Original subtitles

My name's Roderick Gerald Noble,

and in 1963 I was 13.

Perth was very quiet in those days.

Very well-off people lived here.

But it's a very small place.

Everyone knew everyone or seemed to know everyone.

Over this side, anyway,

this side of the river.

That's the Western Suburbs side.

Every backyard had an outside dunny.

Still works. It's a beauty.

Everyone had buffalo grass and the Hill's Hoist clothesline.

And they'd spin you around while you were swinging off it.

Kids lived out here, basically.

We had a fabulous life.

We were footloose and fancy free.

And all of a sudden,

there was the body on the back lawn.

(DRAMATIC MUSIC BUILDS)

It was like it happened yesterday.

Even now, I can see that backyard.

I can see the body.

Still today, I have trouble sleeping.

This thing will never go away.

(THEME MUSIC)

# So you run, run, run

# From everything you are

# And you're lost

# With every scar

# And you say my name like it's a game

# But you can't hide

# I see you there

# Behind the lies

# You'll never know the pain

# Comes and goes in waves

# That cannot be erased

# We've only been through it

# Long enough to remember the price we paid. #

(PIANO PLAYS)

- Perth was blown apart by a major, major crime wave in 1963,

especially within the Western Suburbs.

It shattered our world,

shattered my world.

It shattered everybody's world.

Perth changed forever, instantly.

The police were right onto it, of course.

Daryl Beamish was locked up for life

for the hatchet murder of Jillian Brewer.

John Button was in jail for running down Rosemary Anderson.

And now we had the shooter for Shirley McLeod.

It was Eric Edgar Cooke.

REPORTER: Perth was numb in September '63.

The cruel killer who'd terrorised us for most of the year

was a truck driver with seven kids.

- It was a great relief that

the police were getting on top of things.

Although we were all aware

that the killer responsible for the shootings on Australia Day

was still at large.

But there was a twist.

My police section...

I was yet to discover that the good work of the police

was far from good.

John Button was completely innocent.

This is a cover up by the police.

Once police had confirmed that Cooke had shot Shirley McLeod,

they started to think that he might be behind

the Australia Day shootings.

They all had a similarity.

The victims had all been shot accurately in the forehead

with a .22 calibre rifle.

It was so certain to police he was the one,

but they had no evidence.

So they had to find the murder weapon,

because the gun was different from the one used to kill Shirley McLeod.

- But Cookie wouldn't talk to them.

So that was where I come in the picture.

I was down the football club on my only day off. (LAUGHS)

Inspector Lamb, he said, 'We dearly want a cough,'

meaning admitting.

I said, 'Well, OK.'

So I went down and saw Cookie,

and he did the old trick.

'No, not me, Mr Baker. Not me, not me.'

'Yes, it is you.'

So we put him in the car and drove around.

Nedlands, West Perth,

everywhere.

- So they took him on a tour of the Western Suburbs,

where the Australia Day shootings took place,

hoping to prompt a confession.

But instead, he just took them to lots of houses

where he confessed to a variety of thefts,

some peeping Tom crimes, stealing cars.

There were so many.

You could pretty well say that in those days

if you caught somebody in your backyard or looking in your window,

it was most likely Cooke.

But that wasn't what they wanted.

- What I was doing is seeing how he reacted to everyone

that we went past.

You know, you'd say, 'How about that one, eh?'

And he'd say, 'No, no, not that one.'

But he was a person that'll tell lies.

We stopped at the Albion Hotel

and bought him some curried chicken and rice.

As we sat there,

I thought, 'Oh jeez, I've had enough of this.'

'He's never said a bloody word to me,

so I've gotta get it from him.'

Now it's in the report.

And I said, 'Hey Cookie, you're going to hang.'

'There's not much doubt about that.'

'Now think about your wife and kids.

Are you going to be dragged to the gallows like a mongrel dog

or are you gonna go like a man?'

And he actually hit the right spot,

because Cooke was very fond of his family.

- Spluttering his curried chicken, he said,

'Mr Baker, what do you want to know?'

