"Had he been guilty he may have deserved it, but not being guilty, he doesn't deserve it."
Just 52 years ago, despite contradictory evidence, numerous appeals and huge protests, Ronald Ryan became the last person in Australia to die by capital punishment.
In never-before-seen footage, new angles of the large public protests calling on the government not to kill Ryan, as well as the opinions of everyday Australians on capital punishment in the 1960s, have been revealed.
Unedited film reels, stashed in archives for more than five decades, also feature Ryan's mother moments after seeing her son for the last time the day before he was to be hanged for murder.
Ryan's story, and the changes to capital punishment laws after his execution, began with a neglected child who fell into petty theft.
Who was Ronald Ryan?
Ronald Joseph Ryan was born in 1925 to alcoholic, abusive parents.
As a child he stole a watch from a neighbour, which got him in enough trouble to be shipped off to a school for "wayward and neglected" boys.
Ironically he escaped the school and lived with his mother and sisters before meeting his future wife, Dorothy.
The couple had 3 daughters.
Historical archives report that Ryan fell into gambling, addiction and stealing.
He was jailed in 1960 and released on parole 3 years later, but could not escape the revolving door of crime.
In November 1964 he was sentenced to 8 years' jail for robbery.
It was in Melbourne's Pentridge Prison that he met and befriended Peter Walker.
Just 1 year into Ryan's 8-year sentence, he and Walker hatched a plan to make a break for it.
The crime that started it all
On a December day in 1965, the pair scaled a wall, entered a tower and Ryan stole a rifle.
He forced a guard to open a gate. The pair escaped.
Warders discovered the commotion and attempted to catch the 2 men.
One of those warders was George Hodson.
Hodson was making chase when a shot was fired, hitting him in the chest and killing him.
Walker and Ryan stole a getaway car and fled.
News reports warned the public that the two escapees were violent and dangerous, and urged anyone with information to come forward.
ABC journalist Noel Norton said reporters and police worked alongside and even with each other at Melbourne's police headquarters throughout the manhunt. "It's an electric atmosphere, shown out with the police reporters and the detectives almost living in each other's pockets as they follow up every available lead and they pass it across between their two respective camps," Norton reported at the time.
The escapees travelled to Sydney, but a public tip-off set police on their trail. On January 6, police caught Ryan and Walker, ending their 19-day spree.
Ryan and Walker were extradited back to Melbourne to await trial for the murder of George Hodson, which began on March 15, 1966. A long legal battle
Ryan said he never fired his rifle and his attorney and Philip Opas, QC, argued the trajectory of the bullet that killed Hodson could not have come from Ryan's position.
The bullet was never found at the scene, so forensic testing was never completed.
Witness statements were inconsistent, including ones that another warder fired a shot himself.
Despite the mismatched evidence, the jury found Ryan guilty of murder after a 12-day trial and he was sentenced to death.
Opas lodged an appeal on Ryan's behalf, but the full High Court rejected it.
Victorian Premier Henry Bolte ordered for Ryan's legal aid to be cut, but Opas was so convinced of Ryan's innocence, he represented him for free.
It was announced Ryan would be hanged on January 9, 1967, but soon after, a stay of execution was issued while Opas flew to London to make an appeal to the Privy Council.
That appeal was also denied, and the State Executive Council decided Ryan would be hanged on January 31.
The day before the execution, another stay of execution was ordered so new evidence could be considered. That evidence was soon withdrawn.
Bolte and his cabinet met yet again to consider Ryan's sentence, and again the decision was made: Ryan would be hanged on February 3 at Pentridge Jail.
Anti-capital punishment protests were gaining traction.
Protests and a Premier hell-bent on hanging
The public was divided on capital punishment at the time of Ryan's sentence, but Bolte supported it and was sick of death sentences being downgraded.
Between 1951 and 1967, all 35 death sentences in Victoria were commuted to life without parole, including for violent criminal Robert Tait who brutally killed an 82-year-old woman in 1961.
The premier wanted him hanged, but because Tait suffered brain damage as a child the High Court forced the sentence to be commuted at the last moment.
Bolte was determined that the next death sentence would go ahead no matter what.
News reports described growing protests as "ugly and rather unpleasant scenes".
People young and old marched together against capital punishment. Placards compared Bolte to Hitler.
But of the films recording chants of "don't hang him", people could also be heard calling to do just the opposite.
ABC reporter Mike Crewdson took to the streets the evening before Ryan's execution, asking the public their feelings of responsibility about the hanging.
"I'm for it, I think Bolte's quite right in sticking to his guns and I don't see why hanging isn't a great deterrent to criminals. If that isn't, I don't know what is," one woman told Crewsdon.
"I think they should get on with it and stop the sob-stuff campaign that they're having."
"I don't approve of it at all," the woman's male counterpart said.
