from Rochelle Crew. She was 18 months old when she was found standing in that cot. The only living witness to everything, too young to remember, old enough to carry it forever. Somewhere in the silence of five winter days. Between a locked up farmhouse and New Zealand’s longest river lies an answer no one has ever found.