I'm Andrew Rule Liza's Life and Crimes. Today we welcome my colleague Jen Kelly to the microphone because she has been looking into the fascinating story of the last woman hanged in Australia. Now, this remarkably is in living memory, and I can recall my own mother, who's still with us, telling me all about this happening when she was at Teacher's College as a young woman. So it's not sort of ancient history. There are people out there who recall
it happening. And now, without further ado, Jen Kelly is going to tell us all she knows about the life and sad death of jean Lee.
Great to be here, Andrew, thanks very much. Yes, it was only in nineteen fifty one, so not so long ago, and Jean Lee was the last woman executed in Australia. She was also the only woman executed at Pentridge Prison in Melbourne. But it's quite a fascinating case for a few other reasons. It raised lots of interesting questions because she was hanged for murder even though she definitely didn't commit the murder itself and police knew that, and also
she confessed to the murder. But many people believe that she confessed simply to save her lover, because she thought that being a woman, there's no way known she would have got the death sentence. But obviously it didn't actually pan out that way.
No, it was a terrible thing, and probably that version is real because they would imagine that she'd beat it and get him off and all backfired. Because of course, murders committed in company are still murder, aren't they. That's the law. It doesn't matter who pulls the trigger. If it's a joint venture. Sadly, you're all in it, which is a very good reason to avoid bad company when
it comes to committing. What's the background on Jean Lee. Now, she'd had a pretty patchy life before she, yeah, hit this. I think she went from bad to worse.
She did, she knew all about bad company. She just had absolutely terrible taste in men. She actually came from quite a respectable family. They weren't particularly well off, but you know, she fell on hard times and she just kept falling for the wrong men, really dodgy men. But by this time in her life she was an attractive young woman. She was actually a young mum, but she'd had to pass off her young daughter to her own
mum to look after. She was only thirty one, and by this time in her life she was with her lover, Robert Clayton, and they were small time crooks in Melbourne and they were running what was called the badger scam,
which was pretty common back then. So she would lure some unsuspecting guy, usually in his car, and they would start getting it on and she'd get the man into a sort of compromising position and then her lover, Robert Clayton, would kind of, you know, burst into the scene and pretend to be the wronged husband and shake the guy down and basically demand compensation and rob the guy blind. He would say that, you know, I need money to divorce this harlot, or he'd say you have to give
me money or I'm going to tell your wife. And it was actually a pretty lucrative scam. So apparently they made something like two hundred and fifty pounds in a month, which was quite a lot of money in nineteen forty nine.
It was a lot of money in nineteen forty nine.
Yeah, yeah, And they were both big drinkers and you won't be surprised to hear that Robert Clayton was quite violent towards gen Lee, so you know, as I say, terrible, terrible taste in men. But I'll take you forward to the knight of the murder. They were out drinking with a third crook, so a guy called Norman Andrews, and somehow they get drinking with the man who eventually becomes the murder victim. So he's a seventy three year old guy and sp bookie in Carlton. He's named Pop Kent,
so seventy three, much older guy. You can imagine they probably thought that he was going to be an easy target, a pushover. All four of them are drinking at a pub called the University Hotel in Carlton, and then Pop Kent invites them back to his place, which is a room at a rooming house in Carlton, and they're just drinking, knocking them back, and at some point in the night, the three of them decide that they're going to rob him.
And they're all drunk, so they obviously think that this is going to be pretty easy, but Pop Kent fights back, and he really puts up a fight, and it just turns into the most horrific scene. The men have tortured him. They've stabbed him repeatedly, they've beaten him and in the end he's actually been strangled to death, and the three of them have gone on the run. You know, just
an absolutely horrific murder. Now, they could have probably just laid low or kept running and they might have got away with it, but they're just blind drunk by now, and just not very smart criminals. They've stopped at a payphone and they've booked a flight to Adelaide. It's actually not that late at night, it's only about nine o'clock. They've gone back to their hotel room at the Great
Southern Hotel in Spencer Street. They've changed out of their clothes, which have got blood stains on them, and they've left the blood stained clothes in the hotel room.
So evidence genius.
