Rory Jack Thompson

It’s one of life’s little oddities, but my encounter with Rory Jack Thompson is worth a mention. 

In mid-1983 or thereabouts, my then-sweetie-girlfriend was a talented dancer and choreographer. Thinking about starting her own studio with perhaps ten or so likeminded dancers, we’d settled on Salamanca Place as the ideal location. 

Salamanca was not yet what it is today, perhaps half-occupied and still more of the jam factory for which it had been built, large open spaces and occasional massive wood uprights, wood floors and whitewashed walls over sandstone substrate.

And, as an observation, these are the best of Georgian era buildings for a modern context, unlike the narrow-windowed, small-room-with-fireplace domestic versions, which generally cannot be converted to modern commercial use.

This was, by contrast, a factory floor, a well-lit and big open floor space with the original factory toilets attached, ideal for storage. It was perfect, or would be with some clearing and cleaning. Walls were scraped, old a jam labels tossed out and in a final touch, dance-related additions like a full length barre and mirrors added. 

It’s a Saturday morning from memory and we’re scrubbing and scraping, doing what we can with an uneven wood floor. He doesn’t say much, not so much as a name but he was industrious and sometime around mid-after, disappears off into the dust. Thus we found ourselves on a Saturday morning, a small team of dancers in dirty old clothes, wire brushes and scrapers in hand, brooms at the ready.

At some point, a stranger stuck his nose through the door, asked what we were doing and offered to contribute. A second request was unnecessary promptly handing a scraper and brush. He joins about a half dozen old-cold clothed dancers to get the job done. While he didn’t talk much, and didn’t even offer a name, he joined the dirty, happy crew and helped get the job done.

Sometime during the afternoon, he drifted off and that was that. Well, not quite.

It was a couple of weeks later when we learned the name of our unpaid, unnamed worker when his name appeared in the court proceedings in Hobart.

He was in fact Rory Jack Thompson, a well thought of marine scientist with the CSIRO. And he was in the court listings having been tracked down via the sewers of West Hobart.

Long story short: after a lengthy domestic dispute with his wife Maureen, (Warning. This part of the story is not for small children) he’d killed her, cut up her body and flushed it down the toilet. From memory, something about a thumb getting stuck in a grate somewhere.

Jack Newman (10 May 1942 – 18 September 1999), better known by his birth name Rory Jack Thompson, was an Australian CSIRO scientist and murderer.

In September 1983, he was charged for murdering his wife, Maureen Thompson, in their Hobart, Tasmania home and after dismembering her body, he dumped the remains down a toilet. He was not sentenced to serve in prison on the grounds of insanity, but instead, was detained in a hospital attached to the Risdon Prison Complex for an unspecified period of time.[2]

Thompson wrote an autobiography in 1993 providing stories of his early life and the subsequent murder.[3] On 18 September 1999, several months after he attempted an escape, Thompson was found dead in his hospital cell after he hanged himself using a shoelace.