Murder With Malice Aforethought

Introduction

Murder is the unlawful taking of another person’s life, while the expression ‘malice’ is the old term for the evil intent of the murderer, while ‘aforethought’ would now be termed as premeditation. It is the ‘malice aforethought’ that most of us find so interesting and intriguing, when looking on as outside observers of murder and murderers.

Most people enjoy a good murder story, although some fictional stories, no matter how well written, can leave the reader unsatisfied. A fictional story is just the product of someone’s imagination while real murders and real murderers, tend to be more intriguing, complicated, interesting and downright weirder than fiction.

What goes on in someone’s mind for them to decide to take the life of another human being, and to think they are clever enough to get away with it? Is it conceit, desperation, downright stupidity or the product of some sort of warped or evil mind-set? Whichever it is, it is hard for a normal person to understand, even though, as we shall see, some people do get away with murder.

This book tells twenty four such true stories, beginning with the scene of the crime, the twists and turns of the investigation, which are not always properly conducted, then the court trials, which sometimes but not always, may reveal the malice aforethought. Finally the murderer receives their punishment which in many cases of years past was to be ‘hanged by the neck until dead.’

The stories are set in England, New Zealand, America, Scotland and Australia and are dated from as long ago as 1892 to the present time. These two dozen stories have been chosen because each and every one of them has some special aspect that makes them stand out from all the rest and very readable.

The first of these stories, the Crewe Murders, is a classic ‘Who Done It’ which has never been satisfactorily resolved and has remained one of New Zealand’s and the world’s, most enduring and intriguing enigmas for almost half a century.

Chapter One

The Still Unsolved Crew Murders

Sometime during the late afternoon or early evening of the 17th of June 1970, someone shot David Harvey Crewe in the head, probably as he sat relaxing in his own armchair. That someone then smashed, what was probably the butt of the same .22 rifle, into the face of Jeannette Lenore Crewe, breaking her nose, dislodging a number of teeth and knocking her to the floor. The murderer then stood over her and shot her in the head.

This murderous rampage occurred in the lounge of the Crewe farm-house, situated in rural Pukekawa, New Zealand. The double murderer then spent a considerable time that night, and quite possibly subsequent nights attempting to clean up the blood, burning a hearth rug and a cushion that were almost certainly heavily blood-stained and in the process moving some of the furniture from its usual position.

The killer then managed to move both bodies from the farm and successfully secret them somewhere. This would have been an extremely difficult task, requiring enormous strength, as Harvey Crew was a big man, six foot one inches tall, heavily built, and weighed sixteen stone (102Kg).

During the next five days, a number of people tried to contact the Crewe's by telephone, or in the case of a stock-agent called Jerry Moore, by actually going to the house and knocking on the door, but to no avail. Eventually on the 22nd of June, another stock-agent Ron Wright, rang Jeannette's father Len Demler, who lived in the adjoining farm, saying that he wanted to send some trucks to pick up sheep but couldn't contact Harvey to get the O.K., would Len make contact with Harvey and confirm he wanted the trucks? So after lunch on the 22nd of June, Len Demler drove to his daughter's farm and walked up to the back door.

He noticed, he said later, that the kitchen and the porch lights were on and the key was in the Yale lock of the back door as was often the case. He considered that apart from the kitchen and porch light being on during the day it was not out of the ordinary for the key to be in the lock. However, when he got into the lounge, he noticed the furniture had been moved around, the hearth rug and a cushion were missing and there was a considerable amount of blood on the carpet and the furniture. He went into his granddaughter, Rochelle's room and found the little girl in her cot looking rather thin with somewhat sunken eyes and dressed in a pyjama jacket and soiled nappy, but not seemingly in any great distress at that moment.

Then Len Demler did a most extraordinary thing, he left the Crewe house and went home, leaving his granddaughter in a blood stained house, with her parents missing in sinister circumstance. Later, when trying to justify his action he said he had to get home to ring Ron Wright to cancel the sheep trucks. Even when he got home and rang the stock agent, and found him out, he waited fifteen minutes for him to return before passing on the message about the sheep trucks. Why he didn't pass on the message from the phone in the Crewe Farm went unexplained.

Then he went to a friend, Owen Priest's farm and asked him to accompany him to the Crewe farm to help him look for his daughter and son-in-law. Even then on the trip between the Priest's and the Crewe farm he never mentioned anything about the blood he had witnessed or any suspicion he may have had of foul play. So it wasn't until Len Demler's second visit to the Crewe farm that he removed little Rochelle and took her to a place of safety with a neighbour, Mrs Willis.

