The only daughter of Harvey and Jeannette Crewe has broken her silence to ask the police to re-investigate the unsolved murders of her parents 40 years ago.
Rochelle Crewe - just 18 months old when found crying in her cot five days after the Crewes were last seen alive - has written to Police Commissioner Howard Broad to request that the case be reopened.
Speaking publicly for the first time since her parents' murders in June, 1970, Ms Crewe said speculation had been allowed to "fester" since Arthur Allan Thomas was pardoned after spending nine years in prison.
She was critical of the decision of Solicitor-general Paul Neazor not to lay charges against two police officers after a royal commission of inquiry concluded the pair planted evidence to frame Mr Thomas.
Australian judge Justice Robert Taylor, the head of the 1980 royal commission, said it was "an unspeakable outrage" that Detective Inspector Bruce Hutton and Detective Len Johnston buried a shellcase from Mr Thomas' rifle in the Crewe garden to link him to the crime.
But in his report to the police the following year, Mr Neazor decided against charging the pair because he believed there was not enough evidence to justify a prosecution.
Ms Crewe said it concerned her "that the Solicitor-general unilaterally usurped the role of the court".
"I would like to know why the police didn't prosecute Hutton and Johnston on the commission's findings that they had planted the cartridge case."
She had intended to approach the police commissioner for some time but the catalyst was reading Arthur Allan Thomas: The Inside Story, by Ian Wishart.
Mr Wishart claims that the evidence points to Len Johnston, the detective who found the evidence which linked Mr Thomas to the crime.
Ms Crewe said that an article in the Weekend Herald by Ross Meurant, a detective on the original murder inquiry, acknowledged this was a possibility.
She said Mr Meurant's article highlighted a "pervasive corruption" exposed by the new book.
"This concerns me. Lastly, I just want to know who killed my Mum and Dad."
The unsolved deaths of Harvey and Jeannette Crewe is one of the great murder mysteries in New Zealand.
"A terrible bloody mess" was what Jeannette's father, Len Demler, found on the floor of their home on a Pukekawa farm, south of Auckland, in June 1970.
He also found Rochelle crying in her cot.
Doctors who examined her said she could not have been abandoned for five full days since the murders, so someone must have fed her.
Witnesses reported seeing a blonde woman at the house but she was never identified.
The case gripped the nation for months.
Police initially considered a murder-suicide theory but soon switched attention to Mr Demler.
Jeannette's body was later recovered from the Waikato River in August that year, her jaw badly broken.
Harvey was found a month later, weighed down with an axle.
Both had been shot.
Arthur Allan Thomas was charged and convicted of the murders and spent nearly 10 years in prison.
But the farmer was pardoned in 1979 after mounting public protest and the personal intervention of Prime Minister Rob Muldoon.
A royal commission set up to investigate the case found inquiry head Detective Inspector Bruce Hutton and Detective Len Johnston had planted a rifle shell casing at the Crewe house to frame Mr Thomas.
The two officers were never charged with planting evidence and the police never re-opened the case.
Mr Johnston died in 1978.
Ms Crewe said yesterday said no-one had been held accountable for her parents' murders.
"In reopening the case I am seeking truth and justice as to what happened during the original investigation and what really happened to my parents, Jeannette and Harvey Crewe."