And then they've gone out to the Copakabana nightclub and continued drinking. So in the meantime, the cops have gone to the scene of the crime and they've done some pretty fine police work. So by the time these three have got back to their hotel room at nearly four am, the detectives are waiting, having done some pretty fine police work.
Over the next few hours, and of course the police have found the blood stained clothes and the police have hauled the three to the police station and interrogated them for hours while they're drunk and sleep deprived, and this is when the first of a couple of intriguing confessions start to emerge. So I won't tell you anymore, but
this is where we'll play you. We recorded two parts, a two part episode of this story with a wonderful guest, Damian Bard, who is a tour guide with Penridge Prison Tours, because you can go and do tours down at Penridge Prison in Coburg. And we've recorded two episodes, a two part episode of this amazing story. We'll play the first episode of the In Black and White podcast now and you can hear part two of the story wherever you get your podcasts.
Excellent.
And as I did, Clayton started to drink more. Now Gene was also had a well and truly established drinking problem as well. But as they were doing this more people seem to be wising up to the scam as well. It was becoming less successful. They were making less money and there was definitely several instances where the intended target fought Back.
I'm Jen Kelly from the Herald Son and this is in Black and White, a podcast about some of Australia's forgotten characters. Today we'll hear the story of Jean Lee, the last woman executed in Australia. Jean was a thirty one year old mother when she was hanged for murder at Penridge Prison in Melbourne in nineteen fifty one. Did she do it or did she confess to save her lover? Today we're joined by Damian Beard, a tour guide at
Pencridge Prison Tours part of the National Trust. For part one of the story, make sure you return on Thursday for part two. Welcome to the podcast, Amien, thank you.
Now.
Jean Lee was of course the last woman executed in Australia, but there is a lot more to this story. So why have you chosen this particular character from the many stories from Penridge Prison's history to share with us today.
Well, there's a few reasons, the first being she was the only woman executed at Penridge of the eleven people executed there. And the thing with women and Pentridge is a lot of people don't actually realize that they are a huge part of the story. The Pentridge operated as a woman's prison three times during the one hundred and forty
seven years that it was open. But also her story just has some big questions surrounding it, I guess, you know, of terms of culpability, and whether she was coerced to confess, whether she confessed to potentially save her lover, who actually did the murder, and sort of speaks to some larger
questions about levels of responsibility and things like that. It also was the last execution before Ronald Ryan's execution in Victoria's, so it was almost the run up to all the big debate about the death penalty and things like that.
So many aspects of the case that are still unresolved this day, which is why I find it so fascinating, And we'll hear more about that later on. To begin with, can you tell us what do we know about jen Lee's early life?
So she was born on the tenth of December nineteen nineteen at Dubbo, with her birth name being Marjorie gen maud Wright. Her father was a railway worker and she family was working class, but they're often described in the newspaper counts as respectable. So I don't think that means
particularly well off. But if you can kind of imagine it almost as like the kind of family where their clothes are threadbare and their shoes are falling through the souls, but they're always immaculately pressed and washed, and you know, she's always sent off to school with clean hair tied up in ribbons and all that kind of stuff. The fact that her dad was a railway worker as well probably meant that they were quite insulated from the depression.
It was a steady government job, and so in nineteen twenty seven they moved to Chatswood, where she intended a convent school. She didn't finish year twelve, but she did train in what was, you know, the kind of roles that were available for women at that time. So as a typist stenographer, she learned shorthand, and she spent some time leaving school several jobs. She did a office junior at a motor company, she was a millner, she was a stenographer, and she worked in the can goods factory.
It's interesting that, as you say, she was from a respectable family, so there was no hint of crime in her family background. Now, I don't know if it was bad luck or bad judgment. But when it came to picking men, she seemed to partner up with some real shockers from a young age.
