Australia: Incompetent pathologist put man in jail for murder

Henry Keogh was given a life sentence for murdering his fiancée in an Adelaide bath in 1994. But what if a key expert got it wrong, and she simply drowned?

Chatting over their chardonnay, Henry Keogh and Anna-Jane Cheney must have seemed like the perfect couple to other patrons meeting for an end-of-week drink at Adelaide's Norwood Hotel on Friday, March 18, 1994. The 38-year-old financier and the vivacious young solicitor had plenty to discuss. They were five weeks away from their wedding day; two days before, Cheney had celebrated her 29th birthday and attended the final fitting of her wedding gown.

Interviewed later, staff remembered a "well-dressed" man who was polite when they mixed up the pair's drinks order. The couple enjoyed several glasses of wine - Keogh would later recall he had three, while Cheney had four or possibly five - and shared a bowl of potato wedges before heading off before 7pm.

Around 7.30pm, Cheney arrived at the home of her best friend, sister-in-law Susan Cheney, to walk their dogs together. Anna-Jane did not appear to Susan to be intoxicated (although tests later returned a blood alcohol reading at .08) and she seemed happy enough when the pair parted at about 8pm, having made arrangements to meet again on Sunday.

But two hours later, staff at St John's Ambulance took a 000 call from a distressed man reporting he had just pulled his fiancée unconscious from the bath. That man was Henry Keogh, and although two ambulance officers arrived at the couple's home in Adelaide's east within five minutes of his call, there was nothing they could do for Anna-Jane Cheney. Her airway was so badly blocked they could not effectively administer CPR, nor could they find a heartbeat.

At least 10 police officers were quickly on the scene, photographing and taking notes about the body, as well as the state of the bathroom, bedroom and surrounds. They interviewed Keogh, who told them Cheney had seemed fine when he left to visit his mother Eileen in a nearby suburb at about 8.15pm, but was slumped lifeless in the bath when he returned about an hour later. Police also spoke to Anna-Jane's parents, Kevin and Joanne Cheney, who had sped to the home after receiving an anguished call from Keogh.

By the time Cheney's body was taken from the home shortly before midnight, the consensus among those investigating seemed to be that her death had been an unfortunate accident. Summing up the call-out later at nearby Holden Hill CIB, one officer noted in the station's journal, "No suspicious circs, appears drank bottle of wine during evg at hotel, gone home, sat in bath, fallen asleep, drowned. No signs of struggle etc on body at all."

Within a matter of days, that opinion would be dramatically reversed.

In subsequent police interviews, members of the Cheney family raised concerns that Anna-Jane had a substantial life insurance policy - with Keogh named as the sole beneficiary. They also made it clear they did not trust him and suspected that he might be involved with other women.

Keogh would eventually hand over not one but five separate life insurance policies for Cheney and even admit he had signed the policies in her name. By way of explanation, he said he had begun working as an insurance agent for the five companies because he feared he might be laid off from his full time position at the State Bank. (He eventually left the bank to join a local stockbroking firm six weeks before Cheney's death.)

To keep his agencies with those companies current, he had taken out the policies for Cheney - a practice not unknown among insurance brokers - but insisted she knew about them, even if she didn't sign them herself. She had even listed the exact amount of the insurance premiums when she filled out loan applications later.

No matter. Keogh, a divorced father with significant child-support responsibilities to his three young daughters, stood to gain almost $1.2 million by cashing in the combined policies. Police now believed they had a motive - greed - and, when two women came forward separately to say they'd had affairs with Keogh while he was living with Cheney, his credibility was damaged further. (Keogh would later admit under oath that he had been involved with one of the women during a rocky period with Cheney, but always denied a relationship with the other.)

But the prosecution case against Keogh was still entirely circumstantial. Police were yet to find a weapon or concrete evidence of foul play resulting in the murder of Anna-Jane Cheney.

That changed when South Australia's chief forensic pathologist, Dr Colin Manock, arrived to conduct the autopsy on her body on Sunday, March 20, 1994.

When Keogh faced court on murder charges in August 1995 (an earlier trial having been abandoned after the jury could not agree on a verdict), Manock, with three decades of experience in forensic pathology and approximately 10,000 autopsies under his belt, was called by the prosecution as a key expert witness.

Manock told the court he was "at no time happy that the death was accidental because I could find no explanation as to why she would have drowned". He insisted there was no medical evidence to support defence suggestions that Cheney might have fallen asleep, fainted or slipped in the bath, having drunk four or more glasses of wine earlier in the evening, before sliding beneath the water unconscious.

Instead, Manock drew attention to four marks on the woman's left calf, which he said were consistent with bruising caused by someone gripping her lower leg shortly before death. The pattern, he said, reminded him of a famous English case in 1915, in which a man named George Joseph Smith had married three times, only to drown each of his new brides in the bath during their honeymoons. It became known as the "brides in the baths" trial, and clearly made an impression on Manock, who said Cheney's bruising suggested her killer had grabbed her by the legs and pulled them up sharply, forcing her head under water, just as Smith had done almost a century earlier.

