It’s 7:07 am on Monday morning, and I spent most of the night making origami aliens for the name cards for my birthday dinner on Friday night. While I was making them, I decided to listen to some Billy Joel, and I found myself listening to Innocent Man.
As I was listening, I started thinking about miscarriages of justice and the Henry Keogh case. I’m no expert on what happened, but I remember taking an interest in it some years ago and doing some reading about it.
Last night, I wanted to refresh my memory, so I looked on my podcasts app and found a podcast called Pure Grit with Paula McGrath that featured a two-part interview with Henry Keogh.
As I folded my aliens, I listened to these two recordings, and it was interesting to hear things from Henry’s perspective. He hasn’t been acquitted, and I’m not entirely sure what that means, but as I understand it, he hasn’t been proven innocent as such, but his conviction has been overturned.
In the interview, he talked about what happened, explaining that he was engaged to South Australian lawyer Anna-Jane Cheney, who at the time was the head of Professional Conduct at the Law Society of South Australia. They were just six weeks away from their wedding.
He described how they met up one Friday night after work for drinks, and when they got home, she decided to take a bath while he went to see his mother — to tell her she wasn’t invited to the wedding. When he returned home, he found Anna slumped over in the bath.
He says he took her out of the water and called an ambulance while trying to resuscitate her, but she died at the scene.
Initially, the police deemed it to be a death by natural causes, with nothing suspicious. But weeks later, after an inspection by the chief forensic pathologist Colin Manock, it was ruled that her death was a murder, and Henry became the chief suspect.
This podcast actually annoyed me a bit because Paula’s phone rang, and you could hear it ringing. She even answered it, and you could hear her on the call! She could have edited that bit out. I mean, she had a guest who people would be interested in listening to, and for that, he deserves some respect — but she made the whole thing feel so unprofessional.
She also talked about herself a lot, which was frustrating. Another ridiculous thing she said was when Henry first went into the city watch house, she asked him:
“What sort of people were you in with there?”
And I just thought, “What kind of people do you think were in there?”
But Henry went on to explain that he spent most of his time in solitary confinement while he was in the watch house.
Henry had been working at a bank, and as a side business, he dealt with insurance. To keep his business running, he participated in a practice called “tombstoning.” Apparently, it’s called this because insurance brokers used to go to graveyards, pick a name from a tombstone, and use it to set up an insurance policy.
By doing this, the policies effectively paid for themselves because the commission was higher than the premiums — making it a way to keep your business running. Henry did this using Anna’s name on five different life insurance policies valued at $1.15 million, and he forged her signature in setting them up.
I know this would be circumstantial evidence, but if you combine it with what Colin Manock determined, it makes a pretty compelling case. In 1995, at age 40, Henry was sentenced to 26 years in prison for Anna’s murder.
He launched various appeals, and something interesting happened involving the International Court of Human Rights — which I want to read more about — but in the meantime, there was a growing legion of people who believed there had been a miscarriage of justice in Henry’s case.
It turns out the chief forensic pathologist, Colin Manock, was not properly qualified, and he later retracted his statements about some of the bruising on Anna’s legs. There was also one legal academic and researcher, Dr. Bob Moles, who did the extensive legal research for Henry’s defence.
In the end, they were successful: Henry’s conviction was quashed in 2014. By then, he had served 20 years of his sentence. Apparently, the full court still believed Henry should face trial over Anna’s death, but the DPP ultimately decided not to proceed with it.
It was sad listening to the podcast. Henry had young daughters when he went into prison, and now that he’s out, they’re all adults — but the saddest thing he talked about was how he was raped in jail.
He said two men attacked him, and while one held him down, the other raped him. Afterwards, the man whispered in his ear to keep quiet about it because they knew where his children went to school.
Reporting it wasn’t an option for him. Firstly, he didn’t know who the perpetrator was, and secondly, it would have gone against the unwritten code in jail — you don’t snitch. He also couldn’t seek medical attention, because the people administering it would be obliged under mandatory notification laws to report it.
It sounded like the most horrific ordeal, and I felt so terrible for him. The physical and emotional wounds from something like that are too much to bear.
This also reminded me of something I’ve thought about before — about how hominins, including early humans, may have been sexually violent with each other, particularly men raping other men. I’ve always imagined this as possibly being territorial, maybe with an alpha male as the perpetrator.
It’s just so awful.
I was listening to Henry last night, and if he is innocent, it’s just an unforgivable thing — twenty years of his life have been taken from him, and he can never get that back. But something I was thinking about was… he still could have done it.
He sounds like a nice man, and after I finished listening to the two-part podcasts, I watched a 40-minute episode of Spotlight on YouTube about the case. He got teary every time he talked about certain things — like the loss of years in prison and the miscarriage of justice itself.
But I sometimes wonder if circumstances like this can make martyrs out of very bad people. He could have done it. If you took the forensic evidence off the table, he could have picked her up and drowned her, and — not that I’m any kind of medical expert — but what if that left no physical markers? I don’t know.
I’m not saying he did it. It sort of reminds me of the Brittany Higgins rape case — no one will ever really know what happened apart from her and Bruce Lehrmann.
Henry may not know what happened if he was really visiting his mother and came home to find Anna like that — but if he was responsible, no one will ever know unless he confesses on his deathbed or something like that.
South Australia has the most awesome Police Commissioner, Grant Stevens. I really like and respect him, and he had this to say about Henry Keogh in August 2018:
“It would be an understatement to say Mr. Keogh remained a person of interest.”
I remember when there was a lot of news about the Chief Forensic Pathologist Colin Manock and something to do with three babies, which I recall being shocking. But if he testified at over 400 trials, I can’t help but worry about the quality of the evidence being presented. Have the outcomes of all those trials even been reviewed?
In terms of compensation, Henry initially asked for $6 million but was given $2.57 million, which sparked some controversy. Anna’s family was understandably not happy, and I read in an article from 2018 that they were taking civil action against Henry for the forged insurance policies.
There are two things I remember about this case in particular.
I remember when one of the trials was going on, there were some graphic photos that had been reenacted of Anna in the bath. They were published in The Advertiser, and — I don’t know how I know this — but I remember hearing that advertisers had threatened to pull their business from the paper as a result of the public outrage over the photos.
The second thing I remember is when Henry was released from prison. There were people who were happy that justice had finally been served, but I also remember Tom Koutsantonis making a statement to the media acknowledging Anna’s family in all of this. I can’t remember his exact words, but whatever he said made me stop and think.
I’m not suggesting anyone in particular knows what happened — apart from Henry — but there are people who have seen all the evidence that we can’t see or have access to. There are people who know things the general public can’t know, which is why someone like me can never really know what happened.
All I know is… there are people who know.
What I want to know is this: is our legal system set up in such a way that it becomes a miscarriage of justice when a guilty man is sentenced to life in prison — simply because he didn’t leave us the right amount of evidence?
