Jean Lee - The Last Woman Hanged in Australia

On 19th February 1951, Jean Lee, an attractive, red-haired, 31-year-old woman was hanged at Melbourne's Pentridge Prison. She had been sedated and was held upright on a chair before being plunged to her death. Jean Lee was the last woman hanged in Australia and the only one to hang in the 20th century. She and her lover Robert Clayton and their friend Norman Andrews had been found guilty of the murder of 73-year-old SP bookmaker Pop Kent at Carlton in 1949. Jean was an outlier in postwar Australia, husbandless, supporting herself and her child through work and lovers, eventually spiralling into prostitution and petty crime. Subverting every code in the conservative postwar female identity, Jean Lee did not fit the mould. She went to the gallows despite severe doubts about what part she played in the murder, highly questionable police interogations of the time, and controversial High Court and Privy Council decisions...