Deaf mute Darryl Beamish, who was on death row in Australia...

Deaf mute Darryl Beamish, who was on death row in Australia 41 years ago for the murder of a wealthy Melbourne heiress, began a new legal fight.
He walked into court with his wife, Barbara, and sister, Frances Grenville, to begin a bid to clear his name. The West Australian Government agreed in June to refer Beamish's case to the WA Court of Criminal Appeal after fresh evidence cast doubt on his 1961 conviction for the murder of socialite Jillian MacPherson Brewer.
His case was highlighted in Estelle Blackburn's book, Broken Lives, which claimed Beamish and another man, John Button, had been wrongly convicted for crimes committed by killer Eric Edgar Cooke. Button, who spent five years in jail for the 1963 manslaughter of his 17-year-old girlfriend Rosemary Anderson, won his appeal in February.
Beamish's lawyer Jon Davies said the grounds of appeal dealt with new evidence, including the modus operandi used by Cooke in his killings.
"The modus operandi apparent in the murder of Jillian MacPherson Brewer was the modus operandi of Eric Edgar Cooke down to the fine detail," Davies said.
Cooke later confessed to killing Brewer. He was the last man to hang in WA.
Brewer, the 22-year-old heiress to the MacRobertson confectionery fortune, was beaten about the head and body with a tomahawk and stabbed repeatedly with a pair of scissors on December 20, 1959, at her Cottesloe apartment. Beamish, who lived near Ms Brewer, confessed to police but later claimed his confession was made under duress.
He was sentenced to death, later commuted to life imprisonment, in 1961. Beamish, who was 20 at the time, spent 15 years in jail.