Yeah, and I mean I tend to be sympathetic to this is you know, what options did she have? She got kind of quite a bit of a bad start with her romantic life, and I think things went downhill from there because as she moved on throughout her life, the doors and the options closed to her. The ladders were pulled up in those kinds of things. So in my nineteen thirty eight, at the age of eighteen years old,
she married a guy named Raymond Breece. He was a house painter who was seven years her senior and apparently had known her since childhood. And poor Jean, she had to deal with Raymond being frequently unemployed. Again we're still in the lingering after effects of the depression and things like that. And as he was spending a lot of time unemployed, he was spending a lot of time drinking,
and when he was drunk, he was abusive. A year after their marriage, she gave birth to her daughter, who is her only child, and in the same year Raymond was convicted of auto theft. But World War two broke broke out, and so he signs up with the first Australian Heavy Anti Aircraft Artillery Training Regiment and does service with them. It's not clear from what I could see from his records whether he actually did go overseas. But like many of the men she became involved with, he
wasn't a particularly good soldier. He was court martialed several times for being absent without leave or failure to appear on parade and things like that. And she separated from Raymond sometime around nineteen forty three.
And really it just went downhill from there, didn't.
It it did.
I mean, she was a single mother in the nineteen forties, in the middle of the war. You know, a lot of huge amount of the men were overseas. Being a single mother at the time was incredibly taboo. She is from a somewhat impoverished background and things like that, so she's trying to basically stay alive and support her daughter as well.
How did she manage to do that?
So what ends up happening is her daughter ends up going to live with Jean's mother, and this is where she ends up spending most of her life. In fact, Jean doesn't have much contact with her daughter for the
rest of her life. Jean moves up to Brisbane, where there is a lot of work for women, doing sort of waitressing work and stuff like that, because Brisbane was of course the staging ground for the Pacific War of Australian American Dutch soldiers up there, and she gets a job working as a waitress at Lenin's Hotel, and sometime around then that she starts changing her name to Jane, starts calling herself Gene as well, and in nineteen forty three she meets a man named Maurice Dias who is
a petty criminal, and they travel back from Brisbane down to Sydney, then Adelaide and finally ending up in Perth, sort of from what I've been able to gather, sort of staying one step ahead of the cops each time they move, as Morris's ending up in trouble for various petty offenses like theft, burglary and stuff like that. They spend eleven months in Perth and des again. Like many men in her life, he is a drinker and he is abusive when he's drunk, and to cope with this,
Gene starts to drink heavily as well. Now she's actually asked later on in her life, after everything happens, why she didn't leave DS at this time, which I think is I mean, when we talk about people leaving domestic violence situation today, it's an incredibly insensitive question, you know. I think we understand these days how difficult it is
to leave from those situations. But you also have to understand that she's in wartime Perth, So just simply getting out of the city, let alone having somewhere to go, having the means to get there, all that kind of stuff is a lot difficult. In Perth at the time is much much a separate part of Australia, separated from Australia, I should say, compared to it is these days, and there are wartime restrictions on travel and things.
Like that, and it's hard to imagine Damien as well, the sadness that she must have carried about being separated from her child, to not be able to look after her child, so having to leave that child behind.
Absolutely Now, Jean's child does not pay a play a huge part in her story. I have to say, there's not a lot on her and I do wonder if a lot of it has actually been sort of scrub from the records or kept from the records to protect her. Like I wasn't even able to find her name looking through the newspaper articles. Now, of course, as soon as I say that, someone's going to be able to answer in the comments right away what her name was and things like that, but which please do, I'd love to know.
But so you would think that she would be feeling that pain, you know, that failure is a mother and things like that. She would definitely be being viewed in that context at the time. Single mothers are absolutely taboo second class citizens, but ones who can't even afford to look after their kids, they've you know, failed the requirements of their gender and their sex somehow. But I also do wonder, you know, maybe she was happier apart from
the kid. Maybe she was content with the fact that the kid was actually being looked after.
Unfortunately we just don't know.
Yeah, that's true, that's a good point. And what did you do after the war?
So in nineteen forty five she returned to Sydney and DS was arrested on outstanding warrants and so she's now on her own with no sort of methods of support, so she turns to sex work to raise money for his bail. He gets bailed out and in nineteen forty six they moved to Tasmania again because he now has further outstanding warrants on him, and this is where she finally actually managed to escape the relationship with Maurice dis and she.
Moves back to Sydney.
She takes up a job at the Liverpool Arms Hotel which is on Pitt Street, and supplants her income there as well with sex work in a brothel. And it's sometime around this that she meets the third man who is going to be a huge figure in her life and in many ways was the love of her life, which was Robert Clayton. It's also this time when she becomes gen Lee. This is one of the aliases she uses when she's picked up the prostitution.
