CHAPTER 7

THE MAD SCIENTIST

On Tuesday, 13 September 1983, a sewage treatment worker spotted the severed right middle finger of a woman’s hand in effluent at Tasmania’s Macquarie Point Sewage Plant. At 9.45 a.m. that day, Dr Rory Jack Thompson had reported that his estranged wife Maureen was missing from her home in West Hobart.

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The Thompsons had moved to Australia from the United States in 1974. They lived in Perth and Sydney before settling in Hobart in January 1983. Maureen, 37, looked after their two children – three-year-old Rafi and seven-year-old Melody – while her 41-year-old husband, a specialist theoretical oceanographer, worked with the Tasmanian CSIRO.

Despite a happy start, the marriage soon deteriorated. Thompson beat his wife savagely in front of the children. In fear for her life, Maureen moved out of the family home a couple of months before Thompson reported her missing. With the assistance of state welfare, she moved into a house in West Hobart to begin a new life.

As Maureen was broke with no access to her husband’s income, welfare organised a supporting parent’s benefit, and she took a part-time teaching job. She took out a restraining order against her husband. The situation mellowed. The couple began talking again. Maureen even allowed Thompson to take the children for one day and night per week. But the pain of losing his children slowly grew inside him.

After the finding of the severed finger, authorities visited Maureen’s home the following day and found bloodstains on the hallway wall and pieces of human tissue in the bathroom. There was a large bloodstain by the bed. When told that his wife may have been murdered, and that the severed finger found in sewage could belong to her, Thompson appeared uninterested. He said that on the night police alleged Maureen had been killed, he had been in Kingston, and arrived home at about 9 p.m. He put the children to bed and went to bed himself at about 10.15 p.m. and woke the next day around 7 a.m.

Three days later, Thompson went to the Criminal Investigation Branch and asked for his car, which police had taken for testing. He said he wanted to take his children camping. Police told him they hadn’t completed their tests and alerted detectives to Thompson’s intentions. They had good reason to worry. The previous day Thompson had told Detective Inspector Ernest Roffe and Detective Sergeant Richard McCreadie that the ‘good Rory’ would not have killed his wife but the ‘bad Rory’ was still dominant. He also told investigators that he was concerned the ‘bad Rory’ could have been involved in his wife’s death.

Roffe believed Thompson could be contemplating murdering his children and committing suicide. A close watch was kept on his home. The following night Rafi and Melody were taken away by uniformed police and placed in the care of the social welfare department. The next day Thompson broke down and confessed to his wife’s murder and took police to her bush grave. The sewer pipes at the Hill Street house unearthed 83 pieces of her body. Maureen Thompson had been cut into pieces and flushed down her toilet.

Thompson told police that at 10.30 p.m. on Saturday, 10 September 1983, he wore a long wig that covered his face, a scarf and mascara. He dressed in paint-splattered overalls covered by a thick wraparound skirt. In his carry bag he put the leg of a chair, rubber and cloth gardening gloves, a plumber’s drain-clearing plunger, a meat cleaver, two knives, an oxyacetylene torch kit, two hacksaws with three spare blades and a garrotte made of orange rope. He then drove to his wife’s house and waited in the garden until she went to bed.

Thompson said his initial plan was to garrotte his wife but Maureen woke up after he pulled the quilt from her face. He struck her twice over the head with the chair leg, which he then dropped. Maureen picked it up and hit him over the head with it. She started to scream. Thompson then grabbed his wife by the throat and throttled her to death saying, 'Maureen, I’m sorry it had to happen this way.’

Thompson dragged his wife’s body to the bath and using a meat cleaver and hacksaw, he cut her into small pieces and sat there for several hours flushing them down the toilet, until it became clogged. Finally, he burned what was left of her and bundled the charred remains in towels and into a garbage bag and buried them and his bloodstained clothing in a hole he had dug at Lenah Valley earlier in the year.

At his trial, on 23 February 1984, Thompson pleaded not guilty. He said he wanted to plead for mercy – and told the jury they had the power to acquit him. Thompson said he would never do anything ‘like that again’ and asked to be released so he could go back to his marine research where he could do more good for society than he could in jail.

He told the court that in the 12 months before the break-up he had planned to murder his wife. He had decided to bury her alive in the backyard. He even tried to dig a hole, but his small shovel was useless on the hard ground. Still, he carried a length of rope with him at all times – in case he got a chance to garrotte her. Thompson told the court that as he had been planning to dispose of his wife down the toilet he had practised chopping up a side of lamb and some soup bones to see if they would flush.

Eventually, Mr Justice Everett instructed that Thompson be dealt with as a mentally disordered person, and ordered him to be incarcerated in the hospital section of the overcrowded Risdon Prison until a decision on what to do with him was made. In June 1984, the Tasmanian Attorney-General declared that Thompson’s period of detention at Risdon would be indefinite, and that he could only be released by the governor when the governor was satisfied, on advice, that detention was no longer required for the public’s protection.

In 1990, the Mental Health Review Tribunal recommended that Thompson be released to an appropriate mental institution, but it was overruled. He stayed at Risdon. By this time Thompson had changed his name to Jack Newman by deed poll, and written a book titled Mad Scientist. He also kept in touch with the outside world and continued to conduct research.

Thompson published more than 50 scientific papers, and patents for a 3D television system and a solar oven were pending. But apart from his academic achievements in jail, Thompson found another love – gardening. The gardens became the pride of Risdon, and Thompson was encouraged to indulge his passion. Soon he was spending most of his time outdoors, alone in the fresh Tasmanian air with his beloved plants.

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In July 1999 – with his freedom guaranteed in November – Thompson was working in the gardens outside Risdon prison when he casually walked away, caught a bus into central Hobart, withdrew money from an ATM and flew to Melbourne, where he was arrested. Thompson wasn’t given a sentence for the escape, but he was made to spend time in solitary confinement away from his beloved research books and garden. On 17 September 1999, he was found hanged by his shoelaces in his cell.