Before the police were called, word had got out that the Crewe's were missing and every neighbour and quite a few nosey parkers had entered the Crewe farm and moved, trampled and fingered every piece of potential evidence. They were probably all well-meaning, as rural New Zealand people are, in their efforts to find the Crewe's, but in their untrained attempts at helping, they managed to destroy or alter any forensic evidence that may have been there.

When the police became involved, Inspector Bruce Hutton from the Auckland Criminal Investigation Branch evicted all the would-be-helpers and called in the scientist of the New Zealand Government's Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, or DSIR.

The scientist quickly established that rhesus positive blood, Harvey's group and brain tissue were found on Harvey's chair and sufficient rhesus negative blood of Jeanette's, was found to establish that both the Crewe's must, in fact, have succumbed to their injuries. The scientist speculated, wrongly as it transpired, that they had probably been beaten to death with a piece of wood, which was subsequently burnt in the fireplace.

It was at about this point, day three in the enquiry, that people began to realize that if, as was assumed the Crewe's died on the 17th of June and that Len Demler and Owen Priest had discovered the situation on the 22nd June, how had little Rochelle stayed alive for five days in the house alone? When the girl had been taken from the house and put in the care of Mrs. Willis she was hungry but not starving. Mrs. Willis and a district nurse looked her over and decided apart from a bit of nappy rash she was not in need of further medical attention.

Later two Doctors examined her and found she had lost a little weight during those five days but had certainly been fed. Evidence at the house also proved that someone had changed her nappy, probably a number of times.

The fact that the baby had been fed during the five days, probably by a woman, seemed to be born out and confirmed by one of the first witnesses to make a statement, Mr. Bruce Roddick, a self-employed farm labourer. He told the police that on the Friday he had been feeding out hay in a paddock opposite the Crewe farm entrance and saw a woman and a car at the Crewe's front gate. He described the woman as about 5'8" tall, wearing slacks and with, 'not blonde but fair hair.' He described the car as a Hillman that he considered he'd seen before in the area and almost certainly the Crewe's.

It was established that the murderer, or a female accomplice had fed and cared for the baby during those crucial five days, but what was just as important, but seems not to have been scrutinised as closely by the police, was that someone, the murderer for sure, had fed the animals. The farm dogs that were chained in the back yard were, when found, as fat as seals, indicating they had not only been fed but over-fed, probably to keep them content and quiet. Also on the 18th, the day after the killings, a neighbour of the Crewe's noticed as he was feeding out hay to his cows, the Crewe cows came up to the fence bellowing as if hungry, but this never happened on the subsequent four days, indicating that on those days the Crewe's cows, had been fed normally.

This sequence of events indicated that whoever killed the Crewe's not only cared about Rochelle and ensured she came to no harm, they also had a 'farmer mentality,' of ensuring the animals were fed. They also needed to be able to access the Crewe farm without being seen. Len Demler fitted all these categories as his farm adjoined the Crewe property so he could access his daughter's farm from the rear without leaving a vehicle in the roadway where it could be seen.

From early in the investigation the police let it be known that they considered there was only one suspect and that was Jeanette’s father Len Demler. They actually told him to his face, that 'they knew he'd done it.' There was in fact a mounting list of circumstantial evidence against Jeanette's father. There was found in the passenger seat of Len Demler's car a small blood stain of the same group as Jeanette's. Also, some months before when Len's wife Maisie had died she had left her share of the farm, not to Len, as he'd expected, but to Jeanette. Only one day before they were presumed to have been murdered Jeanette and Harvey had been to the solicitor’s office to sign the deeds, transferring half of what Len considered his farm, to Jeanette. It was also known that Harvey Crewe was keen to buy out Len’s share the Demler farm.

It also transpired that in the event of Jeanette's death her estate would pass to her husband, Harvey Crewe. However, if both the Crewe's died then the Crewe farm and Jeanette's half of the Demler farm would pass to her trustees, to be managed until any Crewe children attained the age of twenty one years, when it would pass to them. It just so happened that Jeanette's trustees were Maisie Demler, who at the time of the murders was deceased, and none other than Len Demler. These facts seemed to Inspector Bruce Hutton, to be a very strong motive for double murder.

Also, Len Demler refused to join in the considerable ground search for his lost relatives in spite of Army, Navy and Air-force personnel and most of the local people being involved. When chided about his lack of searching, Len Demler said something that would later come back to haunt him, he said 'It’s no good searching the ground, they're in the river.' This may well have been a local man's astute guess, based on knowledge of the area and the nearby Waikato River, but later it looked to the police as if Len had 'prior knowledge.'

