12

The Mad Scientist

On Tuesday, 13 September 1983, a sewerage treatment worker spotted something unusual on top of the crust of effluent at Tasmania’s Macquarie Point Sewerage Plant. The object looked like a human finger. The man rang the police. The discovery turned out to be the severed right middle finger of a human hand – a woman’s hand. Police didn’t have to look hard to find its owner. At 9.45 am on the same day of the grisly find, Dr Rory Jack Thompson, renowned scientist and chief research officer with the Hobart CSIRO, had reported his estranged wife, Maureen, missing from her Hill Street home in West Hobart.

As it turned out the Thompsons had been going through a bitter custody battle over their two children, 3-year-old Rafi and his 7-year-old sister Melody, who were living with their mother after she had moved out of the family home. Mr Thompson was trying to get legal custody of the children. Early that year Maureen Thompson had left her husband and taken out a restraining order against him. She told a committee campaigning against domestic violence that she had lived a life of intimidation with a man who flew into violent rages for no reason and regularly beat her in front of the children.

Mr Thompson became the only suspect in his wife’s disappearance. Police called in leading pathologist Dr Royal Cummings, who collected the finger from the treatment works and visited the missing woman’s home the following day. There, he found bloodstains splattered on the hallway wall and pieces of human tissue in the bathroom. There was a large bloodstain by the bed.

Thompson told police that he had not seen his wife since noon the previous Saturday when he had collected his children to stay with him for the night as they did each week. He said he had returned to his wife’s home later that day and there was a note on the door saying that she would see her children the following day at 3 pm. Thompson claimed that he had returned the following day as arranged to return the children and there was no one at home.

A witness told police that Thompson had told her that Melody had gained access to her mother’s house on the Monday to get fresh clothes and that Thompson had told her (the witness) that he wished that his daughter had not gone into his wife’s home ‘in case she may have seen something’.

When told that his wife could have been murdered and that the finger may belong to her, Thompson appeared uninterested and denied having anything to do with her disappearance and possible death. He told police that he hadn’t loved his wife since the marriage broke up in January that year and she had left him and taken their two children. He said that on the Saturday night that police alleged that his wife had been killed he had been in Kingston and arrived home at about 9 pm. He put the children to bed and he went to bed at about 10.15 pm, awaking the next day at about 7 am.

Three days later, Thompson came to the CIB office at about 5 pm and asked for his car, which police had taken charge of for scientific testing, to be returned. Thompson said he intended taking his children camping in the bush. Police told him that testing had not been completed and immediately alerted detectives of Thompson’s intentions.

Thompson’s request to get his car back was made on the day after he had told Detective Inspector Ernest Roffe and Detective Sergeant Richard McCreadie that the ‘good Rory’ would not have done such a thing to his wife but the ‘bad Rory’ was still dominant and when he was bad he was very, very bad. Thompson told the investigators that he was concerned that the ‘bad Rory’ could have been involved in his wife’s death and may have cut her head off because he could not stand her looking at him while she was bleeding.

Detective Inspector Roffe was convinced that Thompson had murdered his wife but he didn’t have enough evidence to arrest him. Roffe’s suspicions were that he was dealing with a killer who had attempted to conceal his crime but now had realised that he had slipped up and would be caught. Roffe believed that now Thompson could be contemplating the most evil of all ways out: committing suicide and taking his children with him.

Detective Inspector Roffe’s immediate fear was for the safety of the youngsters. A close watch was kept on the Thompson’s New Town home and the following night Rafi and Melody were whisked away by uniformed police while all their father could do was watch in horror. After a hearing before a specially convened late-night sitting of the Children’s Court, the children were placed in the care of the Social Welfare Department. It was the turning point in the investigation.

Under intense questioning the following day Dr Thompson broke down and confessed to his wife’s murder and took police to a bush grave that contained what was left of her. The next day the sewer pipes in the backyard of the Hill Street house were unearthed and cracked open. Among the filth and stench investigators found another 83 pieces of human body parts and tissue. It seemed as though Dr Thompson had murdered his wife, cut her into little pieces and literally flushed her down the toilet.

American-born husband and wife, schoolteacher Maureen, 37, and scientist Dr Rory Jack Thompson, 41, had arrived in Australia from the United States in 1974. After living in Perth and Sydney they eventually settled in Hobart in January 1983. Maureen Thompson looked after the children while her husband, a specialist theoretical oceanographer, took up an appointment with the Tasmanian CSIRO.