I said, 'Did you shoot George Walmsley and the others that night?'

Cookie said, 'Yes, I'm the bloke you're looking for.'

'What happens now?'

- And so then Cooke himself

told the police how he did everything.

- I think I want a drink.

- I think I'm thirsty. - I'll get it off, don't worry.

- There's the Narrows Bridge,

and he was there with the detectives.

Cooke had a great memory,

and he could remember that he threw it from light pole number 324

with an over arm motion.

(PIANO PLAYS)

And there it is.

That rifle that Cooke had stolen and used on Australia Day

was still there in ten centimetres of silt.

After all those years of hunting for Cooke and getting the pressure,

quite a trophy.

- Understandably, it was a terrific relief,

not only to members of the public,

but also naturally, of course, to the police.

- Oh yes, great jubilation, for everybody.

- For the first time, I felt relief.

People just breathed out.

- But Cooke, once he started confessing,

he didn't stop.

- Dad held a party.

My sisters had friends staying there that night,

and it went on quite a while.

At the end of it,

Dad used to throw whisky bottles and plates on the back lawn

and wash them out.

We got up early.

Dad used to go to the beach every morning,

and often I'd go with him.

And I went to the toilet,

right at the back of the yard.

Opened the door, like that.

Mum was behind me.

And down on the grass was a body.

She was nude.

I thought it was one of my sisters.

She had the whisky bottle from the party under an arm.

My mum started calling out and found out all the girls were safe.

And then I thought, 'She's dead.'

(PIANO PLAYS)

I just thought, 'She's dead.'

It was Constance Lucy Madrill.

She was a lovely girl.

We played cricket in that laneway all the time.

We used to hit the ball into her backyard often,

and she used to throw the ball back.

During the night,

he strangled her with the bed flex of a Bakelite lamp

that was on the bed.

He dragged her through the house.

Had sex with her outside, on the back lawn.

And dragged her into our backyard and put her on our back lawn.

(TENSE MUSIC)

Dad rang the police.

They came down the laneway.

They must have been shattered when they saw it.

Really shattered.

- Oh, it was shocking.

Everything was investigated,

the city, the suburb and country,

everywhere,

with no days off.

We were full up, right up to there.

- And all of a sudden there were

Criminal Investigation Bureau everywhere.

They took over our house as headquarters.

They thought he'd come back because this one was strangled,

and all the others were shot.

At the time I just felt awful.

I just thought, 'I wish they'd catch him.

I wish it was over and done with.'

INTERVIEWER: Do you think it was associated

with the other crimes at the time?

Definitely not,

because she wasn't shot,

and he shot every other one.

I couldn't believe it.

- Really?

I couldn't believe it.

- The police hadn't linked

Lucy Madrill's strangling with the shooter.

They were looking for a shooter and a strangler.

Cooke's confession to the Madrill killing

was a huge shock to the police.

They took Cooke to the Madrill property

and he walked them through again in minute detail.

He'd strangled her with the cord of her own lamp.

He'd dragged to the back garden of the house behind.

These details hadn't been reported in the paper,

so they had to accept this confession.

What a shock.

The shooter and the strangler was one and the same.

- How do you feel toward him?

Bitter.

Yeah, very bitter.

My whole life changed, from that morning.

There's no counselling, no therapy.

I've never talked about it like this before.

- Really? - Yeah.

Still today, I don't know why he did that.

Then, there was another completely unexpected turn.

Cooke started confessing to murders

that other people had already been named as responsible for.

Pnina Berkman and Jillian Brewer.

The police were convinced that Pnina Berkman's boyfriend,

who had fled back to Greece,

was responsible for her murder.

And Jillian Brewer,

they already had their man.

They had that odd 19-year-old, Daryl Beamish.

They had him put away for life.

And then he confessed to running down Rosemary Anderson.

- When Eric Edgar Cooke confessed to running down Rosemary,

this was the first time that something gave me hope

to be released.

I would have been able to maybe put the pieces back together again.

