Detectives visit Pukekawa again

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32676, 4 August 1971, Page 18

Detectives visit Pukekawa again

(New Zealand Press Association) AUCKLAND, August 3. Detectives today again visited the Pukekawa area in their investigations into reports that Crown witnesses in the Crewe murder trial are being harassed.

The officer who was in 1 charge of the investigation 1 into the murder last year of ( Mr and Mrs David Harvey i Crewe at Pukekawa, Detec- ( tive Inspector B. T. N. Hut-. ton, said on Monday that a i number of Crown witnesses of the trial had told the ] police they were being har- i assed. i Mr Hutton has said the '

police would not stand by and see the witnesses and their families embarrassed. An unsigned, typewritten statement delivered to the “New Zealand Herald” today said that the committee formed to press for a retrial for Arthur Allan Thomas, a Pukekawa farmer, aged 33, who was found guilty of the murder of Mr and Mrs Crewe by a Supreme Court jury in March and was sentenced to life imprisonment, took exception to Mr Hut-

ton’s statements about the harassment of witnesses. The statement said: “This committee denies any harassment of any person—prosecution witness or otherwise —but we will also not be intimidated.” The statement called on Mr Hutton to name the witnesses he had said were being harassed and the people doing the harassing.

Mr Hutton said on Monday that people were parking in vehicles outside or near the properties and houses of Crown witnesses, and in one case, had followed the wife of a witness to and from her home when she went shoping. The statement today said: ’•The roads in the (Pukekawa) area are public roads and neither Mr Hutton nor anyone else can restrict the movements on these roads.” Mr Hutton today refused to comment on the statement but it is known the police are closely studying a section of the Police Offences Act which deals with besetting people’s houses.

One sub-section of the part dealing with besetting says that it is an offence for anyone td follow a person about from place to place with the intention of intimidating a person performing a lawful act Another sub-section says ft is an offence to watch or beset with similar intention the house or other place where a person resides or carries on business, works or happens to be, or the approach to such house or place.