Pukekawa: The Eyre Murder and the Crewe Murders

Pukekawa is a small rural settlement in the Lower Waikato River area of New Zealand's North Island, about 66 km south of central Auckland. Though a quiet farming community known for market gardening, it became nationally known in connection with two separate killings.

On the night of 24 August 1920, farmer Sydney Eyre was shot in his bedroom on his Pukekawa farm in the presence of his wife. Police investigation of hoof marks and cartridges at the scene led to a former employee of the Eyre farm, Samuel Thorn. Thorn was convicted of murder that year in the Auckland Supreme Court and was hanged. He maintained his innocence up to his death. The trial drew national attention, and during proceedings Eyre's wife testified that she had been "intimate" with Thorn.

Decades later, Pukekawa returned to national headlines with the killings of Harvey and Jeannette Crewe, who were shot in the living room of their farmhouse on or about 17 June 1970. Their bodies were thrown into the Waikato River and were recovered separately many weeks after the killings. According to the Wikipedia account, a woman who was never officially identified had been observed in the Crewe house before the couple was reported missing, and an unknown person had fed the Crewe baby, Rochelle, and the farm animals during that period. Local farmer Arthur Allan Thomas was twice convicted in the Auckland Supreme Court and imprisoned for the murders; the Crown attributed a motive to a romantic interest in Jeannette Crewe. Thomas was later found to have been wrongly convicted, was pardoned by the Governor-General on 17 December 1979, and was awarded NZ$1 million in compensation. The case was dramatized in the 1980 film Beyond Reasonable Doubt, filmed in Pukekawa with participation from both sides of a local dispute over the case.

The Crewe case has continued to divide the district. Des Thomas, a Pukekawa water-supply contractor and brother of Arthur Thomas, has continued to investigate the murders in relation to an unnamed local man referred to as "farmer X." A police report released in July 2014 cleared as suspects the late Len Demler (Jeannette Crewe's father) and his second wife, Norma Demler, while reportedly implying that Arthur Thomas remained a suspect to police; the same report stated that a cartridge case used as evidence against Thomas may have been "fabricated evidence." The house where the killings occurred remains occupied. The Thomas family farm remains in the family, and a memorial cross once at its gate listing "Justice" and "free Thomas" supporters has since been moved into nearby bush with its lettering obliterated. At the Tuakau cemetery, the graves of Arthur Thomas's parents lie roughly 27 metres from the graves of the Crewes.

This summary is based solely on the Wikipedia article on Pukekawa, which cites a contemporaneous 1888 newspaper item via Papers Past and a 2023 census dataset from Stats NZ as references; those sources were not independently drawn upon for the narrative facts above.