AboriginalJustice

Rupert Max Stuart due to be hanged in 1959 in South Australian murder case resting on a typed confession

Rupert Max Stuart due to be hanged in 1959 in South Australian murder case resting on a typed confession
Rupert Max Stuart's defence to the 1959 Ceduna murder charge rested on whether police had fabricated his confession.
Image courtesy National Archives of Australia

A typed confession in precise educated English became the key evidence for Rupert Max Stuart, an itinerant Aboriginal from Central Australia, to be convicted and sentenced to hanging in 1959 in the South Australian supreme court for murdering nine-year-old Mary Hattan at Ceduna, on South Australia’s Eyre Peninsula, in December 20, 1958.

Roger Cardwell, married to Hattan’s cousin, alerted police and Ceduna citizens, who were watching the film Dial M for Murder in the memorial hall, that Hattan was missing. A search found her body in a small beach cave at 12.30am. The attending doctor said she had been raped, mutilated and murdered between 2.30pm and 8pm.

Two Aboriginal trackers followed tracks, identified as from a member of a northern Australian tribe, from the cave to a travelling funfair where Stuart, an Arrente man, had worked. They later confirmed a match with Stuart’s footprints.

After initially denying the murder, Stuart later signed a typed confession with his only written English: his name, misspelling his first name as “Ropert”.

At the trial, Geoffrey Reed was judge and J.D. Sullivan assigned by the Law Society to represent Stuart, without the resources to check out his alibi or conduct forensic tests. Hairs from the crime scene were introduced as evidence but neither the prosecution or defence tried to match them to Stuart's hair.

The case against Stuart relied almost entirely on his confession to police. Stuart's defence was that police had beaten him then fabricated his confession but to say this under oath would allow the prosecution to present his prior criminal history, including indecently assaulting a young girl in Queensland.

The jury found Stuart guilty. Stuart’s application for leave to appeal to the South Australian supreme court was rejected and his appeal to high court of Australia also failed, although the court found “certain features of this case have caused us some anxiety”.

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