In an unusual prenuptial agreement, when they married Rory and Maureen Thompson had signed statutory declarations in which Maureen had promised her husband custody of any children should their marriage break up. It is believed that Dr Thompson had been previously married and divorced in the United States and when he moved to Australia he had left a child behind and felt an enormous ongoing guilt. The declaration also detailed a bizarre living arrangement in which Thompson would pay his wife a child-minding fee for looking after any children and in return she would pay him for food and lodgings in his house.

Initially the marriage was happy but it rapidly deteriorated. Thompson became increasingly moody and demanding and beat his wife regularly. Maureen Thompson took many savage beltings – often in front of the children – but stayed because she didn’t want to bring them up without a father. But when the attacks became increasingly violent to the point where she feared for her life, she had to accept the fact that her marriage had broken down. She would have to get away before she was killed. A couple of months before she was murdered, Maureen Thompson moved out of the family home.

Maureen Thompson’s predicament is best explained in a letter she sent in mid-1982 to the Domestic Violence Review, a study conducted by the Tasmanian Department of Community Welfare. In it she told of her plight and the shocking circumstances into which the marriage had deteriorated due to her husband’s unpredictable attacks in which he lost his temper.

‘He would intimidate me by yelling at me in public. But the hitting and kicking was usually done at home,’ she wrote. ‘Once, over a discussion of a tennis match on television, he yelled at me, “How would you like to be kicked in the stomach?”. Usually he would lose his temper and grab me at the base of my neck and begin shaking me while pushing me backwards and haranguing me loudly. I would be petrified and go numb. He would accuse me of provoking him, of not backing down, and many times I didn’t know what the argument was about.’

In early 1982, at Maureen Thompson’s instigation, she and her husband went to a counsellor to try and change his behaviour and save their marriage for the sake of the children. ‘I hated being intimidated in my home, but if we tried to talk on our own he would lose his temper,’ she said.

After ten marriage counselling sessions the couple made a behavioural contract in which Thompson promised to stop hitting and yelling at his wife. ‘It lasted a few months but by last October he was becoming more violent than ever and attacking me in front of the children as many as three times in one week,’ Mrs Thompson said in the letter. ‘Once he ran up behind me and hit me with his fist in the middle of my upper back. Once he punched me in the kidney area of my back while I was combing my daughter’s hair to get her ready for school. And once he began hitting me and pushing me down the hallway – and I ran to our bedroom for safety and locked the door. I averted many attacks by disappearing under the house in the storage or laundry area; two times I hid in the car in the garage until after midnight.’

Mrs Thompson said that towards the end of October 1982, the couple was living in Sydney and the attacks were happening more frequently. The children were becoming more and more distraught by the situation, and she at last realised that her marriage had broken down and she would have to eventually leave. When her husband was given the appointment of principal research scientist with the CSIRO in Hobart and the couple moved to Tasmania in early 1983, she hoped that the change in his job would make a difference to her marriage. But it wasn’t long after they had arrived and the attacks persisted that she said that she ‘began to seek help in earnest for separating’.

Mrs Thompson said in the letter that she had discovered in Sydney that hospitals had social workers and information on the availability of financial benefits so she began her departure from her marriage by visiting a social worker at Royal Hobart Hospital. She was given the phone numbers and addresses of two refuges for abused wives, Legal Aid and the Family Court Counselling office. ‘The social worker was very sympathetic and supportive of me in this situation,’ she said. ‘I was fearful of the separation and knew I would have to do it swiftly because of my husband’s previous violence against me and because he had always insisted that he should have the children should our marriage break down. I had desperate fears that he would try to kidnap the children.’

In the letter Mrs Thompson said that the Family Court counsellor also gave her ideas on how to arrange access to the children without being intimidated. He also suggested that she should check with airline bookings to be sure her husband wasn’t about to fly away with her children during access visits. ‘The counselor said that the more I got these details sorted out, the more relaxed I would be about access visits and the better it would be for the whole family,’ she said. ‘He was very supportive of me in the situation.’

Mrs Thompson said that she told a Legal Aid lawyer of her husband’s violence and that she feared in the event of a separation that he would want the children, who she was loath to part with. ‘The lawyer was very cold and didn’t have one helpful or supportive suggestion,’ Mrs Thompson said in the letter. ‘Perhaps lawyers who deal in family matters with Legal Aid could go on a special roster. Perhaps this lawyer was inexperienced in these matters.’

