Mercy Killing

The Case of Dr Maurice Benn

In the quiet Perth suburb of Nedlands in 1964, an extraordinarily tragic murder case gripped the country and the accused was the most unlikely of killers.

Dr Maurice Bernard Benn was one of Australia’s most eminent German scholars and the head of the University of Western Australia’s German department.

Scottish-born Dr Benn, 49, lived in Nedlands with his wife Irene, 36, and their four-year-old son Bernard. The couple had met and married in West Germany where Benn was on a study tour after World War II.

The couple were loving parents to their only child; however, as little Bernard grew it became apparent that his development was delayed. Bernard had an intellectual disability and his behaviour caused a huge strain on the Benns.

Despite the hours Dr Benn spent with his son each day, desperately trying to improve his cognitive abilities, little Bernard would stare blankly back at his father.

A talented pianist, Dr Benn would play music to his son hoping it would stimulate his senses. But the little boy could only sway from one foot to the other, rubbing his hand on his forehead and making sounds that could not be deciphered by the couple.

On the evening of 8 February 1964, Mrs Benn was in the shower when she heard a strange noise. She called out to her husband but there was no reply. Mrs Benn got out of the shower, put on a bathrobe and went to investigate. ‘Maurice?!’ she called loudly again.

Mrs Benn described that she walked out of the bathroom and found her husband looking ‘mad’ and as if he was in a trance. He was standing between the bathroom and their son’s bedroom.

‘I have shot Bernard,’ Dr Benn blankly told his wife.

Benn had killed Bernard by pointing a rifle at his head while he slept in his cot. The boy died soon after at the Princess Margaret Hospital for Children. Benn was charged with wilful murder, to which he pleaded not guilty.

Facing a jury trial – eight men and four women – in April 1964, Benn recounted the reasons why he had decided to kill his own child. He said he had felt an overwhelming fear about the future for his son – that he would need to be institutionalised. Benn also said he was worried about his wife’s state of mind and health. The stress and strain of caring for their son was putting her at risk of a nervous breakdown.

‘I felt my wife would not last much longer under the conditions she had been exposed to for the last two years,’ Benn said. ‘I felt she may become insane or commit suicide.’

Benn told the court he could not envisage a good life for his son.

‘I knew he’d never be normal, knew he was rapidly becoming uncontrollable,’ Benn said.

‘I knew killing the boy was at least a possibility, considering that he would have to spend his life in an institution, at first in an institution for retarded children, then later in an asylum.

‘I remember pointing the rifle at the boy’s temple,’ he said. ‘Then I remember the shot and I saw blood coming from the boy’s temple.’

Benn’s lawyer, Mr K W Hatfield, QC, told the court that Benn’s son was more than just a slow learner. The child was described by Mr Hatfield as having the attributes of a ‘wild animal’ and ran around with his tongue sticking out, ate with his hands, could not speak and did not have any real emotional or cognitive connection to his parents.

The stakes were at their highest for Benn – he was facing the death penalty. His defence suggested that something happened to Benn on the night of the killing – a traumatic, stressful event that caused him to undertake an extreme act. Mr Justice Hale disregarded the defence’s attempt to have Benn found insane, and therefore not responsible for his actions.

‘There is not any evidence at all that the accused ever had mental disease or that he ever suffered any natural infirmity of any kind,’ Justice Hale said.

Just months before, Mr Hatfield had defended serial killer Eric Edgar Cooke, who had terrorised Perth’s suburbs with his random shootings of five people on Australia Day, 1963. Three of the victims died and just weeks later he strangled a social worker to death. In August 1963, Cooke also shot dead a teenage babysitter and he was arrested when he tried to recover a rifle he had hidden in bushes in a suburban street.

Cooke was sentenced to death and hanged on 26 October 1964. In addition, it was revealed years later (by the tenacious work of journalist Estelle Blackburn) that Cooke was actually also responsible for murders that two other men had been jailed for. The extraordinary story was told in Blackburn’s award-winning book Broken Lives.

