Henry Keogh’s life sentence, to be served in Yatala Labour Prison, meant there was nothing between him and the next 25 years behind concrete and steel. For two years, while his appeals and petitions made their way through the legal system, he languished like discarded waste. He gave himself up to the mindless routine and the torment of equally pointless disruptions which served to remind the inmates of their powerlessness.
In fact he wasn’t entirely alone, though at times he may have wished he had been. Lost causes invariably attract lost souls. For almost two decades Henry Keogh would be helped and haunted by more than his share. While not everyone who wanted to ‘save’ him also wanted to ‘save’ themselves, plenty did.
Keogh’s first ally didn’t fit that category. She had the added advantage of being a retired lawyer, albeit a family court lawyer. Valerie Armfield at that time was in her fifties, an immaculately groomed woman with jet black hair, a thin kindly face and a roguish sense of humour. Behind her proper demeanour was a fierce mind and an innate scepticism about the way the legal system operated. Her interest in Keogh’s case was first aroused because her daughter, a serving police officer, lived nearby the Magill home of Anna-Jane Cheney. Valerie had also, briefly, been a colleague of Anna-Jane. It was professional curiosity and this personal connection that tempted her to take a closer look. Valerie quickly came to the view there had been a lapse in proper procedures at every stage of the investigations into Anna-Jane’s death, as well as Keogh’s arrest and conviction. These were lapses the juries knew nothing about.
After reading the entire transcript Valerie decided in October 1998 to write to the Coroner, Wayne Chivell. She posed a series of questions about apparent irregularities in the way Anna-Jane’s death was handled. Firstly, her body had been cremated before the cause of death was registered. Valerie queried the appropriateness of Keogh being arrested and charged before the cause of death had been formally decided and before the results of toxicological testing were known. She also raised the inconsistencies in Dr Manock’s evidence: the conflicts between his account of finding the bruises with that of lab assistant Amanda Caryana, and the ambiguity over which hand fitted the grip pattern. Valerie had also re-enacted the murder scenario in her own bath, but this time with water in the tub. In stark contrast to the choreographed courtroom demonstration, she had found the manoeuvre could not be performed as described. She ‘implored’ the Coroner to allow her to conduct another supervised re-enactment in an identical bath to prove what was put to the court would not be possible. She received no response.
Everyone has an agenda, though not everyone will admit to or see their own. Keogh’s next advocate made no secret of hers. Pensioner Leigh Connolly believed that her calling in life was to help the outcasts and the friendless of society. The latter-day lepers of her choosing were the inmates of our penal institutions, convicted criminals who very often had grown up among the wreckage of domestic violence and abuse.
Connolly wrote a plea to the Police Commissioner, David Hunt, in a letter dated 15 December 1998:
During 1995, while watching the television news services, I was told by the Holy Spirit many times that Henry Vincent Keogh is an innocent man. To be precise the wording was: ‘He is innocent, the man is innocent.’29
On the same day she also wrote to the DPP; the Governor; the Lord Mayor of Adelaide; the then Federal Minister for Justice and Customs, Amanda Vanstone; the Anglican Archbishop; the Premier; the Attorney-General and numerous other dignitaries. Most politely responded; none could help. The Police Commissioner wished her a happy festive season and the Archbishop reminded her that God’s word wouldn’t stand up in a court of law.
Leigh’s partner, Robert Sheehan, believed he too received word from God, but he wasn’t going to leave everything to the supernatural. Sheehan was to become known as ‘the Ferret’, because of his preparedness to go down every burrow in search of new evidence. In 1999 he enlisted the aid of Labor MP Frances Bedford, who wrote to the DPP seeking details of Anna-Jane Cheney’s complete medical history, something which was only dealt with superficially during the trials. Having a member of parliament on the case was a big help. In August of that year, Paul Rofe agreed to allow an independent medical expert to peruse the records in his office. However, in his correspondence to Ms Bedford, he added:
While I do not doubt the sincerity of Mr Sheehan’s belief, I enclose a copy of his partner’s, Ms Connolly, letter to the Commissioner of Police. There is a limit to the length I am prepared to go to accommodate Mr Sheehan’s inquiry. That limit has now been reached.30
The delivery of divine messages had obviously done the rounds.
Four years into his sentence, Keogh’s disenfranchisement seemed complete. He had had no control over his legal advice, no control over the evidence admitted or withheld in court and now none over who might wish to speak for him.
However, Sheehan did enlist the help of Tony Thomas, who would become one of the heroes of Keogh’s saga. Thomas was the same pathologist who’d been engaged by the Coroner to undertake the forensic review of Manock’s autopsies of the three battered babies.
