00:00:06
a teenage girl in australia was found dead on the side of a road her boyfriend became the prime suspect
00:00:13
eventually he confessed to her murder but so did another man who was telling the truth
00:00:21
[Music] it took 40 years a writer and a pedestrian crash reconstructionist to finally uncover the truth
00:00:34
[Music] the city of perth sits on the western coast of the vast continent of australia
00:01:05
it's a modern example of the industrious but laid-back aussie lifestyle where beaches barbecuing and sport are
00:01:15
critically important [Music] in 1963 the city was smaller but not that different
00:01:29
perth had been a sleepy little hollow just a beautiful little town where you'd
00:01:33
never thought of any sort of crime or murder very innocent very secure at that time john button was a teenager
00:01:41
in love with 17 year old rosemary anderson very quiet a bit headstrong at times but
00:01:49
very enjoyable company-wise on john's 19th birthday rosemary stopped over at john's house to
00:01:57
celebrate john's little brother was also there [Music] the three teens spent the night watching
00:02:07
television while they were eating the fish and chips john watching tv saw a hand come
00:02:12
across for his piece of fish yelled at the person thinking it was his little brother but it was rosemary
00:02:19
she got upset she stormed off and said that was over she was walking home [Music]
00:02:33
button said he got into his car and drove alongside her apologizing and trying to convince her to get into the
00:02:40
car so he could drive her home she'd done that once before and after he stopped for a little while
00:02:48
and after a five minute walk on her own she cooled down he thought she would do that again
00:02:53
so he watched as rosemary walked under a railway overpass and around the corner i sat there i smoked a cigarette
00:03:03
and just in those two or three minutes she was out of sight john claimed he drove after rosemary and
00:03:13
found her face down on the side of the road unconscious bruised and bleeding so without thinking i just put it
00:03:23
straight in the car and washed it straight off to her family doctor dr alastair turner treated rosemary that
00:03:30
night she had severe injuries where she was scraped down the road to her face and to her lips and
00:03:38
her blood pressure was very unstable going up and down as she was losing blood into abdominal organs and
00:03:43
so on really i don't think she ever had any chance of survival when the police arrived they noticed a
00:03:51
dent on the front of john's car and they also noticed fresh blood john was interrogated for several hours
00:04:02
there was the accusations why did you knock it down we know it was you that knocked her down of course it was you
00:04:06
look at the front of the car it's damaged you had an argument it must have been you
00:04:10
eventually button confessed to hitting his girlfriend with his car in his written confession he admitted
00:04:18
the couple's argument was over something more than a piece of fish they wrote down that i tried to get fish
00:04:25
with rosemary but i tried to try to come on to her and and she refused my advances and that's
00:04:32
what caused the argument when rosemary refused to get in the car button said he got angry and tried to
00:04:41
scare her so he sped towards her intending to stop but lost control of the car and inadvertently hit her
00:04:50
prosecutors had all they needed for a conviction [Applause] [Music] just a few hours after he confessed to
00:05:02
killing his girlfriend with his car john button recanted he now said his confession was coerced
00:05:18
and that police hit him during the interrogation and i think was after about four hours
00:05:22
of questioning that i received a quick punch to the stomach which put me underneath the table
00:05:29
they pulled me out and set me back in the chair again and i realized at that point that they weren't
00:05:34
going to let me out of here until they got a confession and the way they were going was just going
00:05:40
to get more and more physical buttons said the body damage on his car happened a few weeks earlier and that
00:05:48
rosemary's blood dripped onto the front bumper when he picked her up to take her
00:05:52
to the hospital [Applause] trevor condren examined the car at the request of the local police
00:06:01
if this car had struck a pedestrian i would have expected to find damage to the bonnet
00:06:08
like such as dented bonnet drag marks scrape marks but john button went on trial for murder
00:06:17
and his earlier confession made it an open and shut case the jury deliberated for six hours
00:06:23
before returning to the courtroom with their verdict [Music] members of the jury how do you find the
00:06:32
accused guilty or not guilty not guilty your honor i'm thinking i'm going home
00:06:41
could i go now could i run for the door and i decided well i better not i've got
00:06:45
to wait until the judge tells me i can go so i turn back to the joke oh terribly sorry your honor i made a
00:06:53
mistake we find him guilty the judge had to say guilty of what guilty of manslaughter
00:07:07
a manslaughter verdict meant john button's life had been spared but he was sentenced to 10 years of hard labor in
00:07:13
fremantle prison the police succeeded in the jury thinking he was a terrible young man trying to have sex with that
00:07:21
beautiful young girl i've heard that that's what the foreman of the jury said
00:07:25
hang the bastard trying to have sex with that beautiful young girl why did i sign that confession why did
00:07:31
they force me into it why why do we have that argument with my girlfriend fremantle prison was a relic from
00:07:39
victorian times with no plumbing heating or air conditioning you locked up a cell with nothing but a
00:07:47
mattress on the floor a rubber bucket in the corner a plastic plate and a wooden
