Ronald Ryan

Wow.

The last person to be hanged was Ronald Ryan in Victoria in 1967.

Oh, wrong.

I

I was going through some dusty old papers in my attic this week and came across my clippings file from when I was writing for the Australian newspaper in the late 1980s.

I found a story where I'd interviewed a retired judge, Sir John Stark, known as Jack, who sentenced Ronald Ryan to be hanged for the 1965 murder of Pentridge prison warder George Hodson.

I now ask you, the public, to help.

We are dependent upon you.

The early morning of Christmas...

Ryan was the last man to be legally executed in Australia and his death fuelled mass public protests against capital punishment, which was eventually abolished in Victoria in 1975.

The Executive Council met today and its decision is that the sentence of death on Ronald Ryan will be carried into execution on Tuesday, January 31st at 8am in the forenoon...

Jack Stark, I believe, wrestled with his conscience over the Ryan case until the day he died in 1994.

Yeah.

But what happened while I was down in H2 in the first time, and I went to H2 four times while I was down there the first time, Ronald Ryan was there.

Now, Ronald Ryan escaped with a guy called Walker.

What they did, as you were in Christmas and the prison officers were having a party, Christmas party as you do, and there weren't a lot of prison officers around.

So they were understaffed.

He was going down to South Melbourne to get some sly grog.

And the guy went with him.

Walker stopped because the guy said to him, you know that guy who's there? And Walker said, who? He says, Ronald Ryan.