Ronald Ryan case: Fifty years on, Victoria’s last hanging is remembered
THE judge who condemned Ronald Ryan to hang was distraught, absolutely inconsolable, as the noose went over the murderer’s head fifty years ago this week.
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THE judge who condemned Ronald Ryan to hang was distraught, absolutely inconsolable, as the noose went over the murderer’s head.
Fifty years ago, Supreme Court judge John Starke sat slumped in his chair in his chambers as Ryan became the last man hanged in Australia.
The judge was in anguish not because he thought Ryan innocent but because he so vehemently opposed the death penalty.
But as the law stood then, once the jury found Ryan guilty he had no option but to impose the mandatory penalty of death by hanging.
The burden of his role in ending Ryan’s life weighed heavily on Justice Starke ever afterwards.
In contrast to the judge’s distress, it was business as usual for the Liberal state premier who refused to commute Ryan’s death sentence to life in prison.
On February 3, 1967, just a couple of hours after Ryan was hanged, Sir Henry Bolte gave a press conference and was asked what he was doing at 8am — the exact time Ryan was executed.
“One of the three S’s, I suppose,” Sir Henry said.
Asked by the reporter what he meant by that, Sir Henry said: “A s---, a shave, or a shower.”
Ryan was sentenced to death after being found guilty of murdering Pentridge prison warder George Hodson just minutes after he and fellow escapee Peter Walker went over the bluestone wall.
The jurors heard evidence that Mr Hodson was pursuing the pair outside the jail when Ryan shot him.
Failed appeals argued that Mr Hodson had been accidentally shot by another warden who was aiming for Ryan.
Mike Richards, the author of a book on the Ryan hanging, yesterday described Sir Henry’s insensitive “three S’s” comment as gross, and an indication of the state premier’s callous indifference to Ryan’s fate.
Mr Richards was then 21 and acting secretary of the Melbourne University students’ anti-hanging committee.
Four days before Ryan was executed, Mr Richards was quoted and photographed on page one of The Herald after having driven to Sir Henry’s farm at Bamganie to deliver a petition with 12,149 signatures urging that Ryan be reprieved.
At the time it was cabinet’s role to consider whether sentences of death would be carried out or commuted to imprisonment. The Bolte cabinet, which traditionally followed Sir Henry’s lead, had decided that Ryan would hang.
That was despite it having become the norm for cabinet to overturn death sentences.
Victoria’s most recent executions had been in 1951, when Jean Lee became the last woman hanged.
She and her male accomplices, Robert Clayton and Norman Andrews, were hanged for the torture murder of a 73-year-old SP bookie whose money they were after.
Since Sir Henry had become premier in 1955, his cabinet had commuted all but one death sentence. The exception was the case of Robert Tait, who murdered an 82-year-old woman.
Sir Henry was furious that, despite this, Tait ended up not being hanged. A successful 1962 appeal to the High Court saw Tait jailed for life instead.
Alongside the January 1967 photograph of Mr Richards handing over the petition to police guarding the Bolte home, The Herald ran a front-page editorial.
“Time is running out for convicted murderer Ronald Ryan,” it said.
“The State Government’s insistence on this final solution is causing the deepest revulsion. It is punishment in its most barbarous form.
“And experience has shown it gains nothing but dishonour for the community which inflicts it.”
The Herald editorial failed to persuade Sir Henry to save Ryan from the gallows. He became the 186th person to be hanged in Victoria.
But the newspaper’s continued campaign afterwards helped ensure there were no more hangings in Australia after Ryan.
Victoria abolished the death penalty in 1975. In 1984 Western Australia became the last Australian state to ban it.
Mr Richards became a trenchant critic of the death penalty and spent decades meticulously researching the Ryan hanging and interviewing those who played a role in it.
His research left him in no doubt that Ryan did shoot Mr Hodson — but it also left him in no doubt that Ryan shouldn’t have been executed, and that it was largely down to Sir Henry’s stubbornness that he was.
“I didn’t believe in hanging, regardless of Ryan’s guilt or innocence, but I was convinced of his guilt by a whole raft of reasons,” Mr Richards said yesterday.
“Firstly, there were all of the witnesses who had seen the shooting following the escape from Pentridge. The other set of factors were that Ryan made a number of confessions, including on the night before the execution while speaking to prison governor Ian Grindlay, to whom Ryan was close. He looked Grindlay squarely in the face and said, ‘I did shoot him. But I didn’t mean to kill him, only to stop him’.”
Mr Richards’s book The Hanged Man: The Life & Death of Ronald Ryan, published in 2002, is being reprinted to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the execution of the last man hanged in Australia.