Do we know anything about that name? Why she's chosen the name Jean Lee? Is there any background behind that?
I have no idea, to be honest, the gene is obviously her second name, you know, Marjorie Jane. Where the Lee comes from? I have no idea.
M So tell us about Robert Clayton. What do we know about him?
He was born on the twenty second of January nineteenth seventeen in Sydney. He worked for schweps for a little bit after high school, but enlisted in theaf at the outbreak of war and was kicked out in nineteen forty one following discipline breaches. Sometime around this time he married
a woman named Nancy Lewis. He enlisted in the army and he was sent to Palestine but didn't see combat, and he returned to Australia in nineteen forty two or three as there was this big thing going on without bringing back the Australian Imperial Force that had been sent over there to fight with the British in the Desert campaigns. But there was now a lot of worry about a potential for a Japanese invasion, and so the decision was made to the big objection of Churchill, to bring Australian
forces back. So when Robert returned to Australia, he found that Nancy had taken up with an American serviceman and he initiated a divorce with it. In nineteen forty three, he was discharged as unfit for service because he has also been having a lot of situations of without leave, drunkenness on duty and stuff like that, and in fact
he's eventually court marshal for this. He was a frequent heavy gambler and was running sort of small time scams and petty theft things and stuff like that in Sydney. And that's at this point that he meets Lee.
And did they immediately strike up a relationship.
Absolutely, It almost appears like it was love at first sight, and everything that they go through in the next six years or more, it very much whatever he does to Lee, she seems absolutely devoted to him. So they move in for a while with Jean's mother, but Clayton absolutely hates the domesticity of it and particularly being around Jean's child, and so he's often out running around on Jean and stuff like that. And in nineteen forty seven he's arrested
with a friend of his name, Norman Bolger. They are charged with the attempted rape of two teenage girls. Yeah, he's sentenced to twenty more months in Long Bay. Now Lee Jeane is now again without means of support, so she returns to sex work at this time, but she also worked in the cafe and worked doing sort of housework and support for a disabled American soldier who was
stuck in Sydney. And this guy obviously had some kind of positive effect on her life because he was eventually moved back his family took charge of him and moved back to America. But he wrote her all the way up until the end of her life, including when she was actually in pentridg prison. Oh really, yeah, not a whole lot we've been able to find out about here, But it's just it's an interesting fact, you know, possible what could have been?
I guess.
So where are the letters now? Are those letters still at the prison?
No, they are not.
They will be probably in the custody of her surviving family or something like that. This is just something I came across as just a random end note in a book about her.
There's nothing else more about it now, Jean.
She frequently visited Clayton in Longbay, and you know, he's not a great guy. He's abusive, he's unfaithful, and in Long Bay he's very very self pitying, you know, whoe is me? And she tries to talk to him about her life outside and what she's doing, and he doesn't want to.
Hear about it. He is very critical of.
Anything she's doing, but her devotion to him is still absolutely genuine. So in nineteen forty nine, he is released in September and they begin a particular scam called the Badger scam.
And this is not just a scam that these two pull off. This is actually a common scam at the time, isn't.
It It is. It's very well known.
I mean I first encountered this in the novels of James Elroy, so it was obviously something that was very
much being done at the time. But the plan was this that Clayton would steal a car and he would park it somewhere dark and Jane, who was quite an attractive young woman, she would lure a man, hopefully married, into the car so they could get up to you know, and then Clayton would come out of the darkness knocking on the window and be like, you know, I'm the wronged husband, what are you doing if with my wife in here, and start a fake argument and things like that.
Now he would then buttonhole the man and demand compensation.
What form this would take? Would you know?
Usually be like I need money to divorce. This Harlot sort of thing or something like that, or maybe just I'd need money otherwise I'm going to tell your wife. But it was quite a popular scam, and they it was quite profitable for them as well, because by October they had raised two hundred and fifty pounds.
Yeah, it's amazing that word didn't get around, you know, that people didn't sort of catch on that this was a thing that it still worked.
