In December 2002, a few months prior to the Attorney-General’s address on April 1st, Dr Ross James retired as the state’s Senior Director of Forensic Pathology. He was replaced by new recruit Dr Allan Cala. Cala had been a specialist since 1994 and was employed at the NSW Institute of Forensic Medicine based in Glebe, Sydney. He had been a flight lieutenant in the RAAF Special Reserves and a captain in the Army Reserve Medical Corps and had worked as a medical officer for the Flying Doctor Service in Port Augusta in the late 1980s. When Dr Cala applied for the vacancy in South Australia in October 2002, the department Chief Executive Graham Foreman sent a note to the Minister for Administrative Services, who at the time had oversight of the state’s pathology services, saying, ‘We are extremely fortunate to attract an application from Dr Allan Cala.’34 It wouldn’t be long before Dr Cala was asked to weigh in to the debate over Professor Thomas’s qualifications and the validity of his forensics.
During his attack on the Keogh case it emerged that Michael Atkinson had misled Parliament when defaming Professor Thomas by only referring to the magistrate’s comments. The opposition saw it as an opportunity to embarrass Atkinson by forcing a correction. In mid-September 2003 the member for Heysen, Isobel Redmond, who was later to become opposition leader, asked if he was going to correct the record. Atkinson took the question as an excuse to launch a further assault on the people involved in the Keogh case, myself included. Professor Thomas had been made the offer to meet with the Attorney-General, or his people, in an attempt to come to some ‘arrangement’. When Thomas asked if I could accompany him to the meeting the offer was rescinded.
Atkinson maintained he had already corrected his error and said, ‘Although I concede that my assertions could be construed as misleading, I deny that I deliberately misled the house.’35
I wrote to the Attorney-General on 29 September 2003 asking him to use the opportunity of correcting the record on Professor Thomas to take a serious look at the evidence in the case. In retrospect, I probably didn’t use the best opening: ‘To be absolutely candid, I wonder if you have the moral fibre for this although feel free to surprise me.’36 I continued:
I have never spoken to Henry Keogh. I am happy to go on the record to say I have no interest in him personally, but the Keogh case remains a travesty of due process; worse, it is representative of many others … We have repeatedly reminded you this will not go away.37
I don’t recall receiving a response.
The new arrival at the Forensic Science Centre, Dr Cala, was contacted by the Attorney-General’s office in September 2003 to provide a report that appeared to be aimed at further diminishing Professor Thomas’s integrity, again exploiting the public’s ignorance around the label ‘forensic’ pathologist.
The man running the Attorney-General’s errands was Michael O’Connell, a former police officer who had created a career for himself as a ‘victimologist’. His timing was perfect. The Rann Government saw great political mileage in victims of crime and O’Connell seemed to have no trouble in being of service. It may not have occurred to him that in using Dr Cala as the agent provocateur on behalf of the AG he was assisting in the victimisation of Tony Thomas.
The six-page report authored by Cala was insulting in the extreme to a colleague he hardly knew, who was the country’s chief examiner in pathology and who was internationally recognised. The key line appeared in the closing paragraph of Cala’s manifesto. It read, ‘A/Prof. Thomas can be seen as a competent cardiac pathologist but in no way a forensic pathologist … In my view his opinions and testimony on many recent criminal matters are highly questionable.’38 Atkinson, armed with Cala’s missile, fired off a letter to Professor Thomas to inform him that, having apologised, he was now planning to make a further statement to the House incorporating Dr Cala’s report.39
Dr Cala didn’t stop with his attack on Thomas’s qualifications in pathology; he also weighed in on the Cheney autopsy. He looked at the tissue slides that were held at the Forensic Science Centre and wrote, ‘I … can confidently state the bruising exists. On that issue A/Prof. Thomas is wrong.’40 He also falsely accused Professor Thomas of being involved in the bath re-enactment, which he described as ‘poorly constructed, scientifically unsound and proving nothing’.41
