Martin Bryant

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Martin John Bryant (born May 7, 1967) murdered 35 people and injured 21 others in the Port Arthur massacre, a killing spree in Tasmania in 1996.^[1] He is currently serving 35 life sentences in Hobart's Risdon Prison. His rampage ranks among the deadliest of the 20th century.

Early life

Bryant is the elder of two children born to Maurice and Carleen Bryant. Although the family home was in Lenah Valley, Bryant spent most of his childhood at their beach home in Carnarvon Bay. Carnarvon Bay locals remember him as a quiet and well mannered teenager, although he once pulled the snorkel from another boy while diving, and cut down trees on a neighbour's property. He also had reportedly set himself on fire on one occasion. He was described by teachers as being distant from reality and as unemotional. At school he was apparently a disruptive and sometimes violent child, and suffered severe bullying by other children.

Descriptions of Bryant's behavior as an adolescent show that he continued to be disturbed. He was revealed to have an I.Q. of 66,^[2] equivalent to an 11-year-old and in the bottom 1.17 percent of the population. On leaving school he qualified for a disability pension and lived on a pension for some years, though he worked as a handyman and gardener.

When Bryant was 19, he had met then 48-year-old Helen Harvey, heiress to a share in the Tattersall's Lottery fortune, whilst looking for new customers for his lawn mowing service. Harvey befriended Bryant who became a regular visitor, and in 1990 she invited him to live with her in her New Town mansion. She was reported to have spent large amounts of money on him. In 1991, Harvey and Bryant moved together on a farm she purchased in Copping, where they lived until her death in a traffic accident in 1993. Bryant was in the vehicle at the time of the accident, and was hospitalised for several months with neck and back injuries.

After Harvey's death, Bryant's father Maurice moved into the Copping farm. Bryant returned to the farm after leaving hospital, and two months later Maurice Bryant was reported missing. A suicide note and several thousand dollars was found in his car, and Police divers were called in to search the four dams on the property. On August 16, they found his body in the dam closest to the farmhouse with one of Martin's diving weight belts around his neck. Although ruled a suicide by drowning, police described it as an "unnatural" death.

Bryant was named the sole beneficiary of Harvey's will and came into possession of assets totalling more than half a million dollars. Bryant sold the Copping farm for $143,000 but kept a house in Glenorchy and the Hobart mansion he had lived in as a teenager. In 1993 his mother 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.

Port Arthur massacre and aftermath

Port Arthur Bay.

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.

His first victims, David and Nolene Martin, who owned a guest house in the area, had apparently angered him by buying the guest house he had wanted to buy. He shot them in that guest house before traveling to the Port Arthur ruins. Bryant 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"^[3] to no one in particular. Once he finished, Bryant moved towards the back of the café and set a video camera on a vacant table. He 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 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 fled, but Bryant followed her and killed her with a single shot. He then stole a gold-coloured BMW by killing the occupants. A short distance down the road he stopped beside a couple in a white Toyota and, drawing his weapon, 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, set the stolen car alight and took his hostage inside with the Martins' corpses. The police soon arrived and tried to negotiate with Martin for many hours before the battery in the phone Bryant was using died, ending communication. Bryant's only demand was to be transported in an army helicopter to an airport. Sometime during the negotiations, Bryant killed his hostage.

The next morning, 18 hours later, Bryant set fire to the guest house and attempted to escape in the confusion. Suffering burns to his back and buttocks, he was captured and taken to Royal Hobart Hospital where he was treated 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).

Imprisonment

Bryant was judged as fit to stand trial, and his trial was scheduled to begin 7 November 1996. Bryant initially pleaded not guilty, but was persuaded by his court-appointed lawyer and the prosecution to plead guilty to all charges.^[2]

Two weeks later, Hobart Supreme Court Judge William Cox gave Bryant 35 life sentences for the murders with an additional 735 years for other crimes related to the massacre, and ordered that he should remain in prison the rest of his life.^[4]

He has attempted suicide 6 times while being imprisoned.^[5] 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.^[6]

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 Prosecutions 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 chairman of the Australian Press Council at the time, 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.^[7]

References

External links

• YouTube link to the news story as it happened, [2]
• "Managing Martin: the Jailing of Martin Bryant". Radio National. March 16, 1997. http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/bbing/stories/s10603.htm. 
• Shooters News, "Port Arthur Coverup" [3]
• Joe Vialls, Deadly Deception at Port Arthur (Conspiracy theory)
• Wikileaks https://secure.wikileaks.org/wiki/Martin_bryant