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The Last Woman to Hang

While Jean Lee will always be remembered as the last woman to be hanged in Australia, it must also be remembered that she was a cold-blooded killer who paid for her crime with the maximum penalty of the time.

Unlike Ronald Ryan, the last man to be hanged in Australia, who went to the gallows in 1967, it seemed Jean Lee had indeed committed murder – there was no doubt that they would be hanging the right person.

As a young woman, Jean Lee left her husband during the war and became one of the many prostitutes who catered for the massive numbers of British, American and Australian troops who crowded into Sydney during the conflict.

Lee teamed up with a thug named Robert Clayton, and together they robbed servicemen. Clayton would burst into the room while Lee and a client were in a compromising situation. Clayton would claim that the young woman was his wife, and if the soldier didn’t hand over all his money he would be severely beaten.

They successfully worked the scam for six years, until the war was over. When the police got wise to what was going on they moved to Victoria to find fresh customers. In Melbourne they met the smooth-talking Norman Andrews, who found them new clients and often acted as Lee’s outraged husband or brother who burst in on the scene.

Things were running along smoothly until the night of 7 November 1949, when the trio met up with another intended victim, 73-year-old William Kent, or ‘Old Bill’, as he was known. Kent was a regular drinker at the University Hotel at Carlton, where he first met Jean Lee, Clayton and Andrews. An SP bookie and apartment housekeeper, Kent wasn’t short of a quid and always produced a roll of notes when paying for a drink.

When the University Hotel closed at 6 pm that night, the four headed back to Kent’s lodgings at nearby Dorritt Street. Clayton and Andrews declined Kent’s offer of a drink but Jean Lee joined him in a beer. Although Kent was drunk, he became suspicious when Lee lured him into the bedroom and tried to remove his trousers while the two other men were still in the other room.

When Kent resisted her advances, Lee lashed out at him with an empty beer bottle and broke it across his head. Then she broke a chair across his back and assaulted him with one of the legs, battering him until he lay unconscious. She then tore up one of the sheets on the bed and tied the old man up with it.

Andrews and Clayton came into the room and emptied Kent’s pockets of the roll of notes they had seen him with at the hotel. Then they ransacked the apartment looking for more. Kent had by now had regained consciousness, and was watching them. When they couldn’t find anything the three of them turned on the defenceless man, in an effort to get him to reveal where more money was. Finding none, they left their victim and fled.

Having heard the noise, neighbours investigated. They found William Kent’s body and called the police, but it was too late. An autopsy revealed that the old man had been battered, kicked, stabbed and tortured before he eventually died from suffocation.

It didn’t take police long. They picked up the murderous trio as they spent their spoils in a nearby hotel, where they lived. They all denied the murder, blaming each other.

On 25 March 1950, Lee, Clayton and Andrews were all sentenced to death by hanging. As the foreman announced the verdict, Lee collapsed in the dock, screaming, ‘I didn’t do it! I didn’t do it!’ But there was no doubt that Jean Lee had indeed committed murder and, given the horrendous nature of the crime and Lee’s major role in it, the maximum penalty would be exacted.

But she refused to believe they would hang a woman. A hearing before the Criminal Court of Appeal two months later agreed to a retrial, but the reprieve was short-lived – the Australian High Court reversed the decision. Other appeals also failed, as did pleas for mercy from human rights organisations that claimed it was inhumane to hang a woman. But it was useless. Jean Lee would hang as her co-offenders already had.

A huge gathering of protesters waved placards and sang hymns at 8 o’clock on the morning of 19 February 1951, as Jean Lee, steadfast in her belief that the Victorian government would not hang a woman, fell through the gallows trapdoor to her death – and into the history books.