Martin Bryant
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Martin Bryant (born May 7, 1966) murdered 35 people and injured 37 others in the Port Arthur Massacre, a killing spree in Tasmania in 1996. He is currently serving a life sentence in Hobart's Risdon Prison after pleading guilty.
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Childhood
Martin Bryant is the oldest of two children of Maurice and Carleen Bryant. Bryant was regarded as unusual in his childhood and was diagnosed as having a low IQ in the early years of schooling and put into special education classes. He was described by teachers as unusually detached from reality and as either unemotional or as expressing inappropriate emotions. He was aparently a disruptive and sometimes violent child, and severely bullied by other children.
Bryant was referred for psychiatric treatment several times during his childhood and was described in reports by child guidance centers as torturing animals and bullying his sister. In 1984 a psychological evaluation described him as intellectually disabled and personality disordered.
Adulthood
Descriptions of Bryant's behaviour as a young man continue to show that he was disturbed. When his father, who had taken early retirement to care for him, died in an apparent suicide, 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 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.
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 and was granted for a guardianship order placing Bryant's assets under the management of trustees. The order was based on evidence of Bryant's diminished intellectual capacity.
Bryant travelled extensively both in Australia and internationally during this period, apparently seeking social contact with other travellers but was frustrated at people's negative reactions to him.
Bryant had few friends, and reportedly hired prostitutes every month to compensate for the absence of a girlfriend. One of Bryant's few ex-girlfriends described that she was horrified about Bryant's obsession with the (then) 3 movie series Child's Play. This kind of fear by friends and girlfriends was reported in a number of psychiatric reports throughout adulthood, and after the offence was given as a possible link to the Port Arthur Massacre, as an explanation for what mindset he had.
Port Arthur Massacre and aftermath
See also: Port Arthur Massacre
Bryant has provided conflicting and confused accounts of what led him to kill 35 people at the Port Arthur site on April 27 and April 28, 1996. One explanation he gave a court psychiatrist was that a recent breakup together with mounting frustration at his social isolation had made him unbearably angry.
His first victims, a Mr. and Mrs. Martin who owned a guesthouse in the area, had apparently angered him by buying a guesthouse he wanted to buy. He shot them in the guesthouse before travelling to the Port Arthur ruins and opening fire on visitors. After he killed most of his victims at the site itself and the remainder during his escape, he returned to the guesthouse where police, unaware that the Martins were already dead, assumed that he had them as hostages and besieged the guesthouse.
After 18 hours, Bryant set fire to the guesthouse and attempted to escape in the confusion. He suffered burns to one side of his body, was captured and taken to Royal Hobart Hospital where he was treated for the burns and kept under guard.
Bryant was judged as fit to stand trial and a trial was scheduled to begin November 7, 1996, but Bryant pleaded guilty to murder. He is currently serving a life sentence in Hobart's Risdon prison under protective custody. For the first eight months of his imprisonment, he was held in a purpose-built special suicide prevention cell, in almost complete solitary confinement.
Media coverage
Newspaper coverage immediately after the massacre raised questions into journalistic practices. Photos 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 chair, David Flint, argued that because Australian newspapers regularly ignored contempt-of-court provisions, this showed that the law, not the newspapers, needed to change. Flint suggested that such a change in the law would not necessarily lead to trial by media. [1] (http://eprint.uq.edu.au/archive/00000272/01/nmcasj5.pdf)
References
- Patrick Bellamy, The Port Arthur Massacre: A Killer Among Us, Court TV's Crime Library, [2] (http://www.crimelibrary.com/notorious_murders/mass/bryant/)
- Paul E. Mullen, Psychiatric Report, presented at Bryant's trial. [3] (http://hunter.apana.org.au/~cas/autism/bryant.html)
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