On February 19, 1951, Lee, a young mother from Dubbo, became the first woman in 56 years to be hanged in Victoria, and the last in Australia’s history.
Records about her case and execution at Pentridge Prison were made public by the Public Record Office of Victoria for the first time this week, after remaining sealed for 75 years.
The documents, which span more than 500 pages and have been examined by this masthead, include photographs, letters, newspaper clippings, wills, and court records relating to the case.
They expose instances where the evidence was potentially compromised and legal discussions behind closed doors about whether a police statement should have been admitted.
The records also highlight lingering doubts about Lee’s role in the murder, and controversial interrogation techniques by detectives at the time, who questioned the trio without giving them a caution and shared Clayton’s statement with Lee and Andrews to elicit a confession.
‘And they call women the weaker sex’
Inside an interrogation room at the old police headquarters on Russell Street on November 8, 1949, Lee remained staunch she would not answer questions.
Police had been trying to get a confession for hours after arresting the trio as they were returning to their hotel on Spencer Street that morning.
Lee and Clayton, who had extensive criminal records spanning more than 32 offences between them, had come to Melbourne from Sydney a few weeks earlier. They met Andrews, Clayton’s buddy, at the Werribee races and became inseparable.
Hanging her head, Jean Lee is led into the Melbourne Court. Credit: Fairfax Media
“I am not saying anything,” Lee told detectives over and over again.
Then, a break came in the interview room next door.
“Are you fair dinkum when you say that the chap is dead?” Clayton asked detectives. “If what you say is right, I will tell you all I know. I am not going to take the rap for what others do.”
Clayton said the group had headed to Carlton so that a cash-strapped Andrews could pawn his suit, and ended up drinking at the University Hotel in the afternoon.
There, Lee struck up a conversation with Kent. After the pub closed, the bookmaker invited them to his place.
Later that evening, Lee told Clayton that Kent had money stashed in his fob pocket, but that his belly “was too tight”. If she could not get it “the sweet way”, they would “do him over”.
Clayton told police: “When I left the room, Norman and Jean were still with Pop. I am completely innocent of any attack made on this old man.”
The officers marched into Lee’s interrogation room and showed her Clayton’s statement. Lee, who had been adamant her lover would not talk, asked the detectives to bring him over.
“So you made a four-page statement did you?” she asked Clayton.
Clayton replied he had, and broke down in tears.
“And they call women the weaker sex,” Lee snapped.
After Clayton was removed, Lee turned to the detectives and confessed.
“I love Bobby and I still love him, but if he wants it that way he can have it,” she said.
Lee said she had lost her temper and hit Kent in the head with a bottle and a piece of wood before tying his arms with a piece of sheet. “I knew he was dead when we left him.”
Asked by police what she meant by “we”, she hesitated.
“There was only me,” she said.
Her confession would be a miscalculation.
When Lee was found guilty, no woman had been hanged in Victoria for more than half a century.
Lee’s case file shows an anti-capital punishment movement was brewing. Advocates wrote to authorities asking for the trio to be spared the death penalty, which one described as “murder by rope”. One man even expressed plans to raise donations to fund the trio’s appeal.
After the execution, people wrote to newspapers condemning the decision, and called for capital punishment to be abolished. “This latest execution was a very sordid thing for a civilised country belonging to the dark ages,” one letter read.
Reporting by The Argus newspaper at the time suggests the decision by the state cabinet to stand by the execution had “sensational political implications”, with Labor and some Liberals opposed to Lee’s hanging.
By taking the blame for Kent’s murder, Lee perhaps erroneously assumed that she would be spared the death penalty and save Clayton and Andrews in the process.
Forensic evidence presented during the trial showed Kent’s killer would have needed to use considerable force to strangle him, which police admitted that Lee – with “her little hands” – was unlikely to have. The judge even told the jury that Lee’s confession was obviously concocted and that nobody “in his senses would believe that”.
Lee tried to walk back on her confession, telling the jury that she was “hysterical” after reading Clayton’s statement and admitted to the killing to get some “peace and quiet”. Clayton also told the court his statement was concocted, and he did not think it would throw Lee and Andrews under the bus because they were all innocent.
In the witness box, Lee, Clayton and Andrews claimed Kent had been in good health when they left his home at 7pm. Blood stains on their clothes and wounds to their hands had alternative explanations, they claimed.
Attempts by the defence to get the statement and Lee’s confession’s thrown out on the basis they had been improperly obtained failed, despite the trial judge conceding evidence had been obtained in an “undesirable way”.
The trial was also marred by other issues that would be unacceptable in today’s justice system, including the fact that the evidence of two key witnesses in the case – a man and a woman living with Kent at the time of the murder that placed the trio in the home – was potentially contaminated by allowing them to talk to one another and change their version of events.
Lee, Clayton and Andrews appealed against their conviction and were granted a retrial. After the win, Lee and Clayton hugged and kissed in the dock.
However, the Crown later appealed against the ruling and got the death penalty reinstated. Subsequent attempts by the trio to appeal against the High Court decision in the Privy Council in England failed.
The final Hail Mary
One minute after 8am on a drizzly February morning in 1951, Lee was hanged from the first floor of a corridor at Pentridge prison.
An ingenious scheme by Clayton to bribe prison guards to allow him to spend half an hour with his lover so they could claim Lee was pregnant and save her from the gallows failed.
Police cordoned off the roads leading to the side entrance to the prison, while about 30 officers remained stationed inside its walls, ready to jump at any sign of a disturbance. A handful of people gathered outside.
Seven journalists were invited to witness the executions by Victorian authorities who believed the publicity would deter potential murderers. “A criminal will respect the rope where he yawns at a gaol term,” the since-defunct newspaper Truth wrote at the time of the execution.
A seemingly unconscious Lee, who had been given a sedative the night before to help her sleep, had to be carried from her cell to the gallows by the executioner and his assistant, who had their faces obscured by large steel-rimmed goggles and felt hats.
Lee’s limp body was sat on a chair placed atop the trapdoor. Her head and shoulders were covered by a white hood. Her hands and ankles were bound.
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Then, the door opened and Lee plunged to her death behind a brown curtain.
Bells tolled to mark the execution, but the sound was drowned out by the roar of planes passing overhead.
Clayton and Andrews were hanged together two hours later. They exchanged one final farewell above the trap door. “Goodbye Charlie,” Clayton said. “Goodbye Robert,” Andrews replied.
That afternoon, they were buried in sodden graves that had been dug by fellow prisoners.
As a 1950 assessment of the trio put it: “It is doubtful they would cold-bloodedly plan a murder and go through to it, but in this case, they saw a heaven-sent opportunity to replenish their empty pockets by robbing a sucker.”
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