Thomas' ex-wife adds her voice to Crewe daughter's call

Harvey and Jeannette Crewe on their wedding day. Photo / Supplied

The former wife of Arthur Allan Thomas has again urged Justice Minister Simon Power to start an inquiry into the Crewe murders.

Vivien Harrison is still angry that she was labelled as the mystery woman who fed baby Rochelle Crewe for the five days after her parents, Harvey and Jeannette Crewe, were murdered in June 1970.

She stood by Mr Thomas during his trials and appeals, always protesting his innocence, but separated from him before he was pardoned in 1979 after nine years in jail.

Mrs Harrison wrote to Mr Power this year asking him to appoint an independent investigator into the Crewe case. He declined in August, so she responded last week.

"You say you do not have the power to look at aspects of this case which the police are not investigating and do not intend to," she wrote to the minister.

"But that is exactly the action of the late Prime Minister Robert Muldoon, without whose intervention Arthur would have remained a convicted double murderer."

Her call for a fresh inquiry came shortly before Rochelle Crewe broke her silence after 40 years in the Herald this week.

She wrote to Police Commissioner Howard Broad asking for the case to be reopened because speculation had been allowed to "fester" since Mr Thomas was pardoned.

Her plea introduced a new generation to one of New Zealand's most enduring murder mysteries.

A Weekend Herald straw poll yesterday found that none of six people under the age of 25 had heard of the case, or of Arthur Allan Thomas.

Rochelle Crewe criticised the decision of the Solicitor-General in the 1980s, Paul Neazor, QC, not to lay charges against two detectives after a royal commission of inquiry concluded that they planted evidence to frame Mr Thomas.

Mr Broad said he was considering Rochelle Crewe's request, but Prime Minister John Key said an independent Government inquiry was unlikely.

Labour leader Phil Goff said the Government owed it to Rochelle Crewe to look at the evidence with a fresh pair of eyes.

Mrs Harrison told Mr Power an independent inquiry was the only way to solve the case as the police were reluctant to reinvestigate the Crewe murders "given the level of corruption involved in the prosecution of my former husband".