She was given the name of another lawyer during one of her clandestine visits to Legal Aid. ‘This lawyer was supportive, cheerful, very efficient and knowledgeable in the matter of how to leave a violent marriage,’ she said. ‘And he acted fast.’

Mrs Thompson had tried unsuccessfully for several weeks to find a suitable house or flat for her and two children. In the end she had to settle for emergency short-term shared accommodation in a welfare centre which had accepted her after a brief interview. ‘When the day came, which was much sooner than I had planned, that I had to move out, this lawyer rearranged his day to get an ex-parte injunction from the court,’ she said. ‘He was able to get me interim custody of the children and restraining orders on my husband to prevent his “assaulting, abusing, molesting, annoying or harassing myself and the children in any way”.’

After he came home and discovered his wife’s escape and the legal minefield he would tread in if he dared go near her and the children, an irate Rory Thompson tried to send the cash in their joint account overseas where it couldn’t be touched by his wife. But, in a stroke of luck for Mrs Thompson, because the amount of money – which included the sale of their house in Sydney – was so large, the Reserve Bank refused to honour the cheque. Her lawyer saw to it immediately that from then on their joint bank account was frozen and money from it could only be administered from the court.

But if Maureen Thompson thought her nightmare was over, she was very much mistaken. Another was about to begin. ‘The staff at the refuge were very kind,’ she continued in her letter to the State Department of Community Welfare’s Domestic Violence Review only months before she was murdered by her husband. ‘The house was very large and very clean and in a lovely setting, especially for the children. I was so grateful to have a roof over our heads and people to talk to during this crisis.

‘When my husband was notified of the separation via the court orders, I had no idea how he would react. As it turned out, he was just dazed. When he came to visit the children at the emergency house the next day, everyone there knew the situation and was ready to help out. Living in a place like that, in neutral territory so to speak, during the transition, gave me great support in making the separation.’

But while one monster was temporarily subdued, there was another waiting in the wings to prey on the defenceless absconder in her crisis. ‘It would have been a perfect setting but for one of the other clients who also lived in the house,’ she wrote. ‘He had been very friendly and supportive of me in the beginning, but after a few days he began to pressure me to spend more time and attention on him than I wanted to, and as I backed away, he began a process of harassment that was at times nightmarish.

‘He knew I was on edge from the violence in my marriage that had preceded the separation and began to slam doors and cupboards behind me, raising his arms, sometimes holding objects with threatening gestures, push me as he came down the hall, turn my door handle late at night (it was locked), yell threats and obscenities at me in the presence of one staff worker who was particularly tolerant of him, lock the doors to the house when I was outside, and on and on. Most of the harassments and intimidations were carried out when others weren’t present (such as his spitting every time he saw me), so it was difficult to get help from the staff.’

Mrs Thompson said that complaining to the staff about the man was useless as each time she did he would counter-complain that she wasn’t doing her share of the housework. And it seemed apparent that seeing as the man had the custody of a small child the staff were reluctant to pull him into line anyway. ‘I used to dread going out of my room to use the bathroom or kitchen for fear of encountering him, and he was always about the place,’ Mrs Thompson continued. ‘I ended up keeping myself and my children away from the centre as much as possible, going home only for baths, bed and breakfast. Another woman he had taken a similar line to left the centre after only a week’s stay. She was lucky. She had an alternative.’

After six weeks of hell at the refuge, a suitable house came up for rent. After making a successful application, Maureen Thompson moved in with the assistance of the State Social Welfare Department. The house was in Hill Street, West Hobart. ‘I was treated as a real person and not just another “case” by the staff of the Social Welfare,’ she said. ‘And with their organizing skills and funds I was able to move in to the house with my children and begin a new life.’

But Dr Rory Thompson had other ideas. He would tell a court later that the year previous to the break-up he had dreamed up several ways of getting rid of his wife. These included causing her car to crash, her falling from the Tasman Bridge and by carbon monoxide poisoning. He also said that as long ago as in May or June the previous year he had decided to bury his wife alive in the backyard. He tried to dig a hole in the ground for her body but the small army shovel he used proved to be useless on the hard ground and he abandoned the project. But he still carried a length of rope around in his pocket at all times should the chance to garrote his wife arise. Apparently it never did.

Thompson said that he then decided to put off all ideas of killing his wife but when she left and took the children with her he began thinking up ways to kill her all over again.