Sheehan first asked Thomas for some advice on the autopsy photographs he’d acquired with the assistance of Frances Bedford MP. The ‘Ferret’ also sought access to the histology, or tissue samples, by contacting Professor Stephen Cordner, who arranged for a duplicate set of the tissue sections to be made available. It was the beginning of a tortuous journey for Professor Thomas that would last 15 years.
It wasn’t just the work of Dr Manock in the baby deaths cases that Professor Thomas had been asked to examine. In 1999 the Northern Territory Coroner requested he review a post-mortem carried out by Dr Manock, who was then acting as a private forensic consultant. A Darwin schoolboy had collapsed suddenly during a game of rugby. The cause of death, according to Dr Manock, was ‘heat stroke’. In the microscopic examination of the heart tissue Thomas found evidence of viral-type myocarditis of several days’ duration, a disease with a high potential for fatal consequences. That, rather than heat stroke, had been the cause of the young boy’s death. As with the case of the three babies, the legal implications of a false diagnosis could have been substantial. The rugby administrators may have faced accusations of failure in their duty of care had the original cause of death been allowed to stand.
In November 1999 Tony Thomas began his inspection of the tissue samples taken from Anna-Jane’s body. Bruising is a general term that identifies changes seen on the surface of the skin following a blow or a knock. The leakage of blood from blood vessels, caused by pressure, enters the surrounding tissue in sufficient quantity to be seen through the dermis and epidermis of the skin. What Thomas saw shocked him. Or, more accurately, what he didn’t see.
In July 2000 Thomas returned to the Forensic Science Centre for a thorough examination of the records and the original evidence. What he encountered was a shambolic situation. There were 22 black-and-white photographs of the body, but not one full-body shot to identify the subject of the autopsy. The histological ‘blocks’ of tissue samples were so poorly labelled that it was not immediately possible to confirm the origins of the tissue. Based on the dates on the containers and the evidence given by Dr Manock the tissue samples were said to be excised from the body on Monday 21 March 1994. Yet lab assistant Amanda Caryana’s statement about her observations over several days doesn’t add up:
There were several small circular bruises on the ankle. They were only light in colour and not bruises that stood out or were readily noticed. During that week it would have been probably three times that I saw her body. On these occasions Dr Manock and Mr Billet [the photographer] were present. I noticed that the bruising on the ankle consistently got darker as the week progressed.31
Thomas was also struck by the inadequate number of histology samples taken from the body. Aside from the four blocks of tissue taken from the bruises, there were two from heart tissue, one from the lungs, and one from the kidneys. He thought it inappropriate that no brain, liver, adrenal, pancreas or pelvic tissue was taken for histological analysis. It was a common theme reiterated by the prosecution at the trials and various appeals that fit young people don’t just suddenly die: ‘We say the circumstances, her general health and fitness, the findings of the post-mortem … leave no other explanation [but murder].’32 Yet in Thomas’s specialised experience, unexplained deaths of young people are surprisingly common.
Thomas knew of numerous cases not dissimilar to that of Anna-Jane Cheney’s death. When the death of a 22-year-old Sydney woman was reported in the Advertiser on 18 June 1996 the article read, ‘A healthy young woman drowned while taking an early-morning bath when she fell asleep after a night of socialising with friends, a Coronial Inquest has found.’33 Jodie Louise Ryan was discovered by her flatmate immersed in her bath at 7.20 am, with the bathwater still lukewarm. Jodie’s parents were shocked and mystified by the sudden death of their daughter, a former state champion swimmer. However, foul play was ruled out and she was found to have had a blood alcohol level of 0.13. It was a fatal reminder of the dangerous mix of alcohol and hot baths.
Aside from the glaringly inadequate photographic record and the lack of organ tissue samples Thomas found other problems with the autopsy. Nothing could compare to what he saw, or failed to see, when he examined the tissue taken from the inside of the left leg. This was the site of the so-called thumb bruise crucial to Dr Manock’s grip theory. After fitting the glass slide onto the stage of his microscope and peering through the eye piece, Professor Thomas adjusted the focus and continued to stare at the cells magnified by his lens. What he was staring at was nothing: nothing at all. The flooding of red blood cells into surrounding tissue which marks the presence of a bruise simply wasn’t there. The presence of a small number of red blood cells was most likely to be artefactual, the result of cutting to remove the tissue sample from the leg. The final assessment, which he was asked to confirm many times in the years to come, was, ‘I can find no proper basis for the inference that it is a bruise.’34
Thomas knew the significance of his finding was hard to overestimate. No evidence of a bruise meant there was nothing to support the application of thumb pressure to the leg. That meant nothing to underwrite the existence of a grip. Without a grip there was no evidence of human intervention in the death of Anna-Jane Cheney. Without any physical evidence of murder the notion of any motive falls away. This was fresh evidence of the most compelling kind. Perhaps Thomas had stumbled on the critical smoking gun which pointed directly to a monumental miscarriage of justice?