With this brewing away in the background, on 21 October 2003 Isobel Redmond rose again to remind Atkinson he had failed to correct the record and apologise. Atkinson again maintained he had already done so. Redmond upped the ante by saying any other court misinforming the judge, albeit unwittingly, and not addressing the mistake at the earliest opportunity would be the subject of disciplinary action. She was forced to withdraw that remark after the Speaker called her to order, admonishing her for ‘getting involved in invective which leads to the sort of belief that it is fair to have a kick at somebody else because they have had a kick at you’.42
While I welcomed Redmond’s willingness to go on the offensive on behalf of Tony Thomas, it also revealed just how poisoned the name Keogh was in almost every quarter of politics. Redmond had prefaced her challenge to the Attorney-General by saying:
I want to say from the outset that I am absolutely at one with the Attorney in supporting the conviction of Henry Keogh. I have no doubt about that man’s guilt. I am not part of any conspiracy theorists group trying to get Henry Keogh released.43
Then in reference to John Lewis’s notorious travelling truck banner she remarked, ‘Indeed, I would like to get another truck to put around the place to put a big “Why?” whenever they put a “Release Keogh” banner on a truck around the place.’44
Atkinson responded by saying:
Some months ago, Professor Thomas, who is an anatomical pathologist, appeared on one of Graham Archer’s exposés on Today Tonight about the Henry Keogh case. Professor Thomas’s purpose was to raise doubts about Henry Keogh’s conviction with a view to his being released from gaol.45
It was a repeat of his previous misrepresentations: Tony Thomas had never said Keogh should be ‘released’. Atkinson continued to hammer the point that Professor Thomas had no standing as a ‘forensic pathologist’ based on the assessment of the Forensic Science Centre.46 Atkinson was on a mission to erode Thomas’s credibility one way or another; he said he was arranging for Thomas to read his response to these assessments. The Attorney finished his response, ‘That is taking a little time to arrange, but as soon as it is done I will be back here and I will do it.’47
This provoked another MP into action. In September 2003 Angus Redford, a Liberal member of the Legislative Council, moved that Hansard in the upper house reflect that the Attorney-General had misled parliament, and had acknowledged that he had done so but failed to apologise for suggesting Professor Thomas was not a qualified forensic pathologist, that he had not carried out a homicide autopsy in SA or that he was not impartial. The motion was adjourned over a number of sittings, during which time Redford learnt of Atkinson informing Thomas he was considering putting Cala’s report before parliament, which prompted him to call it how he saw it:
What a threat! What a disgrace this Attorney-General is! He defames a person, he gets caught out and then he comes back at this person and says that he will make another statement on him. That is a despicable act on the part of an Attorney-General.48
The matter was never satisfactorily resolved. Sadly, Professor Thomas wasn’t the only one in Michael Atkinson’s sights.
Now that I had signed up to pursue the case Valerie Armfield must have felt some of her work was accomplished. She had managed to stir media interest and despite setbacks had found a determined ally to continue the fight. Valerie still took a very active interest but her behaviour seemed to be becoming erratic. I thought initially she’d become emboldened by having serious media support but that wasn’t consistent with the Valerie I had first met: thoughtful, polite and professional. I had noticed in a couple of letters she had written to me that her handwriting had deteriorated.
In June 2003 Valerie rang veteran talkback host Jeremy Cordeaux to point out to his listeners a matter raised in a story I had presented the previous night. In the segment I had revealed the contents of a letter I had been provided by lawyer Linden Fairclough, whose legal offices had been raided partly on Anna-Jane’s instructions a week before her death. No search warrant had been obtained and on the day of her death Fairclough had several discussions on the phone with Anna about the return of his files. His impression was that on that day Anna-Jane was under considerable stress. Fairclough decided to share his concerns by writing to the then Attorney-General, Trevor Griffin:
I gained the distinct impression Miss Cheney was increasingly concerned and distressed about the way the above matters had occurred. I believe Miss Cheney died that evening. I immediately wondered if there was any connection to her apparent state of concern when I spoke to her last about lunchtime on Friday.49
Linden informed me he had received no response.
