The 55-year-old cold case that won’t leave our heads: Crewe murders book wins national award

Friday, 26 September 2025

“It’s the perfect example of New Zealand gothic” says investigative journalist Kirsty Johnston.

“A bloodied farmhouse, missing parents, a weeping child… and it's still unsolved.”

This week, Johnston, of RNZ, and journalism academic James Hollings won the 2025 Ngaio Marsh award for Best Non-Fiction book for The Crewe Murders: Inside New Zealand’s Most Infamous Cold Case, a work judges called “the definitive record” of the 55-year-old story: “a scrupulously researched book, layered with forensic and legal detail.”

It’s clear why readers keep coming back to the tragedy of Pukekawa couple Harvey and Jeannette Crewe, and their 18 month-old– Rochelle, who would now be in her late 50s – who was left lying in a cot in a farmhouse in June 1970, her parents bodies not found until three months later, Johnston said.

“Even though it's been 55 years, the person who did it could be still alive, people that maybe they told about it could be still alive.

“It's not impossible we could find out who it is, and I think that's something people find really hard to let go of… the hope that it will be solved at some point.”

In The Crewe Murders, published by Massey University Press in 2023, Johnston and Hollings canvassed tonnes of pages of evidence, court transcripts, royal commission investigations and more.

Johnston says winning the Ngaio Marsh award feels like validation in the approach the pair chose in reporting on the case – always reminding each other that it wasn’t a 'titillating” saga.

“James and I were so hesitant about writing this book, because we didn't want to add to the long list of people who'd treated it as something titillating. Rochelle, she's still alive. There are so many people who were deeply traumatised by this case, there is a community that was very damaged by it and there are families who still have ongoing trauma from it.

“I just like to remember that's what we're actually talking about here.”

And though the book didn’t solve the cold case or offer any new suspects like many hoped it would, the pair interviewed for the first time former justice minister Jim McLay on why he pardoned Arthur Allan Thomas, the man who was twice-convicted for the Crewes’ murders, and finally released and pardoned in 1979 after fresh findings by journalist Pat Booth and forensic scientist Jim Sprott proved he couldn’t have committed the murders.

To date, it remains the only free pardon in New Zealand history – the only time the government went over the courts to set a convicted murderer free.

For Hollings, unpacking McLay’s decision, and finally hearing about it from the horse’s mouth, was remarkable.

“McLay had never talked,” he said.

“What I like about our book is that we got behind the Ministry of Justice wall, and why they were so resistant to letting [Thomas] go.

“It was Ministry of Justice and the courts, they just refused to admit there was any problem, to the point where a very senior judge rang McLay and said, ‘why are you pardoning him’ in an appalling breach of constitutional separation.”

Hollings said the lesson from Thomas’ case still hasn’t been learned – that there is effective check on the courts, leaving media as the “court of last resort” for unsolved crimes and cold cases like these.

“And it’s increasingly under threat in New Zealand, because politicians and the courts think it’s their job to suppress information, like in the case of Tom Phillips,” he said.

And not just in the current complex case of the Marokopa father, who this month was killed after a four-year manhunt, but in other cold cases too, Hollings continued.

In a new Media Council ruling, a piece that ran in the Rotorua Daily Post on May 31 about the 50-year-old cold case of a missing 18-year-old hitchhiker was deemed to have been “unfair”, because the police officer who worked the case at the time named a credible suspect in the May interview.

The family of that suspect complained to the Media Council, and it was upheld – though with four dissenting voices among the council’s members.

Hollings describes it as a “dangerous” decision that will have a chilling effect on the industry – and would have made a significant impact on Pat Booth and his Crewe investigations had it happened 50 years earlier.

“The point of that police officer being able to name someone in public is that then puts it into the community so that other people who may know something can come forward and support it – or not,” he says.

“If you silence that, you lose the ability for the community to participate in solving the case or furthering the conversation.

“We saw it in the Crewe murders. The Thomas family flung around all sorts of accusations about other people, and that was hurtful to other people, but it was their right to do so – and it meant other people came forward and said something as well.

“So, you actually had a difficult but ultimately constructive debate about what actually happened.”

The council, in its decision, considered whether it was fair to publish the names and details of people that were never charged and link them to criminal investigations.

“Naming previous persons of interest and publishing unsubstantiated theories around their connection to the disappearance is in certain circumstances unfair,” its ruling says.

“Regardless of whether the article labels it as a theory, it still heightens the speculation around their involvement. The impact that this has on people that were not charged, and in this case their families, is understandably distressing.”

Four dissenting members said, “Ultimately, it’s in the public interest for news media to report on cold cases. Podcast and magazines are full of such reporting, including re-examining unproven theories. We disagree with the majority that this example of everyday journalism falls short of Media Council standards.”