Crime Junkie - MURDERED: Harvey and Jeannette Crewe

Episode Date: January 25, 2021

A shockingly brutal crime rocks a rural New Zealand community, but the fallout has bigger consequences than anyone could ever have imagined.  For current Fan Club membership options and policies, please visit https://crimejunkieapp.com/library/. Source materials for this episode cannot be listed here due to character limitations. For a full list of sources, please visit https://crimejunkiepodcast.com/murdered-harvey-jeannette-crewe/ 

Hi, Crime Junkies. I'm Ashley Flowers. And I'm Britt. And today's story comes to us from literally halfway across the world. From all the way in New Zealand. And I know I said it back when we covered a case from Iceland, but it just completely blows my mind. Every time we get requests from people who live all over the world, realizing that our voices make it so far from where we live here in Indiana.

I think it's amazing. Yeah, it's by far one of the coolest things ever. And at least for me, it never ceases to amaze me. I know. And one of my favorite things that you guys do that I love is when you take a picture of where you're listening from and tag us. It is especially during this never-ending pandemic. I would say it feels like traveling. It feels like traveling without being actually able to go anywhere. Yeah, so show us where you're listening this week.

And I will tell you about a crime that not only shakes a rural New Zealand community, but eventually winds up changing the whole country's faith in their own law enforcement system. This is the story of Harvey and Jeanette Crew. In 1970, the town of Pukakawa on New Zealand's North Island, this is about an hour south of Auckland, is a small, easy-going farming community. The population here is pretty small. Think like the kind of town where everybody knows everybody else, everybody's kind of up in each other's business.

So like the town that we grew up in. Pretty much, yeah. So on the morning of Monday, June 22nd, this is 1970 during the winter, because again, we're here in Indiana, but seasons are flipped in the southern hemisphere. A man in Pukakawa named Leonard Demler gets a phone call. Now, it's important to note that Leonard lives alone because he's recently become a widower after his wife, Mae, passed away from a brain tumor a few months before. But he has a little family around.

His daughter, Jeanette Crew, lives on a sheep and cattle farm nearby with her husband, Harvey, and their 18-month-old daughter, Rachelle. So the person who's calling Leonard is actually calling him about Harvey and Jeanette because he can't get ahold of them. His name is Joseph Moore, and he asks, hey, are Harvey and Jeanette away on vacation or something because they're not answering their phone and I have to talk to them about some business? Leonard tells him, no, as far as I know, they should be home. He doesn't think anything of this call until later that same day when his phone rings again.

This time, a man named Ronald writes calling, and he wants Leonard to do him a favor. You see, Ron can't get ahold of Harvey or Jeanette either, and since the livestock transport company that he works for has a truck on their way over to pick up Harvey's sheep, he wants Leonard to go over to the farm and make sure Harvey's got everything squared away, like he's ready for them to come. Yeah, which makes sense. So at about 1 p.m. that afternoon, Leonard does just that. According to Anna Liske's piece in the New Zealand Herald, Leonard gets to Harvey and Jeanette's house

and goes through the back door. He walks through the hall and into a strange scene that feels almost frozen in time. The TV's on, dinner is on the table, clothes are in the dryer, and the dryer is running, and Jeanette's knitting project is on the couch. But the bottom drops out of Leonard's stomach when he looks at the living room carpet and sees big patches of dried blood, and there are drag marks that run through the blood and out to the front steps, as if something had been removed from the house or potentially someone.

There's no sign of Harvey or Jeanette anywhere, and no one answers when he calls their names. But as Leonard's standing there, trying to process the horrible truth of what he's looking at, just then he hears a child making some noises, like not exactly crying or anything. And you said Rachelle is what, like 18 months old, right? Yeah, just about there, yeah. Okay, so I feel like at that age, you're kind of past the sweeps and grunts and chirps of an infant, and may at least love to babble. Just kind of nonsense talk, but in the cadence of an actual conversation.

So that makes sense. Yeah, I don't know, it doesn't say exactly what he's hearing, but he's hearing some kind of noises from her. So Leonard runs into Rachelle's room and finds her still in her cot, but she is just filthy. Like just from looking at her and like breathing the air, it's obvious that Rachelle's urinated and defecated all over her cot, and that she hasn't even had a diaper change in, I mean, we're not talking hours, we're talking days. Her eyes are all red and sunken back into her head, her lips are crusty,

like she's dehydrated and hungry, and it's beyond clear that she has been pretty badly neglected. Yeah. Now, instead of calling the police right away, Leonard does something that to me is pretty weird. He leaves Harvey and Jeanette's and goes home. I mean, but he at least takes Rachelle with him, right? So that's the other weird thing, because no, he doesn't. Leonard leaves his granddaughter in this mess of a crib in a bloody house to drive home and call Ronald to let him know that the sheep transfer is totally canceled.

Then he goes and picks up his neighbor, this guy named Owen Priest, and together they go back to Harvey and Jeanette's and do kind of this like searching of their own, looking for any trace of where the two might be, but they can't find anything. And then finally, at 2.20 p.m., this is an hour and 20 minutes after Leonard first found this like bloody scene and this neglected toddler with no sign whatsoever of his daughter or son-in-law, Owen, the neighbor, not Leonard, the grandfather, then calls the police. Wait, what? Yeah. So nothing about like the chain of events there, do I understand?

