Gangland Robbers (17 page)

On 7 November they went to the University Hotel in Lygon Street and latched on to the small and fat William ‘Old Bill' Kent, a 73-year-old Carlton bookmaker. It was only a matter of drink and time before he was persuaded to take Jean Lee to his flea-and-lice-infested rooming house in Dorrit Street. She told him she was a dancer and that her stage name was Valez, and wrote it down for him. She then got him more drunk
and, while performing oral sex, tried to pick his pocket. When he would not let go of his wallet, she hit him on the head with a bottle and then a piece of wood and, joined by the others, tortured him. They placed him on a chair with his thumbs tied together with a bootlace and, for over an hour, repeatedly kicked and beat him. Finally, he was strangled and left tied to the chair, having died from asphyxia caused by compression and fracturing of the larynx. After the three had left, around 11 p.m., his neighbour James Conole, who had earlier been drinking with them all, looked in Kent's room and immediately called the police.

With some of the money they had stolen, Clayton bought tickets for a flight to Sydney and the trio went to the Copacabana club to celebrate. After their night out, with £50 left from the robbery, they returned at 4 a.m. to their rooms at the Great Southern Hotel to find the police waiting for them. An astute officer, who was able to link her to the name Valez, had traced Lee.

It was Clayton, always a coward, who broke first, blaming the others. ‘Listen, I didn't do it. Jean did it! Jean and Andrews. I had nothing to do with it. I didn't want to be in it.' In a statement to the police, Lee took full responsibility, saying the others had nothing to do with the murder:

 

Did Bobby say that? All right. He can put the blame on me. I sort of done my block. I hit the old man with a bottle and a piece of wood and tied him up. I tied his thumbs together. I gave him the treatment to find out where the money was. He was dead before we left.

 

However, she refused to sign the statement.

As for Andrews, he told the police, ‘I have to look after myself. Clayton is trying to put it on me. I did not hit the old chap, but I held him while they went through his pockets. He was pretty drunk.'

At the trial, Lee gave evidence on her own behalf, saying that the three had been in Kent's room but had left to go and get a meal and he had waved them off from the veranda. She denied making the long admission she had refused to sign. Clayton told the jury that he had only made a statement implicating Jean Lee because the police had held a gun to his head. ‘It was question, question, question. I turned like a yellow dog.' His confession was, he said, ‘a concoction of lies and a figment of imagination'. He had not thought it would cause any trouble for the others because they were innocent. Quite how he could have thought that is difficult to understand.

When the jury returned their guilty verdicts, Lee broke down, crying, ‘I didn't do it.' Clayton yelled at the jury, calling them idiots and adding, ‘May your next feed choke you, you swine.'

In May 1950 their appeals went before the Court of Criminal Appeal when the confessions' admissibility was challenged. Some, but by no means all, judges were becoming concerned about the number of oral confessions apparently made to police officers that, when put in writing, the suspect would not sign. On 19 May, by a majority decision, the court ordered a retrial so there could be a review of the admissibility of alleged confessions by the accused to the police. Mr Justice Smith ruled that Lee's alleged confession should not have been admitted at the trial because she had been given an emotional shock when the police told her that her lover had made a statement. ‘After that she abandoned for a time her attitude of refusing to make a statement.' Many might consider the judge's interpretation generous.

Mr Justice Barry, agreeing with Mr Justice Smith's judgment, looked at the broader picture:

 

No responsible person fails to recognise the need for a full investigation of crime, and the speedy apprehension of criminals. But that investigation may be defeated, and the proper administration of justice frustrated if, through distrust of police methods, juries are reluctant to convict obviously guilty persons. In the long run, therefore, the needs of law enforcement will best be met by the Courts insisting upon observance by investigating officers of standards of fairness, which commend themselves to the average sense of the community from which juries are drawn.

 

In an 8000-word dissenting judgment, which took Mr Justice O'Bryan an hour to read, he held that the appeals should be dismissed.

