There were movements on other fronts. On 10 August 2006 every media organisation and television newsroom was invited by the press secretary for the Deputy Premier and Treasurer, Kevin Foley, to attend a press conference at the State Administration Centre that afternoon. No detail was provided of the subject matter and the firm stipulation was that the invitation was limited to just one journalist from each organisation. It was an odd request. Channel Seven’s political reporter, Mike Smithson, who received the alert, thought it must be to release some unexpected economic news and the Treasurer was ensuring journalists didn’t attend forearmed. When they had all assembled and were seated Foley solemnly took his place at the lectern and proceeded to tell them he was there to announce that Henry Keogh’s third petition had been rejected by the government.
For the mostly political journalists in attendance, this must have been a serious anticlimax. No major economic announcements, no cabinet reshuffle, just something about a 12-year-old murder case that the government, probably for good reason, had decided not to refer back to the court.
It appeared to me this entire effort was stage-managed to ensure I didn’t turn up. No one else had any real interest in or knowledge of the case. Why Foley was deputising for Michael Atkinson was not clear. The reason offered was that Atkinson had a conflict of interest, but I didn’t recall that having arisen as an obstacle in the past.
Foley assured those gathered that the investigation had been scrupulously thorough:
After considering the report of the Solicitor-General delivered after an exhaustive examination of over two and a half years of 37 complaints contained in Mr Keogh’s third Petition, I’ve formed the opinion that it did not disclose any arguable basis that the Supreme Court could find there had been a miscarriage of justice.115
While admitting minor issues with the forensics, the official view was they didn’t negate the other incriminating facts:
Ms Cheney was found dead in the bath at a time when without her knowledge her life was insured to a total value of $1.2 million under five policies that had been fraudulently obtained by Mr Keogh by forging her signature on the policy applications.116
It sounded like an unambiguous reason for the conviction. Following this statement Foley spent some time batting away the more speculative aspects of the petition, the ones introduced largely courtesy of Sheehan’s conjectures of conspiracy. Sheehan’s suspicions about the photographs were not always harmless: in one image, for example, he claimed he could see a mark on Anna’s thigh which to him bore the signs of espionage. He imagined he saw the pinprick of a hypodermic needle or at the very least a bee sting, and came to believe the photographs had been doctored by the police to erase signs of the real cause of death. Disparaging references were made, in Foley’s press conference, to the claims about the reversed hand photograph, the so-called injection mark on one of the legs and the ‘missing’ car. This kind of speculation eroded the good work Sheehan had done, and risked ridicule; these notions made perfect targets for those looking for reasons to condemn Keogh’s petition. It was around this point, in 2006, that Sheehan and I finally parted company.
Foley also dismissed any questions about the depth of the bathwater, saying it was clearly deep enough to drown Anna-Jane. The fact that the prosecution’s scenario was that her face had been upright was not addressed.
Mike Smithson attempted to ask some pertinent questions on my behalf but they were dismissed by Foley:
I think it is clear from the report of the Solicitor-General that the so-called evidence of Today Tonight has been totally rejected and is without foundation. It is for Today Tonight to make their decision of their continued support, should it be there, of Mr Keogh. The people of South Australia can be comforted in the knowledge that a two-and-a-half-year exhaustive examination by the Solicitor-General, one of the most senior officers of this state, has concluded that there is no doubt in his mind as to the guilt of Henry Keogh. The overwhelming body of evidence shows Mr Keogh is guilty of a terrible, terrible crime and I appeal to those who for whatever motivation, for whatever reason, continue to put the family of Anna-Jane Cheney through so much torment, please end their nightmare and allow a family to get on with their lives.117
They were words that ought one day to come back to haunt Atkinson, Foley and Kourakis. That day was a long way off. What I didn’t know was there was a bombshell sitting in the Solicitor-General’s office that would not be revealed for another seven years.