- John did not do it.

Thank God someone has come forward to admit.

- My father, Ken Hatfield,

went to visit Button in prison

and told him he wanted to get the appeal

to prove that John was innocent.

- I was just waiting for someone to come and release me.

But that is not what happened.

- The police, they had to investigate everything.

So they took Cooke to Stubbs Terrace,

where Rosemary was run down.

They took him there and said,

'Alright, Cookie, you tell us all the details.'

And he did.

So he's showing the detectives

where he first saw her walking along the road,

where he did a U-turn,

where he came back behind her,

and where he hit her.

But the location Cooke pointed to where Rosemary was struck

was out by a few metres.

She was lying in the sand further on than he'd said.

- But he also said on the record he had stolen a car that night.

He said that after he'd hit Rosemary and damaged the car,

he drove it to Kings Park and smashed it into a tree

to disguise the damage.

- So they took him to the tree.

Wrong tree.

The one that he pointed out was three or four trees away

from where that Holden had been found.

- He had a bloody good memory,

and his memory let him down on that one.

So they knocked him out of that one.

He was found out telling lies.

- The police, they wouldn't believe him.

The man they thought had done the killing,

John Button, was locked up in jail.

- Cooke thought he was going to be executed,

and it was my belief that he was extending time,

causing us investigations and the court proceedings

and that sort of thing,

to delay and spar for time.

- They were certain Cooke was lying about Rosemary Anderson.

They said, 'Cookie, you're lying. You didn't do this.'

So he retracted that confession.

He confessed to Rosemary Anderson in the morning,

and he retracted it in the afternoon,

and he apologised for taking up their time.

- I was devastated.

Our last chance of getting that appeal were dashed.

- In those days, punishment for murder

was capital punishment.

And the community was very upset.

He's a vicious and violent murderer,

and he doesn't deserve any sympathy from anybody whatsoever.

- He's caused so much unhappiness and sorrow to people.

They shouldn't waste money on trialling him or nothing,

a man'll do what he done.

I think he should definitely hang.

Until he is hung,

the book can't be closed.

(GAVEL BANGS)

- At the time,

people they wondered, you know,

what the motivation might have been.

Was it somebody taking revenge on middle-class people, for example?

- The fact that he would come over to Nedlands,

and they were all people around this area that he murdered.

He had a harelip and a cleft palate and would have felt inferior.

INTERVIEWER: People in this part of town,

are they inclusive of people like...

No, that was all in his head, I'm sure.

- I think he'd gone through his life feeling pushed aside

because of that disfigurement,

and it had created a terrible, terrible blind rage in him.

And somehow,

he took it out on society at large.

He had a...

a white-hot sort of revenge on society.

- Do you think he was proud of what he did?

- I believe he was.

It seemed to give him a great feeling of self-importance.

- The court found Cooke guilty,

And he was sentenced to death.

I remember to this day it was 1964.

I think it was in the October,

and everyone knew he was going to be hanged that day.

We were sitting outside,

waiting to go into classes.

Come 8 o'clock that morning,

we sat silently,

thinking about what was happening

a few kilometres down the road at Fremantle Prison.

I was on tenterhooks.

(TENSE MUSIC)

- But then, on the morning of Cooke's execution,

he was in the punishment cells behind the gallows.

He voluntarily took the Bible out of the Minister's hand,

and holding it, said

'I swear before Almighty God,

I did kill Brewer and Anderson.'

- And a minute later they hanged him,

and he was gone.

I was thrilled.

It was a relief.

I know Mum and Dad were very relieved.

- I knew there was something wrong about this.

I knew there was something terribly wrong about this.

It happened in all the films.

The good guys won.

The baddies died.

But I just seemed to think even then,

there was something going wrong,

something I didn't agree with.

- After five years,

I got parole,

so I got released from prison late December 1967.

I came out believing I was going to hang around with the mates

I used to hang around with before.

But friends dropped off.

They obviously believed that I was guilty,

and that hurt.

It wasn't a very good moment.

