Dressed to kill

Dressed to kill

Convicted murderer John Bryan Kerr was an intriguing, outspoken figure in 1950s Melbourne. Then came silence and a lifetime of secrets.

Aged 11, Kate Wallace returned to her East Malvern home with a school assignment to complete a family tree. She began asking questions of her mother, Denise, who was separated from but on civil terms with her father, John. Who were her grandparents, now deceased? Where was her father from? What had he done in his life?

Denise took a deep breath. It was a long story, which even she did not know entirely. You see, John Wallace was 10 years older than he claimed, and had legally taken that name only quite recently. Why? Because in September 1950, despite his protestations of innocence and an exclusively circumstantial case, he had been convicted of the brutal murder of a young woman on the beach at Albert Park, and barely escaped execution. When John and Denise met in 1976, he had confided a little of his past, repeating his adamant claims to have been wrongfully convicted. Denise had taken him at his word. She was at the time barely half his age - too young to probe more deeply; too young to remember the name John Bryan Kerr.

Newspaper clippings of stories about and by John Bryan Kerr, who became Victoria's No. 1 celebrity prisoner.


For those who did remember, the name provoked instant recognition. Handsome, well-groomed, well-spoken, expensively educated at Scotch College, a rising star in the glamorous industry of radio, 24-year-old John Bryan Wallace Kerr was a man with the world at his feet. Then, late in December 1949, detectives from Victoria's elite Homicide Squad arrived at his Toorak family home, next door to that of Harold and Zara Holt, and conferred on him the instant fame that came with the suspicion of strangling 20-year-old typist Beth Williams.

Interest in the case was revived three years ago, when the cold case unit of the Victorian police received information from a young woman in whom an old man, subsequently deceased, had confided his guilt. But after so long, what could really be known?

Other than being a subject of stories, John Bryan Kerr was himself a journalist, penning newspaper articles after his release.


It was, on its face, a simple crime. Eighteen hours before Homicide arrived at Kerr's door, a passer-by had stumbled on Williams' body, clothes torn, body dampened by the rising tide. Drag marks suggested she had been strangled near the bathing sheds. Inquiries revealed she had left her shared room in Albert Park the night before intending to rendezvous with a sailor, James Stevens, beneath the clocks at Flinders Street station.

Delayed by two companions, Stevens had been late. While waiting, Williams glimpsed Kerr, whom she had casually met twice before, rounding the corner. She called his name; he did not recognise her, but stopped to chat and smoothly asked her out. They had dinner at a city restaurant and breezed to a party in Malvern, whose host then dropped them back in Albert Park. Kerr was, therefore, the last person known to have seen Beth Williams alive.

The story gripped the city. Murder 65 years ago was infrequent and usually squalid: prior to Christmas in 1949, Melbourne had experienced only nine murders, all among the poor or the criminal. Not long before Kerr's arrest, for example, sensibilities had been shocked by the case of an elderly SP bookmaker, William "Pop" Kent, tortured to death in a Carlton lodging house. The three accused included a woman, prostitute Jean Lee, and two confederates, Norman Andrews and Robert Clayton. They engendered little sympathy and their trials were thinly attended.

When Kerr entered the dock, it was as if he had been sent down from central casting. His wit was quick, his tailoring immaculate. Crowds composed mainly of young women grew with each day, the queue for admission snaking around the Supreme Court building. His parents, quiet and respectable, attended every day, accompanied by his vocal coach and loudest personal champion, Lee Murray (mentor to a generation of media personalities, Bert Newton and Mike Walsh among them). Behind the prosecution lounged the hulking figure of Senior Detective "Bluey" Adam, Homicide's hardest man.

He's my father: John Wallace with wife Denise, whom he met in 1976, and daughter Kate.


It was Adam who had conducted Kerr's interrogation, and he claimed to have taken a full, uncoerced and rather eerie confession: "Beth wanted to go home, I can't remember much as I felt a turn coming on but I got her to go down to the beach, we were inside a wooden structure. I could hear the sound of the sea, it was dark there. I was in the Navy, I like the sound of the sea. I put my hands around her throat, I am strong, usually, I have big shoulders and don't wear padding in my coats. I am stronger when a turn comes on, 5 men couldn't hold me ... I took her pants off, I wanted to kiss her on the privates. I don't think she wanted me to. She said, 'John John John.' I always kiss women on their privates with whom I have been with [sic] ... I saw her lying down after I had her by the throat. I strangled her. She groaned while I was choking her.”