During this, while he's calling the police, Leonard meanwhile takes baby Rachelle over to a family friend's house before going back to his own farm to do some work while he waits for the police. According to police documents, the first officer on the scene is Constable Gerald Wiley, and he gets out to the farmhouse about half an hour after Owen first calls. He's the Constable from the neighboring town of Toowakow, which is about 12 miles north. And even though he's not from this town, he's the only Constable they've got actually, because again, teeny tiny towns, teeny tiny law enforcement departments. And when this officer gets to the crew's farmhouse and sees all of the blood stains,

it's obvious just from a glance that something terrible has happened here. So as he's looking around the house, Gerald notices the same thing Leonard did, that the dryer is running. It is so hot that he's worried about it being a fire hazard, so he unplugged it. So I was actually wondering about that because it doesn't really make sense to me. Like the baby hasn't been tended to in days. The blood is dried, but there's like a fresh load of laundry still going in the dryer. Right, right. And I had questions about this too, because to me it was like, well, someone's been here like just a little bit ago,

but you have to remember, this is 1970. Dryers at that time probably aren't like what we have now. And from what I gather, the police's theory is that the dryer had actually been running for five whole days, like had not turned off, which is a real fire hazard, especially when you think about a toddler being in that house. Now, I can't speak to the state of like early 1970s home appliance safety standards, but I think it's entirely possible that it didn't have like an automatic timer. You had to manually turn it on and manually turn it off.

It would just keep running continually until you stopped it. Right. So Gerald finishes the search on his own, and then he calls for backup. While he's waiting, Gerald looks in the delivery box that the crews have attached on their gate and sees some newspapers that nobody's picked up. There's a couple of like New Zealand heralds dated from June 18th and June 19th. Once backup arrives, the search gets underway in earnest. By the time the afternoon is over, the crew property and the other farms nearby

are swarming with police officers searching for Harvey and Jeanette. They find the crew's car still in the garage. Harvey's three working dogs are safe in their kennels and the farm's livestock is doing just fine. Back inside the farmhouse, though, police find more blood, as well as evidence in the hearth that a bloody rug and a cushion could have been burnt. On the hearth itself is yet more blood and police also find blood on the bricks outside near the front steps and in different places in the kitchen,

like on the cabinet doors, the linoleum flooring, the faucet, and on two sauce pans. And even more disturbing, Harvey's armchair in the living room has got blood and bodily fluids on it and it's enough blood like that dripped down onto the rug underneath it. Okay, so at this point, the police have to be suspecting that Harvey and Jeanette were murdered or at least someone has been very, very seriously injured here. Oh yeah, I mean, there are no bodies at the scene to confirm what they're suspecting, but police records do mention that they're thinking of this as a homicide investigation from a very early stage because of how gruesome the crime scene is.

Like, again, there's blood, there's even brain tissue. The odds are somebody has died here. But along with not knowing exactly what happened here, they also don't know when this incident might have taken place. But judging by the contents of the crew's delivery box, those newspapers, and the state that Rochelle was in, they're thinking at least a few days had to have passed since the crews were last at that home alive and well. So can they tell from the scene if both Harvey and Jeanette were injured?

Like, you said there was blood and brain tissue, but is there, you know, any way to tell if they're dealing with two homicides versus a homicide and maybe an abduction? Well, the brain tissue is pretty localized to Harvey's armchair, but with all of the blood at the house and all of the stuff in the fireplace, like, they're definitely thinking it's likely that two homicides happened here. So as the search continues and goes on into the next day without police finding either Harvey or Jeanette, police start talking to the crew's neighbors to put together a timeline of when they were last seen. Annaliesk's New Zealand Herald piece reported that the last time they were seen alive by anyone

was at about 2.30 in the afternoon on June 17th. This is five days before Leonard found the bloody house. By Tuesday the 23rd of June, the day after the crime scene was found, police bring in experts to photograph the farmhouse scene and collect blood samples for analysis. Again, since this is 1970, all they can do with the blood is type it, but that's enough for them to look at the hospital records and see if the type is a match for Harvey or Jeanette or both. And while forensic testing is underway, they mount huge searches all over nearby farms and up north to the Waikato River hoping to find any sign of Harvey and Jeanette alive or dead.

But even though they have no bodies and no forensic results yet, police aren't totally at square one because they already have their sights set on someone that they think might be involved. Almost from day one, police believe there's a good chance Harvey and Jeanette might have been murdered by Jeanette's dad, Leonard. They keep coming back to his odd behavior when he first got to the house, like how he didn't call police right away and then, you know, just left his sick and dehydrated granddaughter in a filthy cot for almost an hour so he could go home and make a phone call before passing her over to someone else for help. Right, like, even I hearing this started siding it. I can totally see how someone actually looking into it would be like, hmm, that's kind of sus.

Right, and it doesn't help that Leonard's kind of an awkward guy. Like, he laughs when he gets nervous and stuff like that. So it's as if he finds these really inappropriate things and this terribly inappropriate situation almost funny. During the first week of the investigation, police talk to Leonard just about every day that week to continue to get statements from him. Like, they get one on the 22nd and they specifically were asking him about discovering the bloody house and about the last time he saw Harvey and Jeanette and Leonard says that he hasn't talked to them in almost a week. On June 25th, police ask Leonard if they can search over at his farm and he agrees. The police records say that they find a 12 gauge shotgun that Leonard keeps in his bathroom

and one of the officers searching the farm sees what looks like blood on a pair of shoes and on a green coat while another officer sees more blood in Leonard's car. This blood, he says, was on the back of the front bench seat. So, like, imagine you're sitting in the back seat of the car. You know, you'd be able to, like, look at the blood on the back of the front seat. Does that make sense? Yeah, because it'd be, like, right in front of you, right? Exactly, right.

Okay. So the next day, the police come back with a warrant. They do an even more thorough search of Leonard's car and bring out a doctor to confirm that the blood they saw in the car yesterday is in fact blood and not just some, like, random stain. When police question Leonard later that same day, this is, again, the 26th, Leonard claims that it's his blood in the car. He said, like, I cut my finger. You must have, like, touched something.

