FEATURE
Hang Jean Lee DR AUKE ‘JJ’ STEENSMA, BARRISTER & SOLICITOR, STEENSMA LAWYERS
I
told them it was me that did the kill, you know I love you, I always will. And the papers say it was all due to me, everybody wants to hang Jean Lee. - Hang Jean Lee, Ed Kuepper & Judi Dransfield-Kuepper, Sep 2007
THE PROTAGONISTS OF THIS STORY
her cell. The Executioner and assistant were both “wearing steel-rimmed welders goggles and soft felt caps pulled well down”.6 Lee would be carried to the gallows, on “the first level of a dim-lined corridor’ in the remand section of the gaol.7 The Mirror newspaper reported that: an extra-large trapdoor was built between two narrow catwalks which join cells on the first floor. The three condemned with taken from cells only a few yards away. The hanging ropes were tied to a heavy white wooden being about 35 feet from the ground level.8
Jean Lee
Robert David Clayton
Norman Thomas Andrews
(Photographs courtesy of Australia’s Dark Heart website: https://australiasdarkheart.weebly.com/ jean-lee.html)
BOB ASCENDS HEAVENLY STAIRS/ BIG ROAD BLUES At 8am on Monday, 19 February, 1951, on a ‘grey drizzling sky’,1 Jean Lee, born Marjorie Jean Maude Wright was executed at Melbourne’s HM Prison Pentridge for the murder of William George ‘Pop’ Kent. No other woman had been executed in Victoria since the execution of Emma Williams on Monday, 4 November, 1895, some 56 years earlier.2 Jean Lee was the 191st person executed in Victoria,3 the fifth woman hanged in Victoria,4 and has the dubious honour of being the last woman executed in Australia. Lee would leave no last words, for she had collapsed to the floor when the Executioner5 and his assistant entered
30 THE BULLETIN September 2020
Barely conscious, she was strapped to a chair that was facing sideways on the scaffold.9 The 31-year-old single mother would leave behind a daughter, who she had left with her mother, Florence Wright, who had successfully gained the legal custody of her grandchild, some years earlier.10 Two hours later, at 10am, her accomplices Norman Thomas Andrews and Robert David Clayton met the same fate. As they both stood at the scaffold, Clayton quietly bid farewell to Andrews, saying simply; “Goodbye Charlie.”11, to which Andrews replied; “Goodbye Robert.”12 Following the executions, the Government Medical Officer, Dr JD Whiteside, signed the certificates stating; “that the sentences of the law had been properly carried out”.13 The Governor of the Gaol; declared that an inquest would be held that afternoon at 4pm on the bodies of Lee, Clayton, and Andrews. Lee, Clayton, and Andrews were buried at the HM Prison Pentridge Cemetery.
DADDY’S GIRL Jean Maude Wright was born on Wednesday, 10 December, 1919, at Dubbo in New South Wales.14 She was the youngest of five children born to Florence and Charles Wright, a railway ganger. When Jean was eight years old, the family moved to Sydney. She went
to school at Chatswood Public School, a Convent in North Sydney, and Willoughby Central Domestic High School.15 She was considered intelligent but had a rebellious nature.16 She left school without finishing her intermediate certificate. The Herald newspaper wrote that: Jean didn’t like school very much. But, of course, there are tens of thousands of boys and girls who dislike school, yet grow into welldisciplined men and women. Jean was a trifle rebellious; she felt that she didn’t get on well with the teachers. But if this childish resentment of authority was the first suggestion of a shadow, that is all it was. In other ways, Jean Wright’s girlhood progressed normally.17 Jean was in and out of jobs. She worked in a can goods factory, waitress and even tried a hand at being a milliner.18 While at Chatswood Public School, Jean had learnt typing and shorthand and was employed as an office junior at a William Street motor firm.19 And Ed Kuepper sings; “Can’t you see she is Daddy’s Girl, I tell ya she’s my darling”.20
SKINNY JEAN On Saturday, 19 March, 1938, life would then to change for 18-year-old Jean, Jean Maude Wright married Raymond Thomas Brees, a house painter, at the Methodist Church in South Chatswood.21 She had known Brees since she was a young woman at school. In April 1939, Jean gave birth to a daughter. The marriage lasted only about nine years. Brees was often out of work and began to drink heavily. Jean did not drink nor even smoke. When World War II broke out, Jean moved to Brisbane where she worked in service canteens. It was at this time that her life began to change. She began to drink which increased; “in that town of hotels beleaguered by thousands Allied