When the convictions were quashed, Lee began kissing Clayton and had to be physically separated from him before being led from the dock, laughing. Her elation lasted less than a month, when on 23 June the High Court reversed the Court of Appeal's ruling and restored the death-penalty sentence. There was to be no retrial.

A campaign to reprieve her began and it was thought, with the Labor Party firmly against capital punishment, the Cabinet was swinging in her favour. However, ten days before Christmas 1950, one minister went on record saying, ‘We must do something drastic to stop these
endless murders in Melbourne.
The number has grown alarmingly
, and this year there have been twice as many as last year.' The trio were due to hang on 8 January, but on 18 December the State Executive Council suspended the executions until 5 February, to allow them ‘ample opportunity' to appeal to the Privy Council in London. On 12 January, with the executions still postponed, the Privy Council refused their application for leave to appeal.

Lee still could not believe that the government would hang a woman. No one had been hanged in Victoria for nearly ten years and there had only been four executions that century. And, after all, there had been reprieves in the Surridge case, albeit in New South Wales, a few years earlier. But she was wrong. The New South Wales standover man Chow Hayes wrote of the trio:

 

I'd been in jail with Norm Andrews, who wasn't a bad bloke … It was never revealed in the newspapers, but the whisper was that they'd cut off their victim's penis and stuffed it in his mouth.

 

Which would account, at least in part, for the government's reluctance to grant a reprieve. Veteran reporter Alan Dower partly confirmed this, writing that Kent's penis had been bound with a bootlace and repeatedly stabbed.

At 8.01 a.m. on 19 February 1951 Lee was hanged at Pentridge Prison. The previous week, she had become hysterical, throwing her food at the warders, and shouting and screaming obscenities at them. Heavily sedated, she was carried to the gallows, wearing what were described as khaki pedal pushers and a white shirt and sandals, and was hanged, sitting in a chair in which she had to be supported by the hangman's assistant. She was the first woman to be hanged in Victoria since 1894, when baby farmer Frances Knorr was executed.

Two hours later, Clayton and Andrews were hanged in a double execution. Andrews shouted from under his hood, ‘Goodbye, Robert.' Clayton replied, ‘Goodbye, Charlie.'
Outside the jail, part of the crowd
sang ‘Nearer My God to Thee'.

It was Chinese–Australian Leslie Woon, known as The Professor, who planned Sydney's Mayne Nickless robbery on 4 March 1970. It would ultimately prove disastrous for the perps and fatal for one of them.

Woon had started his career early, at the age of nineteen, with a series of armed robberies, including one at the Mutual Cash Order Company in Melbourne on 28 October 1938. Masked, he and another youth had held up the cashiers. One of them had kept the women covered, while the other went into the manager's office and took £92 and change. As they ran away, one of the men fired a warning shot. Their little spree came to an end a fortnight later, when they held up Henry Woodlands' grocery shop in Spencer Street. The police staked out a house in Atkins Street, North Melbourne, and after a chase over the fences, found 16-year-old James Berryman hiding with a loaded revolver. Two other youths, Raymond Lloyd and Allan McArthur, were also arrested.

In turn, Woon was arrested in bed at his parents' home in Rose Bay, Sydney, and told the police he had lost his share of the money on Melbourne Cup Day: ‘This is the first and last job I'll ever be in.' No part of this statement was accurate. However, his counsel told the court Woon came from a ‘most respectable family' and had he ‘not taken liquor for the first time in his life on the night of the raid it was doubtful that he would have taken part'. Woon was remanded for sentencing, but by the time he next appeared he had pleaded guilty to two more robberies, which rather undermined the earlier mitigation.

On 16 December, telling the youths and particularly the press that this sort of thing had to be stopped, Judge McIndoe pontificated:

 

I feel it is my duty to impose sentences that will not only punish the youths, but will also act as a deterrent to other young men who might be contemplating crime.

 

He sentenced Berryman, who during one robbery had pistol-whipped one of the victims, to five years, and the others to three apiece. All were to receive a private whipping of ten strokes of the birch.