Like, it's definitely mine. Okay, but how much blood was there? The police report doesn't say. I mean, I'm guessing it's enough to be noticeable and have to, like, be a stain, but probably also enough that you could believe that someone cut their finger. So it's not, like, the whole thing's, like, covered, I'd imagine. Right, right. Now, the blood is just one thing that the police ask Leonard about on the 26th.

They also are probing him on his actions back on the 22nd when he first found the house in the state it was in. Police keep asking him why he did what he did. Again, why leave your granddaughter? Why go all the way home and call the transport company before you call even police? And why not do all of that, like, right there at Harvey and Jeanette's house? Or even if you were scared to be in the house, like, why not go to a neighbor's house? Or, hey, my question, why make, again, a business call before calling police? Like, that, to me, more than anything.

That's, like, almost the first big misstep. Yes, that's what's wild. To me, there's two things. It's why did you leave your granddaughter in that house? And, again, I don't know why you left to go to your house to make a call. And then why was the first thing you do to call somebody and, like, hey, transport's off today. We're going to have to reschedule. Like, that would be the last thing on my mind.

I don't care if people show up and, like, sheep aren't ready. I mean, and we say this all the time. You never know how you're going to respond when you walk into a scene like this or get into a situation like this. But this just doesn't feel like the way anybody should. And to me, this isn't even about responding. This is just, like, what order of events do you do? I don't care what you say when you call police.

But, again, your granddaughter is clearly suffering. Get help there immediately. Right, right. Now, the police are determined to use anything and everything they can to poke holes in his weird behavior. And Leonard knows it. He's starting to get agitated as he realizes these aren't just normal run-of-the-mill questions that you ask a family member. He realizes that he is really being looked at as a possible suspect.

Okay, but does Leonard even have any motive for possibly harming his own daughter? I mean, what's the number one motive always? Give me a hint. Starts with an M or rhymes with honey. Okay, got it. So remember how I mentioned that Leonard's a recent widower? Yeah. So when his wife, May, died in February of 1970 to the same year,

she actually owned half of her and Leonard's farm. According to police records, May's will actually didn't pass that share of the farm over to Leonard at her passing, which is often common in like a spouse's will. Like if I were to die, Eric gets everything. But if we were both to die, then other people take over, whatever. But instead, in May's will, it actually passed everything she had her name on over to Jeanette. So Jeanette actually owns half of her dad's property. Beyond that, May's will also gave Jeanette money, shareholdings,

and all of her personal belongings, including her car. Okay, so May cut Leonard out of everything? So not completely. The will says that he can still live there, still work the business, and keep all the money he makes from the farm for the rest of his life. So he's not like out on the street or anything. And the will also leaves him $23,000, but it specifies that he has to use it to pay off the mortgage on the farm. And it turns out Leonard's had some financial problems dating back decades.

And that's how May wound up owning half of the farm in the first place, like why they split it into two people's name. And so it's that half of the farm that now belongs to her daughter. And so his like financial situation might be why everything didn't go right to Leonard. Like I said, I know for a lot of people when you die, like it goes right to your husband. But if she knows that he's bad with money, maybe that I want to protect those assets, pass them on to someone who's going to be responsible with something like that. Yes, you probably wanted to make sure that like her kids were going to be okay.

Now there was at least something left over if she wasn't there to make sure like Leonard was keeping everything on the up and up. Right. In other words, Leonard wasn't going to squander it all away. Exactly. Now, even though Leonard wasn't totally cut out, there was someone in the family that was totally out of May's will completely. And that was Jeanette's younger sister, Heather. You see, May was a really devout Presbyterian, and she was really mad that Heather chose to marry a divorced guy with three kids. Like apparently that went against everything she believed. And so she didn't leave Heather a single penny in her will.

Okay, wait, then let's let's just forget about Leonard for a second. Where is Heather in all this? Well, she's been in the U.S. because that's where she lives. And that's where she was when the murders took place. But she did come back to New Zealand on June 25th once she learned of what happened at her sister's farm. Now, on the surface, Heather's got a pretty solid alibi of literally living halfway across the world. Right. But as police are interviewing witnesses, they get reports about a mysterious woman being spotted on the farm several days before the house was found empty. Now, one of the crew's farm workers, this guy named Bruce,

tells police that he saw a woman in Harvey and Jeanette's garden on the morning of the 19th. The homicide investigation review, which is like this 328 page document from the New Zealand police review of the original investigation, doesn't clarify exactly when in the investigation, Bruce, like tells police about this. But it does talk about how this sighting plays into one of the biggest unanswered questions around the case. Had someone been coming to the crew's house to feed and change baby Rochelle, because again, we know no one was like turning on the dryer. But a lot of people wondered if she could have actually survived without food and water for five days between when Harvey and Jeanette were last seen and when Leonard found the house in the way that it was.

Okay. So that would mean someone was like coming around and taking care of her, but also not wanting it to look like she was being taken care of. I mean, if there was a person, right? Like that's my best guess. I don't know if a child can survive five days without water. That seems like a long time. Yeah. But if someone was taking care of her, obviously it wasn't well enough that she had a clean diaper or a clean crib or again, wasn't completely dehydrated.

Yeah. So it's almost like a little bit like enough to keep her alive. Just enough to keep her there. Right. I don't know. Yeah. Okay. But I guess even if there was a woman or someone, this person couldn't have been Heather. You just said she was out of the country.