I'm just trying to think of a polite way to put this. Of men being enticed by young attractive women, sometimes all sense goes out the window and they're not necessarily thinking with the right part of their brain. I imagine it's something that still happens today. I mean, you know, people still get catfished online today and things like that.
So that is true. So they raised a lot of money with this scam, didn't they.
Yeah, two hundred and fifty pounds in the space.
Of a month.
Astonishing.
So they decided to head down to Melbourne, where the Spring Racing Carnival was beginning, and try and enact the same scam down in Melbourne.
So they actually did it at the races.
Around the races, you know, I mean even today you can see there's a lot of people stumbling home from Flemington in sort of the worse state to wear and stuff like that, so there are quite a few targets from there.
We'll be back shortly to find out what happened next, so stay with us. So tell us more about their life at crime in Melbourne.
So the money started to dwindle pretty quickly. They stayed in quite a nice hotel to start with that then moved into less salubrious accommodations and the circumstances started to get quite precarious. As this did, and as this did, Clayton started to drink more. Now Gene was also had a well and truly established drinking problem as well. But as they would doing this more people seemed to be wising up to the scam as well. It was becoming
less successful. They were making less money and there was definitely several instances where the intended target fought back and when this happened, Clayton would be humiliated, drunk and angry,
and he would take this out on Gene. There is definitely at least one instance where he attacked her and left her with a bruised face and cuts across her nose after a failed scam, but they persisted and October twenty sixth they went out to Werriby to a race meet there and that is where they met a man named Norman Anthees, otherwise known as Norman Andrews.
And Andrews had a pretty colorful criminal background himself, didn't he.
He did so Andrews. He was born in nineteen ten in Orange and New South Wales. He worked as an electrician and a projectionist. Married in nineteen thirty one and had a daughter, but by nineteen forty he was divorced and living a pretty itinerant lifestyle. Were just turning to petty crime to survive, like many people were the time. I think something that's maybe not clear to a lot of people is how common that was in the wartime era.
Now the wartime era, it kind of reminds me of almost like the sort of the first decades of colonization, where you know, if you're a free settler, you know, you run into trouble in one town or one city, you just move to another one, change your name and you know, I'm a completely new guy. And also, by the way, I'm a doctor or something like that, and start set up shop again. And this is kind of
a similar thing. In the wartime era, there's lots of movement of men from place to place, and lots of people jumping ship or jumping train and disappearing into the chaos and confusion, you know, less police officers to run things up. We have, particularly in many of the cities, we have brownouts or blackouts, which are better opportunities for crime,
you know. We obviously have in Melbourne the famous case of the brown out strangler, Eddie Leonski, who was possibly an American soldier, possibly the criminal of that, although that's a whole other podcast.
And so just this.
Itinerant lifestyle and this lifestyle of petty crime, it was quite possible at the time. But in nineteen forty he did enlist in the army and he became a signalmant and he was actually injured by a shrapnelt to Brook, but he wasn't also again not a great soldier. On four separate occasions he was court martialed, the last being in nineteen forty four for robbing and assaulting a civilian and that's when he got three years in Long Day, which is where he met Clayton and how did they meet.
They met at a race meet at Werribe, so just obviously ran into each other in the crowd somewhere.
Yeah.
And then did Clayton and Andrews instantly form a criminal association?
Yeah? Absolutely they did.
Now there's no convictions that I've been able to trace or anything like that, but they did absolutely pale around committing petty crimes, attempting these scams still and doing a hell of a lot of drinking, all three of them, and their funds started to run out, which leads us up to the fateful day that would end up with all three of them seeing Scaffold.
Now, I love the way that you've been introducing the key characters in his tale, like a who done it? So we get to know them one by one. I'd love you to do the same with Pop Kent. He's obviously the next most important character in this story. So what do we know about him?
Yeah?
So William George Kent. He was born the twenty third of October eighteen seventy four in the Western Districts and his life absolutely revolved around horse racing. So as a young man he was a jockey and then he owned race horses while he worked doing things like farming and stuff like that in the wim Era. He married in nineteen oh three and fathered nine children. But life didn't go well for him either, because by the mid nineteen forties he was living apart from his wife and running
a boarding house in Dorritt Street in Carlton. While he was doing this, he also worked as a bookie, taking illegal bets and he frequently drank in the University Hotel, which is just a few blocks over from Dorritt Street on Lygon Street. And he was known in the area that on Monday he would collect all the takings from these illegal gambling rings that he was running.