It had been an unsuccessful start to what is generally thought of as a brilliant criminal career for Woon. Both his peers and the police would come to regard him highly. The
Victoria Police Gazette
described him as, ‘Not afraid to dirty his hands when planning a job. He doesn't mix with the criminal element; using different names for his flat, car and telephone.'

In 1952 Woon, now also known as James, was charged alongside William Stuart with having broken into Melbourne's Queen Street branch of the Commercial Banking Company of Sydney and the Victorian Club. It was a typically well-organised heist by Woon, and the evidence against the pair was thin. When the police, led by Detective Stanley Miller, went to the club, they found two gas cylinders at the top of the stairs leading to the basement. Doors leading to a stationery store down there had been broken open. A fireproof door to the bank had been torn away, and an electric drill, plugged into a power point, was found near it. As they entered the banking chamber, the officers heard the D24 signal and found a wireless tuned to the D24 police radio wavelength.

James Alexander McDiarmid, the Victorian Club manager, said that when he went to the club at 8 a.m. on 23 March he saw that a door in the basement had been forced:

 

I went upstairs to call the police and then went out the back door, closing it behind me. I heard some terrible yells from several voices, coming from inside. I stood back and saw three men through the glass door fumbling with a key trying to get out. Two of them ran past shielding their faces, but I had a quick look at them. I do not think either of the defendants was among them. I later identified the other man in Queensland.

 

Most importantly, McDiarmid said he had known Stuart for three years and felt he would have recognised him had he been one of the three men. J Cullity defended Woon and after he successfully submitted that
there was no case to answer, the magistrate declined to send either Woon or Stuart for trial.

Generally regarded as a highly successful putter-up, Woon now organised a number of successful bank robberies in both Melbourne and Sydney, often using clerks to provide inside information and help. On 19 April 1953 two armed and masked men held seven members and staff of Tatt's Club in Melbourne at pistol point, and took leather bags said to contain £10 000 (later reduced to £3000), the day's takings at Caulfield. The money had been locked in a cupboard prior to being taken to the bank with the proceeds from the night trots. The operation took a mere two minutes. No charges were ever brought.

On 1 December 1957 there was a break-in at City Tattersalls club in Sydney, when bookmakers' strongboxes were forced open. At one time it was thought that £100 000 had been stolen but, again, the figure was later greatly reduced. The robbery had the hallmarks of a Woon job but he was never charged.

He did come a cropper, however, when £34 967 was removed from the ES&A Bank, Russell Street, Melbourne, on 28 May 1962. It was six months before Woon was arrested, and also in the dock were his old offsider William Stuart, described as a farmer, along with the bank's number one teller Charles Shirreff, and builder Walter Radcliffe. It was clearly an inside job because twenty-one keys were needed to get through the various doors. Shirreff had stolen them so wax impressions could be made to ensure a ‘key entry' through doors and grilles into the inner vaults and money boxes. Stuart had been arrested trying to change £1500 worth of £1 notes into £10 notes. All three of them dobbed in Woon.

At Woon's first trial, in June 1963, the jury disagreed, but after a retrial at the end of September, he was convicted. The evidence against him had been wholly based on selective answers he gave to the police. In particular, he denied knowing Radcliffe, but there was evidence he did and had been sending him coded telegrams, something Woon finally conceded.

All four received eight years each, with six to be served pre-parole. Mr Justice Hudson, sentencing Woon, thought it was clear that he had got most of the money. During the trial, there was a suggestion that Woon had been too greedy and was prepared to doublecross the others, which is, no doubt, why they had dobbed him in.
He lost an appeal based on
the admission of certain questions, and then lost a further appeal to the Supreme Court. On 21 July 1964 Stuart and Radcliffe
were convicted and sentenced to five years, three concurrent and two consecutive with the ES&A sentence, for burning down four unoccupied terraced cottages in East Melbourne. In 1967 Woon successfully claimed $364 taken from him when he had been arrested. There was, agreed the police, no evidence to show the money had come from the bank. Woon said it belonged to his wife and children, and that it was not unusual to have large sums of money in the house.