During the days following Anna’s death the question of insurance and wills arose on a few occasions. Henry Keogh was vague in his recollections and remarks. He put this down to shock, little sleep and having to deal with a myriad of people, from distressed family members and friends to the police who suddenly descended on the otherwise quiet and private household. Among those who visited on the Saturday was a colleague from the State Bank, Donny Walford. Since Keogh’s departure from the bank she had continued their relationship as his personal banker. She had phoned Henry at 8.30 that morning to check if he was okay. She described him as ‘devastated … crying the whole time he was talking to me’.38
Later that day she went around to the Magill home to see him. She found him shattered and still barely able to speak. She remained, busying herself cleaning up, while he visited the Cheney family home in Burnside to assist with the funeral arrangements. When he returned he raised the question of where he might live, saying he’d have to sell the house. It was Anna-Jane’s property, but he seemed to think it was now his responsibility. At that point Donny says she asked about insurance:
I said, ‘Didn’t Anna have insurance?’ Henry said no. Then he asked, ‘What kind of insurance?’ I said, ‘Well, MPI insurance,’ which is mortgage protection insurance that’s taken out on a home loan, or life assurance. He said no.39
His friend went on to say he was hardly making sense and, ‘He didn’t want to talk about anything, to tell you the truth.’40
The issue of insurance was raised by Anna’s father on the Sunday evening. Henry had been invited to dinner with Kevin and Joanne Cheney. Before the meal he and Kevin squatted in their well-groomed garden and chatted. Kevin seemed anxious to know the state of Anna’s finances. According to Henry Keogh there was a possible subtext to her father’s inquiries which related to his own finances. Henry noted in his detailed statement to his lawyers sometime later that Anna-Jane was:
well aware that her father was intending to leave her mother shortly. Their marriage had not been particularly good for some years. I think Kevin was simply trying to inform himself about the various liabilities in the event that they had to be taken into account with any property settlement with his wife.41
According to the version given by Doctor Cheney the Sunday evening conversation with Henry went as follows: ‘Henry, I know Anna has a personal loan from the State Bank. How much was that for?’ Henry answered, “It was about seventeen thousand dollars. Anna recently extended it by five thousand dollars to buy her car.”’ Kevin then broached the subject of her assets and insurance, to which he says Henry responded, ‘I don’t know of any other than she had some superannuation. I don’t think that is very much and she would probably only get her contributions back and that would be about two thousand dollars.’ Kevin pressed further: ‘Has Anna any insurance policies?’ He says Henry was very definite in his reply: ‘No, not that I know of.’42
According to Keogh, during a conversation later that night, ‘Jo started speculating about the cause of death and talking about AJC [Anna-Jane Cheney] generally. Kevin was appalled and I found this intolerable. I left and went to my car.’43
On Wednesday or Thursday of that week Kevin Cheney says Henry paid him another quick visit at home to inform him that:
there was no need to be concerned about any of the expenses. [Keogh] recalled Anna-Jane had taken out a $400,000 insurance policy before they went on their South-East Asian holiday, and at the same time he’d taken out an even larger policy for $700,000.44
Kevin believed this meant $700,000 over his own life, not that of Anna-Jane.
It was prior to that holiday that Anna-Jane had raised the topic of wills and life insurance herself with members of her family. In April 1993, while preparing for the holiday with Henry, she asked her brother Marc if he and Sue had a will. They didn’t. On the other hand Anna-Jane did, and in the same conversation she said she also had around $400,000 of life insurance. As for the premiums, according to her brother’s recollection, she said she was ‘quite happy with the amount she was paying’.45
At the Forensic Science Centre, Constable Walkley was trawling for whatever clues she could find. On Monday afternoon she added another incriminating entry into the coronial running sheet, sourcing some of what she wrote to Dectective Man:
… believed she had insurance on her mortgage and he is beneficiary. He got her to do her will just weeks ago – He has still been having sexual relations with his ex-wife. Money is apparently everything to him. He also froze her accounts today – he also gets 2 cars.46
On Tuesday Keogh had been preparing to collect Anna’s wedding dress from the home of Sue Cheney’s mother in Burnside: the dress she would wear not to her wedding but her funeral. Before Keogh departed, Detectives Man and Fielding again came knocking at the door. Henry had been waiting for any updates from the Coroner and was hoping perhaps they’d come bearing news. Kevin Cheney, as next of kin, would be the first to be informed by police, but he too had heard nothing, except that Anna had a bump on the head. Henry and Kevin had discussed this briefly but had been provided with no real details.
