Darryl Beamish

Darryl Beamish (born 1941) is a Western Australian man who was wrongfully convicted of wilful murder in 1961 and sentenced to death by hanging. The death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment and he served 15 years. After six appeals his conviction was finally overturned in 2005.

Darryl Beamish, a deaf mute man, was aged 18 in 1959 when the 22-year-old socialite and MacRobertson's chocolate heiress, Jillian MacPherson Brewer, was slain in her Cottesloe flat by an intruder who mutilated her body with a tomahawk and a pair of dressmaking scissors. According to Perth Detective Owen Leitch, 18-year-old Beamish provided four confessions, two through a sign language interpreter, one a written statement and another in notes scrawled on the exercise yard at the Perth lock-up. Beamish said the confessions were obtained through intimidation and threats, and were untrue.

Beamish appealed to the Court of Criminal Appeal on the grounds that the trial judge's directions were in error, and his confession was involuntary and therefore should have been ruled inadmissible or excluded in the trial judge's discretion. The appeal was dismissed on 20 October 1961 and an application for leave to appeal to the High Court of Australia was dismissed on 11 December 1961.

Serial killer Eric Edgar Cooke, who had been questioned in relation to the Brewer murder in January 1960, confessed to the murder on 10 September 1963. Beamish filed a petition to the Attorney-General which was referred to the Court of Criminal Appeal. The Court of Criminal Appeal dismissed the reference on 22 May 1964. Wolff CJ, who had also been the trial judge, held that the case against Beamish was "strong."Virtue J described Cooke as an "utterly worthless scoundrel" and "palpable and unscrupulous liar". The appeal was dismissed. A further application for special leave to appeal to the High Court was dismissed on 14 September 1964, as was an appeal to the Privy Council.

Beamish's case caused continuing concern in legal circles. On the morning of his hanging at Fremantle Prison on 26 October 1964, without prompting, Cooke took the Bible from the prison chaplain and said: "I swear before Almighty God that I killed Anderson and Brewer." In a book titled The Beamish Case (1966), Australian professor of jurisprudence Peter Brett argued that the affair was a "monstrous miscarriage of justice".

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