In her call to Jeremy Cordeaux, Valerie referred to Anna-Jane’s role with the Law Society but went on to say that her boss, Barry Fitzgerald, had given a false name to police after Anna-Jane died:
and therefore no enquiries in relation to solicitors were ever made. So that is a very serious thing to do, is to give a false name to a policeman thus stopping a line of enquiry; that was the first problem with the investigation into Anna-Jane’s death.50
Cordeaux asked what this had to do with a man sitting in jail after two trials. Valerie responded, ‘He has never had a fair trial …’51 That much was true, but Mr Fitzgerald had not given a false name. I believe Valerie’s confusion was due to a police error, as one of the investigating officers had written on the running sheet, ‘Spoke with Peter McKenzie, he was at the Cheneys.’ In fact the person who’d visited the family to pass on his condolences was Barry Fitzgerald. I was surprised Valerie wasn’t aware of this.
Governments spend a great deal of money employing media monitoring companies to keep tabs on what’s being said about them and their performance. Valerie’s error on the radio slipped into those hostile crosshairs. Michael Atkinson tracked down Barry Fitzgerald in Bendigo, where he had by then set up a bed and breakfast, and wrote to him on the official Attorney-General’s Department letterhead to alert him to what had been said on radio: ‘Given the nature of her comments I thought it advisable to draw it to your attention. I enclose a transcript.’52 Atkinson said he was perhaps going to make another statement to the House, and, ‘If you care to provide me your comments on Mrs Armfield’s reference to you I would be happy to include them in my response.’53
Barry Fitzgerald, armed with the transcript, launched a defamation suit against the radio station and Valerie. It cost her tens of thousands of dollars. I remained puzzled by Valerie’s confusion until 18 months later when I received a letter from her. In a very shaky hand Valerie wrote, ‘Dear Graham, Henry’s plight seems to have stalled. I want you to consider doing something for me. I have been diagnosed by Dr Jane Hecker as having Alzheimer’s disease. My family know of course, and Henry.’54 I don’t know what it was she wanted me do. I couldn’t help feeling that, albeit unwittingly, this defamation case amounted to victimising a woman suffering with then undiagnosed mental health issues.
Few knew what a pillar of strength Valerie had been. She and her husband, John, had helped Henry’s family overcome economic hardship after they’d struggled to meet the legal bills that accumulated during his trials. Without John Lewis and Valerie, Keogh’s father and stepmother, Avril, would have lost their home. Henry later wrote from prison, ‘[Valerie has] been one of my longest and stalwart supporters. Apart from just staying in touch I wanted to thank her and John personally for saving my dear old dad.’55 He also wrote, ‘John Lewis is a godsend, he truly is. He provided dad and Avril with a huge lifeline staving off imminent financial disaster.’56
In the years after, Valerie gradually deteriorated, and her active involvement ceased, but she and John gamely attended every Keogh-related occasion.
Michael Keogh is the middle brother of Henry’s family. The murder conviction had devastated the family and they were all desperate for some kind of salvation. I was considered useful because I had the means to give voice to their disbelief and anger. But the last thing I wanted was to become entangled in the family’s personal turmoil. Eileen Keogh used to call me whenever I put something to air, thanking me and saying she was praying for the day Henry could prove his innocence and be freed from jail. I could only recommend patience. David, the youngest of the brothers, also made contact occasionally. David would propose grandiose schemes to expose the injustice. In early 2004, Michael Keogh called me unexpectedly and asked if we could meet. I agreed if he was prepared to come to Channel Seven.
Michael arrived with his partner, Robyn, and took a seat in my cramped office one July morning. I could see the family resemblance. Michael explained that they’d been forced to relocate to Victoria in order for him to escape the stigma and find employment. Silently I recalled a female friend who had studied law with Anna-Jane saying that she had been invited on a double date. Anna-Jane and Henry, she and Michael Keogh. ‘Imagine,’ she said to me, quite seriously, ‘two young blonde lawyers, both murdered!’
Robyn and Michael appeared to be deeply troubled by their inability to do anything. Robyn produced a letter she’d written to Justice Duggan three weeks after Henry’s conviction. When I read what she had written I realised it was the first well-reasoned challenge, outside the court itself, to the integrity of the prosecution case. Of course a letter to the trial judge from a family member was fruitless and Robyn understood that. She wrote, ‘This letter is not written out of raw emotion knowing of Henry’s innocence. I am not related to Henry and I feel that I have remained quite objective in the past 18 months.’57 She acknowledged it would be ‘inappropriate’ for the judge to respond but asked if someone could let her know what avenues were available.
