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The Final Indignity for Darryl Raymond Beamish

When the former death row inmate Darryl Raymond Beamish was granted an ex gratia payment of $425,000 in June 2011, it was the final indignity in a chain of events that had been going on for 52 years, during which Darryl Beamish had spent 15 years in jail for a murder he did not commit. Let’s go back to the beginning.

At around 11.30pm on the evening of 19 December 1959, at a block of apartments at Cottesloe, a fashionable seaside suburb of Perth in Western Australia, a peeping Tom got lucky. While peering into a bedroom he watched as 22-year-old Jillian Brewer and her fiancé made love, before the man left at around midnight and left her naked on the bed, sleeping soundly.

Armed with a stolen hatchet, the peeping Tom crept silently into the bedroom and stood beside the bed. But as he gazed down on the young woman’s nakedness, it wasn’t sex he had on his mind. He was there to defile and murder her in protest that he could never have anyone such as her in his lifetime. Beautiful young socialites were strictly off limits for a facially deformed man such as him.

The man raised the hatchet and chopped at her throat, breasts, genitals, face and head, fracturing her skull and pubic bone and severing her windpipe in the frenzy. Then he attacked her lower body, her thighs, stomach and legs, with the flat side of the hatchet head until what minutes before had been a sleeping beauty was now unrecognisable. When the hatchet handle broke he stopped and listened to see if anyone had heard and, convinced that he was safe, picked up Jillian’s sewing scissors and plunged them deep into her abdomen five times.

Exhausted, he sat on the bed beside his victim and pulled the bloodied sheet up to her chin as if to cover the massive wounds to her body, but leaving her battered face on display. He put a pillow across her chest, folded the sheet back over it and placed her left arm on the pillow as if she were sleeping peacefully. Happy with his work, the man calmly cleaned the apartment of prints and left via a window, which he closed behind him and threw the hatchet over the back fence as he went.

Next morning, Jillian’s fiancé returned at 9am for golf to find the normally open front door closed. Using his key, he found the bedroom door was also unusually closed. He opened it to find the carnage. The police found the hatchet wiped of prints, as was the pair of scissors and everything else in the apartment. This bloke knew what he was doing. Ten months earlier there had been a similar murder of a naked woman in South Perth in the early hours of the morning, when an intruder had stabbed 33-year-old Pnena Berkman to death during a violent struggle in her waterside apartment and hadn’t left a clue.

There was no motive as to why anyone would kill Jillian Brewer. The glamorous socialite and heiress to the MacRobertson Freddo Frog/Cherry Ripe confectionery fortune had only been in Perth 15 months, was engaged to be married in a couple of months to a young man beyond reproach, and didn’t have an enemy in the world. And there was nothing missing, which ruled out a burglary gone wrong. The coroner and mortuary staff agreed that the murders of Jillian Brewer and Pnena Berkman could have been committed by the same person.

In a city that was more like a big country town where doors were never locked and keys were left in car ignitions, the citizens of Perth demanded an answer. Fourteen months later they found it in 19-year-old mentally impaired Darryl Raymond Beamish, who had convictions as a prowler and petty thief and crimes of a sexual nature against young girls. Mentally, Beamish was of an equivalent age to them. Darryl Beamish was also a deaf mute who could say only a few words and communicated by interpreter or writing. He was the perfect scapegoat.

It wasn’t hard to cajole a confession to Jillian Brewer’s murder out of Beamish. Had he not had a watertight alibi for the night Pnena Berkman was murdered, Beamish would have been charged with that as well. At his trial it was said that he confessed four times – twice through an interpreter, once in a statement and once in writing on the cell floor of the Perth lockup. There was no forensic or other evidence to connect him with the crime. On 13 August 1961, the bewildered Darryl Beamish was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death by hanging. Four months later his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment with hard labour.

Two years later police apprehended Jillian Brewer’s real murderer, the social-outcast serial killer Eric Edgar Cooke. Over the previous eight months Cooke had held Perth under siege. A man and a woman were shot at in their car. Two men on separate occasions were shot at point-blank range as they slept in their beds. Another was shot between the eyes as he opened his front door. A young woman was strangled to death and raped. An 18-year-old babysitter was shot dead as she studied and listened to music in front of the fire. Cooke also admitted to the murders of Jillian Brewer and Pnena Berkman and running down and killing Rosemary Anderson in a stolen car, a crime for which another man was serving a 10-year sentence for manslaughter.

Although Cooke supplied knowledge of the Brewer and Anderson cases that only the killer would have known, police chose to ignore it; Cooke was found guilty of his other many crimes, and was hanged on 26 October 1964. Ten minutes before he was hanged, Cooke took the Bible in his hand and said: ‘I swear before Almighty God that I killed Anderson and Brewer.’

The deaf mute Darryl Beamish spent 15 horrible, silent years in jail for a murder he did not commit, before being released on parole. Over the years he appealed his conviction six times and eventually, in the wake of the successful appeal of John Button, who was another man wrongfully convicted of one of Cooke’s murders, was finally exonerated on 1 April 2005. Both men had been championed by Perth journalist Estelle Blackburn and you can find their stories in her books Broken Lives and The End of Innocence.

In 2010, 51 years after Jillian Brewer’s murder, Darryl Beamish, now 70, lodged a claim for a ‘meagre’ $500,000 to ‘make him and his wife Barbara comfortable in old age’. In light of the fact that John Button had been awarded $460,000 in 2003 for the five years he had wrongly served for one of Cooke’s murders and another man, Andrew Mallard, had been awarded $3.25 million in May 2009 for the 12 years he spent behind bars after being wrongfully jailed over the 1994 murder of Perth jeweller Pamela Lawrence, you would consider this a reasonable request.

But no. In their wisdom, on 2 June 2011, the state of Western Australia decided that Darryl Beamish isn’t worth that kind of money and have discounted his ex gratia request by $75,000 to just $425,000. Seems as though they intend to bully the scapegoat until the bitter end.