Instead of arriving with answers, however, the detectives came to ask further questions. This time they wanted to conduct a thorough interview. They insisted it be undertaken at the Holden Hill Police Station. Henry agreed to meet them after he had picked up the wedding dress. The meeting, which the police said would only be brief, lasted four and a half hours.
The statement from that meeting covered 35 typed pages. Its contents were devoted to the history of their relationship, the activities of the day of Anna’s death, the events of that Friday night and Keogh’s activities since.
At 4.30 on Tuesday afternoon the two detectives turned up again at the Magill house seeking financial records and Anna’s will. As Keogh handed Detective Man an envelope containing the will, he was asked who the beneficiary to Anna’s will was, to which he replied dismissively, ‘I don’t know.’47 Detective Man took this to be a significant lie because the will immediately revealed Keogh to be not just the executor but also the main beneficiary. When this accusation was later put to him, Keogh said he’d had only a few hours’ sleep in the previous four days and was overwhelmed by the continual questioning. He said of Detective Man’s inquiry, ‘He had the darn thing in his hand. I thought it was a stupid question.’48
Anna’s primary bequest was $30,000 to her father to repay his contribution for the deposit on the Magill house. Beyond that Keogh was to receive the residue of her estate. His will was almost identical, with Anna named as the executor and a beneficiary, after his insurances were divided between his three daughters. Family first was the common theme in both documents.
When preparing his witness statement months later Detective Kerrie Man noted he’d been further taken by surprise after having explained to Keogh the reasons for wanting Anna’s will. Keogh had responded, ‘I understand, it’s not the first time nor the last time a person’s been killed for money.’49 Was it something a person trying to play down any suspicions might say? Man thought so. Later, under cross-examination in court, the officer conceded the comment was made in the context of Keogh also saying to the detective, ‘Look, I understand you’re just doing your job and you’ve got to be sure of things.’50
On Tuesday afternoon Keogh had handed the two officers ten life insurance and superannuation policies. Three of these – an MLC policy, one from Tyndall Life and another from Tower Life – covered Anna-Jane and totalled around $730,000. The other two significant policies covered Keogh’s life and amounted to $700,000. There were two other policies on Anna’s life stapled together and placed in another file. Between them they came to a further $400,000. Keogh came across these some days after the others had been handed over. Not making these immediately available to police helped fuel the fires of suspicion. Had this been an attempt to conceal the total amount of insurance covering his fiancée’s life?
What Keogh didn’t disclose was that the signatures on the policies and application forms had been forged; he had signed Anna-Jane’s name to establish her as the policy-holder. His explanation for creating phoney policies would emerge later, but in the meantime he had initially denied the existence of any insurance and was now at risk of accusations he had engaged in a sinister and fraudulent conspiracy. When later asked why he had not immediately informed the police about the phoney policies, he explained that he already felt ‘under suspicion and that there was some sort of foul play involved. I didn’t think that was the most prudent time to suddenly say, “Look, those policies are all bogus.”’51
Keogh also prepared a summary of Anna-Jane’s assets and liabilities that included policies on her life amounting to about $650,000. This showed that around $450,000 would remain after her debts had been cleared. It may have been what prompted Henry to tell Kevin Cheney, when he visited the family an hour after the detectives’ visit – the visit Cheney said took place on Wednesday or Thursday of that week – that there was insurance to cover any debts. It’s possible the $400,000 spoken of was the residue of the estate, rather than the total of the insurance cover.
On Wednesday evening Henry was visited by friends Lucinda and Anthony Reu. Lucinda had lived across the road from Anna-Jane when the two were children. Anthony, her husband, grew up with the two girls, who had been friendly rivals for his attention. Lucinda and Anthony had been married for about a year. She worked as a sales rep and he was a tiler. Both had been very accepting of Henry and in his words didn’t have the ‘private-school attitudes’52 of some of Anna-Jane’s other friends. Implicit in this comment is the sense that he wasn’t entirely comfortable in her world. This disconnect was apparent to Detective Kerrie Man, who jotted down in his running-sheet data, ‘All friends of deceased except Lucinda Reu don’t like Henry (secretive and [a] liar).’53
At about ten past nine that same evening there was a knock on the door at the Homes Avenue address. Henry again found Detectives Man and Fielding on his doorstep. Kerrie Man stepped forward to explain:
Henry, I need to speak to you about the death of Anna. We need to clarify aspects of statements given by you. We also want to put things about the death to you. We would like you to come back to Holden Hill to do that.54
Henry was reluctant to undergo more tedious questioning at that time of night but Man insisted that they needed to ‘clear things up tonight’. Detective Man then pushed his point: ‘We would like this done now. Further, we intend to have your home examined by techs, tonight.’55 This meant Technical Service Branch, the workers in blue overalls and rubber gloves with specialised skills used in cases of suspicious deaths, were about to crawl through the place searching for anything that might prove incriminating.