- The hurt, thinking all these people,

they don't believe me, still.

Think the hurt of Jack and Joan Anderson,

the parents of Rosemary Anderson,

still not believing in him.

You must think of it all the time.

Why? Why can't they believe me?

- And all of a sudden,

this life that I'd yearned for for so long

was just a myth.

And I think it was at that point that I lost all hope,

and I started falling into deep depression.

Certainly growing up,

I was very clear in my awareness

that my dad was a criminal

and served time in prison for manslaughter.

When I was ten, eleven years of age,

I remember driving up this road with my parents

and my mum made a passing comment to my dad.

'John, there's your old home.'

I looked up at that looming limestone wall,

and as a ten-year-old, it really sunk in.

My dad had lived the other side of that wall

for a period of time.

I guess that was the moment when the enormity,

the deep sadness and the pain of what my dad had experienced

started to take hold of me.

As I was growing,

I noticed my father was still imprisoned emotionally within.

I think I started to take on my dad's fight.

It was so important for him,

and that was therefore so important for me.

I believed my father was innocent,

but now we need proof that he was innocent.

- And then I come into the picture.

As fate would have it,

I met John Button's brother Jim

at a dance soon after.

That's me dancing with Jim Button, in fact.

(LAUGHTER)

I love dancing.

Jim told me his brother had served time in prison

for a murder that Cooke said he did.

Well, I did not believe him,

but I believed in the justice system.

I believed in the police.

But I'm a nosy journo.

I was curious.

- I remember the phone rang,

and it was my Uncle Jim.

He had met this woman who was an investigative journalist.

She was really keen to meet my dad.

So I got some time alone with John, then,

who told me his story.

I was pretty intrigued by the story,

and I wondered what was there in the police files

about Eric Edgar Cooke and John Button.

And through my government networks as a press secretary,

I was able to access all the Cooke and Button files

that hadn't been public

and had just been archived all those decades.

This is the transcript of Button's trial,

right back in 1963.

I arrive at the police files, the record section,

not knowing what I'd find.

If anything, I thought

I would find something that would find John Button guilty.

(READING) Very seldom locked the door...

But after a couple of days,

I found something really extraordinary.

Confessions that Cooke made

that the police didn't make public at the time.

Why would they keep them quiet?

That's Cooke's handwriting.

There were boxes of them.

And in those confessions,

I found his confessions to other violent crimes,

other hit runs against women.

(TENSE MUSIC)

Well who were these women?

I had to track them down.

It's really interesting to go through it with you.

Among all his confessions,

I found Glenys Peak.

I'm walking down here, minding me own business.

I heard this car start up.

I got to about here, when I heard the car rev up.

I thought, 'Oh my God, he's going to hit me.'

And then all hell broke loose.

One minute he was coming down the road,

the next minute I'm flying through the air.

And all I could think of was,

'I've got to get home. I've gotta get home.'

I kept screaming that he was coming for me.

He's coming for me.

Then I got the ambulance,

and they took me to Perth, to the hospital.

The next day, I could not be in the house on my own.

I was absolutely scared stiff that he was going to come back.

I still cannot walk on the side of the road.

- This was the same as Rosemary Anderson.

A woman walking along a dark street,

late at night on her own.

The MO was exactly the same.

And then I discovered more.

- It was raining quite heavily,

and luckily, we'd brought our umbrellas.

- Yeah. - And we turned

and we heard this car roaring,

headed straight for us.

I said, 'Look out!'

Maureen was hit

and carried on the bonnet of the car,

'till when he turned left at Cross Street,

and then she rolled off.

Georgina was hit to the side.

I had blood everywhere.

My back was gashed open,

and my head.

- I just ran because I thought,

'He's going to come back and get me,

'cause he knows that he didn't get me.'

I had to sleep with my parents for a long time,

because I was scared.

- Just scared.

Cooke had confessed to this,

where he stole the car,

where he saw the women,

where he ran them down,

and where he abandoned the car.

And at the bottom,

it was stated that the police and the Crown

accepted those confessions as correct.

