NZHistory, New Zealand history online - murder

Arthur Allan Thomas convicted of Crewe murders for a second time

The murder of Waikato farming couple Jeanette and Harvey Crewe in the winter of 1970 is one of the great ‘whodunnits’ in New Zealand’s criminal history. It also became one of the country’s most protracted legal struggles as Arthur Allan Thomas, the neighbour convicted twice for the murders, fought to clear his name.

Thomas was convicted in 1971 of the double murder of the Crewes the previous year. His appeal was rejected by the Court of Appeal and an inquiry by retired judge Sir George McGregor found no reason to reopen the case. Thomas’s supporters maintained his innocence and began a long quest to have the convictions quashed. In the face of strong public opinion the government referred the case back to the Court of Appeal, which ordered a retrial that began in late March 1973. The defence questioned evidence presented by the police in the first trial, especially with respect to a cartridge case crucial to the original conviction. Forensic scientist Dr Jim Sprott testified that the cartridge case found in the Crewes’ garden did not match the bullets that had killed the couple. Despite this, Thomas was convicted for a second time.

The matter did not end there. A campaign led in part by Pat Booth of the Auckland Star attempted to overturn Thomas’s conviction. The publication in 1978 of Beyond reasonable doubt?, by British author David Yallop, proved decisive. Yallop was scathing in his criticism of the way the police and courts had handled the case. He included an open letter to Prime Minister Robert Muldoon asking for a pardon. Muldoon responded by ordering Auckland QC Robert Adams-Smith to investigate. The barrister’s finding that ‘an injustice may have been done’ led to Thomas’s pardon in December 1979. A 1980 Royal Commission concluded that police had committed ‘an unspeakable outrage’ – they had planted the cartridge case that had been key to the original conviction. Thomas received $950,000 in compensation for the nine years he had spent in prison.

Scene from Beyond reasonable doubt, 1980 (NZ On Screen). See the full feature here:

Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme

Pauline Parker (16) and Juliet Hulme (15) who were convicted of murdering Pauline's mother in 1954. The young age of girls meant they could not be sentenced to death.

See also: biography of Pauline Parker

Credit:

Star-Sun 23 August 1954. Christchurch City Libraries

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The Maungatapu murders virtual comic

Virtual comic book telling the story of the Maungatapu murders committed by the Burgess gang in 1866. Click on image to open up the comic book.

Text by Norman Bilbrough
Images by James Findlater
Produced by the NZHistory.net.nz team

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Maungatapu murders, 1866

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Pauline Parker

Born on 26 May 1938, Pauline Parker was the second daughter of Christchurch couple Herbert and Honora Reiper. At the age of five, she was hospitalised with osteomyelitis, a crippling bone marrow infection. Though she survived the painful treatments, she suffered chronic leg pain throughout her youth, which excused her from physical activities at school. She had an interest in art and writing, and showed talent sculpting with clay.

Though the Reipers were not a religious family, Pauline and her older sister Wendy spent some time attending the East Belt Methodist Church, and often went on church-organised outings and holidays. At Christchurch Girls' High School she met Juliet Hulme and formed the friendship that was to radically change the course of both their lives.

Juliet was a few months younger than Pauline, but they were in the same year at school. Born in England, she had been hospitalised with tuberculosis as a child, and had been sent to live in South Africa and the Caribbean in the hopes that the warmer climates would be beneficial to her health. When Juliet was 13, her father Henry was appointed Rector at the University of Canterbury, and the family moved to Christchurch.

Pauline and Juliet soon became inseparable. The two girls fired each others' imaginations and soon created a considerable fantasy world. They would spend hours concocting stories, renamed themselves Gina and Deborah, and made plans for a life of fame and fortune as actresses in America. While both families were initially pleased with the friendship, they soon grew concerned.

When Juliet was once again hospitalised with tuberculosis, the families saw it as an opportunity for the girls to spend some time apart. Their friendship resumed with the same intensity, though, once Juliet was discharged from hospital. Pauline's parents, concerned at the co-dependence of their daughter's relationship with Juliet, took her to see a psychiatrist, who informed them that he suspected the pair of having a homosexual relationship.

It was around this time that Juliet and Pauline discovered that Juliet's mother was having an affair with their lodger, Walter Perry. As Juliet's parents' marriage broke up, the Hulmes decided Juliet would leave New Zealand with her father. Pauline and Juliet were panicked by this decision, and hoped that Pauline could move with them. Both sets of parents flatly refused this suggestion.

According to Pauline's diary, the girls began planning Honora's murder early in June 1954. On 22 June Honora took Pauline and Juliet to Victoria Park. The three had tea in the kiosk and then set out for a walk. A short while later the two girls ran back to the kiosk, covered in blood and screaming for help. The police were called, and Honora's body was found on the path. That night police found Pauline's diary. The next day the teenagers were arrested for murder. The jury rejected the defence assertion that Pauline and Juliet were insane, and on 28 August they were convicted of murder.

Pauline spent around five years in Paparua Prison, near Christchurch. On her release, she studied at Auckland University, and graduated BA in 1964. She then spent a year working as a librarian in Wellington, before moving to England, where she worked at a London librarian for a time before giving up the profession.