Right from the start the police made assumptions that took on the significance of facts. The first was that as the TV had been disconnected they assumed that the murders had occurred after 11pm, when the TV closed down. The dining table was laid with three plates, two of which contained the remains of a fish meal and knives and forks, while the third plate contained an untouched flounder. In front of another chair was the day’s mail, opened and obviously scrutinised.

From this, the police assumed, by linking it to their previous assumptions that the TV was off, that the meal was the evening meal, but it could just as well have been lunch. The assumption that the meal was the evening meal and not lunch doesn't account for the fact that the Crewe's were not answering their phone much earlier in the evening around 7.30pm, so they could have died in the afternoon.

The police also discovered that in the recent past, the Crewe's had been burgled and a silver comb and brush set, Jeanette's engagement ring and her handbag had been stolen. Later still there had been two fires. The first destroyed a pile of new clothes, recently bought for Rochelle and the second completely destroyed the hay barn.

The assumption the police drew over these three incidents was that someone 'had it in' for Jeanette and Harvey Crewe, or was very, very angry with them. That person, in the eyes of the police could only be Len Demler and they held a secret, high level meeting to consider if they had enough evidence to charge Len with double murder. The outcome of that meeting was that although they had quite a lot of circumstantial evidence, they needed some direct evidence and would delay the arrest in the hope that the search, which was still continuing, would discover the bodies and reveal further forensic evidence.

Meanwhile, the police were doing the rounds of the neighbours within a reasonable distance from the Crewe farm and on the 2nd July Detective Sergeant Hughes called at the Thomas farm and spoke to Arthur Allan Thomas. In conversation Thomas mentioned he'd known Jeanette from school days and at one stage had been quite keen on her and had tried to court her although Jeanette had kept the friendship platonic.

Later still, on the 12th of August Detective Sergeant Parkes visited the Thomas farm making enquiries about a brush and comb gift set that had been found on top of the wardrobe in the Crewe's farm. The set had been wrapped in gift paper, with a card attached signed Arthur. Thomas readily agreed that he was the Arthur who had sent the gift to Jeanette some years previously on her return from a trip to Europe, one year before he had married his wife Vivian.

On August the 7th the massive search for the Crewe bodies was called off, the searchers sent away and the police working on the case reduced to four. The murders seemed to be slipping into the unsolved category, simply through lack of any direct evidence. At this point, just as the case was going cold, Jeanette's body came to the surface of the Waikato River and was discovered by two men out white-baiting. The body was fully clothed, wrapped in bedding and tied up with wire. She had been shot through the head, which destroyed the scientific theory of death being caused by an assault with the proverbial blunt instrument.

Inspector Hutton picked up Len Demler and took him to see Jeanette's body then put him through a gruelling interview, but if Demler was guilty as Hutton suspected, he revealed nothing. The next thing the police did was to collect up most of the .22 calibre rifles in the area, in a radius of five miles. 64 rifles were collected and test fired to try to match the bullet fragment from Jeanette's head with a rifle. All but two were eliminated. Arthur Allan Thomas' and a rifle from a family called Eyre. What the test showed, was not that the bullet that killed Jeanette Crewe was fired from either of these rifles, but simply that they could not be excluded from the fact that one of them 'could' have fired the fatal bullet. Later evidence produced at the trials gave the impression that it was definitely Arthur Allan Thomas' gun which had fired that bullet, but this was never the case.

About this time the police made a thorough search of the Crewe farm, including sieve-searching the flower beds around the house but without turning up anything. However, they made an assumption then, that the first shot, which killed Harvey, had been fired from outside the kitchen, through the louvers of the kitchen window, but in assuming this they disregarded the original and normal position of Harvey's chair and used the altered or moved position. Much later with the chair in its normal position, it was proved impossible to get a shot on someone from that window, which totally discredited the window shot theory, but by then it was far too late.

On the 16th of September, Harvey's body came to the surface of the Waikato River at a place called the Devil’s Elbow. The body was in a bad state of decomposition and inexorably snagged on obstructions in the river and the police had great difficulty in deciding how to recover it. Eventually they decided with Inspector Hutton leading the team, to lift the body onto a basket stretcher, cutting away the snags as they went. Even then the body seemed reluctant to be lifted enough to fit into the stretcher so Inspector Hutton reached underneath