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Marjorie Jean
Maude Wright (1919-1951), murderer, was born on 10 December 1919 at Dubbo, New South Wales, fifth and youngest child of Australian-born parents Charles Wright, railway ganger, and his wife Florence, née Peacock. Her names were registered as Marjorie Jean
Maude. After the family moved to
Sydney in 1927, she was educated at Chatswood Public School, at a convent in North
Sydney and at Willoughby Central Domestic High School (1932-33). She did not sit her Intermediate certificate examinations.
Jean Wright turned her hand to a number of jobs, working as a milliner, waitress, stenographer and as a labourer in a canned-goods factory. Aged 18, on 19 March 1938 at the Methodist Church, South Chatswood, she married Raymond Thomas Brees, a 25-year-old house-painter; their daughter was born in April 1939. From the beginning the marriage was strained by financial difficulties; Brees was regularly out of work and drinking heavily. The couple separated and were divorced in April 1949.
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As a single mother, Jean Brees found it difficult to make ends meet. Increasingly she became caught in a cycle of poverty, petty crime and prostitution in
Sydney and
Brisbane, using numerous aliases, among them 'Jean Lee'. In 1943 she had begun an association with Morris Dias, a criminal who managed her earnings from prostitution. Three years later she met Robert David Clayton, a 'con man' and gambler with whom she formed an enduring, if violent, relationship. Between May 1945 and July 1948 she appeared twenty-three times at
Sydney's Central
Police Court, mostly on charges of offensive behaviour.
In October 1949 Lee travelled to
Melbourne with Clayton, who had just been released from gaol. There they teamed up with another criminal, Norman Andrews. The three committed minor offences which brought them into further conflict with the law. On 8 November a 73-year-old, part-time bookmaker William ('Pop') Kent was found murdered in the front room of his house in Dorrit Street, Carlton. The
police alleged that Clayton, Andrews and Lee had accompanied Kent to his
home, bashed him, tortured him to find where he had hidden his money, and finally strangled him. Angry and bitter about the charge, Lee pleaded innocence and insisted she was an onlooker rather than an active participant in the crime.
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On 25 March 1950, after a long and dramatic trial in the Supreme Court, the three were found guilty of murder and sentenced to death. The media and a majority of people were in favour of the sentence being carried out, but, spearheaded by the Labor Women's Organising Committee and groups opposed to capital punishment, some public sympathy emerged for Lee. No woman had been hanged in Victoria for fifty-six years. Telegrams of protest were sent to the McDonald government, but a subsequent legal appeal failed to reverse the decision. At 8 a.m. on 19 February 1951 Jean Lee was carried to the scaffold and hanged at Pentridge prison, Coburg, while protesters and the press gathered outside. Clayton and Andrews were hanged two hours later. Survived by her daughter, Lee was buried within the prison walls. She was the last woman to suffer the death penalty in Australia.
It was decided that Lee should be the first to hang, the two men being executed two hours later.
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She was heavily sedated as she shuffled under escort to a double cell near the gallows.
Sheriff William Daly was required to read the death warrant to her. But she collapsed on seeing the hangman and his assistant.
Because of her state of collapse, the executioner pinioned her arms in front of rather than behind her back as was normal. His assistant then pinioned her legs with a strap whilst he put the white hood on her head, and they carried her from the cell the few yards to the gallows where she had to be placed on a chair on the trap. Her head drooped to her chest and the executioner had to pull it back in order to adjust the noose correctly.
The flap of the hood, which was to cover her face, had been left open. At a signal from the sheriff, the executioner dropped the flap to obscure her face, stood back from the trap and pulled the lever. The trap fell and both she and the chair plummeted through. The chair had been secured to the gallows by a cord and although it fell with her, the two parted company at the end of the drop leaving her suspended normally.
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