Manock's theory and his identification of grip marks on Cheney's leg were crucial to the Crown case. Summing up, Director of Public Prosecutions Paul Rofe, QC, told the court: "If those four bruises on her lower left leg were inflicted at the same time, and that time was just before she died in the bath, there is no other explanation for them, other than a grip. If it was a grip, it must have been the grip of the accused. If it was the grip of the accused, it must have been part of the act of murder."

A little over five hours after retiring on August 23, 1995, the jury returned a unanimous guilty verdict. Henry Keogh was later sentenced to life in prison.

Manock retired soon afterwards and did not speak publicly about the Keogh case for almost 15 years. But in 2010, after agreeing to be interviewed on ABC radio, he spoke almost fondly and with some satisfaction of the time he had detected an antipodean version of the "brides in the baths".

"I read the copy of the transcripts from the George Joseph Smith case," Manock told Background Briefing host Hagar Cohen. "I was quite familiar with the circumstances. And when I saw the circumstances of Anna-Jane's death, it was like seeing a friend across the street. I'd seen it all before."

Reading the transcript of the Keogh trial in the late 1990s provoked no fond feelings in law professor Bob Moles. With an academic background in jurisprudence (the theory of law), Moles had little initial interest in messy criminal cases.

But then a solicitor, charged with supervising a group of law students working on a research project, asked Moles to have a look at the Henry Keogh case, suggesting it might provide suitable material for another group to research. Stunned by the amount of material the solicitor's assistant delivered to him, Moles eventually sat down to review it.

"As soon as I read the transcript, I knew there was something wrong," Moles recalls. "There was so much that didn't add up. The pathologist's evidence just didn't make sense ... and some of the mistakes were so obvious, you didn't have to be a QC or an eminent judge to spot them.

"I can't say why the defence counsel didn't do a better job than was done. What I can say is that it wasn't a very good job and that most of the evidence that was led against Keogh at his trial was technically inadmissible."

One of the first problems Moles identified was the tendering in court of black-and-white autopsy photographs. Those featuring Cheney's legs were handed to Manock, who was then asked to circle darkened areas that he believed were bruises with a red pen, before being passed over to the jury.

"How leading of a jury is that?" asks Moles. "How prejudicial? They should have been handed an unmarked photograph and asked whether they could see any bruising at all."

That issue would become the tip of a highly contentious iceberg. Moles eventually quit his job at the University of Adelaide to pursue what he believed to be more than a dozen cases involving flawed or discredited forensic evidence, all of which implicated the work of Dr Manock.

In 2004, Moles and the team supporting Keogh lodged a complaint with the Medical Board of South Australia, claiming Manock's autopsy of Cheney had been incompetent, and his work on the case amounted to unprofessional conduct. The board investigated and conducted a second inquiry before referring the case to the Medical Professional Conduct Tribunal.

In the course of those investigations, it was revealed - and admitted by Manock - that the only tissue sample he had taken from the suspected thumb bruise had come back negative after microscopic analysis. In other words, there was no forensic proof of a thumb bruise - the key mark supporting the grip theory - at all.

Manock also told the board it had always been his opinion that the marks on Cheney's legs had been caused by a left hand - despite testifying during the Keogh trial that the marks indicated someone had grabbed her leg with their right hand, while pushing her head under water with their left.

Ultimately, the tribunal found Manock had conducted a "less than perfect" autopsy but "those deficiencies were trivial or harmless [and] holding a mistaken opinion does not amount to unprofessional conduct". By then, Henry Keogh had been held in maximum security for more than a decade.

An even more stunning volte-face by Manock was to follow in 2011, when he conceded in a 60 Minutes interview that the bruises on Cheney's legs could have been three or even four days old. Under oath in the Keogh trial, he had testified the bruises would have been caused shortly before death, and certainly no more than four hours prior to that time.

Given that evidence of a recent grip on Cheney's leg was presented as fundamental to the prosecution case - DPP Paul Rofe told the jury it was "the one positive indication of murder" - Moles contends the grounds for Keogh's conviction to be set aside are now overwhelming.

Other elements of the case have also been undermined. At the Medical Tribunal, Manock conceded a person could suffer a loss of consciousness (by falling in the bath, for example) without sustaining any damage to the brain that would be perceptible during autopsy. "The opinion which Dr Manock formerly held and gave to the jury was wrong," the tribunal concluded baldly.

Recreating the scene from police photographs taken on the night, the Keogh team has also thrown into doubt whether the depth of water in the bath was enough to deliberately drown a struggling person.

But at the very heart of their doubts is a far more disturbing question, with implications so far-reaching they might explain why South Australian authorities from across the political spectrum have so far resisted calls for a broad inquiry into the Keogh case.