Interest in the sensational 1954 murder case was revived after the release of Peter Jackson's Academy Award-nominated film Heavenly creatures (1994). In 1997 a New Zealand journalist tracked Pauline Parker down in a small village in Kent, England. The convicted murderer whose youthful folie-a-deux had captivated the nations imagination was now a devout catholic named Hilary Nathan, who taught children how to ride horses.

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20-year old hanged for murder

On the evening of 28 April 1955 a cold and hungry Edward Te Whiu broke into the house of Florence Smith, a 75-year-old widow, with the intention of robbing her. Smith was in bed when she heard him and turned on the light. He attacked her, fracturing her skull, breaking her jaw and nose, knocking out her denture and breaking the hyoid bone in her throat. She died rapidly from asphyxiation.

In a long statement to the police after his arrest on 12 May, Te Whiu admitted killing Smith. He knew she was dead when he left the property; he had covered her up before washing the blood off his hands and making himself something to eat. He hadn’t meant to kill her: ‘I only intended to knock her unconscious so that I could look the place over. I must have hit her once too often’. The defence took a similar line at his trial, which began on 25 July 1955 and lasted three days. But it took the jury just 35 minutes to convict him of murder. They gave no recommendation for mercy and he was sentenced to death.

Many questioned whether the death penalty was appropriate for Te Whiu because of his underprivileged background and childlike mental state. But his execution went ahead at Mount Eden prison at 6.59 p.m. on 18 August 1955. A justice of the peace, several reporters, a priest, doctor and selected police and prison staff bore witness. He was to be the fourth from last person executed in New Zealand. The last was Walter Bolton on 18 February 1957.

Further information: Sherwood Young, Guilty on the gallows, Grantham House Publishing, Wellington, 1998.

The Maungatapu murders

See the Maungatapu murders virtual comic

On 12 June 1866 James Battle was murdered on the Maungatapu track, south-east of Nelson. The following day four other men were killed nearby in a crime that shocked the colony. These killings, the work of the 'Burgess gang', resembled something from the American 'wild west'.

The case was made more intriguing by the fact that one of the gang, Joseph Sullivan, turned on his co-accused and provided the evidence that convicted them. The trial was followed with great interest and sketches and accounts of the case were eagerly snapped up by the public. Sullivan for his troubles escaped the gallows; his colleagues were not so lucky.

All four members of the Burgess gang had come to New Zealand via the goldfields of Victoria, Australia. Three of them had been transported to Australia for crimes committed in England. They were the sort of 'career criminals' that some of the authorities in Otago had feared would arrive following the discovery of gold in the province. The South Island goldfields of the 1860s offered potentially rich pickings for criminals. Crime was generally the work of individuals, and often a spontaneous act fuelled by alcohol, but there were notable exceptions.

Mokomoko and Völkner - capital punishment

Mokomoko, executed 17 May 1866

The Te Whakatōhea chief Mokomoko was one of five Māori executed on 17 May 1866 for being implicated in the murder of the missionary Carl Völkner at Ōpōtiki in 1865. The government punished Te Whakatōhea further for Völkner’s death by confiscating much of the iwi’s land.

Death of Carl Völkner

Völkner’s death had occurred during what Pākehā called the ‘Hauhau disturbances’. Many Māori saw Völkner as a government spy. When in May 1865 he ignored warnings from Te Whakatōhea to stay away from Ōpōtiki, he was seized and later hanged. Mokomoko denied responsibility for the killing. He claimed that he went away after the decision was made to kill Völkner and was not present at the death. His descendants claim that earlier he had tried to help Völkner escape.

Mokomoko surrendered in October 1865 and was tried in Auckland on 27 March 1866. Witnesses identified Mokomoko as a member of the procession that took Völkner to his execution. Testimony that he had carried the rope with which Völkner was hanged was to be crucial in his conviction. No witness, however, claimed that Mokomoko was directly involved in the killing itself.

According to Te Whakatōhea the rope had been taken from Mokomoko. In the end the evidence was deemed sufficient to make him an accessory to Völkner’s murder. Heremita Kahupaea, Hakaraia Te Rahui, Horomona Propiti and Mikaere Kirimangu joined Mokomoko on the scaffold on 17 May 1866. Mokomoko’s last words were, ‘E mate hara kore ana ahau. Tēnā koutou Pākehā. Hei aha.’ (I die an innocent man. Farewell Pākehā. So be it.)

His song, ‘Tangohia mai te taura i taku kakī kia waiata au i taku waiata’ (Take the rope from my neck that I may sing my song), became an important expression of Te Whakatōhea’s anger at what had happened to Mokomoko and his co-accused.

In 1993, the justice minister, Doug Graham, made an official visit to Ōpōtiki to apologise to Te Whakatōhea and the descendants of Mokomoko. In September 2011 a pardon agreement was signed by Māori Affairs minister Pita Sharples and Mokomoko’s descendants.

Further information - Maungatapu murders

This web feature was written by Steve Watters and produced by the NZHistory.net.nz team.