"I think Mr Bolte is acting rather pig-headedly, not listening to what are reasonable arguments. And if he wants to be a dictator, this is the way to go about it."
Even after Opas requested another last-minute postponement to consider new evidence, the decision to hang Ryan was confirmed.
The state opposition leader, Clive Stoneham, made a statement to the ABC that the cabinet could not possibly have properly considered all the submissions.
"In dereliction of his oath of office, the tyrannical premier has forced ministers opposed to capital punishment into submission of his outrageous obsession to hang Ryan," Stoneham said.
"This can only be described as having no precedent in the history of Australia."
The protests, by the opposition and the public, were to no avail.
Ryan's final days and moments
On February 2, 1967, Ryan's mother Cecilia was permitted to briefly visit her son.
She told Crewdson shortly after that the sentence was unjust.
"As he said, had he been guilty he may have deserved it, but not being guilty, he doesn't deserve it," she said.
"He's quite sure the gun didn't go off. He said he had it in his hand and he said 'it didn't go off, it didn't'.
"He knows that he didn't do it."
Despite the crowds, the scene was described as "quiet" outside Pentridge Prison on the morning of February 3.
Dozens gathered around the gates, including children.
Cameramen filmed the clock tower as it ticked closer to 8:00am, the time the execution was set to take place.
Crews captured people crying. It is not known whether they were relatives, friends, acquaintances or supporters of Ryan.
Journalist Brian Morley was one of the witnesses to the execution.
Exactly 40 years later, in February 2007, he spoke on ABC Mornings Conversation Hour about one of his most difficult experiences.
"The thing that struck me, and stayed with me forever, was the smell of the disinfectant they used," Morley said.
"It just had almost a medieval atmosphere, it was terrible."
Morley said Ryan was "terribly calm and terribly dignified" as the hangman stood him on the trapdoors.
"As he pulled the hood down over Ryan's face and he actually leapt for the lever, I closed my eyes. I couldn't take it anymore," Morley said.
"The scene was just so horrendous. There was this almighty crash as the metal trapdoors swung open, it was a hell of a racket.
"When I opened my eyes Ryan was gone, just the rope was swinging, creaking. Dreadful sound."
What was left behind
ABC reporter Jeff Watson spoke with Ryan's attorney in July 1973.
Opas told Watson that Ryan was the first client he had "ever really felt sorry for".
"I stopped to consider the dreadful preparation, the barbaric ritual that was involved in scientifically breaking a man's neck," Opas said.
"I still find myself even after all this time occasionally suffering nightmares in which I'm reliving the day he hanged."
Opas died in 2008.
Carole Price, daughter of murdered prison warder George Hodson, was in her mid-teens when Ryan was hanged.
She told the ABC's Law Report on the 40th anniversary of Ryan's execution that her stance on capital punishment changed drastically throughout her life.
"I felt, at the time, 'good. An eye for an eye'," she said.
"I've had time to think about it, and … I don't believe Ryan would have had enough opportunity to think about his actions and the effect it has [had] on people.
"He's gone. He's not doing the sentence, Ryan's family is and my family is."
Ryan's own daughters were about the same age as Ms Price when their father was hanged.
They had their father's remains exhumed in the late 2000s but requested privacy from the media through the process.
Walker, Ryan's jailbreak accomplice, was released from prison in 1984.
He returned to jail briefly in 2002 for theft and cultivating cannabis, and was arrested again in 2014 on deception, drugs and firearm offences.
He was sentenced in 2016, aged 74, to 7 years and 2 months in prison with a non-parole period of 4 years and 4 months.
Australia's final hanging
When Ryan was hanged in 1967, the death penalty for murder was already abolished in Queensland and New South Wales.
1 year later it was abolished in Tasmania.
The Whitlam government abolished capital punishment for offences under Commonwealth law in 1973 with the Death Penalty Abolition Act, covering the Australian Capital Territory, which had never had an execution, and the Northern Territory.
Bolte resigned as Victorian Premier in 1972 and was replaced by then-deputy premier Rupert Hamer.
Hamer's Liberal Party was voted back into power at the 1973 election with an even bigger majority than what it had before, and two years later a bill was introduced to abolish capital punishment in Victoria.
In March 1975 he told journalist Kerry O'Brien on This Day Tonight his own stance on capital punishment changed from for to against after studying the evidence.
"This is a matter of social conscience, it's a matter of the opinions that people have, and of course it's an issue that divides the community," Hamer said at the time.
The bill passed that year, and capital punishment was abolished in Victoria.
South Australia followed in 1976, and Western Australia in 1984.
It was not until 2010 that the Commonwealth government extended the Death Penalty Abolition Act to cover all states. No jurisdiction can re-introduce the death penalty in Australia.
Source: abc.net.au, Kelsie Iorio for RetroFocus, January 5, 2020
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
