Darryl Beamish

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Darryl Beamish, born 1941, is a Western Australian who was wrongfully convicted of wilful murder in 1961 and sentenced to hang. The death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment and he served 15 years.

Justice for Button and Beamish: Darryl Beamish, Estelle Blackburn and John Button at the Supreme Court celebrating Beamish's exoneration on 1 April 2005 (44 years after conviction), following Button's exoneration on 25 February 2002 (39 years after conviction).

Beamish, a deaf mute, was 18 in 1959, when the 22-year-old socialite and chocolate heiress, Jillian Brewer, was slain in her Cottesloe flat by an intruder who mutilated her body with a tomahawk and a pair of dressmaking scissors.

His conviction for the murder in 1961 caused continuing concern in legal circles. An Australian Professor of Jurisprudence, Peter Brett, wrote a short book titled The Beamish Case, in 1966; arguing that the affair was a "monstrous miscarriage of justice". (Beamish had narrowly escaped the gallows.)

Western Australian journalist, Estelle Blackburn, uncovered new evidence, which she advanced in her book Broken Lives, and which led to the overturning of the convictions of both Beamish and John Button. The two men had both been convicted of crimes committed by the serial killer, Eric Edgar Cooke, and to which Cooke had insistently confessed before his death by hanging. Beamish's conviction was finally overturned by the Court of Criminal Appeal in Western Australia on 1 April, 2005, after five failed appeals in the 1960s.