Following the depressing announcement I prepared a freedom-of-information request seeking the actual advice Kourakis had provided to the Attorney-General. I argued that given some of that advice had been selectively used for the press conference and the published media statement the legal professional privilege had been waived. After all, this was the Crown and it shouldn’t be able to pick and choose the sections of advice that just suited a particular purpose. I was informed the advice remained protected by privilege. I then sought an internal review of the decision, which was conducted by Jerome Maguire, Chief Executive of the Attorney-General’s Department. His investigation discovered the document I requested was no longer held by the Attorney-General’s Department but resided solely with the Solicitor-General, an FOI-exempt agency. He concluded with, ‘I therefore vary [the original] determination and refuse access to the advice provided by the Solicitor-General.’118 I’d have to wait almost a decade for at least part of what I was seeking to find.
While Dr Manock appeared to have escaped another round of scrutiny as a result of the petition decision the same couldn’t be said for Dr Allan Cala. Word of the NSW Health Care Complaints Commission’s charges against him over the Weightmans’ double fatality had emerged in the Sydney press. Dr Cala was facing eight separate complaints, including his failure to take photographs or retain those taken of the post-mortem; wrongly accepting the police opinion of accidental death; erroneously recording the presence of hypoxic encephalopathy and cerebral oedema; and a failure to document and communicate the injuries to the Coroner. In July 2006 the Advertiser re-ran a story from the Sunday Telegraph entitled, ‘He was dead wrong’. It was the beginning of a series of articles revealing the details of the double murder, which questioned Dr Cala’s fitness for the job in South Australia and asked whether the autopsies he’d conducted since arriving could be relied upon.
The DPP, Stephen Pallaras, held a press conference and went on the attack in defence of his department and the justice system. He opened with, ‘The unhelpful publicity surrounding the position of senior consultant pathologist Dr Allan Cala has caused much unnecessary anguish in the community.’119 But what could be more legitimate than to report that the state’s leading forensic pathologist was facing charges of unprofessional conduct in the jurisdiction from which we’d recruited him? Dr Cala hadn’t disclosed this information when applying for the job or before giving evidence in a series of murder trials. One of the DPP’s own prosecutors had failed to inform him that she’d become aware of the Cala complaint before it hit the press. This was no time for Stephen Pallaras to take the high moral ground and a number of the journalists present, including myself, told him so.
In the meantime I was tipped off to another Dr Cala bungle. In May 2006 the town of Gladstone, between Adelaide and Port Augusta, was rocked by a catastrophic blast. A factory run by Quin Investments, where explosives were manufactured for the mining industry, blew up, killing three local men and injuring two more. The owners, who claimed they were being persecuted, faced charges under the Occupational Health, Safety and Welfare Act 1986. The autopsies of the deceased fell to Dr Cala. The deaths caused an outpouring of grief in the small close-knit community. Hundreds attended the funerals when finally the remains were released by the Coroner.
In August, however, I made a terrible discovery. The story that subsequently went to air included this revelation:
We’ve now learnt that parts of the bodies of one of the men were not returned to the family to be buried as they should have been … Unbeknownst to the family, they remained stored at the Adelaide Forensic Science Centre. The job of bringing all the remains together is that of the forensic pathologist doing the post-mortems … In this case, that pathologist is Dr Allan Cala.120
When I questioned Forensic Science SA about this bungle they immediately went to ground. Though I called repeatedly they maintained their silence, a sure sign the information was accurate.
Cala’s reputation was about to take another battering. The Health Care Complaints Commission (HCCC) delivered its findings on the Weightman murders on 9 March 2007. The commission determined:
that Dr Cala is guilty of unsatisfactory professional conduct within the meaning of Section 36 of the Medical Practice Act in that he has demonstrated a lack of adequate knowledge, skill, judgement or care in the practice of medicine.121
After seven years the Urwins’ misgivings about the autopsies had at last been justified. However, the pain wasn’t over for them: David Weightman had had an accomplice, and it was to be another five years before Terry Donai was convicted and sentenced to 40 years in jail. The personal fallout for Allan and Margaret Urwin was devastating. They had not only lost their closest family members and had to face the horror of them being killed by their own adopted son but they had also lost faith in the society in which they lived and the authorities tasked with maintaining law and order.
Shortly after the HCCC findings Dr Cala left his employment in South Australia in disgrace. This was the man the Attorney-General had been prepared to rely upon not only to attack the impeccably qualified Professor Tony Thomas, but for his deeply flawed analysis of the Cheney autopsy. Unbelievably, he called Thomas for advice about what path his career should then take. Tony was, as always, courteous.