In 1995 I had returned to Adelaide from Sydney to launch the new local current affairs program Today Tonight for the Seven Network. The events involving Henry Keogh were well underway by the time the program was on air. As a rule, court proceedings are the preserve of TV news programs reporting on the progress of each day, but to speculate on the evidence or interview witnesses is to risk being in contempt of the court. When the second trial concluded, Henry Keogh went to jail and the Cheney family requested privacy. It wasn’t for another six years that my interest in the case was aroused. What triggered my curiosity was what had emerged during those years.
On 25 August 1995 – the day after the ‘Keogh the killer’ edition of the Tiser hit the streets, and just 36 hours after Keogh’s conviction – another significant publication was released. The publication was entitled ‘Finding of inquest into the deaths of Storm Don Ernie Deane, William Anthony Barnard, Joshua Clive Nottle’.
It was harrowing reading. Coroner Wayne Chivell had picked his moment to hand down his report on the autopsies conducted on three battered babies who had suffered horrific injuries in the early to mid-’90s. The purpose of the inquest was twofold: to reinvestigate the cause of death of each infant, and to discover why the autopsies were so monumentally flawed. Despite obvious signs of extreme abuse, the finding for each baby was recorded as death through natural causes. All three post-mortems were the work of the state’s Senior Director of Forensic Pathology, Dr Colin Manock.
Dr Manock was a short, slight man with an intense gaze and a broad Yorkshire accent. He had a narrow handsome face and thick dark hair, parted on the right. On 3 March 1968 he applied for, and won, the position of the Director of Forensic Pathology, a division of the Institute of Medical and Veterinary Science (IMVS). The section was later expanded under the title of Forensic Science South Australia (FSSA). The state’s police, Coroner’s Office and Department of Public Prosecutions are FSSA clients. According to his job application he had completed a medical degree at the University of Leeds in 1962, aged 25. After Manock graduated he was employed as a Resident House Officer at St James’s University Hospital, Leeds General Infirmary and the Leeds Maternity Hospital. In 1964 he became a Home Office-approved pathologist for the County of Yorkshire. It was a huge leap of faith by the South Australian authorities to appoint, to such a senior post, a 31-year-old with so little experience in pathology and with only some of the specialist qualifications required to perform the duties of a forensic pathologist.
Over the years Manock has prepared at least three curriculum vitae. Each document added more content to his postgraduate period in the UK than its predecessor, and more autopsies he claimed to have performed before his appointment in Adelaide. In his original job application for the role of Senior Director of Forensic Pathology, the number of autopsies between 1964 and 1968 was listed as 1200. In the second CV, created in 1977, the number for the same period rose to 1400. On that document, one of the nominated referees was Kevin Duggan QC, at the time of writing the state’s Chief Crown Prosecutor. Dr Manock prepared a third CV in 1983, inflating the number of autopsies in the same period to 1845. It was a 30 per cent increase over the three CVs. My attempts to check these figures with the Coroner in Yorkshire were blocked.
Colin Henry Manock arrived in Adelaide to considerable fanfare. The Advertiser appeared awe-struck by the selection of the state’s new ‘crime-fighting’ scientist. He brought with him, it curiously enthused, a ‘practical knowledge which would earn the admiration of a safe cracker’.1 But among the skills Manock promised to employ were those he lacked the qualifications to perform. Absent in particular from his original CV was the specialist area of histopathology: the study of the body’s tissue and fluids at the cellular level through microscopic examination and chemical analysis. Dr Manock informed the paper, ‘Before we submit any evidence to court we have to be able to back it up with undisputed scientific fact.’2
Despite Manock needing to undertake five years of part-time study in histopathology, he simply chose not to do so. If he was to remain in his specialist role without causing embarrassment to his employers, his glaring lack of qualifications had to be remedied by other means. Being well placed within the state branch of the Royal College of Pathologists, his superiors found a solution. It would be better for all involved if the college opened its doors to Dr Manock and conferred upon him at least the appearance of the specialist standing his position required.
A hastily arranged 20-minute viva examination was conducted before a panel and in place of five years of exacting study Dr Manock became an instant Fellow of the college. This thin veneer was acknowledged many years later in a TV interview between journalist Sally Neighbour, for the ABC’s Four Corners program, and Dr David Weedon from the college:
DW: Well, it was the practice in those days for members who held very senior positions in Australia, and who had British qualifications, to be given a viva examination – that is, an oral examination only.
SN: But Dr Manock didn’t even have British qualifications.
DW: So I believe.
SN: So why would he have been given this oral-only examination?
DW: Because of the seniority of the position he held. It would probably have been about 20 minutes, and he would’ve been asked questions related to forensic pathology.3
It is not surprising, then, that Dr Manock’s career was littered with controversy. Many of the most contentious convictions revolved around crucial opinions expressed about the age and timing of injuries and the victims’ times of death. From the earliest cases in the 1970s to his retirement just prior to Keogh’s second trial, Dr Manock seemed to sail through these storms undeterred.
