Poor Nellie Howard would not return from a moonlit walk to Wagga Beach in May 1927. Photo: Created using AI.
“When sentence of death was passed on Cedric Thomas Victor Ryan by Mr Justice Campbell on 12 June, Ryan expressed the view that he did not care whether the death sentence was carried out or not.”
In fact, the article in Sydney’s Labor Daily in August 1927, suggested that the young Wagga man who had murdered his lover on the banks of the Murrumbidgee was disappointed to learn that the sentence had been commuted to life imprisonment.
Cedric Ryan was a 30-year-old telephone linesman who had fallen jealously in love with a 19-year-old waitress named Nellie Howard.
Twelve years earlier Ryan had been among the first to answer the call of Empire, sailing with the AIF from Sydney to Egypt in June, 1915 and fighting at Gallipoli and on the Western Front.
At his murder trial, Ryan pleaded not guilty on the grounds of insanity and the defence argued that he continued to suffer from shell-shock and was a “chronic alcoholic” under treatment for addiction.
The jury was told that Ryan had met Nellie Howard while working in Corowa in 1926 and had begun a correspondence. She met up with him on one occasion in Albury and the pair traded around three letters a week.
Eventually, he invited her to move to Wagga and she did so, staying with his parents until she secured a job as a waitress at the Australian Hotel.
The pair continued to meet regularly over the next six months but it seems that Nellie’s romantic affection for Ryan had cooled and she had begun seeing another man.
According to the AGE in June, 1927, the prosecution alleged that the murder had been premeditated and witnesses confirmed that Ryan had been sober in the hours before the crime.
“A week before the girl met her death Ryan had already formed the intention of murdering her,” they claimed.
“On 30th April he went to an ironmonger at Wagga and purchased a knife for skinning foxes.”
Speaking from the dock, Ryan read out a prepared account of their relationship, his suspicions and the events of the fateful night, however he insisted that he had no memory of the murder.
The Daily Advertiser reported that in the weeks leading up to what Ryan called “the tragedy”, Nellie had begun to make excuses to avoid going out with him. He had subsequently learned that rather than “resting”, she had been going out for “car rides with a certain man”.
On the 6th of May, Nellie had agreed to meet him for supper at a cafe and a walk to their favourite spot overlooking the river at Wagga Beach.
“We went to the riverbank, and sat down. She said she was going to a dance the next night with a man named Graham,” Ryan told the court.
“I disapproved of it, and told her it was not a right thing to do as I had paid a deposit on an engagement ring for her.
“She then said, ‘I shall have no more to do with you. I have been only fooling you, and I will never marry you. I intend to marry Graham.’
“From then on I do not remember what happened.”
Ryan alleged that he had caught a taxi home, but returned to the river when he realised he had forgotten his coat and “saw the girl lying covered up in my coat”. He then “walked around all night” before calling for an ambulance in the morning.
According to the operator at the telephone exchange, an agitated Ryan had arrived in the morning sipping a bottle of brandy and asked that he be placed in an ambulance.
He later led police and ambulance officers to the river where he told them, “’There she is, she was a good girl. I stabbed her, and she said, ‘You are the only man I have ever loved’, she then fell back dead.”
Ryan allegedly told a constable that he could not bear any man going out with her and that his “only regret is that I did not get the man”.
“I loved the girl more than anything in the world, and I still do so,” Ryan said calmly from the dock.
“I would have given my life a dozen times over for her, and I hope she is happier where she has gone.”
The prosecutor declared him a hypocrite and guilty of a “particularly stupid, brutal and callous murder, the outcome of a mind diseased with jealousy”.
The jury agreed.