I mean, she says she was, but when police show Bruce a picture of Heather, he says that she looks quote similar to the woman that he claims to have seen. So what they have to do is they actually have to check with New Zealand immigration authorities to verify her travel. And it's when they do that, that, you know, potential eyewitness sighting or not, they end up having to clear her because they learned there's no way it could have been her. She was not lying. She definitely wasn't even in the country until June 25th. But even with Heather cleared, police's suspicion stays on the family again, especially around Leonard and it's getting even stronger when they get the blood analysis results back.

So the blood in the house comes back as being type A negative like Jeanette and type O positive like Harvey. Now, more interestingly, because none of that was a surprise, we have to assume the two people who live in the house who are missing, we knew it would probably be their blood. But the interesting part is that the blood in Leonard's car is also type A negative. Now, I tried to find out what Leonard's blood type is, right? Because Jeanette's A negative, it's not a wild assumption to think her father is too. But one of her parents, right? I couldn't get a definite answer on what his blood type was.

However, the homicide investigation review does mention that he's got a different blood type than Jeanette. They didn't mention Harvey in the report at all. So I assume it was more important for them to specify that it was different from his blood relatives. I mean, I don't know. I think it's weird that they didn't mention Harvey, but I'm kind of led to believe that it was different because they use this fact about it being different from Jeanette to say that they think it means that his story about cutting his finger and getting his blood on a seed can't be true. Oh, okay. So when police take this to Leonard, he changes his story.

Now, he's saying like, oh, I guess I didn't cut my finger. I guess at some point Jeanette must have, and that's how her blood got there. And over the course of repeated interviews, all through the rest of June and July, the police keep pushing at Leonard. They keep looking for these kind of holes, these changing stories. They're trying to get him to confess, and they get lots of shifting stories, but nothing that they can use to prove that he was involved. As police keep searching for anything that will give them more insight into what happened to Harvey and Jeanette in their house that day, they get a tip during their investigation.

This comes in on July 2nd. The tip is about a guy named Arthur Allen Thomas who allegedly had a big crush on Jeanette when they were younger and who may have, I guess, had like a hard time kind of taking a hint that she wasn't interested. Like the inquiry goes into Jeanette's life story a little bit, like her going out of the country for a few months in the early 60s before coming back to New Zealand and how Arthur gave her gifts on a couple of occasions. And it wasn't like totally one way, not that they had like a romantic relationship, but they had some kind of friendship because they wrote letters while she was overseas,

and he sent her a writing book once, which considering that Jeanette trained to be a teacher seems like innocent enough, right? But about a year later in 62, after Jeanette comes back to New Zealand, Arthur came over to her parents' house on Christmas to give her this like set. It was a hairbrush and a comb and a mirror. They're probably like matching and super cute. Yeah, but I mean, especially back in the 60s, like that's something that you put on like your vanity. Like it's kind of an intimate piece, like not really a let's just be friends present. Yeah, not super platonic, but also it's not like super sexual or anything either.

So at the time though, like Jeanette must have been like realizing right, he wanted more from her than she wanted from him. So she actually kind of like lies and she tells Arthur, sorry, I've got a boyfriend, even though at the time she didn't. She just, you know, didn't want to hurt his feelings, but didn't want to get any more involved. But like nothing bad happened from that. It seemed like he probably took it okay. And this is like the most sinister thing they can find.

And all of this happened eight years before Harvey and Jeanette go missing. And by now Arthur's been married for several years to someone else and he doesn't seem to have any other connection to the case. Yeah, it kind of sounds like he's moved on. Yeah, so, you know, with circumstances, personal histories, and small town crushes seeming to point in tons of different directions, police need something big if anything is going to move this case forward. And they're about to get it.

On the morning of August 16th, 1970, sometime after 8.30 in the morning, two fishermen are out on the Waikato River when they spot something. There, on the north side of the river, tangled in the willow branches and partly submerged underwater is a woman's body. The two men hurry back to the shore right away and call police. And by three o'clock that afternoon, after a positive identification from Leonard, police make it official. The body belongs to Jeanette Crue.

I couldn't get an exact distance of how far away she is from her farm and where she went missing from. But what I was able to piece together is that she's found about 9.7 kilometers, or a little over six miles downstream from this bridge that is about a six-minute drive from the road that her farm is on. So I have to imagine this is probably like 10 to 15 minutes away by car. According to an article in the Sydney Morning Herald, Jeanette's body has been wrapped in a green bedspread

with copper wire tied up around her knees. So can they tell how she died? Well, once police get Jeanette's body back to the pathologist, they learn that she died from a single gunshot wound to the head. Police records detail that the bullet entered her skull at close range, only like one and a quarter inches above her right ear, and it traveled from right to left downwards and forwards. Now, based on the bullet fragments retrieved from her skull,

Jeanette was shot with a.22 rifle. And some of the fragments are too small to really get a lot of information from. But one is big enough that police can make out a number eight embossed on the base of the bullet. In addition to the gunshot wound, Jeanette's also got a big bruise near her left armpit along with some damage to the tissue around her right eye and a fractured nose showing that she was actually hitting the face before she died.

Since Jeanette was fully dressed when she came out of the river, there's nothing to suggest that she might have been sexually assaulted. And so that likely wasn't part of the motive here. Now Harvey's mom Marie identifies the blanket that was found wrapped around Jeanette's body as coming from the crew's own house, actually their own bed. So with Jeanette's body being recovered, the hope of somehow finding Harvey alive really disappears.

That same Sydney Morning Herald article I just mentioned actually runs with the headline, quote, New Zealand police believe man shot, end quote. Which I mean, that pretty much sums it up right there. According to this piece, police are theorizing that Harvey was shot in his armchair. Remember that like it was so bloody, it was like seeping through the chair onto the floor. And that his body was probably also dumped in the same river.