Kerr claimed to have told Adam that he had simply walked Williams to the end of a laneway leading to her lodgings and left her; although strongly urged to confess, he had refused. And quite apart from not being signed, Kerr insisted the "confession" could not possibly be his: he was pedantic about expression and chivalrous towards women. "Kiss women on the privates"? Why, it was "just filth".

Innocence declared: John Bryan Kerr as a free man. He declined to discuss the death of Beth Williams following his release.


Initially, the "confession" was all the Crown had. There was no eyewitness, no motive, and no forensic evidence to speak of. Rob Monahan, KC, Kerr's virtuoso defence counsel, gave a bravura performance, depicting Beth Williams as a young woman courting danger by dating sailors and attending dances on her own, his inference that she was the victim of a spurned lover, perhaps the sailor Stevens.

Because capital crimes required unanimous decisions, three trials were held. At the first trial, the jury voted 10-2 to acquit; at the second trial, 8-4 to acquit. The media coverage grew so febrile that Henry Winneke, KC, the patrician senior counsel to the Solicitor-General, seriously considered a defence application for a nolle prosequi on grounds that it would be impossible to find jurors who had not prejudged the case, and because of the potential damage to the reputation of the police from further discussion of the "confession". Monahan was utterly convinced of his client's innocence. He told his sons that never, in more than a hundred murder trials, had he encountered a defendant whose resolve was so unshakeable and recall so exact. Uniquely, Kerr's story remained the same every time he told it.


Came a third trial, and the Crown stiffened its resolve. Judge Sir Charles Lowe was a notorious martinet, prosecutor Frank Nelson a clinical logician: "Cold Charlie" and "Frosty Frank" exerted wintry authority. Lowe admitted highly prejudicial evidence from a psychiatrist, Dr Henry Stephens, whom Kerr had consulted about ungovernable rages into which he slipped from time to time. Nelson homed in: Kerr, it transpired, had been court-martialled in the RAAF for striking a superior officer in 1944, pleaded guilty to breach of the peace in a hotel in Colac in 1945, and been involved in a violent altercation with fellow lodgers while boarding in Hobart in 1949.

To prevent unruly scenes at the end of the trial, Lowe had the public galleries cleared when the jury began deliberations at 4pm. But more than a thousand people milled about the building, women in fur coats mingling with workmen eating fish and chips. Not until after 10pm did the jurors return, when their foreman found Kerr guilty "with a strong recommendation of mercy" on grounds he was "not responsible for his actions at the time". Lowe pronounced the mandatory sentence of death. Kerr was lucky. The Country Party then governed Victoria, with Labor support. Cabinet warmly favoured the death penalty, but their bloodlust was satisfied by despatching Jean Lee and her male confederates in January 1951. And when Kerr's sentence was commuted to 20 years, he became, bizarrely, Victoria's No. 1 celebrity prisoner. For Kerr's incarceration coincided with the first gestures towards penal reform in Victoria, including a parole board and prison education courses. Prisoners in Pentridge's A Division were permitted to attend classes in the civilising indulgences, such as literature, music appreciation, drama and debating. Kerr took up the last of these so vigorously that the prison debating team he captained, known as Latrobe, entered the top level of the metropolitan debating competition, The Age and Leader Shield State Debating Championship, and won it two years out of three, beating such groups as the Christian Young Men's Society, the ES&A Bank, Essendon Jaycees, Balwyn Speakers, Ford Motor Company, and the Young Labor and Young Liberal associations.

Latrobe had two advantages: they always debated at home, and a bleak and freezing mess hall containing 70 or so convicted criminals could be an intimidating environment; and they had extensive preparation time of which Kerr made full use. He carefully preserved all his debating notes, dense wodges of close typing with nary a misprint, all committed to memory. The debates were covered in newspapers and even carried live on radio. Such respect was Kerr accorded that he represented Victoria in the 1956 Australian Debating Championship - held, as was necessary, at Pentridge.

Kerr tackled other pursuits, too. He undertook a journalism and creative writing course by correspondence and interviewed popular visitors to the jail, including Herb Elliott and Alan Marshall. And in October 1960, he starred in a prison production of The Caine Mutiny Court Martial, adapted from Herman Wouk's novel, as the brilliant defence counsel, Lt Barney Greenwald, who reduces Captain Queeg to a blustering mess in the witness box: the dialogue reads like his ultimate revenge fantasy. To opening night, attended by many local media personalities, The Herald sent its drama critic, who was glowing in his praise: "The actors bowed low, blew kisses, bowed again - and again. I thought the audience would never stop cheering last night. When they did, they - Melbourne's top lecturers, debaters, TV personalities - invaded the stage to shake Lt Barney Greenwald by the hand."