Benn was sentenced to the same fate as Cooke – death. (In fact, Benn would spend time with Cooke in the condemned section of Fremantle Prison.) Newspapers reported that Benn received his sentence calmly but his wife began sobbing and was comforted by female friends who had attended the trial to provide her with support.

In an exclusive post-verdict interview with the Sun Herald, Mrs Benn said, ‘Yes, Maurice did it because of his love for our boy and his love for me.’

She added, ‘When Maurice did it he was terrified and helpless with the problem of our boy, Bernard, and his future. Maurice is no murderer. He is no criminal.’

Mrs Benn recounted what a loving and devoted father Benn was to their son, who could not speak. She said her husband would take Bernard to the zoo and bought a wading pool for their backyard where father and son would paddle together on hot days.

Benn’s case highlighted the issue of the treatment of people with disabilities and the lack of community facilities. In a startling Sun Herald editorial entitled ‘Why parents kill retarded babies’ the mother of a teenage ‘sub-normal’ boy wrote that top administrators of Australian state health departments should be placed on trial, rather than desperate parents like Benn.

Mrs R V McCulloch, who was also the secretary and supervisor of The Handicapped Children’s Centre in Sutherland, NSW, said in the 8 April edition of the paper: ‘In 1964, when men are conquering space, there is no available residential care awaiting families who have been brought to the point of desperation trying to live with a mentally retarded child who is beyond control … this is why they shoot them.’

There had been some other high profile cases of children with a disability being killed by a family member. In 1952, a Sydney woman Laska Grace Savage was sent to trial for the murder of her newborn niece who was born with Down syndrome. Ms Savage had taken the baby girl from her sister, under the pretext of finding the eight-day-old baby a home and had killed the child.

She had the baby christened and then took the child to Sydney’s Central Railway Station, gave her two sleeping tablets and strangled her with some clothing.

Horrifyingly, Ms Savage had then dismembered the baby and disposed of the body in a public toilet. Ms Savage, who looked on her 19-year-old sister as more of a daughter, according to newspaper reports, told a police detective during interview, ‘I thought I was doing the right thing for my sister but I realise I have got myself into serious trouble.’

‘I don’t suppose a more tragic case has ever come before the court,’ Ms Savage’s lawyer said at her remand hearing.

The concept of ‘mercy killings’ were not acknowledged in Australian law at that time but Ms Savage’s lawyer told the court that if it was able to be applied to a murder then his client ‘acted with the highest and purest motive to save her sister whom she loves very much’.

It took the jury just 10 minutes of deliberation to find Ms Savage not guilty of the murder of her ‘imbecile’ baby niece. After the acquittal she told reporters at her Bondi home that she wanted to start a new life in Queensland after her ordeal.

‘I know I am free and it is a wonderful feeling, but it isn’t easy to wipe out the horror and ugliness that has gone before. I have black moments, when I feel all crunched up inside and I think of that awful day, but I know, as time goes on I won’t get so upset,’ Ms Savage said in March 1953. Her words made newspapers around the country.

In frankness that would be almost unheard of today, Ms Savage also said, ‘Some people might think I am not fit to look after babies after what has happened, but I love kiddies.’

Benn’s sentence was commuted to 10 years just a few weeks after the initial verdict. The university assured Dr Benn that he would be offered a teaching or research post as soon as he was released from prison. His plight attracted worldwide attention and lobbying from his university colleagues from around Australia for the Western Australian State Government to pardon Dr Benn.

It was revealed in newspapers that the jurors in the trial had been confused about court proceedings. According to reports, they thought a recommendation for mercy from the judge had to be unanimous and many of them were stunned at the outcome of their guilty verdict.

Mrs Benn visited her husband whenever she was allowed – usually every fortnight – and she was gravely concerned about her husband’s mental state. She wrote to the state premier David Brand to seek her husband’s early release. By 1968 the parole board had recommended that Dr Benn be released but the state government delayed their decision.

Benn worked as a librarian during his time at Karnet Rehabilitation Centre (now known as Karnet Prison Farm), where he was moved after 12 months at Fremantle Prison. The jail was on a par with Melbourne’s notorious Pentridge for its Dickensian conditions (Fremantle Prison was closed in 1991 and is now a world-heritage-listed site). Benn continued his academic work while incarcerated and had the use of the administration office so that he could write in peace and quiet.