Aware that Maureen Thompson was flat broke and had no access to her husband’s high income, Social Welfare had acted swiftly and organised a special benefit and an ongoing Supporting Parent’s benefit. She took a part-time teaching job and left the children at a daycare centre or with babysitters. Maureen was about as happy as she could be under the circumstances. Once the Family Law Court hearing in late September was over and she knew exactly where she stood with custody and access of their two children, she could move on with her life as a single parent.

But there was one thing that concerned her above all. The only thing that had kept her in the marriage for so long was her devout belief that if she brought up her children without a father in their lives then it would affect them forever.

She was convinced that she now held the upper hand. She had a restraining order against her husband as a safety net, and as the situation mellowed the couple began communicating again. Maureen consented to allow him to take the children for one day and night per week. He could pick them up on Saturday and drop them back on the Sunday. But as time went by the reality of losing his children manifested inside Rory Thompson despite the fact that he had signed an agreement with his wife that no matter what he would have custody of any children should their marriage break up.

But, with the Family Law Court hearing looming and the distinct possibility that he may never be granted full-time custody of his children again, he decided to take matters into his own twisted hands.

He confessed to police that at about 10.30 on Saturday night, 10 September 1983, he threw another log on the fire, tucked an extra blanket on his sleeping children just in case he didn’t get back, and disguised himself for murder. He put on a long wig that covered his face, a scarf and mascara which highlighted his eyebrows. 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 oxy-acetylene torch kit, two hacksaws with three spare blades and a garrote made of orange rope.

Thompson told police that he drove to his wife’s house, parked his car in nearby Warwick Street, walked to her home and climbed over the back fence. There he waited in the freezing garden until he saw her go to bed, turn out the light and thought she would be asleep. When he entered through the back door with his daughter’s key, Thompson’s first intention was to bash Maureen’s dog to death with the chair leg in his bag. But the dog was sound asleep and didn’t flinch. Thompson told police that his initial plan was to garrote his wife because he had heard somewhere that it was a silent and quick method of killing and he had practiced how to do it several times at home on a doll.

But his plans were thwarted when his wife woke up after he had put the garrote down and pulled the quilt from her face. Maureen said, ‘Rory’ and he struck her twice over the head with the leg of the chair, which he then dropped. He said that his wife then picked up the leg of the chair and hit him over the head with it and started to scream. He then grabbed her by the throat and throttled her. Thompson said that he knew brain death occurred from a lack of oxygen after around four minutes. Using Maureen’s bedside clock as a guide – he distinctly remembered the time as being 11.06 pm – he continued to strangle her for six minutes. But she didn’t die.

Thompson told the detectives that at that stage he felt a mild compassion for his wife. As she lay in his arms groaning he cradled her and said, ‘Maureen, I’m sorry it had to happen this way.’

The wounds to Maureen Thompson’s head had caused a pool of blood in the carpet at his feet and there was blood all over the bed sheets. Dr Thompson carried his wife into the bathroom. There, he lay her out in the bath and cut open her stomach and cut her throat while she was still alive and groaning.

Thompson told detectives that he then turned on the shower and the tap to wash the blood away. With a meat cleaver and a hacksaw he cut his wife’s body into small pieces and sat there for several hours flushing them down the toilet until it became clogged and he gave up. Finally, he cut his wife’s head from what was left of her torso and burned it in the fire.

Thompson spent the next hour trying to unsuccessfully get the bloodstains out of the carpet, wash the sheets and remake the bed. He also washed the blood-soaked pyjamas his wife was wearing when he murdered her and threw them in the dryer. Then he bundled his wife’s charred head, what was left of her burned torso and his rubber gloves into garbage bags and buried them and his blood-stained clothing in a hole that he had dug at Lenah Valley earlier that year when he had planned to murder and bury her. He complained to police that some of the bags were messy and broke open. He drove home in his underwear in the freezing cold and got into bed without arousing the children and woke at 7 am.

At his trial, held at the Hobart Criminal Court commencing 23 February 1984 before Mr Justice Everett, Dr Rory Jack Thompson pleaded not guilty to murdering his wife and disposing of her body down the toilet and burying the rest in a bush grave. Thompson told the court that he would like to explain to the jury why he had pleaded not guilty. He said that he just wanted to plead for mercy – and told the jury they had the power to acquit him.

