Introduction
The Crewe Case
There has been no more celebrated murder case in the history of New Zealand.
A farmhouse is discovered one winter’s morning in 1970 its lounge awash in blood, a baby lying in dirtied clothes in a dirtied cot, and the farmers, father and mother, absent perhaps dead.
Two months later the body of the mother is found in a nearby river with a bullet in the head. A month later the father’s body surfaces, tied to an old car axle and also with a bullet in the head.
Two months again and a local farmer is arrested, then tried, then convicted for the two murders.
Two High Court Trials, four hearings in the Court of Appeal – two of them after referrals from the Governor General – two Government-appointed investigations by senior legal figures, and ten years and several books later, the farmer is pardoned and released, pronounced innocent while a top policeman is found to have planted vital evidence against him.
Forty years later the killer remains not just unidentified. He’s never been sought. Why not? Who killed the Crewes?
Nor has the accused policeman ever been brought to court. Why not? Did he really plant evidence?
For all the answers read The Case of The Missing Bloodstain, published on Monday 16 April 2012.