Books

Confessions of Richard Burgess: The Maungatapu Murders and other grisly Tales, David Burton, Reed 1983
Death Round the Bend, J. Halket Millar, RW Stiles and Co Ltd, Nelson, 1954
Guilty on the Gallows, Sherwood Young, Grantham House 1998
Murders on Maungatapu, Frank Clune, Angus and Robertson, 1959
The Maungatapu mountain murders : a narrative of the murder of five men between the Wakamarina River and Nelson by Burgess, Levy, Kelly and Sullivan, in 1866, with an account of their capture, trial, conviction and execution ; also, some particulars as to their lives and career in New Zealand, Luckie, D. M. (David Mitchell), Christchurch, N.Z., Kiwi Publishers, c1998

'Heavenly Creatures' found guilty of murder

The fact that Pauline Parker and her friend Juliet Hulme killed Pauline’s mother Honora on 22 June – a sensational crime later dramatised in Peter Jackson’s film Heavenly Creatures – was never disputed. But in finding the two teenagers guilty of murder, the jury rejected the defence’s assertion that the girls were grossly insane.

Pauline was aged 16 and Juliet 15. Because they were both under 18, neither could be sentenced to death. Their punishment was instead ‘detention during Her Majesty’s pleasure’.

Pauline’s lawyer, Dr Haslam, said in his final address to the jury that the two girls had seen Pauline’s mother as a threat to their remaining together, a threat they felt they had to remove. ‘We have these girls planning their dreadful act, carrying it out so clumsily, and then, after it was over, not showing any remorse.’

In the opinion of psychiatrists Mr Medlicott and Dr Bennett, the girls’ contempt for the Bible and belief in a ‘fourth world’ paradise were evidence of insanity. The jury were told that the pair thought they were morally right in killing Honora. The girls suffered from ‘paranoia, delusions of grandeur and delusions of ecstasy. Each affects the other and aggravates the process of the disease.’

The Crown prosecutor maintained that the psychiatrists had contradicted their own evidence under cross-examination. This ‘plainly was a cold, callously committed and premeditated murder, committed by two highly intelligent and perfectly sane girls … They are not incurably insane. My submission is they are incurably bad.’

Included in the girls’ sentence was the provision that they were never to contact each other again. This made it difficult to find appropriate places of detention. There was only one girls’ borstal in New Zealand, and while borstal was deemed insufficient punishment for murderesses, imprisonment in an adult institution was thought to be too severe for women so young.

In the end both girls served around five years in prison: Pauline at Paparua prison, near Christchurch, and Juliet initially at Mt Eden prison and then at Arohata prison in Tawa, near Wellington.

Image: Parker and Hulme (Chch City Libraries) .

See the trailer for Heavenly Creatures, 1994 (NZ On Screen):

'Mr Asia' found murdered

It was a gangland murder with international links which unravelled New Zealand’s largest drug syndicate. It was a gruesome mystery in the heart of the English north-west – the demise of ‘Mr Asia’.

The mutilated body of Marty Johnstone, nominal leader of the Mr Asia drug syndicate, was found by divers in Eccleston Delft, a flooded disused quarry in Lancashire. His execution had been ordered by Terry Clark.

Clark was a small-time crook who had become a police informant after being imprisoned for burglary. After his release from prison he began buying cannabis from Marty Johnstone. Clark’s drug interests moved into the big league when he started trading in cocaine and heroin. Escaping to Australia after a large shipment of heroin was uncovered in Auckland, he was picked up in a marijuana raid and deported back to New Zealand to face trial. Miraculously, he was acquitted. Rumour had it that he had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars buying off witnesses.

By now a very wealthy man, Clark bought properties in the Bay of Islands and Fiji, and changed his name to Terence Sinclair. But with terrible power came terrible consequences. Addiction and death trailed closely in his wake. Because of fears that ‘Pommy’ Harry Lewis would talk, his body was found without hands or teeth. After Doug and Isobel Wilson, who had been recruited to distribute heroin, did talk to the police, their bodies were found in a shallow grave in Melbourne. The murder of the Wilsons led Australian police to issue a warrant for Clark’s arrest – but he had fled once more.

When he was arrested and charged with Johnstone’s murder, Clark was worth millions. The Mr Asia money was stashed in safes and bank accounts around the world. More was said to be buried in sacks in the New Zealand bush.

The Mr Asia story was broken by Auckland Star assistant editor Pat Booth, whose book The Mr Asia file: the life and death of Marty Johnstone was published in 1980. The saga has been dramatised several times, including in the television series Underbelly: a tale of two cities (Nine Network, 2009) and Underbelly NZ: land of the long green cloud (TV3, 2011).

Terry Clark died in prison in 1983, supposedly of natural causes.

Image: Terry Clark (NZ Herald)

NZHistory, New Zealand history online - murder

Arthur Allan Thomas convicted of Crewe murders for a second time

Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme

The Maungatapu murders virtual comic

Pauline Parker

20-year old hanged for murder

The Maungatapu murders

Mokomoko and Völkner - capital punishment

Mokomoko, executed 17 May 1866

Further information - Maungatapu murders

Links

Books

'Heavenly Creatures' found guilty of murder

'Mr Asia' found murdered