Well if Cooke did do these five other hit runs

and the police and the Crown, the state, accepted them,

then hang on.

That's what really got me going

and pursuing this story very strongly,

because I believe the cover-up of the other hit and runs was that,

had we people of Perth at the time known

that that was an MO of Cooke's,

that he did it on five other occasions,

we would have been much more open to John Button's pleas of innocence.

All it could be was

that if this showed that Cooke was the killer of Rosemary Anderson,

it would prove that they had the wrong person in prison.

- Estelle came around to share with my parents

that she had discovered a confession

of other hit and runs that he had done.

- She told me in the police files there was a single page

of five other accidents

where Eric Cooke was involved in running down females,

which showed that Eric Cooke's modus operandi

was identical to what happened to Rosemary.

- It was a pretty overwhelming moment.

There was this energy for my mum

and my brother and myself and my dad of,

'We've got this, you know.

We... This is...

This is the time to really clear my dad's name.'

- It gave me hope that one day I'd be able to get back

into living again.

But there was still a big problem.

John had confessed to killing Rosemary.

We believed that if he confessed to the crime, he must be guilty.

I began to reappraise the evidence

and wondered if there was truth to the claims

that he confessed under duress.

I began to interview the police.

One most interesting one I did was with Detective Sergeant Max Baker.

He said, 'Things happen that you wouldn't read about.

You might persuade the fellow with a couple of rib-ticklers,

such as that would be far better if he told the truth. (LAUGHS)'

He was laughing through this.

'And that's where you went out of bounds.'

He told me this.

- I do have a habit of hunches.

I've put numerous people in jail for ...

One reason, I didn't believe what he was saying,

and I kept at it.

If you think that they're still guilty,

you go to the boss and say,

'Look, they've all said no. I reckon it's yes.'

'Well Max, if you think that they're still guilty, go and have a go.'

'Don't give up, just ... just try again.'

- This confirms to me they knew they'd got an innocent man.

After that for me, everything changed.

I knew John Button was innocent,

and I needed him proved innocent.

Being part of the community,

how could we allow this to happen?

I really felt I needed to take responsibility

and do something to make a difference.

I didn't think it was right that John Button

should go through the rest of his life as a murderer.

I really wanted to get him a new appeal.

There's justice to expose.

I wrote a book about Cooke,

the life and crimes of Cooke that were never known before.

We published it.

Couple of weeks later,

the Attorney General granted a new appeal.

Wow, we had a new appeal for John Button.

- I saw that hope reignite for my dad.

This is the time that someone's going to take responsibility

for what happened to my dad.

- But I was very nervous

about whether we had enough fresh evidence to win.

REPORTER: John Button spent five years in jail

for killing his teenage girlfriend, Rosemary Anderson.

37 years later, he's won the right to a second appeal.

But the struggle to clear his name is far from over.

Today, the DPP argued that Eric Cooke's confessions

aren't proof.

The Crown are entitled to insist on strict proof of these matters,

and we'll prove them.

- We published Estelle's book in The Post newspapers.

Her book was a masterpiece of research.

That was that incredible photo of Eric Cooke in front of his car.

I'd met John,

and he certainly didn't seem like the sort of person

who was capable of killing someone deliberately.

Accident scene...

Or even losing his temper enough to accidentally kill them.

Amazing stuff.

His story seemed to stack up.

- And this was where I lived.

- But the fresh evidence of the other hit runs...

- This fence wasn't there.

- That was important, but it was not proof

that Cooke in fact was driving the car

that killed Rosemary Anderson.

- It was all... this was all open.

- That's not evidence.

I mean, belief is not proof.

I reckon that the answer to solving all crimes

always lies in the science.

So then I went searching for someone who knew all about

car versus pedestrian crashes,

the science of it,

and I tracked this fellow down in the United States,

a bloke called Rusty Haight.

I paid his fare to come out here and run some crash tests.

I said to Rusty,

'I don't want you to come here to prove John innocent.'

'I want you to come and prove the truth.'

