The Hopetoun House Horror

Four trials, one death sentence and a menacing mystery that haunts Hopetoun House.

By Elliot Lindsay

5 Frances Street, Randwick, 27 December 1952.

The grand sandstone façade of Hopetoun House, once the eastern suburbs retreat of Lord Hopetoun, Australia’s first Governor-General, stood silent under a summer moon. Inside the 30-room guest house at number 5, the corridors smelled of linoleum polish and boiled cabbage. 

At 6.45 p.m., Mrs Stella Rose Hearn borrowed the evening newspaper from her neighbour in Room 12, 86-year-old widow Mika Marie Minnitt. “Goodnight, dear,” Mrs Hearn called. Mrs Minnitt, frail but sharp, settled back to her nightly game of patience beneath a single bulb, her crochet hook resting beside the cards.

By 8 p.m., the house stirred with small sounds: a radio from the common room, the clatter of teacups, the creak of floorboards as guests returned from the Ritz Cinema. Then came the scream – high, piercing, cut short. 

Mrs Patricia Maria Avenell, walking to the front gate for a breath of air, glanced up. Framed in Mrs Minnitt’s window was the silhouette of a man, fists rising and falling in fury. Below the sill, something thumped and gurgled. “Like two cats fighting,” another guest later said. 

Mrs Avenell, assuming a domestic row, retreated to her room. No one knocked on Room 12’s door.

Ten hours later, cook Vasilios Hagiyiacomi arrived in the kitchen beneath Mrs Minnitt’s room. At 7.30 a.m., he observed blood dripping from the ceiling onto the lino floor. Hagiyiacomi climbed the back stairs, peered through the locked window, and saw the old woman crumpled on her bed, skull fractured, face purpled by strangulation. 

Manager Robert Adams forced the door with a master key. The room was a slaughterhouse: blood soaked the mattress, spattered the wallpaper, pooled beneath the patience cards still laid out in a half-finished game.

Detectives from Randwick Police Station - led by Inspector J. Rogers - arrived before the breakfast plates were cleared. They found a broken string of beads, a shirt button torn from its thread, and, most damning, the cord from a dressing gown knotted near the body. 

In the adjoining Room 11 slept nightwatchman Robert Henry Bungate, 42, a heavy drinker with a bandaged wrist and a history of “blackouts.” By nightfall, Bungate was in the cells, charged with wilful murder.

Trial One: March 1953 – The Prejudicial Question 

Central Criminal Court, Darlinghurst. Mr Justice McClemens presiding. Crown Prosecutor C. V. Rooney, Q.C., painted Bungate as a sexual deviant who had battered Mrs Minnitt with his fists, then a bottle, before returning in the small hours to silence her with the dressing-gown cord. 

Public Defender F. W. Vizzard fought to exclude mention of Bungate’s prior suicide attempt. When Rooney asked a witness whether Bungate had “tried to kill himself five weeks earlier,” Vizzard objected. McClemens agreed: the question was “grossly prejudicial.” 

Jury discharged. 

Francis Street buzzed - would the watchman walk free?

Trial Two: April 1953 – The Vanishing Witness

The second trial took place in the same courtroom under Mr Justice Brereton.  The Crown wheeled in a parade of witnesses: Mrs Avenell describing the silhouetted attacker, Hagiyiacomi recounting the blood dripping ceiling. 

Then disaster - a key Crown witness, a boarder who claimed to have seen Bungate lurking near Room 12 at 1 a.m., collapsed with chest pains. Brereton had no choice. Jury discharged again. At the Clovelly Hotel, punters laid odds: “Third time lucky for the Crown - or for Bungate?”

Trial Three: June 1953 – The Hung Jury

This time before Mr Justice Dovey. Five days of evidence including the cord, the button, the bead found in Bungate’s laundry bundle. Bungate took the stand: “I never set foot in that room. I was blind drunk, woke at 10 p.m., had a plunge bath, [and] went to a dance at the Trocadero.” 

The jury retired at 4.10 p.m. on Thursday. By Friday morning, after 18 hours locked in the jury room above King Street, they returned deadlocked. Dovey discharged them. 

Randwick gossiped over back fences: “Four trials? They’ll never hang him.”

Trial Four: June–July 1953 – Verdict at Dawn

Before Mr Justice Dovey again with the same prosecutor and same defence. But the jury was different - twelve strangers who knew nothing of the prior fiascos.  Rooney opened with chilling precision: “This dear old lady of 86 was the victim of a sex maniac.” He walked them through the timeline: the 8 p.m. screams, the silhouette, the blood dripping into the kitchen like a macabre clock. 

Medical evidence confirmed two assaults - first the battering, hours later the strangulation to silence a witness who might identify her attacker.

Vizzard countered: circumstantial only. The cord could have been planted; the button was common; the bead might have fallen among Bungate’s clothes when police bundled the bloodied bedlinen. Bungate again denied everything. “I hardly knew the woman,” he said, voice flat. “If I was in there, I would have had a blackout.”

The jury retired at 5 p.m. on Thursday, 2 July. They deliberated through the night, pacing the jury room while trams clanged below on the busy Street. At 9.45 a.m. Friday, they filed back in. The verdict… Guilty. 

Bungate stood motionless as Dovey donned the black cap. “In the case of one so inhuman and callous,” the judge intoned, “it would be a waste of words to do more than voice the sentence which the law requires.” 

Death.

Long Bay and Beyond

Bungate’s appeal - claiming Dovey had unfairly admitted crime-scene photographs - was dismissed in October 1953. He was transferred to Long Bay Gaol’s condemned section, Cell 7, Wing 3. 

There he waited on death row, playing cards with trustees, writing letters home to a sister in Paddington. However, in April 1955, the Homicide Act abolished capital punishment in New South Wales. 

Bungate’s sentence was commuted to life. He became a quiet fixture in the prison laundry, mending inmates’ greens, speaking little of Frances Street.

On 31 May 1971, eighteen years after the verdict, Robert Henry Bungate died of a heart attack, aged 60. Hopetoun House at 5 Frances Street Randwick stood until at least 1982. However, the forces of progress had handed down its own death sentence and by 1986 the old mansion was demolished and replaced with a block of flats. 

As memory of the old mansion faded away, so did memory of the murder of poor Mika Minnitt and the four trials of Robert Henry Bungate.