Jean Lee (born Marjorie Jean Maude Wright)
Convicted: Jean Lee (born Marjorie Jean Maude Wright)
On the morning of 19 February 1951, Jean Lee was too sedated to walk to her own execution. When the door opened and she saw the masked hangman waiting in his large felt hat and black goggles, she collapsed. Prison officers carried her to the trapdoor, placed her on a chair, and fitted the rope. At 8:00 a.m., seven stone and six pounds of unconscious woman dropped eight feet. She was thirty-one years old.
Lee became the last woman ever executed in Australia, a distinction she holds to this day. But the story of how a girl from Dubbo, New South Wales, once a milliner and a waitress, arrived at that gallows is darker and more complicated than any simple narrative of guilt allows.
Together with her lover, professional criminal Robert Clayton, and their associate Norman Andrews, Lee had participated in the torture and murder of 'Pop' Kent, a 73-year-old Carlton bookmaker, in November 1949. The three had tied the old man to a chair and spent an hour beating, stabbing, and ultimately strangling him in a bid to find his hidden cash. The neighbours heard him screaming.
What followed was a legal saga that raised serious questions about coerced confessions, political interference, and whether a woman who hadn't delivered the final blow deserved to die for it. The Victorian government, unmoved by mass public protest, said yes. The High Court of Australia agreed.
This is the story of Jean Lee: her life, her crimes, and the morning they carried her, unconscious, to meet the rope.