They just haven't found it yet. So now that they know what kind of weapon was used to kill Jeanette, police start going around to every one of the crew's neighbors within a five mile radius collecting all of the 22 rifles that they can get their hands on. And they also go back to the crew's property to search for any trace of a 22 rifle that maybe that they had or any lengths of copper wire like the stuff that Jeanette was found wrapped in. In particular, police focus hard on the garden. Like the police records call what they're doing a sieve search.

So they're like literally filtering all of this dirt like through a sieve, looking for bullet fragments, shotgun shells, cartridges, any ballistic anything. Yeah, to help them hone in on this particular type of gun that killed Jeanette. But unfortunately, the search comes up empty. There is nothing in the crew's garden. Even though the garden looks like a dead end, the police have plenty to do with all of the 22 rifles that they've collected. And as it turns out, one of these rifles actually belongs to Arthur Allen Thomas,

the same guy who used to be interested in Jeanette. Oh, yeah. And when they test it within just a few days, ballistic tests say they can't be excluded as the gun that shot Jeanette crew. So that doesn't mean that they can prove that this gun was the gun that was fired, was the one that killed her. But they also can't say that it wasn't the gun that was fired. Exactly.

They can't rule it out. And right around the same time, so we're talking within a week after Jeanette's body was found, another witness comes forward and informs police that she heard three gunshots after 8.30 that night around the time Harvey and Jeanette were thought to have been killed. Remember, it's like the 17th of June. That's like the last day anyone saw them alive, right? Right. So I guess where was Arthur that night?

Well, he claims that he was home with his wife Vivian and his cousin Peter, and both of them corroborate that story. So it feels like they're hitting another dead end, and they kind of just have to wait for more evidence to surface. And that happens at 11.25 a.m. on September 16th, exactly one month to the day after Jeanette's body was found. A police search team out on the Waikato River finally finds what they've been looking for. They find Harvey Crip. He's face down, partially submerged, and just like Jeanette,

he's also been wrapped up in wire and he's fully clothed with pieces of green blanket kind of tangled around his waist. When they search the areas near his body, police find a brown bedspread in the river. And more interestingly, about six feet straight below Harvey's body, like in the river, they also find a car axle that they think was tied to the wire and used to weigh down his body. Once again, police call Jeanette's dad, Leonard, in to have him ID Harvey. Okay. I mean, at this point, Harvey's body has got to be pretty badly decomposed after being in a river for, like, what, almost three months?

Yeah. And in my opinion, like beyond the point of IDing just by looking at him. So why even call in Leonard? Or if you're going to call in somebody, why not Harvey's own family? Yeah. I wondered that too, because you're right. The water has definitely, at this point, had to have taken its toll on the body. I mean, I would imagine it is almost unrecognizable. And eventually the pathologist actually has to use dental records to get a positive ID.

While pretty much all Leonard could tell them when he came in was that the clothes that this body had on looked like they could be Harvey's. And again, interestingly, Harvey's mom was the one, if you remember me saying that ID the bedspread from the river is coming from her son's master bedroom. So she's obviously involved at some point. So I don't know why the police are looking at Leonard to, like, have him ID and, like, bring him in. I mean, the only thing I can think of is if they're still looking at him to kind of shock him into confessing or leading them to something.

I think that's exactly what they're trying to do. Because, like, when I was looking at the official review records on this case, I think you're spot on. I think they're trying to, like, again, spook him into confessing and make him, like, come face to face with what they believe at the time that he did. But even when they have him come in, Leonard holds firm. He keeps denying that he had anything to do with the murders. Now, the same pathologist who IDs Harvey also concludes that he died from a single gunshot wound to the head and, again, from a.22 rifle fired at close range.

There's also an 8 on the base of the bullet just like the last one that was found in Jeanette. So this is all happening on September 16th. They are literally doing the autopsy the same day that they find Harvey's body. It's just go, go, go. And when these two new officers come in with fresh eyes, they have an interesting take because Olivia Allison reported for Radio New Zealand that both officers reached the conclusion that the investigator's narrow focus on Leonard is actually misguided. Oh, does it say why they think it's misguided?

No, it is literally just one sentence in there. But the inquiry records go into more detail and make it clear that there's an opinion forming in the broader New Zealand law enforcement community that after several months and zero hard evidence to pin the murders on Leonard, that the investigating officers need to branch out. Like clearly you're not getting anywhere, like maybe at least start ruling out some other things. I don't know. But the officers, especially Detective Inspector Bruce Hutton,

are also facing increasing public scrutiny about why the murders haven't been solved yet because as I was reading in the inquiry records, there are three other unsolved murders in New Zealand at the time. One in Southland, all the way on the southern part of the South Island, and two more in the Bay of Plenty on the north island. So the pressure to solve the crew murders is just mounting by the day. They do make a little bit of progress in October though. That's when the axle used to weigh down Harvey's body is finally identified.

Radio New Zealand reported that the axle came from a trailer that used to belong to none other than Arthur Allen Thomas' father. And that's not the only thing. It's like the more they look at Arthur, the more they seem to find because wire samples taken from the Thomas farm come back as possible matches for the wire found on Harvey's body. And a bullet found at the farm has the same eight embossing as the ones pulled from both of the crew's skulls.

Police keep questioning Arthur all throughout the month of October, searching his property multiple times. So between Arthur's unrequited interest in Jeanette and evidence that keeps not tying him specifically, but kind of pointing back to his farm, the police focus starts to shift more and more away from Leonard and on to Arthur. But so far, it's all just pretty circumstantial. So later that same month, we're talking like October 27th at this point, police returned to the crew's garden for a third search.