Thompson said that he would most certainly never do anything ‘like that again’ and asked to be released so that he could go back to his marine research where he could do more good for society than he could in jail. He said that putting him in jail would achieve nothing. It would not bring back his wife Maureen, his two children – who had been sent back to America to stay with relatives – or any of his assets.

Under examination from his counsel, Mr P. Slicer, Thompson told the court that in planning to dispose of his wife down the toilet, he had practised chopping up a side of lamb and some soup bones he bought from the butchers. He told the court that the lamb had already been cut up when he bought it, but he had cut several pieces off to see if they would flush.

Under cross-examination by the prosecutor, Mr A. Jacobs, Thompson said he never had felt before that killing his wife was the wrong thing to do. It wasn’t until about a month after her death that he realised most people would disapprove of what he had done and that it was illegal and immoral. When asked if he was aware that it was a person that he had killed and not an animal, Thompson replied, ‘No more than a person working in a slaughterhouse saying “this is a sheep” before slaughtering it.’

When asked if he felt any emotion when he killed the mother of his two children, Thompson replied, ‘Oh, a mild pity. No strong emotion. It wasn’t much more than it had been with the roosters. I just got ’em, grabbed ’em and twisted their necks.’

A court-appointed psychologist, Dr Christopher Williams, told the court that in his view Thompson was highly intelligent but suffered from a well-established personality disorder which raised the possibility that he would be unable to resist committing murder when the urges came over him. But a Crown witness, Hobart psychiatrist Dr Ian Burges-Watson, had another opinion. He told the jury that in his view there was no evidence before the court to suggest Thompson had suffered from a psychotic illness which would affect his power to think, although he agreed with other psychiatric evidence that the accused suffered severe personality disorder. Dr Burges-Watson added that he did not agree with earlier evidence that Thompson was suffering a borderline personality disorder which could be tipped into a psychotic state, or that the accused suffered from probable residual schizophrenia.

Five days into the trial and after all the evidence had been heard, Thompson formally accepted that the Crown had proved its allegation and told the court that he had murdered his wife in her West Hobart home in September 1983. Thompson was allowed to read a two-page statement to the jury after the trial judge had ruled it improper for his counsel to include it in his closing address. Thompson told the jury that he now understood what psychiatrists had said about him during the trial and he realised his personality was slow to learn about social matters.

‘I, and everyone who mattered to me, have been badly hurt by my inappropriate actions. I have learned not to do that again,’ he told the jury. ‘I now realise that I am a person of special importance although I did not know much about God or Christ, I often prayed for guidance. If I’m ever lucky enough to get a caring wife again, considering for her will be more important than self-righteousness. I don’t recommend murdering people; it doesn’t work very well.’

Thompson’s counsel said that his client’s only defence now was that he (Thompson) was insane at the time of the murder and that it would be up to a jury to decide if that defence had been established. Apparently it had. After six hours of deliberation the eight-man, four-woman jury returned with a verdict of not guilty on the grounds that Dr Rory Jack Thompson was insane at the time he killed his wife and cut her into small pieces.

Mr Justice Everett then instructed that Thompson be dealt with as a mentally disordered person and ordered that he be incarcerated in the hospital section of the notoriously overcrowded Risdon Prison situated across the Derwent River from Hobart until it would be decided what to do with him.

In June 1984, the Tasmanian attorney-general, Mr Pearsall, declared that Thompson’s period of detention at Risdon was indefinite and that he could only be released by the governor if the governor was satisfied, on advice, that Thompson’s detention was no longer required for the protection of the public. In other words, the seriously mentally ill Thompson had been sentenced to ‘the governor’s pleasure’, an archaic and cruel sentence usually reserved only for the worst of the worst and used to keep dangerous criminals behind bars until the governor’s advisors saw fit to have them released – if at all.

This was all very well for sane killers and the like, but for a brilliant scientist like Dr Thompson who had been found not guilty of a crime on the grounds of insanity, to the mental health community it was an outrage. And to be put in a jail – albeit in the hospital – with all sorts of dangerous criminals without having committed a crime, was a total contradiction to the court’s finding that Thompson was chronically sick and should be in a mental institution receiving treatment for his homicidal schizophrenia.

But there would be no immediate reprieve for Thompson from behind the bars of the dreaded Risdon Prison. Under the Mental Health Act he would have to wait twelve months to have his case for transferal referred to the Mental Health Review Tribunal for a continuation of the restriction order.