By the late 1970s those working around and above him had become increasingly uneasy, particularly over his lack of any genuine specialist skills. Dr J. A. Bonnin, the Director of the IMVS and Manock’s immediate superior, attempted to remove him from the directorship and place a qualified pathologist above him to monitor and supervise his work. Dr Manock took his employer to the Industrial Court, claiming he was the victim of a calculated effort to demote him which was a breach of his original terms of employment.
During the court case the circumstances of Dr Manock’s appointment became public, as did his deficiencies in the job. Under oath Dr Bonnin emphasised the political pressure he had been under at the time; the state was so desperate to fill the vacancy that the minister responsible for the institute had rebuked him: ‘Do you mean to say you cannot supply me with a service for forensic services?’4 Bonnin admitted that he was well aware Dr Manock was not qualified for the job: ‘knowing as I did briefly from his curricular activities that he could not and was not able to do all the activities, work and duties that Dr Robertson [his predecessor] had done’.5 Vastly more alarming was the admission in the Industrial Court by Dr Bonnin that Manock ‘was unable to do certifying the cause of death because of his lack in histopathology’.6 Despite this, the industrial case was resolved in Dr Manock’s favour and he was reinstated. By the admission from those who’d employed him the state had a Senior Director of Forensic Pathology who was unable to certify cause of death and yet he was permitted to do so for a further 20 years.
The death of Indigenous 16-year-old Gerald Warren in 1984 involved one such serious forensic faux pas. The young man’s body was discovered approximately ten metres off the side of a dusty track on the outskirts of Port Augusta. When the gruesome find was made, Dr Manock happened to be in the city of around 15,000 people, which sits between the head of Spencer Gulf and the vastness of the Flinders Ranges 300 kilometres north of Adelaide.
Major Crime police had flown up to be present when the autopsy was conducted. Having inspected and photographed the horrific injuries they began their investigations into a possible homicide. However, that was suddenly called to a halt as Dr Manock’s autopsy found Gerald’s death to be accidental: the unfortunate youth had been riding in the back of a ute and due to inebriation had tumbled out and been killed on impact with the road. Death by misadventure was Dr Manock’s conclusion. The family of the teenager was furious. They could see the explanation didn’t fit the type and extent of Gerald’s injuries. The police who had seen the corpse agreed, but their hands were tied.
There was something else about the damage to Gerald Warren’s body, aside from its severity, that troubled the police on the scene. He had striated bruises, made up of close parallel lines, on his face and on the back of his right hand. The marks were explained by Dr Manock as having been caused by Warren’s head and hand striking his corduroy trousers as he fell onto the road.
For Gerald Warren justice arrived three years later, arriving in the form of a heated argument between a female patron and her boyfriend in a hotel bar. Afterwards, the woman turned up at the Port Augusta Police Station and incriminated her partner and one of his mates in the murder of a young Aboriginal man some years earlier. The story she told was of the two men, Stefan Niewdach and Allan Ellis, cruising the town when they came across an idle Gerald Warren, who was perched on a fence and drinking from a can of beer. As the two men in the ute drove past they thought he’d given them some lip. They circled around while concocting a brutish plan of revenge.
The two pulled into one of the nearby bottle shops, purchased a slab of beer and returned to where Warren was. They pulled up and invited him to join them in a few beers, an offer he apparently accepted. They chose as their drinking spot an isolated, dusty dirt road on the edge of town that led to the local dump. After a couple of cans they put their malicious scheme into effect. One of the men removed from the ute a length of brass rod with a threaded end. He beat Warren over the head and face. As he crumpled to the ground their victim held up his right hand in a desperate but futile attempt to shield his face. The threaded end of the bar left a series of savage parallel bruises with every blow, in stark contrast to Dr Manock’s diagnosis which incriminated the corduroy trousers.
The beating continued until Warren was rendered senseless. When the two realised their victim was still alive Niewdach jumped into the car and, while Ellis urged him on, he drove backwards and forwards over the helpless Warren until he was dead. At one point his body became lodged under the vehicle, inciting the driver to spin the car around on the dirt road until their crumpled victim was flung out and tumbled into the bushes some metres off the side of the track. He lay there for weeks undiscovered.
Both men pleaded not guilty and were tried separately. During Allan Ellis’s trial, his defence barrister, Gordon Barrett QC, cross-examined Dr Manock over his implausible autopsy findings, and whether he still held the view that the parallel bruising injuries were the work of the corduroy trousers:
GB: The possible cause that you gave for those marks was the fabric of corduroy, wasn’t it?
CM: Yes.
GB: I take it that’s still your view as a possible cause for those marks?
CM: It would certainly produce a pattern.
GB: So, while you agree with my learned friend that those marks may have been caused as she [the prosecutor] asked you to hypothesise, by the thread of a piece of iron, and you agreed that’s consistent with that?
CM: Yes.
GB: But also consistent, you would still say I think, with the pressure from the corduroy of the pants?
CM: Yes.
GB: You’d have no reason to resile from that view?
CM: Correct.7
Both Ellis and Niewdach were convicted of murder, and were sentenced to 18 years and life respectively. Justice Kevin Duggan was the judge overseeing both trials.
Despite these kinds of incident, and there are many of them, what occurred in court largely stayed in court. For nearly 30 years Dr Manock presented a conundrum for the legal system and successive governments that they showed little appetite to confront.