Chapter 6
And then, nothing.
There was no justice for Mena Griffiths or Hazel Wilson.
The families were left to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives as the rest of the country moved on.
And forgot.
The horror that had gripped the public in late 1930 and early 1931 – that had dominated headlines from coast to coast – faded into memory, sepia photographs left in the sun to be occasionally brought out and considered when journalists wanted to write about unsolved crime or ineffectual police. Hazel and Mena had become nothing more than names to conjure shock and outrage.
There was a moment in 1932 when Melburnians were reminded in the most horrifying fashion of the murders. It happened on Sunday, 4 July, in the good, middle-class inner suburb of North Carlton.
Four-year-old Norma Kendall and her brother, aged six, were returning home from Sunday school when they met a man who chatted with them for a few minutes before luring the little girl into an empty house on Drummond Street.
The initial encounter took place not far from the Methodist church where William Hueston was waiting on the street. His attention was drawn by the contrast between the blonde child in her Sunday finest and the shabby, unshaven man, but at first he didn’t do anything, thinking that perhaps the man was the children’s grandfather or some other relative. However, as he watched, the girl and man, hand in hand, walked up the street and disappeared into the vacant house. Knowing the house to be empty – there was a ‘To Let’ sign in the window – he realised something was very wrong, and at almost the same moment the six-year-old boy came running.
‘A man has taken my little sister away with him! Please help!’
Hueston rushed into the church to summon help. A Mr Cooper and three (unnamed) female teachers accompanied him to the address, where they found the unkempt man standing in the open doorway.
‘Where is the little girl you took away from the corner?’
‘I know nothing of any girl.’
They pushed past him, entered the house and were searching the rooms when they heard the front door close. They rushed outside, but the culprit had gone. Witnesses pointed them in the right direction and the two men gave chase, quickly catching the man. He was immediately handed over to police.
However, there was no sign of the little girl in the house. It was subsequently hypothesised that the man had shoved her out the back door before being intercepted by the Methodist posse at the front. Some time later, she was found by her frantic mother in nearby Pigdon Street. The little girl was crying, covered in dirt and blood, and according to one report ‘looked as if she’d been run over’.1 She was the victim of a violent sexual assault.
Suffering severe injuries, the child was rushed to the Children’s Hospital where she underwent surgery and remained for several days, her condition serious.
Her 59-year-old attacker was identified as one David Bennett aka Robert Bennett and he was immediately charged with a capital offence. Bail was refused.2
In this instance, justice was swift. After a preliminary hearing at the end of July, the trial was set for 15 August. It ran for two days, and at its conclusion, it took the jury only 45 minutes to find David Bennett guilty.
He was sentenced to hang.
Bennett would be the first person in 41 years to be hanged in Victoria for an offence other than murder, and his execution the last one in Australia for such a crime.
***
During the course of the trial, details of Bennett’s past were exposed. In 1917, in the Melbourne Criminal Court, he had been sentenced to 15 years’ hard labour for armed robbery (he held up a bank in Middle Park) and in 1915 he got nine months in gaol in Sydney for conspiracy. But most shocking was his 1911 conviction in Western Australia. On 28 January of that year, Bennett had pulled an intellectually disabled 10-year-old girl into a public urinal and raped her. A witness saw him accost the girl and called police, the local constable arriving in time to catch Bennett, but not to prevent the crime.
When tried for this crime, Bennett attempted to plead insanity, bringing in a doctor to attest to his medical history and continued impairment. Unsurprisingly, nobody bought the story, and it took a jury only 20 minutes to find him guilty as charged.
Several days later, when sentencing Bennett to life in prison with hard labour and a flogging, the judge said he had never heard a more horrible and disgusting story.
The flogging was later remitted due to Bennett’s supposedly weak physical state. He spent only three years in gaol before the Attorney-General of Western Australia authorised his release; Bennett ended up in Melbourne.
When these details emerged at Bennett’s 1932 Melbourne trial, one of the most widely asked questions was, why didn’t the West Australians hang him when they had the chance? Victorian authorities didn’t hesitate. Bennett was sentenced on 17 August and on the morning of 26 September of that year, he walked to the gallows at Pentridge Prison.
Before he was put to the drop, Bennett made a nine-minute speech, apparently the longest speech ever made by a condemned man in Victoria.
As soon as he stopped talking, the hangman slipped the hood and noose over Bennett’s head, and pulled the lever; the trapdoor sprang open, and it was over.
Except …
When Smith’s Weekly published its scathing article following the mishandling of the Mena Griffiths case, among the lengthy diatribe against the Victorian police, the Smith’s reporter also included some oddly prescient paragraphs, based on events that occurred during the inquest into Mena Griffiths’ murder. In the packed Coroners Court, the journalist had found himself seated not far from someone whom he recognised, and on 28 February he wrote,
Now that McMahon is eliminated as a possibility in the Mena Griffiths murder, it is an interesting coincidence that the proceedings at the Morgue were followed with close attention by a man who commented freely, in an undertone, on the evidence as it was given, noting the points that were made against the accused man, and remarking the manner of his cross-examination. His final remark was: ‘He is gone a million!’
The commentator was in a good position to criticise. He was an old lag, who once incurred a long sentence for an offence on a child.3
The man in the Coroners Court with so much to say about Mena Griffiths’ murder was David Bennett.
***
Following Bennett’s hanging, some newspapers began to speculate about his motives for attending the inquest into Mena Griffiths’ murder. Why was Bennett so keenly interested in the proceedings? Surely a man with his criminal history would prefer to stay away from courtrooms.
And there were rumours. Rumours that it was David Bennett who had given the police ‘valuable’ information, based on which they took a certain line of action and arrested Robert McMahon.4
More importantly, might David Bennett, convicted of raping two young girls in two different states, have murdered Mena Griffiths? Senior members of the Victoria Police Force seemed to think so.