Remember, this is the one they like sifted through, but they're coming back again looking for anything that they might have missed those last couple of times around. Now, again, this is the same garden that they like took their little colanders and like sifted through. I imagine like a old, you know, when you see archaeologists. Like a gold mining situation. Yes. So everything that I've heard, it was like super thorough before.

But this third time, third time's a charm. This time they get lucky because right there in one of the flower beds near the back garden gate is a 22 brass cartridge. OK, but that's not like a tiny piece of something like that's a. It's a cartridge. Yeah, like it's a pretty decent sized thing. But what does that get missed? Your guess is as good as mine.

But ballistics testing matches the cartridge that they found to Arthur's gun. So finally, this is the crucial piece of evidence that they've been waiting for to crack this case wide open. So coupled with the motive, which they're saying is Arthur being like this jilted jealous man. And now with these bullets coming from his weapon, he is actually arrested on November 11th, 1970, and charged with the murders of Harvey and Jeanette crew.

Arthur pleads not guilty, but in February of 71, almost eight months after Leonard first found the bloody farmhouse, the verdict comes down and Arthur Alan Thomas is found guilty and sentenced to life in prison. Arthur, his legal team and his supporters actually managed to get a retrial in 1973 due to lingering questions around some of the physical evidence, in particular around this 22 cartridge that was magically found during the third search of the cruise garden.

But even in that new trial, he's convicted again, and his life sentence stands. He files various appeals like pretty typical stuff, but none of them have any impact. And then in 1979, something totally unexpected happens, like bigger than appeals, bigger than a new trial. Arthur gets something he probably didn't even let himself hope for. On December 17th, 1979,

Arthur Alan Thomas is granted a free pardon for the murders of Harvey and Jeanette crew, and he is released from jail after spending almost a decade behind bars. What? Yeah, a whole group of people from retired New Zealand, judges to British investigative journalists, spent years apparently lobbying for his release, doing their own research, and even writing whole books

about what they felt to be a grave miscarriage of justice, and all of that work finally paid off. According to the New Zealand Herald, the pardons based on the police case not being proved beyond a reasonable doubt. But there's more, like way, way more. So in April of 1980, a Royal Commission of Inquiry is ordered to investigate the whole thing.

They spend the rest of 1980 conducting interviews, having public hearings, and pouring over files. According to police records, the commission goes through something like 1,800 pages of evidence and around 5,000 pages of police files, and they hear from 132 witnesses. The official report on the findings, it has a long title, but it's titled,

The Report of the Royal Commission to Inquire into the Circumstances of the Convictions of Arthur Alan Thomas for the murders of David, Harvey, crew, and Jeanette, Lenore, crew. And when it comes out in November of 1980, its findings are stunning. It finds three key areas of police corruption that led to Arthur's conviction. So first, that 22 brass cartridge known as Exhibit 350,

again, magically found on search number three, they say it was actually planted in Harvey and Jeanette's garden by two police officers. One of these officers is Detective Lenrich Johnston, and the other is Detective Inspector Bruce Hutton, who is the lead investigator on the original case. The second thing that the report finds is that during Arthur's second trial in 73,

Bruce actually switched out the cartridge from Arthur's farm with another one that matched Exhibit 350, the one they found in the garden. And the third thing that this report found is that Bruce and other officers perjured themselves. Okay, I know you've been researching this for a while now, but I mean, you're telling me this, and it's like a lot to just throw out there and start processing.

What? Yeah. So, again, basically like what they're saying, to like break it down to layman's terms, I mean, I think everyone understands, but like, A, they're saying they planted the cartridge, and not only did they plant it, but also made sure that there was evidence matching it.

To match it, yeah, so both of those things are fake. It's not like they like planted a cartridge that matched real evidence in custody. They planted both of these things, and then lied about it during trial. Right, oh my God. And so, you know, the inquiry really looks hard at that cartridge.

Again, this is known as Exhibit 350. So, since it was supposedly outside for over four months before police found it, you know, what they said is you'd expect that the brass would have been kind of corroded, right? I mean, it's outside in the wind and the elements in the rain. Yeah, you would have seen like some wear and tear from the elements, stuff like that.

Yes. So, according to the report, Exhibit 350 doesn't have any of the same corrosion as other brass cartridges that were buried for comparison. Not just on the surface either, but down to like the little tiny crevices and folds that human hands can't even get to. Like the whole thing is just too neat and clean

to have been in a garden for that long. Right. You'd expect like little microscopic pieces of soil and dirt and even roots and stuff like that. Yes. And in addition to that, the report goes into all kinds of detail about tracing when this cartridge was made compared to when the bullets that killed Harvey

and Jeanette Crew were made. Basically, what it boils down to is that the type of bullets that killed the crews stopped being made in November of 1963. But Exhibit 350, this cartridge that they found in the garden, was made in 1964 or later. What? Yeah, so the bullets that would have been in it

wouldn't have had the number eight on them. They would have had like 18 or 19 instead. So then this cartridge couldn't have contained the bullets that killed them? Exactly. So Exhibit 350 from the garden is shady, but so is Exhibit 343, which is the one that is found in Arthur's garage that they compare to,

and that's what their like smoking gun was. You see, during Arthur's second trial in 1973, one of the forensic scientists working on behalf of the defense, this guy named TJ Sprott, he was examining both exhibits. And he found that 343, the one in Arthur's garage, was a category three cartridge that had never been fired. As Dr. Sprott told the commission,

he was examining 343 when Bruce, the lead detective, came into the courtroom and told him basically like, get away from that evidence. You have no right to be touching it or even looking at it. And this is a forensic scientist working with one of the legal teams. Yeah, you got it. Bruce can't do that.

