Date of Incident: 20-2-1959
Date of Conviction: 15-8-1961
Exoneration Date: 1-4-2005
Charge: Wilful murder
Conviction: Wilful Murder
Sentence: To death comuted to life
Sentence Served: 15 years
Contributing Causes: False confession
Compensation: No
Darryl Beamish has since birth been deaf and cannot speak. He was sentenced to death by hanging for a murder he did not commit.
In 1959, socialite heiress Jillian Brewer was found murdered in her bed in her ground-floor flat in Cottesloe, just before Christmas in 1959.She had been attacked with a tomahawk and a pair of scissors. Her murderer was serial killer Eric Edgar Cooke, who murdered seven other people and attacked numerous women in their beds in a crime spree lasting five years. A month after the Brewer murder, Cooke was questioned about it but was released without charge.The same detective who had questioned Cooke arrested Darryl Beamish for the murder 17 months after Ms Brewer was found dead.
At Mr Beamish's trial, it became clear that under police questioning through an interpreter, Mr Beamish had played back to police unpublished facts about the crime that police had fed to him. He was tried and convicted of wilful murder and sentenced to death.The jury recommended mercy on the grounds of his disability, which the state Executive Council later endorsed. An appeal against his conviction was unsuccessful.
Two years later, Eric Cooke confessed to the Brewer murder. Mr Beamish again appealed on the grounds of Cooke's confession.Police and prosecutors contrived to discredit Cooke's confession, and the Court of Criminal Appeal upheld the conviction, as did the High Court of Australia and the Privy Council in London.
