Case study: Leith Ratten

The trial and conviction of Leith Ratten was one of the most contentious murder cases in Australian history. In May 1970, police in Echuca, northern Victoria, responded to an emergency ‘phone call from the Mitchell Street home of Leith and Beverley Ratten. They found Beverley dead on the kitchen floor. She had been killed by a shotgun blast to the upper left chest. Police investigations subsequently revealed that Leith Ratten was having an affair with Jennifer Kemp, a family friend. Both were unhappy in their marriages and had discussed leaving their spouses to live together. Two days before the shooting Ratten and Kemp visited a solicitor in a nearby town, to seek advice about divorce and child custody issues. Ratten had also applied for a one-year posting to Antarctica, possibly to distance himself from his marriage.

On the afternoon of Mrs Ratten’s death, a woman working at the local telephone exchange took a call from Ratten’s house. She later testified in court that a high pitched female voice had asked for the police. When police arrived at the Ratten home they found Beverley Ratten dead and her husband in a distressed state. Leith Ratten was removed for questioning and his wife’s body was taken away for an autopsy. He later told police he had been cleaning an old shotgun in the family kitchen, and that it had discharged accidentally, hitting his wife. He could not explain why the gun was loaded or how it came to discharge. According to Ratten, it was him who made the emergency telephone call, after his wife had been shot. The following day the police charged Ratten with murder. An inquest into his wife’s death recommended that Ratten stand trial. The hearing began on August 10th 1970 and received an enormous amount of publicity, a good deal of it focusing on Ratten’s extra-marital affair. After ten days, Ratten was found guilty of murdering his wife. He was given the death penalty, a sentence later commuted to 25 years in prison.

Ratten’s case was re-examined by his own legal representatives, as well as independent legal theorists and two sitting members of State parliament. They expressed serious doubts about the nature of the evidence presented at trial, as well as some specific points of evidence. Of particular concern were the testimony of the telephone operator, forensic evidence about Mrs Ratten’s wound and the likely angle of fire, the circumstantial nature of Ratten’s affair with Jennifer Kemp and an unproven prosecution assertion that Ratten had pulled both triggers of the double-barreled shotgun.

Over the next decade, Ratten’s legal representatives would launch four separate appeals against his conviction: to the Full Court of the Supreme Court of Victoria, the High Court of Australia, and the Privy Council in England. All four appeals failed. One appellate court ordered the exhumation of Beverley Ratten’s body for further forensic testing, though this produced no conclusive new evidence. In 1983 the cartridges in Ratten’s gun were forensically examined and found to be ‘reloads’. Since Ratten did not use reloaded cartridges, this suggested they were placed in his gun by another party. Ratten was released on parole later in 1983, having served 13 years of his 25-year sentence. He continued to maintain his innocence. Several legal and political figures, including Liberal MP Don Chipp, backed Ratten’s claim. A book by criminal lawyer Tom Molomby, The Web of Circumstance, suggested that the evidence against Ratten had been weak and largely circumstantial. Molomby suggested that Ratten was convicted for the moral offence of cheating on his wife, rather than on evidence that proved his guilt ‘beyond reasonable doubt’. Ratten died in January 2012.