No, he totally can't. And here in the States, that's kind of what we'd call a Brady violation because the defense has just as much of a right to all of the evidence as the prosecution. Yeah. So Dr. Sprott was so taken aback by Bruce's behavior and so worried about what was going to happen to the evidence. Like even then, he knew like this isn't right.

That what he did is he etched this like little, teeny, tiny microscopic fish onto the cartridge. Like here, I've actually got a picture of it. Let me show you. Okay. So I'm looking at it. And at first it kind of looked like a number two, kind of based on like the angle of the photo,

how it's taken and the shadowing. But the more I look at it, this is going to sound silly. It looks like a mix between like a Jesus fish and a goldfish cracker. I saw, I totally saw Jesus fish when I first saw it. But the report goes on to say that magically the next day, this exhibit 343 was examined by another forensic scientist, this guy named Dr. Donald Nelson.

According to his findings, the cartridge is an unfired category four, not a category three like the other guy found. And there is no fish on it. So therefore the report concludes that someone switched the original with a new one. Now, all they can say is that they were switched, but there's no way for the commission in 1980

to go back and look at the evidence directly because here you go. The detective inspector, Bruce, the guy who's in charge, actually had everything destroyed in 73. What? Yeah. It was just another thing that the report is highly critical of. It finds that Bruce ordered them destroyed

as a way of covering up that 350 had been planted and that 343 had been switched out. As a result of the full report being published, Arthur Allen Thomas is awarded $950,000 in compensation by the New Zealand government. According to the Taranaki Daily News, Bruce Hutton and Lenric Johnston both strenuously deny all accusations made against them.

And despite the evidence laid out by the report, surprise, surprise, neither man is ever charged with doing anything wrong. Oh, my God. The solicitor general at the time doesn't think that there's enough evidence to prosecute them. And in my mind, I'm like, yeah, because he destroyed it. Yeah, can you charge him with destroying evidence?

Because I feel like that one's pretty obvious. This is bananas to me. Now, despite Arthur Allen Thomas being released and compensated, this doesn't spur any kind of like new investigation into trying to figure out the real question here to me. Or get released to me. If not Arthur. Then who?

Then who? Exactly. And for 30 years, no one attempts to answer that question. And that's despite the fact that we have an unsolved double murder, this lingering bad taste of clear police misconduct, and multiple lives that have been ruined. Yeah. Now, over the years,

Rachelle Crue was cared for by family members as she grows up without her parents. And once she becomes an adult, she starts putting pressure on law enforcement to find the truth. Good. And in 2010, in no small part due to Rachelle's demand for answers about who killed her parents and why Bruce and Lenrich never answered for the crimes that they were accused of,

the police commissioner of New Zealand announces the opening of a review into the original investigation and how it was handled. Four years later, so in 2014, the New Zealand police release a brand new report. This is the Crue Homicide Investigation Review. And it finds that among other things, officers didn't properly secure the crime scene.

The alleged sighting of a woman at the farmhouse was never independently confirmed that it was unlikely anyone came to feed Rachelle or tend to the farm. Their decision to have Leonard identify the decomposed body of his daughter and son-in-law was unacceptable practice. Agreed. That they didn't corroborate the alibis of other people who had access to Arthur's farm and things like the wire and the gun.

They didn't take any pictures of Jeanette's body at the scene in the river where it was recovered. They didn't follow up on witness accounts of vehicle sightings near the Crue's farm or follow up on the other crimes that had happened. There, like before the murders, apparently there's like this burglary, there are some fires. Basically, there's like a lot of questionable police work even before the corruption and all of which may have ruined

the chances for ever finding out who really murdered this family. But here's the thing about this review. It concludes that whoever killed Harvey and Jeanette had access to stuff on Arthur's farm and that his gun still could very well have been used for the murders. Now, it doesn't actually say 100% without a doubt Arthur Alan Thomas is innocent of these crimes or it doesn't actually formally apologize to him.

So as you can imagine, the Thomas family is kind of furious by this. Right, because they still have this thing kind of looming over Arthur. Right, and I would imagine Rochelle is upset too. Like if they're trying to imply that Arthur could have done it but a bad investigation let him just walk free, I mean, that would be a devastating blow. Yeah. And if he is an innocent man like the court has declared him to be,

then why is no one looking for the real responsible party? Right, I feel like we talk about closure and justice a lot. And like, this is neither of those things. This is just unresolution. Yeah, to this day, the murders of Harvey and Jeanette crew remain unsolved. Leonard passed away in 1992. Arthur Alan Thomas is still alive in his early 80s. And as of 2019 is facing what Edward Gay's piece for Stuff New Zealand calls,

quote, historical charges of rape and indecent exposure, end quote. Now, Rochelle crew is also still alive. She's in her early 50s. And while she's only ever given a tiny handful of interviews to the press, she's used them to make her stance on the investigation clear. While she's gained closure from the inquiries finding, she still believed that the police's mistakes have allowed her parents real killer to remain free for all of these years.

She views the inquiry as proof that no one in her family had anything to do with the murders. And although she did share her gratitude for having her relatives names cleared, she didn't mince her words either, calling police's tactics myopic and sloppy in the New Zealand Herald. She's just one of many people in the region who have spent their entire lives in the shadow of this brutal crime. And even now, almost 50 years later, they still hope that the truth will come out and shine a light into the darkness

and finally lift the shadow once and for all and finally provide answers and justice for Harvey and Jeanette Crew. You can find all of our source material for this episode on our website crimejunkiepodcast.com. And be sure to follow us on Instagram at crimejunkiepodcast. And don't forget if you ever want extra episodes, you can always find that in our fan club. That's on our website as well crimejunkiepodcast.com. Do stick around because we have a profit the month.