Kerr's chief preoccupation, however, was his own innocence. In February 1956, at Lee Murray's instigation, The Argus launched a six-week campaign to obtain a retrial on grounds that there had been another suspect for Williams' murder with a propensity for strangulation - a Pole, Leszek Kacprzack, subsequently convicted of attempted murder in Sydney and strongly suspected of another unsolved murder. The Argus couched its campaign in terms of Kerr being a man of dubious guilt who might well have hanged, and ran a succession of editorials decrying the death penalty - the first of their kind in Australia.

Although the campaign failed, Kerr seemed never to leave the headlines. "Go to any Victorian newspaper office,'' observed The Bulletin's Keith Dunstan, "and you will find that the file on John Bryan Kerr is almost as fat as the files on Mr Menzies and Mr Calwell." On his release in May 1962, Kerr duly sold his story to Truth and to Pix, who ran long series based on interviews.

But his fame was now problematic: how was a 36-year-old man who had spent more than a third of his life in prison to readapt to life on the outside? He declined now to discuss the death of Beth Williams directly - he had declared his innocence; he would not repeat it. In this he continued to divide opinion. Two Truth journalists who befriended him, for instance, were intrigued. Owen McKenna decided that it probably implied his guilt; Brian Hansen, who thought Kerr in any event too clever to have given the alleged confession, empathised with his weariness of the affair. Kerr remained a charismatic, alluring figure. When the desire to put the past behind him took him to Sydney, it was with another man's wife. Thirty-three-year-old mother-of-two Yolanda Kelly had become convinced of Kerr's innocence and visited him in prison. Their mutual infatuation was not to last - and nor was "John Bryan Kerr". He steadily retooled his name: Wallace-Kerr, Kerr-Wallace, finally simply Wallace. He invented a back story, improvised a CV, presented as impeccably prepared, spoken and attired in a succession of mid-level sales jobs.

Still, a temper lurked beneath the smoothly assured and gregarious manner, and the desire to control his environment manifested itself in a growingly obsessive cleanliness: he would dust anywhere he was about to sit, polish any cutlery he was about to use, and spend eternities straightening the cord after telephone calls.

There was also one more astonishing brush with the police when Wallace moved back to Melbourne with a girlfriend in her early 20s, Kerrie Williams. In June 1971, she died of an overdose: another young woman called Williams; another sudden death. It had ended badly once. The police might have been more curious about the case had they twigged to his identity but, it seems, they did not.

So when he met chemist-shop assistant Denise four years later while working as a medical detailer for Merck Sharp & Dohme, John Wallace's charisma and bravado concealed deep anxiety. He told her his identity, but said no more, and Denise asked no further. "John spent his life looking over his shoulder wondering whether people had worked out who he was," recalled Denise. At their wedding not even the best man was aware of the groom's identity.

A few fellow members of the Richmond Football Club coterie came to know Wallace's secret, but kept it to themselves. Workmates knew nothing of his background - and were surprised to be contacted about him so many years later. On his death in November 2001, Denise placed funeral notices in the names of both Kerr and Wallace; nobody at the ceremony knew who knew what, and the eulogists carefully avoided mentioning the decisive incident of the dear departed's life.

By modern lights, the case is thin. The unsigned confession has been discredited, damned in a High Court judgment by Justice Michael McHugh: "There are good grounds for supposing that over the years many of these 'records of interview' tendered in evidence have been fabricated ... Many ... were works of art, worthy of an award-winning scriptwriter.”

Investigators now would be obliged to explore "alternative hypotheses consistent with innocence", which 65 years ago they were not. Yet the alternative hypothesis that subsequently raised its head proved difficult to credit. It was a confidential 2004 confession by an elderly man to his carer, not only claiming responsibility for the murder of Beth Williams but for two other killings. For various reasons, the carer felt unable to come forward for another eight years, and only did so at a friend's urging. But in running a series of stories about the unnamed "family man" with a "dark secret", the Herald Sun glided over anomalies in the confession and the man's history of schizophrenia.

After learning of her father's past, Kate wrestled with its implications. She decided against asking more questions. "If my father elected not to tell me about this," she reasoned, "there must have been a reason." But she also dropped out of school, turned to drugs, and for a while messed up.

Fifteen years later, Kate is happily married with two children, a degree and a responsible job in rural Victoria. She believes steadfastly in her father's innocence. "He's my father and I'll always love the brilliance that he was."

Certain Admissions: A Beach, a Body and a Lifetime of Secrets by Gideon Haigh is published by Penguin

Most Viewed in Lifestyle