So he's an older guy, seventy three, is that right?
Yeah? Much older, much much older. Yeah yeah.
Okay, so now we know all the main characters, can you set the scene for us and tell us about the events leading up to the murder?
Sure?
So, on the eighth of November, the money is so tight that they pawned Andrew's coat and traveling bag and then they went to the University Hotel on Lygon Street. Now I don't know if they had actually heard of this guy beforehand or this was just chance, but they did run across him. How much is this they targeted him, how much it was just circumstance, We're really just not known.
But they began.
Drinking together and eventually they went back to his house. Now this is where things get murky, because we're basing everything on confessions from this point on, and these confessions were later disputed several.
Times in court.
So when I say what happens next, please take it with a grain of salt. But according to Clayton, they went back to his house to buy cigarettes and grog, and Geane noticed a roll of cash in his pocket, and she and Clayton went outside. I believe there was a backyard toilet or something like that, and she proposed
robbing him. Now the place they're at is Mallow House on fifty Dorit Street, and it started life as a really nice two story place for an immigrant family, but by this point it was absolutely run down and filthy and operated as a rooming house. Pop he had one room in the front of the house.
And his furniture in.
There was all dilapidated and broken as well. So when Andrews sat on a chair and immediately broke, he fell to the ground, And there is a broken chair in there that's going to come up very importantly soon. Might even call it Chekhov's chair leg. Now, Lee turned the conversation flirtatious, sitting in Kent's lap as all four of them keep drinking. They're absolutely howsy cheap wine at this point,
so you know, all of them are quite drunk. Now, Andrews and Clayton eventually find an excuse to leave and head out and for a walk around the block while Lee attempts to become intimate with Kent, and she's hoping to pick his pockets while he's you know, otherwise occupied, but she can't get access to them. Andrews and Clayton come in, see them in flagrante and leave again. Jean
tries again, but by this time Kent is suspicious. So according to her again disputed confession, Lee said that she did her nut, and she hits him with a wine bottle, breaking it over his head and slashing open her hand, and then picking up the chair leg and beat him about the head. Andrews and Clayton are standing out in the backyard at this time. They hear this altercation and they run in. They overpower Kent. They tear up his sheets, tie him together, bind him with these sheets, use his
bootlaces to bind his thumbs together. And then once they've got the role of money in his pocket, they think, well, this guy's bookie, so he probably has other cash hidden around the place, and so they start beating him and torturing him, trying to get him to tell them where the money is, and inflicting quite horrific injuries on him, you know, bashing him, putting out lit cigarettes on him,
all kinds of stuff like that. So the thing is, though, Pop probably actually didn't have any end of money in the house. So it's this, you know, the old story with torture. You can torture someone, but they're just going to tell you what they want to hear. And unfortunately Pop can't tell them what they want to hear. There is no other money in the house. They're nearly interrupted
a couple of times. A neighbour from across the street, Mary McWilliam, She was in the habit of coming over for a nightcap with Pop every night, and so she comes and knocks on the door and as she does, Andrews opens the door and says, you know, go away, we're having a private party at the same time, Clayton has his hands around Pop's neck, strangling him to keep him quiet, and it's probable that it's at this point
when he is actually murdered. Now, whether this was intentional or just the eye product of him, you know, strangling him to keep him quiet, is again no one will ever know. But they obviously they now have a dead man in a trash rooming house room, and they decide they need to get out of there very very quickly. At the same time, it's a rooming house, so the noise of the party is being heard by other people, and across the hallway there is another lady living named
May Howard. Now she hears all this noise and then she hears it all stop, and she becomes quite concerned. She then hears Clayton, Andrews and Lee leaving, and Clayton calls out in the hallway, goodbye, Pop, We'll see you tomorrow, you know, establishing some kind of alibi obviously, But there's no response, and so she goes and gets a fellow neighbor in the rooming house, Bill Sommons, and they try to.
