Killer Noel Crompton Hall cries gender disorder, freed from Oz jail

Whatsonxiamen.com (Source: DailyTelegraph.com.au)

April 3, 2010

THE horses were unusually skittish. They shied away from this spot, dancing on their hooves and pulling against the reins where the bitumen ran out and the bush track began.

Their owner, riding behind them in the gig, pulled up and bent to see what was spooking them. It was outside the Murray River town of Gol Gol, three days before Christmas 1987.

In Adelaide, Marrion Saunders was waiting for her son Lyn, 28, to come home for the holidays. His car had broken down and he was having to hitchhike from NSW.

Sleep wouldn't come and she was on the phone to a friend at 1am, standing at the open front door for relief from the heat, when the police came. They told her that she had to ring detectives at Broken Hill. It was about her son.

Lyn, the "baby" of the family of three children, had been shot in the back. When that didn't kill him, the shortened shotgun was put in his mouth and the back of his head blown off.

He had been killed only about an hour before the man exercising his horses found his body.

It was 18 months before police would arrest Lyn's killer when the murder featured on the TV show Australia's Most Wanted.

An anonymous woman called in to name Noel Crompton Hall, then 26 and living with his wife Sharon in Campbelltown.

Hall, who had given Lyn Saunders a lift before killing him after a row, was jailed for life.

Justice Kep Enderby said there were "no mitigating circumstances."

It was at this point that the focus of the story changed. Noel Crompton Hall decided he was really a female trapped in a male body.

He wanted to become a woman. It was no longer about Lyn Saunders, murder victim, but Maddison Hall's "gender identity disorder".

"The courts stopped treating him like a murderer but as a medical case," Ms Saunders said with disgust.

Hall claimed he belonged in a female jail. In August 1999, the Serious Offenders Management Committee recommended he be moved to the all-woman Mulawa prison.

Although still a man, Hall was on hormone treatment but it did nothing to curb his behaviour as a sexual predator. He was charged with raping his cellmate. Other inmates reported Hall had sexually assaulted them.

Hall was moved back among the men, at Junee jail within three months. Courts have been told he prostituted himself for drugs.

In January 2000, the prison rape charge was dropped because the victim had been released and moved home to New Zealand.

Prisons boss Ron Woodham tried to keep Hall in a male jail but it was only the first of a series of fights that not even the notoriously tough Woodham could win as Hall exploited his legal rights as a prisoner, backed by the publicly-funded Prisoners Legal Service.

He sued the Department of Corrective Services claiming psychological trauma and won a $25,000 out-of-court settlement.

Hall has since sued the prisons department twice claiming discrimination.

When Hall returned to the Supreme Court in November 2001 to have his life sentence redetermined under Truth in Sentencing laws, he appeared as a beefy man, bulked up by pumping iron in prison gyms. His muscles bulged against his regulation green sweatshirt, his face covered by a five o'clock shadow.

The court was told Hall was polite. He had taken up craft work, using recycled materials.

Marrion Saunders was disgusted and distressed at the psychiatric reports which focused on Hall's female side. Hall claimed to have first seen a doctor about gender problems in 1985 and was given "treatment" - two years before Lyn Saunders was killed.

"Ms Hall's only psychiatric diagnosis is gender identity disorder, trans-sexual type," one forensic psychiatrist wrote. "The successful adoption of female identity and the continuation of treatment with hormones may well reduce her aggressiveness."

Ms Saunders, a physical education teacher, had been seeing a psychiatrist herself. "He taught me how to survive," she said.

Her psychiatrist told her: "Your son's killer was a violent and brutal man. He will continue to be a violent and brutal woman."

Hall's life sentence was cut to 22 years with 16 years and six months non-parole.

He became the poster child for gender reassignment with support from the Department of Community Services-funded Gender Centre. In 2003, Hall had full sex change surgery, funded by the $25,000 payout, which she described 21 days later on the Gender Centre's website.

"While I didn't wake up as Elle McPherson (sic), I did wake up with a feeling of completeness that was lacking in my life previously. I woke up as me, Maddison."

Hall applied for parole as soon as her minimum sentence ran out in January 2006 and the State Parole Authority was about to grant it, despite Hall having been in strict segregation since 2004 due to serious assaults on other prisoners - until Ms Saunders stepped in.

Hall, who appeared via videolink with a blonde bouffant hairdo, had no work or accommodation to go to. Parole was revoked.

As a registered victim, Ms Saunders was informed about parole hearings and invited to make submissions. Yet, she believes that when she started criticising the authority, attitudes changed. Instead of automatically receiving transcripts of Hall's hearings, she was told they cost $10 a page.

She hasn't opposed parole - just wanted to ensure Hall was properly supervised outside prison walls.

"Hall did a terrible crime and if dreadful criminals' behaviour could be assuaged by the addition of oestrogen, I'm sure it would be prescribed," Ms Saunders said.

She was relieved, when the SPA this week granted Hall parole from April 15, that it was under some of the strictest conditions including 24-hour surveillance via an electronic bracelet.