KELI LANE CASE Is baby Tegan alive?
Bombshell claims eight years after Lane was jailed suggest baby Tegan is alive
For almost two decades, one of Australia’s most notorious women, Keli Lane, has vehemently denied killing her 2-day-old daughter Tegan, and now a new bombshell documentary could reopen the case that divided the nation.
The groundbreaking ABC TV investigation, Exposed: The Case of Keli Lane by investigative journalists Caro Meldrum-hanna and Elise Worthington, has unearthed a series of flaws in her trial that suggest Lane may have been wrongly convicted of murdering Tegan two days after her birth in 1996. After meeting Lane, now 43, at Silverwater Prison, where she is serving an 18-year sentence, and conducting an assessment as part of the ABC investigation, psychiatric expert Professor Anne Buist said she believes Lane is innocent and that Tegan could still be alive. “There’s a great deal of murkiness here,” Dr Buist said. “She’s the hardest, most difficult case. She differs very much to the other cases I have seen.”
The remarkable story made headlines across the country after the private school golden girl and water polo star, who hailed from the affluent beachside suburb of Manly, was convicted of infanticide and lying under oath and sentenced to 18 years’ jail in 2010. After previously falling pregnant three times, resulting in two abortions and putting one child up for adoption, Lane gave birth to a girl, Tegan Lee Lane, in secret at Auburn Hospital in Western Sydney on Sept. 12, 1996.
Records show Lane and the baby left the hospital two days later and the new mother attended a friend’s wedding with her boyfriend Duncan Gillies that afternoon. There was no sign of baby Tegan and neither Gillies nor Lane’s parents, respected NSW police officer Robert Lane and his wife Sandra, knew anything about the pregnancy or Tegan’s arrival.
Later, after the Department of Community Services launched an investigation into the existence of the missing child, Lane, who had hopes of making the Australian water polo team for the 2000 Olympics, told police Tegan was living with a family in Perth. She later changed her story claiming she’d handed the baby to a man called Andrew Morris, which she later changed to Norris, with whom she’d had a brief sexual affair in late 1995 and early 1996, often visiting him in Balmain.
As part of the explosive investigation, Meldrum-hanna and Worthington tracked down a man called Darryl Henson, who supported Lane’s claims and told the ABC that he had seen the tall blonde regularly visiting his Balmain apartment block, although police did not interview him and his testimony was not presented at the murder trial. “I’ve got no reason to lie,” he said. “I’d seen her coming and going through the carpark entrance, through High Street. I’m confident 100 per cent that I
saw her. The jury should’ve heard everything. They should’ve heard from me too, just to clarify I did see her.”
Detective Sharon Rhodes from the NSW Homicide Squad began investigating the case in 2006 and admitted two years later there was still a lack of hard evidence. “I used every trick in the book,” she said. “An undercover strategy, covert DNA samples, every resource that was available. There was nothing. Absolutely nothing. We didn’t have anything.” Despite the lack of evidence, Lane was charged and the case went to trial in 2009. Police denied Norris existed but Lane had reportedly discussed the relationship with her friend Natalie Mccauley, who was never called as a witness during the Supreme Court trial, overseen by Justice Anthony Whealy QC. Ms Mccauley was due to inform the court of Lane telling her about an Andrew she met in the summer of 1995, but she never got her chance due to a bargain deal made between the prosecution and Lane’s lawyer Ben Archibald.
“She talked about this guy she was having an affair with, Andrew,” Mccauley told the ABC. “That’s clear because it’s my brother’s name. She told me about Andrew at the right time period we’re talking about.” The series also found police failed to obtain mobile phone records despite Lane telling detectives she had remained in phone contact with the baby’s father for several months. Those records have since been destroyed.
Lane has always steadfastly maintained her innocence and broke her silence, speaking with MeldrumHanna from inside the Silverwater Women’s Correctional Centre in a last-ditch effort to clear her name. During one phone conversation, Lane spoke about her emotional last moments with her baby before handing her over to Mr Norris and his mother. “She’s so beautiful and just, she’s asleep and she was tucked in this … capsule,” Lane told the journalist. “I was very upset, I was crying, and Andrew was with … his mother. They’d obviously been sitting in the chairs waiting and they stood up as we approached. And just … [a] feeling of: ‘Is this the right thing to do?’ I looked at them and, not to judge, but I didn’t know them, and I did have that moment of, ‘Maybe I could just take her.’”
Even after 22 years, the case still haunts Justice Whealy who told the ABC he was not convinced Keli Lane murdered her baby. “In my mind, I’ve never been certain. And now, years later, I haven’t changed my attitude,” Justice Whealy said. “By the end of the trial, it had been such a harrowing experience for me that I no longer wished to preside over any criminal trial as a judge.”
“I’m confident I saw her...” —Darryl Henson