Thomas’s next step was to approach Professor Stephen Cordner, the defence’s expert, to request access to the forensic evidence. There would be few if any forensic pathologists in Australia with greater professional standing than Stephen Cordner. His conclusions regarding the Anna-Jane Cheney autopsy, as expressed to Keogh’s legal team in December 1996, when they were preparing to reopen his appeal, were that Dr Manock expressed opinions that were ‘wrong’, particularly in dismissing the possibility of accidental death. He had indulged in a speculative proposition to support the idea of murder, and ‘no other forensic pathologist in Australia would be of the view that murder is the only explanation of the findings in this case.’35 His final few words were, ‘these are sad conclusions’.36
What Thomas had seen through his microscope was bound to raise questions that might prove awkward. His visit to the centre in July 2000 and his inspection of the original slides were closely observed by a staff member. It was only a matter of time before the department would be asked to respond to what Thomas had uncovered. It’s here the important role of Dr Ross James, Dr Manock’s successor, emerges. If Tony Thomas was right, and there was nothing in the histology to support the existence of the thumb bruise, James could find himself in a difficult position. He’d given evidence which indicated the bruise was a scientific fact. In cross-examination by Michael David, Dr James was asked about his examination of the slides:
MD: From that you could say you saw four slides of bruising?
RJ: Yes.37
On 6 November 2000, James wrote to the Director of the Forensic Science Centre, Dr Hilton Kobus. The letter followed a request from Kobus seeking reassurance that the whole Manock thing was not about to blow up in their faces, or words to that effect. James had requested the histology slides and indicated he would submit his own report ‘when available’.38 At the time of the original post-mortem there was no peer-checking conducted by the other pathologists, something James was quick to stress had been adopted since Dr Manock’s retirement. James had also received a request from the DPP to review the autopsy report. He responded that in the main he agreed with what was found by his former superior but any review was going to be a long way short of perfect. There was no body to work with and he was entirely dependent on the samples, notes, photographs and observations of Dr Manock.
In his reply to Hilton Kobus, James recommitted to Dr Manock’s diagnosis of ‘freshwater drowning’. James reiterated the view that healthy young women ‘do not simply drown in the bath’.39 He also reassured his boss about the bruising on Anna-Jane’s legs by saying, ‘There was apparently no evidence that she had them [the bruises] before her bath.’40 He omitted to say it was equally true there was nothing to show she didn’t already have them, as no one had attested to the condition of her legs before her death. He wrote, ‘In my opinion the leg bruises are consistent with grip marks and should be regarded as grip marks until shown to be otherwise.’41
It was the histology that really challenged Dr James’s integrity as a scientist and an expert witness. Over the following decade James would find himself required to duck and weave over the evidence he’d given at Keogh’s first and second trials. In his memo to Kobus, he went on the record for the first time to say that not all the leg bruising could be confirmed. At this point he was treading gently, not identifying which bruises or bruise might be in doubt. James wrote, ‘If some sections have failed to confirm subcutaneous haemorrhage in other blocks I don’t consider this particularly important in the sense it alters the opinions expressed.’ He concluded his memo by referring to the circumstantial evidence of Keogh’s case, such as the insurance and his alleged affairs: ‘As I understand it was this evidence that allowed the jury to reach a verdict and not the pathology evidence.’42
The subject of insurance was also occupying the minds of the Cheney family. In March 2000 the Public Trustee, the administrator of Anna-Jane’s estate, engaged lawyers to claim that Anna-Jane ‘believed that Keogh … had arranged for life insurance policies over her life to the extent of $400,000.00’.43 The statement went further to argue that the five companies, for which Henry Keogh was an agent, were all bound by his fraudulent conduct, and that the estate had suffered significant loss as a consequence. The combined total of the policies was close to $1.2 million. While the claim sought orders for a payment of $400,000 it also included a demand for unspecified damages. After numerous conciliation conferences the claim was settled for an undisclosed sum in favour of the Cheney family.
In my only conversation with Joanne Cheney, in August 2002, I asked her why they sought to cash in the policies. She responded testily with, ‘Why shouldn’t we. She was our daughter.’44