By now Henry Keogh had no doubts that things were anything but routine. He asked the police to wait on the porch while he went inside to phone his lawyer. There was little he could do given the technical sleuths were already on their way, and could use their general search warrants if it came to that. Detective Man explained they were to check for any signs of a break-in, in order to test the possibility that someone else could have been present in the house at the time of Anna-Jane’s death. But once they discounted the involvement of others, if this was to become a murder investigation, Henry Keogh would be their only suspect.
Keogh reluctantly allowed the two detectives to enter, ushering them towards a small front room which served as an office. It was furnished with a pine desk, a filing cabinet and some shelves containing books, various papers and pamphlets. The officers proceeded to inform him he was now under suspicion, as there was clear forensic evidence that indicated Anna-Jane’s death was not accidental. It was their view he had lied about the will, he had lied about the insurance and there was evidence discovered during the autopsy which suggested human intervention in his fiancée’s death.
Henry was incredulous. He truly had not expected to be under suspicion. If he had committed this dreadful deed, it could hardly be described as meticulously planned. Until this point he’d rejected suggestions from friends to consult a lawyer, thinking it would simply increase speculation, but that evening he called barrister Michael David QC. Anna-Jane’s death was declared a major crime on Friday 25 March 1994, a week after her death.
On David’s advice, solicitors David Munt and David Martin were engaged, and from then on any direct contact with police was to be through them. A meeting was held at Munt’s home in Brighton, where Henry produced the two additional policies he had found in the second file. These had been filed separately and therefore were not immediately disclosed to Detectives Man and Fielding. Innocent omission or not, this was not going to allay the police’s suspicions. A fortnight later, on 7 April, after taking advice from Michael David, Martin contacted Detective Sergeant Douglas Kokegei from Major Crime and told him of the extra policies. They agreed to an exchange of the documents for copies of the ones already provided to police.
On 11 April David Martin, as a matter of legal procedure, contacted the insurance companies concerned and informed them he was acting for Henry Keogh and would be in touch in due course.56 The premium payments were halted.
Back at the Forensic Science Centre, all that was required for the completion of the autopsy process was the result of the toxicology analysis of urine and blood samples. Kevin Cheney rang regularly to get updates and to fix a time for the release of his daughter’s body. The Coroner’s office first needed to get the okay from Major Crime. By 28 March the body was declared ‘free’. Anna-Jane was prepared for her funeral, on 30 March, in her wedding dress. Funerals for the young are overshadowed by the lost hope of what might have been. There could be a no more literal expression of that than for Anna-Jane to be clothed in the wedding dress she would never wear on the day she had believed was to be her most joyous.
For Henry Keogh the funeral was both heart-wrenching and humiliating. The whispers of suspicion spread quickly and on the morning of the service he was informed by the funeral director that he had been removed from the list of those who would be asked to pay tribute to the deceased. He was obliged to suffer in silence.
Anna-Jane’s body was cremated, and beyond that moment anyone wanting to review the autopsy findings would be entirely reliant on whatever thus far had been recorded and preserved.
The classifieds in the paper carried warm and moving tributes from family, friends and work colleagues. The notice placed by the Law Society read, ‘Deepest sympathies to the family and friends of Anna-Jane. She brought to her work a rare mix of warmth, joy, freshness and skill. We will miss our beautiful colleague and friend.’
A month after the funeral Dr Manock’s final autopsy document was typed up and signed. He’d amended the first draft to report that small bruises to the scalp ‘appeared to have occurred shortly before death’. He also noted the existence of ‘minor’ bruising in a line which ran up the front of the right shin, ‘three faint bruises’ on the outside of the left leg above the ankle and ‘a single bruise on the medial [inner] surface’57 at a corresponding spot on the same leg.