'If these tests show John is guilty, well so be it.'

(SOFT INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC)

I remember my parents and I heading down to the Claremont Showgrounds

for this test to be conducted.

Bret sourced cars to be used.

- Four Simcas, and the Simca was the car that was owned by John Button.

And I also bought a 1961 Holden.

Now that was the car that Eric Cooke said he had hit Rosemary with.

- Rusty brought his own mannequins and equipment needed.

- The crash test dummy was the same size as Rosemary Anderson.

Weight is actually not material,

but roughly the same height is important,

because humans have a high centre of gravity,

and if they're struck by a car,

they tend to wrap around the front of the car

because most of the weight is above.

This was a really huge moment, and I think at that time,

we were all caught up in the excitement of possibility.

- There you go. Alright, now.

Go ahead and give her a... Whoa, whoa, slowly, slowly.

- The tests, they were going to show

whether John was a liar and a killer,

or whether he was totally innocent.

I felt pretty anxious, yeah.

That's probably good.

Prisons are full of people who never did it,

according to them.

So when John Button and his case

was referred to the Court of Criminal Appeal,

there was shock, outrage and fear among the general community.

I couldn't believe it.

I thought no judge could be so stupid.

John Button, he had signed a confession.

If he'd signed it,

we had to accept it as being the case.

The confession was real, yeah.

And they had got to it in a trustworthy way.

It was a shock.

You confess to the crime, you've done it.

You don't confess to a crime you haven't done.

That's the way we thought at the time.

REPORTER: There's been appeals and counter-appeals.

John Button even took his case to the High Court,

but it failed.

Now it's his last chance,

the result of journalist Estelle Blackburn

uncovering startling new evidence.

- We had the whole State against us,

A Director of Public Prosecutions with a whole team

working against us volunteers.

- But of course, that was just going to be the start of it.

We'd need to get three judges over the line.

Very difficult when there's existing conviction.

- Court of Criminal Appeal Matter number 122 of 2000,

Button against the Queen.

- The Crown fought us every step of the way.

I've never fought a case as hard as I had to fight that one,

because there was no cooperation from the prosecution at all.

Yes, may it please the court, I appear ...

The fresh evidence

is put through the hoops, if you like,

and only submitted if it is found to have cogency.

These are copies of the photographs that were given to the judges.

These were the undamaged cars,

showing the vehicles prior to the tests.

We built a gallows contraption to suspend the dummy,

and Rusty drove the three Simcas at the dummy

at three different speeds.

He wanted to assess whether you'd sustain any damage

to the front of the car,

if you hit a lifelike dummy at the speed

that the police said John Button hit Rosemary.

And it was an absolutely graphic representation

of what had happened to her.

It was horrible.

It was really quite... very, very sickening,

for all of us, but for John,

it was a nightmare come true.

You start thinking that's the way it actually was.

That's the way it actually happened.

I was devastated.

All I could think of was her being hurt.

It's the only thing that went through my mind.

- You'll see that massive amount of damage there,

and damage to the leading edge there,

which is not evident on the police photographs

of John Button's car.

It's probably clearest in that photograph there.

See the line of the ... all the bonnet's completely crushed.

INTERVIEWER: Does that mean that if John Button's car

had have hit Rosemary ...

That would have happened to it.

So it's clear and obvious that John Button's car

could not have hit Rosemary,

because that would have been the damage to his car,

especially had he hit her hard enough to kill her.

That is the... That is the really salient point.

- In every case with the Simca,

there was no damage to the front of the car.

The whole damage was to a massive dent in the bonnet.

- These Supreme Court judges were told that Eric Cooke

not only confessed to killing Rosemary Anderson,

he gave precise details about how he ran her down in a stolen car

that he later crashed in Kings Park.

- I thought it was a big volume of evidence for John,

but to buttress that,

he then went and got a car of the same type

that Cooke we know was driving that night,

a Holden,

and conducted the same sort of tests.

- Cooke's confession to Rosemary Anderson's murder

was that she'd gone up on the bonnet,

that she had come up under the sun visor on that old Holden,

and then rolled off onto the side of the road.