00:07:52
spoon a very simple little argument over just a small bit of fish that's all
00:07:58
all that it it started with seven months later another man arrived at fremantle prison
00:08:07
to await his execution [Music] eric edgar cook had been convicted of killing a young man in cold blood
00:08:17
he had also confessed to other acts of random violence well cook confessed to eight murders and
00:08:24
about 12 home invasions in which women were attacked in their beds but that wasn't all
00:08:31
incredibly cook also said that he was the one who killed rosemary anderson cook said he intentionally ran her down
00:08:43
when she was walking on the side of the road [Music] for john button it was an answer to his prayers
00:08:57
as soon as my lawyer came in and told me of this confession i believe then well this is it i'm free
00:09:04
it's only a matter of time [Music] and for the first time button recalled seeing cook's car pass
00:09:11
him when he was looking for rosemary that night what i didn't realize at that very
00:09:16
moment as it's turned out driving past on the other side of the railroad line at that moment was eric
00:09:21
cook but there were problems with cook's confession [Music] police took cook to the scene of
00:09:29
rosemary anderson's murder and asked him to identify where the incident took
00:09:34
place cook pointed to the wrong spot police didn't believe cook's story so the court denied john button's appeal
00:09:45
what should have happened is that the court of criminal appeals should award a retrial of john button
00:09:51
at which eric cook would be the star witness button clung to hope until the day it disappeared
00:10:00
along with the birds gathered on the roof of the prison gallows they all of a sudden just fly off into
00:10:11
the air as the trap door is released and you know just by that that a person's been hanged
00:10:19
eric edgar cook was executed i knew that once eric was hanged that was the end of any chance i had of being
00:10:27
released [Music] the minister attending cook's execution said cook took the bible from his hands
00:10:35
and again confessed to rosemary's murder but it was of no help to john button
00:10:43
it would take years before he'd get another chance to prove his innocence after serving five years of a 10-year
00:10:55
sentence john button was released from prison for good behavior the first thing he did
00:11:02
was visit rosemary anderson's grave he was out of prison physically but not out of prison emotionally he led his
00:11:09
life with a big sign over his head convicted killer and a big rock in his heart injustice
00:11:15
button eventually got married had two children found a job and battled a serious depression
00:11:23
i desperately wanted to live but the heartache and the pain of living with the injustice which was
00:11:29
so intense that i knew that i just wasn't going to make it that i'd finish
00:11:32
up doing something foolish it was seven years after i was released i did do something
00:11:38
foolish in desperation button took an overdose of sleeping pills got into his car and
00:11:45
drove off a steep embankment at a hundred miles an hour miraculously he survived
00:11:54
from that point on my life changed completely um and a couple of things that i asked of this
00:12:03
this god that had watched over me was would he would he would he give me back a life and would he give me justice in
00:12:09
my lifetime he wrote to government officials looking for a way to clear his name
00:12:16
with no luck he even tried writing a book but no publisher would touch it i remember standing there with the
00:12:25
rejection slip in my hand and i raised my hands up and i said god if you want this book written you better do
00:12:29
something in the phone rank it was my father bringing me up to uh just to mention that he'd been out
00:12:35
dancing with the young lady last night and he told her about the injustice he wanted and she wanted to meet me
00:12:42
the call was about estelle blackburn a journalist and the former government press secretary she was intrigued by the
00:12:50
case and agreed to help investigate button's story i had the skills and the doors that were
00:12:56
slammed shut in his face opened for me i had the networks and the contacts i could get the files and everything that
00:13:01
he needed i knew how to research i was playing a detective i was investigating a 30 year old murder trying to find
00:13:08
fresh evidence blackburn wasn't entirely convinced that button was innocent she had serious
00:13:15
doubts about eric cook's credibility now i lived through the cook era i knew
00:13:20
cook didn't run down girls cook shot people and later we learned that he stabbed and strangled as well but he
00:13:25
certainly didn't run down girls but in the files of button's 1964 appeal
00:13:31
estelle found something surprising something that had not been widely reported 30 years earlier
00:13:40
six women had survived hit and run car crashes and eric cook had confessed to being the driver in each of them
00:13:49
each woman's story was eerily similar to rosemary's young women on dark isolated roads run
00:13:59
down by a stolen car estelle eventually wrote her own book about john button's case
00:14:07
and she too had problems finding a publisher that is until she asked her friend a
00:14:14
local newspaper publisher for help when brett christian read the manuscript he agreed to personally finance the
00:14:23
publication of blackburn's book having met john i realized it was just not possible for him to have done it it
00:14:30
and it didn't seem the physics didn't seem right to me either christian also questioned the lack of
00:14:37
damage to the front of button's car the police were trying to say that john's little lightweight french simca
00:14:44
had hit a girl hard enough to kill her and yet there was only there was really no discernible damage on it didn't add
