Networked Knowledge Publications - Losing Their Grip - the case of Henry Keogh

Author: Dr Robert N Moles

Expert Advisers' homepage
Henry Keogh homepage
Article: Australian law on miscarriages of justice
Article: UK law on miscarriages of justice
Article: USA law on miscarriages of justice

Preface by John Batt

John is the author of Stolen Innocence

If you came home to find your fiancée dead in the bath, what would you think are the chances that you would be charged with murder and sentenced to 25 years in prison? Dr Bob Moles suggests, in this compelling story, that that is just what happened to Henry Keogh. In this modern world, with its sophisticated science, technologies and laws, can murder be proved when no crime has been committed? Is it really true that being innocent of any wrongdoing is not enough to avoid a life sentence in jail?

In the UK, at Chester Crown Court, in November 1999, solicitor Sally Clark, daughter of a senior police officer and married to another solicitor, Steve, was convicted of the murder of her two baby sons, Christopher aged 12 weeks and Harry just 7 weeks old, on the ‘evidence’ of experts. She was sentenced to life imprisonment and served 3 ½ years in jail before her innocence was proved before a second Court of Appeal in January 2003. I have known Sally all her life. I too am a solicitor. I helped with her appeals. I have written her story. It is called Stolen Innocence.

Sally is not alone. Angela Cannings from Salisbury in Wiltshire suffered the death of 3 children. In April 2001 she was convicted of the murder of 2 of them. Like Sally, those who ‘proved’ the murders were medical experts. Twenty months later, the Court of Appeal quashed her convictions. In April 2005, a second Court of Appeal freed Donna Anthony, convicted, in 1998, of the murder of her 2 children. She spent 6 years in prison for murders ‘proved’ by medical experts. But people in the street are beginning to work out that something is not right in the criminal justice system. Trupti Patel, from Maidenhead in Berkshire, was tried for murdering 3 of her babies 6 months after Sally’s high profile and successful appeal.  But this time the experts had their come-uppance: Trupti was acquitted by a Reading jury in 90 minutes after a 6 week trial.

In none of these cases was there any evidence of criminal activity by those accused.

The UK’s Attorney General has now reviewed 297 murder convictions -- all involving medical experts -- over the last 10 years. He has identified 28 which may well have resulted in the imprisonment of the innocent and devastated all those families. He has put on hold another 89 cases because new medical research is showing that what, for years, was accepted as the classic pathology of murder may be seriously flawed.

There was no evidence that Henry Keogh committed any criminal act. The medical expert who ‘proved’ he deliberately drowned his fiancée -- whom he loved and hoped to marry 5 weeks later -- has carried out many post mortems and yet he has had no formal training as a pathologist. His major qualification was ‘given’ to him by the Royal College of Pathology of Australia, without study or formal examination of his skills. Incredibly, his speculative and heavily disputed theory as to how Henry deliberately drowned his fiancée in the bath was taken as proof of murder by his jury and by subsequent courts of appeal.

Keogh has so far served 11 years of his 25 year sentence. Bob Moles convincingly argues that no crime was committed in Henry’s home and that he has been wrongly convicted. I agree with him. It looks to me like one of the worst miscarriages of justice in Australia’s history. To find out how this tragic double-tragedy came about, read on.

Beware prosecutors bearing experts!

John Batt

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