Crimejunkie is an audio chuck production. So what do you think Chuck? Do you approve? Okay, so our listener Julie submitted this story to us and I feel like it's really important to say that the first words in her submission are literally warning, sad period. And it is. So I'm just prepping everyone right now because So on your like wax saddle meter, you think it's like a seven and we shall prepare for a 15? Pretty much, yeah.

All right. Like I cried when I read this story. So it's maybe even higher than a seven for my very demented list. Okay, I'm taking off my glasses. All right, go. This is hopefully. So one Christmas Eve, Julie's mom took Julie and her sister out to lunch and their dad was setting up an early Christmas present for them.

And obviously, like knowing that your kid, you're like, well, what is it? What is it? And they guessed the entire time they were at lunch. They're like, is it a swing set? Is it something like a new TV or something amazing for the house? I mean, it's never going to be one of the puppies from down the street when they got home. It's a puppy from down the street, doesn't it? It was one of the puppies from the neighbor down the street.

It was this little red coated a lab and he peeked his little head around the corner. And from that moment on, Jasper was officially a part of their family forever. And of course, dad put rules in place like no Jasper on the furniture, but I think we all know how those go. Yeah. But it takes a while. So when Jasper was around a year old, Julie started secretly letting him up on her bed. So all of a sudden it was so weird, Jasper would always insist on going to bed with Julie.

That's so cute. Because he knew he could climb in bed with her. And even though Jasper was never super cuddly, Julie said he was the type of dog that would just like let any baby kind of plop right on top of his head and wouldn't even care. And when Julie's depression and anxiety really was starting to flare up, he was always there no matter where in the house he was. He would hear her having an anxiety attack and hyperventilating, and he'd immediately get to her side and stay with her till she could either fall asleep again

or get into a place where her anxiety wasn't in control anymore. And this actually inspired Julie to use Jasper and his amazing heart for her senior project in high school. And the whole senior project was officially getting him certified as a therapy dog. That's amazing. Which is like best senior project ever. Yeah. And so he's been to senior citizen homes for training for all the loves and cuddles. And he's even gone to libraries and had little kids read books to him, which...

Oh my God. I have a little kid who can't read, but she loves reading books to Roz. And it just makes my, like, I wouldn't say eye is water, but actually I'm weeping. It is so, so adorable. But Julie, obviously that was her senior project. She eventually goes off to college and, you know, the worst of the worst happens. Jasper started to get really, really sick. And for a long time, no one could really figure out what was going on.

Julie was coming back home and went to every single vet appointment with him. And still there were just no answers. But one day without telling her, Julie's dad took Jasper to a vet. And that's when they got the terrible news. At only six years old, Jasper was diagnosed with lymphoma. And he just continued to deteriorate and got so weak. He could go upstairs by himself. He could barely even walk on his own and just really wanted to lay on the cold floor by himself away from everybody else.

But Julie's dad, Mr. No Jasper on the furniture, just a few years earlier, would spend almost every night sleeping on the floor. With Jasper, so he wouldn't be alone. Last year, while on Christmas break, Julie started taking the floor shift. And somehow she managed to even fall asleep at her post while keeping Jasper company. And she was kind of startled awake in the middle of the night by their other dogs sniffing her hair. And when Julie opened her eyes, she saw her dad just staring at her. And she could tell in his face what had happened. But she had to hear him say it.

And dad confirmed Jasper had passed away that night. And immediately Julie started bawling. Dad started bawling at this is at three o'clock in the morning. Eventually everyone in the house is awake crying and sharing memories of how sweet and funny and goofy Jasper had always been. Like he loved sleeping upside down. He loved to swim, but he was afraid of pools. And even though he loved playing catch, he never wanted to bring the ball back because he really just enjoyed standing around eating grass better. And most of all, how much better he had made all of their lives and so many others as a therapy dog.

And, you know, Julie said that he was her unofficial emotional support dog and she still misses him every single day. And one of the reasons I wanted to honor Jasper with probably the month this month was Jasper moved out just over a year ago. In fact, just on January 7th, it was his one year anniversary of passing. And Julie even has a little urn of some of his ashes that she keeps with her even at college. So Jasper is always by her side. So that is the really, really sad part. Julie and family, we are sending you all of our love from Crime Junkie, especially on like the one year mark. It's my family just lost a dog.

My parents' dog just passed. It's really, really close to home for me this month. So I'm also weeping. But, you know, all the love from Crime Junkie and we want to honor Jasper this month. And I did ask Julie if there was an organization we could highlight in the segment. And she spoke incredibly highly of the Summit Bridge Vet Hospital in Bear, Delaware. She said they worked so hard to help Jasper, went out of their way to get him into their services, even when, you know, the family couldn't get Jasper into his normal fit in Vet Hospital.

So we'll link to that on our website as well as a link to a volunteer-based rescue associated with Summit Bridge called Shayla's Rescue Foundation. And I won't get into it a lot because I've already started crying. But it has an amazing founding story where a police officer was looking for a foster home for a pity who had just been rescued from a fighting operation. And they crossed paths with their neighbors who was like a house full of vet students. And it became this huge foster fail for one of the vet students who then founded Shayla's Rescue Foundation. So it's an amazing organization.

It's associated with Summit Bridge Vet Hospital, which is the place that took such great care of Jasper and Jasper's family. So we'll link all of that on our website. I'm so sorry I made everybody cry on Monday, but I think that's part of my job at this point. And of course we'll have tons of pictures of Jasper, including one of him sleeping upside down. And with a stuffed animal dog that looks shockingly like him called Therapy, which was part of the therapy program. He was not pleased with Therapy. And you can see it all over his face, which makes me love him just a little bit more. Jasper sounds so much like Chuck. I love it.