Manock had one more damning conclusion to draw. There was no observable bruising to the brain, which, to him, was a critical discovery. In his view, if Anna-Jane had slipped and struck her head, causing her to fall unconscious into the bath, her brain would have displayed bruising. No sign of such an injury indicated to Manock that she must have been conscious during her drowning. It was another forensic step for Dr Manock on the path leading to murder.
The Holden Hill CIB also intensified its attention on Keogh’s financial circumstances. Following the agitations of Constable Patricia Walkley of the Coroner’s office and the misgivings of Anna-Jane’s family, police became more convinced that money was the primary motive for murder. They speculated the insurance policies taken out over Anna’s life more than 12 months prior had been part of a premeditated plan.
The police continued scouring Keogh and Anna-Jane’s financial affairs and in their inquiries revisited her parents a number of times. During this period Detective Sergeant Douglas Kokegei observed that Keogh made no attempt to get any intelligence on their investigations. He didn’t try to contact any of the officers he knew were working on the case. In the minds of the police this, too, was interpreted as a sign of guilt. On Wednesday 4 May 1994 they requested a further interview, but this time Keogh, after contacting his lawyer David Martin, refused.
Saturday 7 May 1994
At 1.20 pm three days after Keogh said no to an interview, Kokegei and Detective Wayne Yelland turned up at a basketball stadium at Glenroy Street, in the north-western suburb of Athol Park. Henry was at the sports centre to watch his daughter Dani play when the two detectives approached and introduced themselves.
DK: I am now apprehending you on the suspicion of murdering Anna-Jane Cheney. You do not have to answer any questions unless you wish to do so. Anything you do say may be used in evidence. Do you understand?
HK: Yes.58
The sounds of a basketball stadium are jarring: the howls and shrieks of sports shoes skidding across the polished floor, and balls thumping into backboards and the tin cladding. Keogh’s response was at odds with this cacophony. When asked if he wanted to contact a solicitor, he merely uttered an affirmative ‘Yes’. To Detective Kokegei this response was of special significance. He noted down towards the end of his witness statement that ‘At no stage during the time I was with the accused did he protest his innocence or ask about the investigation.’59
Keogh was transported in the police car to the Angas Street police headquarters, where his solicitor for that day, Ian Sampson, met him and was able to converse with him alone for about 20 minutes. A taped interview with police was then conducted during which, as he’d been advised, Keogh responded to each question with ‘No comment’.
The inquiry focused entirely on the insurance policies. Kokegei commenced with, ‘During my investigations into the death of Anna-Jane Cheney it has been revealed that there are a number of life insurance policies issued for her which were payable on her death. Were you aware of those insurance policies?’60 ‘No comment’ was all the response he received.
The questioning continued until it was obvious Keogh was not going to answer, after which he was formally arrested on the charge of murder.
Next came the grim journey to the Adelaide City Watch House, where he was subjected to a medical examination and photographed. Among the photos taken by the police at the City Watch House were shots of Keogh’s outspread hands. Dr Manock’s speculation about the grip theory had clearly found its way into the minds of Major Crime. This was his Spilsbury moment, his ‘Brides in the Bath’ murder scenario coming to life.
Keogh applied for bail but it was refused. He was remanded in custody to appear before a magistrate at a time to be set. The next day the banner headlines of the Sunday Mail screamed out the news: ‘Lawyer murder arrest’ boomed the two-inch print. Henry Keogh was instantly a household name for all the wrong reasons.
If justice is a casualty of the legal system it’s partly because it’s based on an illusion. The presumption of innocence is one of those hypocrisies we subscribe to because it’s a fine ideal. Practically it’s a myth. Once criminal charges are laid the accused is often tainted. To be remanded in custody, as Henry was to be for the indefinite future, immediately imposes a penalty. Normal life ceases: job, family responsibilities and social commitments are no longer possible. Things distort; weeks fly by, days drag; as Henry wrote in a letter from prison, quoting The Shawshank Redemption, ‘time draws out like the blade’. The primary concern and the most difficult task is mounting a legal defence from a prison cell. Keogh found himself among the cough, clang and echo of incarceration. One phone, with 40 inmates lined up to use it, and if there was no answer or the person called was unavailable, it was back to the end of the queue. Being presumed innocent and continuing to live as if that were true are two very different things.