And so, Thompson became a political football, tossed between two sides. On one side, there was a hostile public, who believed he was sane: they wanted the low-life who beat his wife for years and eventually butchered her kept behind the bars of Risdon at the governor’s pleasure, hopefully forever. On the other side was the Mental Health Review Tribunal, which annually recommended that Thompson should be removed forthwith to a satisfactory mental institution where he could be cured and eventually released back to his science lab. The voters won every time.

With the controversy raging around him, Thompson stayed at Risdon’s hospital wing which he would eventually share with Port Arthur mass murderer Martin Bryant and would share at one time or another with the likes of self-confessed multi-murderer Mark ‘Chopper’ Read.

In 1990 the Mental Health Review Tribunal recommended three-to-nil that Thompson be released to a satisfactory mental institution but Premier Michael Field’s Labour Government overruled. In September 1992, Premier Ray Groom’s Liberal Government turned down a two-to-one recommendation which resulted in an appeal to the Supreme Court. There, three judges ruled in 1994 that even though Thompson had never been convicted of a crime, his detention was not illegal. He stayed at Risdon. Disgusted with the dawdling legalities which kept him from going back to work, Thompson, who by now had changed his name to Jack Newman by deed-poll, wrote a book behind bars titled Mad Scientist. It turned out to be not such a good idea. If the public had thought that he should be locked away with other crazed killers before it was published, paragraphs from the book, such as the following, did him no favours in making them think otherwise.

 

‘Okay, the world is unfair; it is regrettable that people are full of resentment, but the world is unfair to everybody in one way or another. I could understand that problem. A rather more difficult problem was understanding when killing was murder. My children had been taken away from me, a suspected killer, and given to a man who had been a machine gunner in Vietnam, where he had killed people, probably more people than had been gunned down in Hoddle Street. Why was the Hoddle Street multiple killer viewed with horror, and the Vietnam multiple killer viewed with approval? If killing is bad, then that killing is murder. But if killing someone is not bad, then it is not murder. But what makes one killing bad, and another not?’

 

In Risdon Dr Thompson kept in touch with the outside world and continued to conduct research and published over 50 scientific papers which included his patent of a 3D television system and his attempts to patent a solar oven.

But apart from his academic achievements, during the years of incarceration Thompson found another love … gardening. He cultivated the wilting plants and trees around the prison and with seeds collected from his sandwiches and pips and seeds from fruit, he raised a magnificent garden within the prison parameter. 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 with his beloved plants which he had nurtured into a showpiece from virtually nothing.

In 1995, legislation which was aimed at setting Thompson free was first tabled in parliament. It would finally make possible the ultimate transfer of responsibility for the decision about Thompson’s future from the government to the judiciary, who do not have pander to public opinion.

In July 1999, with his freedom a certainty in the coming November, Thompson was working in the gardens outside the prison gates when he casually walked away from Risdon, caught a bus into central Hobart, withdrew money from an ATM and bought a plane ticket on an Ansett flight to Melbourne before he was arrested. Charged with escaping lawful custody, Thompson told the court that he escaped to prove a point. ‘Either I’m insane and therefore not responsible or I’m sane and being held unjustly, the same as a political prisoner,’ he said.

Thompson wasn’t given a sentence for the escape but as punishment, all of his privileges were revoked and he spent time in solitary confinement away from his research books and his beloved garden, which was now strictly out of bounds.

On 17 September 1999, Thompson was found dead in his cell. He had taken the laces from his shoes, tied them together and tied one end to an air vent in his cell and the other around his neck. He left two suicide notes, the contents of which have never been revealed.

What was it that drove the brilliant scientist to take his own life with freedom just two months away? Experts have pondered the significance of his desperate measures ever since. Was it that he had at last realised the enormity of his crime and the possibility of being a crazy pariah, pointed at wherever he went in society? Or could it have been much less complicated than that? Perhaps it was simply that he missed his garden so much that he found living unbearable without it.

But whatever the reason, Thompson and his infamous crime are a prominent part of modern-day Tasmanian folklore. Ask a local if he remembers who the premier was in 1983 and you’ll probably draw a blank. But ask him if he knows who Dr Rory Jack Thompson was and chances are his face will light up and he’ll say, ‘Of course I do. He was that crazy doctor who cut up his wife and flushed her down the toilet.’

Then he’ll most likely tell you a completely different version of the murder to the one you’ve just read. But don’t be confused. This is the right one.