"Nobody wants to think the unthinkable, which is, 'Maybe Colin Manock isn't an expert,' " Moles says, raising implications for the hundreds of court cases to which Manock is believed to have contributed evidence. "If he isn't an expert, his evidence is inadmissible. I would argue that, quite clearly, he wasn't and isn't."

Certainly, Colin Manock was no forensic expert when he was appointed in 1968 as South Australia's chief forensic pathologist. At the time, he had no formal qualifications as a pathologist. His employers at the Institute of Medical and Veterinary Science, the state government department responsible for providing forensic pathology services, would later acknowledge they were desperate to fill the role at the time, but knew that they had appointed "a man who had no specialist qualifications in a specialist's job, and without [further study] this would have been a severe embarrassment".

Ultimately, Manock was exempted from the five years' study and written exams normally required to join the Royal College of Pathologists of Australasia; he was made a Fellow of the College in 1971 after taking a short oral exam.

But was that enough? Moles cites a number of troubled investigations since then, including that of Emily Perry, convicted in 1981 of attempting to murder her husband using arsenic poisoning. Perry's conviction was overturned by the High Court, which castigated the evidence presented as "reveal[ing] an appalling departure from acceptable standards of forensic science" and "not fit to be taken into consideration".

But perhaps the most heart-rending example of Manock's flawed evidence was in the so-called "Baby Deaths" cases, involving three infants who had died in separate incidents in 1992 and 1993, which eventually sparked a coronial inquiry in 1994. Baby Joshua Nottle had suffered 15 fractured ribs, extensive bruising and a broken spine by the time he died at nine months, while Storm Deane had two possible skull fractures and four broken ribs. William Barnard had a broken arm that had been left untreated for up to four weeks and extensive, festering nappy rash.

Yet Manock had concluded the cause of death in each case to be bronchopneumonia - a basic inflammatory disease. In his report, Coroner Wayne Chivell noted that some of Manock's explanations under oath had been "spurious", "incorrect" or otherwise unacceptable. Reviewing the Joshua Nottle case, Chivell concluded: "Dr Manock's investigation, and his subsequent report, provided innocent explanations for the most serious injuries found on Joshua's body, explanations I am now satisfied were incorrect. In those circumstances, and in common with the other two cases, the post-mortem examination basically achieved the opposite of its proper purpose in that it closed off lines of investigation rather than opening them up."

But then he put his report to one side. Aware that Manock was scheduled to appear as an expert witness in another high-profile case, Chivell apparently didn't want to risk derailing that trial by besmirching his credibility so publicly. So the coroner waited instead until August 25, 1995, to publish his findings - two days after Henry Keogh had been found guilty of murder.

In court, Sue Keogh testified that her former husband regularly signed her name on paperwork when they were married, so the fact that he had done it on Cheney's insurance policies hardly surprised her. Since then, she has largely shunned the spotlight.

Today, however, she enters her daughter's art space unexpectedly, with a self-contained dignity that has sustained her since the police arrested Henry Keogh in the most humiliating and public way imaginable: as he watched from the sidelines of his daughters' weekend basketball tournament. "I've known Henry since I was 16," says Sue. "We grew up together and he's made mistakes in his life because he's human. But I just knew he couldn't possibly have done that and I have never doubted it ...

"If I had thought for one moment he had done anything criminal, I wouldn't have taken the girls regularly to see him or encouraged them to speak to him on the phone. I didn't want them thinking or believing their father was a murderer, so I just made sure we always saw him."

Now Alexis wonders why the enduring loyalty of this woman, who would surely be forgiven for turning her back on the husband who had betrayed her, counts for so little, while forensic evidence that has been so discredited is allowed to continue to stand.

"The system feels so corrupt to me," says Alexis. "The 'reasonable doubt' in Dad's case is so plain to see, but there is no way within the bounds of the law that we can make that become obvious to everyone else and then make them do anything. There has been no law there to have a retrial when new evidence comes to light. But there is now, thank goodness."

Generally, a person convicted of a crime in Australia has the right to only one appeal. Once that process has been exhausted (as it has in Keogh's case), should new evidence emerge, the only option is to petition the state's governor - and effectively the attorney-general - requesting them to revisit the case. And in today's political climate, few elected officials are keen to champion the cause of high-profile convicted criminals.

But last year, after a sustained campaign by Bob Moles and his wife, law lecturer Bibi Sangha, South Australia passed legislation handing the ability to grant a further appeal back to the courts. The first case to be heard under the new law is Henry Keogh's, with a hearing scheduled this week.

Original report here

　

　

　

(And don't forget your ration of Wicked Thoughts for today. Now hosted on Wordpress. If you cannot access it, go to the MIRROR SITE, where posts appear as well as on the primary site. I have reposted the archives (past posts) for Wicked Thoughts HERE or HERE or here