Neither Michael nor Robyn had been called by Michael David to give character evidence. Henry had no one at either trial to speak up for him. They had given detailed personal statements, including their observations of the relationship between Henry and Anna-Jane, which were not tendered. In her letter Robyn made reference to one such recollection:
There is one final matter which I feel compelled to raise, albeit sensitive. In July 1993 Henry and Anna came to our house for dinner. This was to catch up with them after their trip overseas and also for Henry’s birthday. It was only after the committal last year that Michael and I became aware that the prosecution were alleging that Anna had no knowledge of any insurance policies … but I will tell you that on the evening of the 17th July that during the course of conversation with Henry and Anna, Anna let slip out of frustration with Michael that she and Henry had ‘insurance cover’ of $2,000,000. The subject was quickly dropped by everyone and Anna never mentioned matters of insurance after that date. To say that Henry only made partial disclosure to Anna of insurance amounts is totally incorrect.58
She concluded by saying she had to come to know Henry very well and, ‘I … know that he is incapable of committing this crime, but that is not the basis of my conviction of his innocence. The facts (or lack thereof) of this case speak for themselves.’59
All I could say to the couple was, ‘Leave it with me.’
Following his appointment in South Australia and prior to his involvement in the Tony Thomas affair, I had begun researching Dr Allan Cala’s professional history. By then I was intensely sceptical of how forensic pathology had been administered. I had originally hoped this new specialist from elsewhere might bring some fresh air to the fetid culture of the department. I was disabused of that view by his enthusiasm to join in the Attorney-General’s machinations but also discovered Dr Cala had his own skeletons buried back in New South Wales.
The highly decorated Sunday program on Channel Nine, for which I’d worked before joining Channel Seven, had investigated the Glebe Mortuary, where Dr Cala had been working. In a segment entitled ‘The body snatchers’, broadcast in March 2001, they exposed the practice of selling or volunteering body parts from cadavers to other institutions for research, without the permission of relatives or the approval of the appropriate authorities. Skulls were supplied to be smashed with hammers for forensic research and joints were provided for sports medicine and orthopaedic studies. The NSW Coroners Act 1980 only allowed parts to be released to other laboratories if the research was directly related to the autopsy process, thus assisting the establishment of the manner and cause of death.
What became apparent was that fraudulent or thinly reasoned documents had been created and slipped into the case files to pay lip-service to that obligation. Very often the law was simply ignored. The loved ones, who had no idea their dearly departed relatives had been cut up for experiments, were outraged. The TV program led to a commission of inquiry conducted by senior Sydney barrister Bret Walker SC.
In his report, sent to the Governor in August 2001, Walker confirmed the practice and said the experiments had little or nothing to do with establishing the causes of death. All the pathologists interviewed agreed they’d breached the Act, except one: ‘Only Dr Cala, one of the pathologists on the Institute’s staff, appeared partly to contest this inference.’60 Furthermore, all the pathologists agreed that including the bogus research in the autopsy reports was inappropriate: ‘The one exception was Dr Cala, who in interview said things I think are likely mistaken about some of these cases where he was the responsible pathologist.’61
In 1994 Dr Cala undertook his final tests, known as ‘slanted’ examinations, to qualify to be a forensic pathologist. I discovered one of his examiners was none other than Dr Manock. The fact that a man who had never undertaken those studies or exams was now an examiner was astonishing. Even more incredible was why, at the very time he was caught up in the disgraceful baby deaths inquest, the Royal College of Pathologists would use him to help set the standard for future forensic pathologists. After I produced a story making this information public, on 3 August 2006, the Royal College was quick to fire off a media release headed, ‘RCPA corrects Today Tonight claims’.62 It accused us of misleading the public over Cala’s length of study and qualifications. Professor Tony Thomas wrote a four-page letter to the college CEO, Debra Graves, defending what we’d put to air, but Graves remained unmoved, even though the point being made was not that Dr Cala’s training was inappropriate but that the college had authorised Dr Manock as one of their examiners in 1994.
I lodged a freedom-of-information request for a copy of Dr Cala’s application for the job in South Australia. I was intrigued to see that one of his three referees chose to have their name blacked out on Cala’s attached CV. One of the remaining two came as a surprise: the NSW state Coroner, who worked at Glebe, John Abernethy, who would have known of the ‘body snatchers’ inquiry. Yet there was another forensic time bomb ticking in Dr Cala’s background that few, if any, outside New South Wales were aware of.
