Martin Bryant
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| Martin John Bryant | |
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| Background information | |
| Birth name: | Martin John Bryant |
| Born: | 7 May 1967 Tasmania, Australia |
| Penalty: | Life imprisonment |
| Killings | |
| Number of victims: | 35 |
| Span of killings: | April 28 1996 through April 29 1996 |
| Country: | Australia |
| State(s): | Tasmania |
| Date apprehended: | 1996 |
Martin John Bryant (born 7 May 1967) murdered 35 people and injured 37 others in the Port Arthur massacre, a killing spree in Tasmania in 1996. He is currently serving 35 life sentences in Hobart's Risdon Prison.
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[edit] Childhood
Martin Bryant is the elder of two children of Maurice and Carleen Bryant. He was described by teachers as unusually detached from reality and as either unemotional or as expressing inappropriate emotions. He was apparently a disruptive and sometimes violent child, and was severely bullied by other children.
Bryant was referred for psychiatric treatment several times during his childhood. In 1984, a psychological evaluation by Dr Eric Cunningham Dax described him as mentally retarded and stated that he had a personality disorder.
[edit] Adulthood
Descriptions of Bryant's behaviour as a young man show that he continued to be disturbed. His father, who had taken early retirement to care for him, died in an apparent suicide in 1993, drowning himself wearing one of Martin's diving weight belts around his neck. Ambulance officers described Bryant as quite excited by the search and unconcerned about the death.
Bryant was eligible for a disability pension due to his low IQ and lived on a pension for some years. He took on odd jobs as a handyman and gardener. One of these odd jobs led to him meeting Helen Harvey, heiress to a share in the Tattersall's Lottery fortune. Harvey befriended Bryant, inviting him to live with her. She was reported to spend large amounts of money on him. Harvey and Bryant moved together to Copping, where they lived until her death in a traffic accident[1], he was in the vehicle at the time.
Bryant was named the sole beneficiary of Harvey's will and came into possession of a mansion in Hobart and other assets totalling more than half a million dollars. In 1993 his mother applied for and was granted a guardianship order placing Bryant's assets under the management of trustees. The order was based on evidence of Bryant's diminished intellectual capacity.
[edit] Port Arthur Massacre and aftermath
Bryant has provided conflicting and confused accounts of what led him to kill 35 people at the Port Arthur site on 28 April 1996. It appears his desire for attention (he allegedly told a next door neighbour "I'll do something that will make everyone remember me"), as well as mounting frustration at his social isolation, had made him unbearably angry. The possible trigger for the massacre, according to a psychiatric report cited by News Limited, was being prevented from selling home-made trinkets outside the Broad Arrow Café, when he was 9 years old.
His first victims, David and Sally Martin, who owned a guest house in the area, had apparently angered him by buying a guest house he wanted to buy. He shot them in the guest house before traveling to the Port Arthur ruins. Martin entered The Broad Arrow Café on the historical site's grounds, carrying a large blue duffel bag. Upon sitting down to eat a meal in the front balcony area he remarked "There's a lot of wasps about today"[2] to no one in particular. Once he finished, Bryant moved towards the back of the café, he set a video camera on a vacant table and took out an AR15 semi-automatic rifle and began shooting patrons and staff. Within a matter of seconds, he had killed 20 people and wounded 15. He then fled, shooting at people in the parking lot and from his yellow Volvo 244GL sedan as he drove away. Bryant drove three hundred metres down the road, to where a woman and her two children were walking. He stopped and fired two shots killing the woman and the child she was carrying. The older child ran away, Bryant followed her and killed her with a single shot. He then stole a gold coloured BMW killing the occupants. A short distance down the road he stopped beside a couple in a white Toyota, drawing his weapon he ordered the male occupant into the trunk of the BMW. After shutting the trunk he fired two shots into the windshield of the Toyota killing the female driver. He returned to the guest house, lit the stolen car on fire and took his hostage inside with the Martins' corpses. The police soon arrived and tried to negotiate with Martin for several hours before the battery in the phone Bryant was using died, ending communication. Bryant's only demand was a ride in an army helicopter. Sometime during the negotiations Bryant killed his hostage.
After 18 hours, the next morning, Bryant set fire to the guest house and attempted to escape in the confusion. He suffered burns to his back and buttocks, was captured and taken to Royal Hobart Hospital where he was treated for the burns and kept under heavy guard.
As a response to the spree killing, Australian State and Territory governments placed tight restrictions on semi-automatic center-fire rifles, high-capacity repeating shotguns and high-capacity rifle magazines. In addition to this, heavy limitations were also put into place on low-capacity repeating shotguns and rim-fire semi-automatic rifles. The Tasmanian state government attempted to ignore this directive but was threatened with a number of penalties from the federal government. Though this resulted in stirring controversy, most Government opposition to the new laws was silenced by media opinion and mounting public opinion in the wake of the shootings (see Gun politics in Australia for more information on the 1996 legislation).
[edit] Trial and imprisonment
Despite his mental dysfunction, Bryant was judged as fit to stand trial and a trial was scheduled to begin 7 November 1996, but Bryant, persuaded by his court-appointed lawyer, pleaded guilty to murder.
Two weeks later, Hobart Supreme Court Judge William Cox gave Bryant 35 life sentences and recommended that he should remain in prison until he dies.
He has attempted suicide 6 times while being imprisoned. For the first eight months of his imprisonment, he was held in a purpose-built special suicide prevention cell, in almost complete solitary confinement. He remained in protective custody for his own safety, until he recently moved detention centres, a decade after his conviction.
On Monday 13 November 2006, Bryant was moved into Hobart's Wilfred Lopes Centre, a secure mental health unit run by the Tasmanian Department of Health and Human Services. The 35-bed unit for inmates with serious mental illness is staffed inside with doctors, nurses and other support workers. Inmates are not locked down and can come and go from their cells. Exterior security at the facility is provided by a three-wall perimeter patrolled by private contract guards.[3]
[edit] Media coverage
Newspaper coverage immediately after the massacre raised serious questions about journalistic practices. Photographs of Martin Bryant had been digitally manipulated with the effect of making Bryant appear deranged. There were also questions as to how the photographs had been obtained. The Tasmanian Director of Public Prosecutors warned the media that the reporting compromised a fair trial and writs were issued against the Hobart Mercury (which used Bryant’s picture under the headline “This is the man”), The Australian, The Age and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation over their coverage. The Australian Press Council chairman, David Flint, argued that because Australian newspapers regularly ignored contempt-of-court provisions, this showed that the law, not the newspapers, needed change. Flint suggested that such a change in the law would not necessarily lead to trial by media.[4]
[edit] References
[edit] External links
- Patrick Bellamy, The Port Arthur Massacre: A Killer Among Us, Court TV's Crime Library, [2]
- YouTube link to the news story as it happened, [3]
- "Managing Martin: the Jailing of Martin Bryant", Radio National, March 16, 1997.
- Mike Bingham, Suddenly One Sunday (ISBN 0-7322-6899-0)
- Shooters News, "Port Arthur Coverup" [4]