Enter the room.
They can't get entry to the room, and Pop is not responding. So they are worried, so they end up now having to call the police. Now, interestingly, Bill Simmons, he was a disabled war veteran. He only had one leg, so he was unable to go to the police. So it ended up being May Howard that ran to the nearest phone box and she called the police. The police forced entry to the room and they found an absolutely trashed rooming house room and the body of poor popkin.
Ah, and then the three of them are on the run.
The three of them are on the run.
Okay, they as they're making their way back into the city, they go to a payphone and they booked flights for the seven am TAA flight to Adelaide and then back to their rooms at the Great Southern Hotel near Spencer Street. They changed out of their bloody clothes and went to the Copa Kabana nightclub where they resumed their drinking and they were eventually asked to leave in the early hours
of the morning because Gene had become worse for drink. Apparently, in the meantime, the police are undertaking a man hunt because they've headed up to the University Hotel where they know Pop Drinks got a quick description of these three people who have been seen drinking with him all afternoon and evening pretty quickly, and they're now just canvassing everywhere in the local area to see if anyone has met
these descriptions. At about twenty to four in the morning, a clerk at the Great Southern Hotel recognized the description says, yep, these three people are staying here in two rooms, and the police gained entry to those rooms and they found bloodstained clothing. They waited at the hotel and about four twenty am Clayton, Andrews and Lee returned and they are arrested by squad of detectives led by senior detectives Cyrial Kura.
They weren't very hard to catch, were they. I mean, they made a lot of mistakes, I guess because they were all so drunk and not thinking.
Made a lot of noise.
And I mean, this is also what my personal opinion is, this wasn't so much premeditated as circumstance. They were drunk, they were desperate, they saw the opportunity, they took it. They didn't really think through the consequences, and you know, look, they were trying to get out of Melbourne with that seven am flight. But they didn't just go back to their rooms quietly and wait until seven am.
Did they?
Now you mentioned the confessions, Did they all confess straight away?
Absolutely not. They're all separated, put in sweatboxes and subjected to hours of interrogation and Gene absolutely held fast for nearly six hours or more I believe it was. But they're all drunk, they're all denied sleep, and you know, possibly subjected to other forms of interrogation and persuasion.
You know, whether the phone books were brought out or not.
Oh interesting, Okay, is this speculation or.
Is this absolutely speculation and cynicism and preconceived bias on my part. But it is late nineteen forties and you can imagine, you know, the police back then were a different breed and how they extracted their confessions. Look, maybe I've read too many James our Roy novels, but I am cynical. But she doesn't budge. However, Clayton does.
Now.
He says later on that you know, he turned yellow like a dog, and that he was just so completely out of it from his being worse for the state of where it's sleep deprivation and drunk. But he is presented with a signed confession, and he signs it, and he is then dragged tearfully into Gene's cell And the thing about this confession is the implicates Gene. It's She's the one that started it all. She's the one that attacked him, She's the.
One that murdered Kent.
So he's brought into the integration room in front of Jane and he him it's yep, I signed that confession. And Gene apparently she scoffed so much for the weaker sex when seeing Clayton in this condition, and then apparently she said, Bobby, I still love you, but if that's the way you want it, you can have it. As he was dragged for the room, and then she turned to the police and she said, I did it.
I did it all.
Everything that he said is true. It's all on me. Pretty clear cut confession. She was delayed to say, however, that she simply admitted it just to get some peace and quiet.
We'll leave this story here for now, but tune back in on Thursday for part two of the story of Gene Lee to hear what happened after she confessed to the murder. Thanks for listening. This has Been In Black and White a podcast about some of Australia's forgotten characters, written and hosted by me Jen Kelly, edited by Nina Young, and produced by John ty Burton. You can find all the stories and photos associated with our episodes at haroldsun
dot com dot au slash ibaw. If you've enjoyed this podcast, we'd love you to leave a five star rating on Apple Podcasts. Even better, leave a review. Any comments or questions please email me at in Black and White at haroldsun dot com dot au. Any clarifications or updates will appear in the show notes for each episode, and to get notified when each new episode comes out, make sure you subscribe to the podcast feed
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