In January 2000, the couple Bill and Pamela Weightman had been found dead in their car after it appeared to have swerved off a winding road in New South Wales’s Heathcote National Park and careened down an embankment. When the police arrived at the scene they quickly assessed it as an unfortunate accident on a twisting road with steep sides. The Weightmans were pillars of the community. The two ran a highly successful childcare business but had not been able to have children of their own, eventually choosing to adopt. For almost 20 years they’d lovingly raised their son, David.
At the accident scene there was surprisingly little damage to the car. Bill, who was found without a seatbelt, was less badly injured than his wife, Pam, whose seatbelt was still in place. The man scheduled to conduct the autopsies on both victims was Dr Allan Cala. His autopsy findings confirmed the deaths were accidental and that tissue slides taken from Pamela’s brain helped confirm that diagnosis. However, some things didn’t add up.
When Margaret Urwin, Pam’s sister, and her husband, Alan, arrived at the Glebe Morgue to identify their relatives they were shocked. According to Alan, the couple looked like they’d been in a fight. Not much else made sense to them either: the lack of damage to the car, Bill’s failure to wear a seatbelt and the fact they had been out driving early in the morning and just swerved off the road. When they voiced their concerns they were eventually granted an audience with Dr Cala, who the Urwins say dismissed their concerns, as they describe it, by telling them it was an unfortunate accident.
Another concern that troubled the Urwins was the behaviour of Bill and Pamela’s son, David. He had put his parents’ house on the market just days after their deaths and began living it up on their money. Within three weeks of their deaths David celebrated his 21st birthday in an elaborate manner. He unnerved the guests by cutting his birthday cake with a samurai sword. There seemed no hint of grief or remorse as David revelled in his newfound independence and wealth.
Twelve months later Dr Cala learnt that there had been a mix-up. The neuropathological tissue samples he’d examined had not come from Pamela Weightman’s brain, but from an unrelated woman. He had erroneously recorded the presence of hypoxic encephalopathy and cerebral oedema in the deceased, which supported his diagnosis of brain trauma, the result of a severe impact that one would experience in a serious car accident. Perhaps the layman’s nous of the Urwins had been right after all. Cala confessed his error to John Abernethy on 25 July 2001. After a delay of almost six months the state Coroner referred the case to police but for operational reasons the Urwins were not informed of the error or that the police had become involved. Whenever the family implored them to investigate further the police appeared unresponsive. The Urwins felt abandoned.
Having sold his parents’ house, and with no family of his own, David Weightman was generously taken in by the Urwins. His behaviour became increasingly erratic. Alan and Margaret became convinced that David had been involved in Pam and Bill’s deaths. Life, with this awful prospect hanging over them, became intolerable. No one would listen to their suspicions and the police and Coroner’s Office remained unresponsive. Margaret was now not just suffering from grief but extreme anxiety, believing she had a killer under her roof. Both also came to suspect David of trying to poison their own son.
In 2004, after repeated attempts, Alan finally extracted a confession from David that he had murdered his parents for their money. Alan secretly recorded his confession on a video camera. It’s an extraordinary indictment of the authorities that it was left to the victims’ family to solve this double murder and deliver the confession to police themselves. Meanwhile, they’d been kept in the dark over the erroneous pathology and Dr Cala had since been employed in South Australia as the Acting Chief Forensic Pathologist, with the NSW Coroner’s blessing.
‘I have resigned as chief pathologist to concentrate on the casework. I could no longer do both effectively.’63 This was Dr Cala’s surprise announcement to his superiors at Forensic Science SA in May 2004. It came as no surprise to me. I had been in close contact with the Urwins and knew what was brewing. The couple had lodged a complaint with the NSW Health Care Complaints Commission over Cala’s conduct. Having confided in me, the couple didn’t want a story to run until the complaint had been heard, and they were constrained by confidentiality as a consequence of their complaint. It seemed clear that Dr Cala’s resignation was a sign the chairs within the Forensic Science Centre were being rearranged in anticipation of further bad news.