Mrs Benn had been given a part-time role as a German language tutor by the university, which was working hard to have Benn freed and returned to his work.

As soon as he was released on parole in December 1968, Benn was appointed as a senior research fellow and he embarked on 12 months’ study leave in Europe.

In his widely read Sydney Morning Herald opinion column ‘Candid Comment’, R T Foster wrote of Benn on 8 December 1968:

This was a mercy killing with a difference. It was not to end an existence made intolerable by pain that Benn shot the little boy. He did so to spare the child and his mother from a cruel future. It was a grim and agonising deed wholly unjustified in any eyes of the law but condoned by many people in the west, including Dr Benn’s friends and the university … pressure for a pardon began almost at once and has continued ever since. But the Brand Government could not view the killing so leniently, possibly opening the door to other mercy slayings. It is acting humanely in freeing Benn after 4½ years.

Benn died suddenly in 1975, aged 60. His wife Irene was widowed before she was even 50.

His academic peers and students remembered Benn fondly, and with great admiration. Head of the university’s German department, Professor J H Lindsay told newspapers that Benn was ‘an extremely gifted linguist who believed that a cultivated person needed four or five languages other than their own’.

There have been other equally tragic cases that have ended up in Australian courts.

In 2007, Sydney couple Raymond and Margaret Sutton were placed on a five-year good-behaviour bond after pleading guilty to the manslaughter of their severely disabled adult son Matthew.

Matthew, 28, died in 2001, the day before he was due to have an operation that would leave him virtually deaf. Matthew was born with Trisomy 13 Syndrome – a condition that usually kills babies within their first year of life. Matthew was born with no eyes and had a profound intellectual disability.

The Suttons, who had dedicated their lives to improving their son’s quality of life, had felt deep guilt at not being able to protect their son from harm done to him by others in the group home where he lived. Matthew had also become violent as a response to coping with the behaviour of his housemates. The Suttons became very involved in the home and helped to interview staff and establish standards for the government-run facility. The couple tried their best to give their son the best life he could have.

The couple could not face the trauma and confusion their son would feel at losing his hearing and decided to ‘release him from any more pain and suffering’. On the night he died, Mrs Sutton gave ‘Matti’ some sedatives and her husband ended their son’s life.

Devoted parents to their boy, the couple had been seriously affected by the strain of making their son’s life comfortable and safe. Mr Sutton had turned to alcohol to cope and Mrs Sutton had suffered from depression and anxiety for almost all of Matthew’s life.

NSW Supreme Court judge Justice Graham Barr said it would be ‘cruel’ to send the pair to jail and their actions had resulted from desperation.

‘Nothing that the court could do by way of sentence could add to the offenders’ suffering,’ the judge said.

Another high-profile case was that of Daniela Dawes, who killed her 10-year-old autistic son Jason in 2003. Dawes held her son’s nose and mouth closed until he suffocated and then tried to end her own life by slashing her wrists. She almost died too. Jason was severely autistic and the family battled to get him adequate services. The family were told that he would need 20 hours a week of early intervention but they could only secure three hours until he was aged six, when they received more appropriate support. The lack of early intervention services from when he was diagnosed at 18 months was disastrous for Jason and the family were told his progress had been jeopardised by the delay. Dawes’ experience battling for services and respite was not uncommon for families with a child on the autism spectrum. She also had another child, a daughter, who was a teenager at the time of Jason’s death.

Dawes, who also suffered from severe depression, pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was placed on a five-year good-behaviour bond. An appeal by the Crown against the leniency of her sentence was dismissed in November 2004.

In 2012, the Australian Labor Federal Government announced the rollout of DisabilityCare Australia – a national insurance scheme to assist people with permanent and significant disability, their families and carers. It is the most significant social scheme since the nation’s publically funded health system Medicare was introduced in 1975.

For the Benns and others like them, the lack of support for people with disabilities and their families has had tragic consequences.