00:14:50
up simply didn't add up but could science back up his suspicions the answer to that question would come
00:15:00
from the world's smartest crash test dummy estelle blackburn's book convinced many
00:15:11
that john button was innocent and that serial killer eric cook was the one who killed rosemary anderson
00:15:19
without a uh a legal verdict i saw classed as a killer a convicted killer his only hope of overturning the verdict
00:15:27
was to find new or fresh evidence in this 37 year old case fresh evidence at law in this
00:15:35
jurisdiction is evidence which was not available at the time of the trial which obviously didn't feature at the
00:15:42
time of the trial and which could not with reasonable diligence have been available at the trial
00:15:49
publisher brett christian believes so strongly in button's innocence that he
00:15:53
searched all over the world for an expert in the new field of forensics called pedestrian crash reconstruction
00:16:01
[Music] in texas he found rusty hate a former policeman and one of the most respected
00:16:08
crash reconstructionists in the field accident reconstruction is an effort to explain how a crash a car crash happened
00:16:15
we use a lot of common sense some elementary applied physics and more common sense
00:16:23
and try to piece together the objective information we have for a given car crash
00:16:28
to make some sense of it to sort out how things happened when hate first looked at photographs
00:16:36
taken of john button's car after the accident he didn't believe there was
00:16:41
damage consistent with the fatal collision rosemary anderson the girl that was hit
00:16:46
by a car was hit in the in the range of 30 to 40 miles an hour and that leaves you know that kind of
00:16:52
contact with the body leaves distinctive marks on a car and there were none of those marks on
00:16:58
the car that i saw photos of nothing even close the mark would be on the hood because of
00:17:04
the way a body moves when hit at that speed i think you can envision you know person
00:17:10
as a struck by a car basically wrapping or or bending onto the to the front of the car
00:17:16
the technical term we use when we're describing the trajectory is a wrap trajectory where the force applied on
00:17:21
the body is below the body's center of mass and so the body is going to bend
00:17:25
usually about the waist and that's going to leave some sort of mark in the hood
00:17:32
but in an appeals court hate would need more than just an opinion he would need hard forensic proof
00:17:40
for that he needed to perform pedestrian crash tests on a 1963 simca brand car a model that by this time was 35 years
00:17:52
old despite the age brett christian found three usable cars he also found a 1963 holden the model
00:18:04
eric cook said he was driving when he killed rosemary anderson cook's version is that he drives up
00:18:11
behind her and hits her from behind a biomedical dummy was used to mimic the reactions of rosemary's body
00:18:20
hate suspended it by a fishing line that breaks on impact the police didn't accept eric cook's
00:18:27
version of the crash because the exterior sun visor on his car wasn't damaged as one would expect
00:18:35
when hate's test car struck the dummy from behind it rolled onto the hood and
00:18:40
over the roof just as eric cook had claimed but i was focused on the visor i was
00:18:47
focused on the alignment and then i looked at the visor and and i remember seeing the visor bend when the dummy hit
00:18:52
it and it sent a cold chill in my back i thought ah no this is not good it can't
00:18:56
be good but the visor had snapped back into shape with no damage this explained why eric cook's visor
00:19:04
showed no damage when police inspected it they actually flex that's what this this
00:19:10
visor had done when the body hit it so now all of a sudden what was kind of a tense moment became hey we've done it so
00:19:17
the dummy did exactly what cook said it was just a moment of wow this is it we've done it
00:19:25
and the dummy landed face down consistent with how john button found rosemary's body
00:19:34
but the tests on john button's car the simca were even more persuasive we found marking at the leading edge of
00:19:42
the hood and more important we found a big dent a big depression in the hood where the dummy had come down and
00:19:48
basically smacked its head on the hood whether we hit it on the right more in the center or on the left it just didn't
00:19:54
matter there was no similar damage to buttons car and each time the dummy landed on its
00:20:02
back inconsistent with the injuries on the front of rosemary's body rusty hate concluded that john button
00:20:11
did not kill rosemary anderson so with estelle's research and with with hate's evidence we were able to
00:20:20
show both of those things i it must have been cook and b it could not have been button you can't
00:20:26
get a much stronger case than that this was enough to convince three judges on the supreme court of west australia
00:20:35
that the verdict must be regarded as unsafe and unsatisfactory on the ground that there has been a miscarriage of
00:20:42
justice [Music] [Applause] [Music] we went back and corrected a wrong and we did it with an appropriate use of of
00:20:54
of the forensic evidence but also a liberal use of good investigative techniques that
00:21:00
didn't come from the police that came from basically laypeople i think it makes us all a little bit
00:21:06
more aware of the fallibility of the system and have a little bit more faith that can be rectified and that it is
00:21:12
possible it's the advance of science that's only just been made possible and the
00:21:17
recognition of that branch of science that is motor vehicle crash reconstruction
00:21:23
that i would say beyond any doubt put the seal of success on john button's case
00:21:29
[Music] [Music] [Music] you