The Commissioner of Police responds to Ross Muerant.

In what might be a first Police Commissioner has replied by the way of an open letter to former MP and Police Officer Ross Muerant, taking issue with an article published in North and South in which Ross Muerant commented about police 'culture' as destructive.

Quite quickly in the letter Commissioner Marshall seeks to reject Muerant's call for the Thomas case to be re-opened, he says that Muerant should know that unsolved murders always remain open. Good point, if but self-serving. Marshall has refused to act on a 'submission' by Chris Birt that seeks Norma Demler be questioned and investigated as to her alleged sighting on the Crewe farm after the murders and before the police were called, and additionally on her claims as to when she arrived in the district, later marrying the slain Jeanette Crewe's father Len, and taking a role in the administration of the dead couple estate. Peter Marshall reported to Chris that Norma denied the claims and that he was not going to take it further.

Commissioner Marshall makes some general comments about what Muerant didn't achieve in his police career, which I expect is meant to give greater weight as to what the Commissioner says as compared to the former officer. It might surprise the Commissioner to learn that people judge an argument or information on its merits not by comparing the length of service in the police of two opposing proponents.

He says that little can be gained by 'dancing on the graves' of former senior Police and calls the interest in why a previous Commissioner Bob Walton, ordered his staff not to interview (effectively investigate) Norma Demler despite the sighting of her on the dead couple farms, 'an untimely attack.' Actually, I didn't see it as an attack at all, I see it clearly as in the public interest. I note a common characteristic when people have a miscarriage of justice lumped on them, as the late Vivian Harrison did, and as the Crewe's daughter Rochelle has, those that have failed to act are defended while the victims continue to be ignored.

I'm sure Peter Marshall knows that it is on Police files that Walton ordered that Norma Demler not be investigated. What is untimely is that she remains un-investigated under successive Commissioners, including now, Peter Marshall. It's clear that Marshall doesn't like what Muerant admits, it is also clear that Muerant is factual and his intention is not to dishonour anybody because he has been remarkably candid in admitting what he himself did in the police and which was overlooked or seen as part of the culture. Peter in using time as a 'cure all' neglects to note that the Thomas case is of another time and fails to realise that is one of the disturbing factors by those intimately injured by the events is that time is being used against them. That somewhere the thought is harboured that the sooner they are all dead and silent the case will die from memory - when of course it will not, and part of what is driving that is that is the awareness that time is being used as a weapon against truth.

Peter has within his power the right, the duty, to open this case again, to open the files and present them for anyone who should so apply under the Official Information Act. The fact that Peter refers to his case as historical is good reason that it should be opened for analysis, not continued to be closed down and every word released like a painful tooth extraction. Open the books, what harm can be done more than an innocent man spending a decade in prison, his ex wife going to her grave never being apologised to for being 'accused' as an accomplice after the fact to murder, and for a child, now a woman, who has appealed that the deaths of her parents be properly investigated.

In closing I note, that the Commissioner and others often refer to the amount of time spent on the Crewe case, what they fail to note is that by far the majority of that time was in defence of a corrupt investigation.