- So Rusty drove this Holden

at the speed Eric Cooke said he was travelling,

about thirty-five miles an hour,

and it hit the dummy at high speed.

This is a picture showing the Holden hitting the dummy

and the dummy cartwheeling over the front of the car.

You can see the head contacting the bonnet

and contacting the sun visor there.

- I think the reason the police refused to believe Eric Cooke

was that it had a sun visor,

and if a body hits and gets caught under the sun visor,

it would rip the sun visor off.

- Here it is leaving the sun visor,

and the sun visor popping back into place,

and not even cracking the paint on the sun visor,

let alone ripping it off or damaging it.

The police report said that Rosemary's body

had been displaced well off the side of the road,

two to three metres in fact.

When Rusty hit the dummy with the Simca,

there was no displacement or anything like that.

It just sort of rolled up onto the front of the car,

but then just sort of rolled off.

Whereas with the Holden,

it was the same as Cooke's description of it,

and the police report.

- We knew a decision was to be delivered,

and the build-up to that

was a really powerful moment.

- Silence in court. Please stand.

You always have these very nervous moments before verdict.

We all rose to receive the court.

However, the Chief Justice,

he read a twenty-minute spiel about it.

- All of this material needs to be considered

against the background of Mr Button's youth at the time.

- One minute you thought, 'We're gone.'

The next minute you think, 'We're getting up on this.'

And the next minute you think,

'They've got a problem with this.'

Similar fact evidence points directly to the likelihood ...

- You never know.

Sometimes you have verdicts go the wrong way.

INTERVIEWER: What were you feeling at that point?

Pretty sick.

Very nerve-wracking.

We had to sit there for thirty minutes,

listening to him give the facts of the case and ah-di-dah.

- Whether the appellant's Simca motor vehicle was involved

in running down Ms Anderson...

- I remember holding my dad's hand.

My mum sat holding his hand as well.

And it was intense as we waited.

- I have concluded that the evidence of Mr Haight

is sufficient to raise a reasonable doubt.

All combine to lead me to the conclusion

that the verdict must be regarded as unsafe and unsatisfactory

on the grounds...

(CHEERS AND APPLAUSE)

..on the ground that there has been a miscarriage of justice.

(SOFT INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC)

- My dad didn't do it.

This is proof that others can see and know as well.

And it was just this most amazing and delightful relief.

REPORTER: John Button finally had his day in court

and made legal history after nearly forty years

of fighting to clear his name.

- It was amazing.

It was a wonderful moment.

- Oh, relief, vindication.

Finally we've got there.

- We were able to prove that Button didn't kill this girl

and that Cooke, beyond almost any doubt, did so.

We were over the moon.

Oh, Rusty.

Oh, it's been absolutely unbelievable.

It's a wonderful time over here.

I just wanted to savour the moment.

I was freed, finally.

Exonerated.

Completely freed.

I... I knew life was going to be different again.

- After John Button's appeal, I was exhausted.

But I was really pleased to know

that my research had helped clear his name.

But I couldn't shake from my mind

the appalling way the police had treated John,

and I had this nagging feeling

that he wasn't the only victim of police misconduct.

So I delved into another case, Daryl Beamish,

who'd been sentenced to life imprisonment

for the killing of Jillian Brewer.

And what I discovered absolutely floored me.

(THEME MUSIC)

We had really only just scratched the surface.

And of course at the back of my mind as I walked out of the case,

I was thinking, 'Well now we have to do Beamish.'

- And suddenly, it occurred to me.

I thought, my God, that's the bloke!

- I see it as a private holocaust.

It only belongs to me.

- The police took justice into their own hands.

- He wouldn't have a bar that Beamish was innocent.

- Very, very light on detail,

and yet this is what he was condemned to death on.

- I'm so angry the police got away with it.

- It's changed us all, hasn't it?

And I don't think you will ever find your freedom.

- I said, 'No matter what happens, don't run away from it.'