Released on appeal after 20 years in jail, Henry Keogh says books and belief kept him from bitterness

Former prison inmate Henry Keogh says a new group of ex-prisoners can help cut the rates of repeat offenders crowding our prisons.

Henry Keogh says he has no time to be bitter about being jailed for over 20 years for a murder he maintains he did not commit. Picture Matt Turner.

Over two decades behind bars Henry Keogh calculates he read a book every couple of days on average, some for pleasure, some for solace, some to learn how to better face a life without freedom.

Keogh, for a while one of the state’s highest-profile inmates, always contended he wasn’t guilty of drowning his fiancee Anna-Jane Cheney, 29, in a bath at their Magill home in 1994.

A jury disagreed. So when in 2014 he was released after the state’s Court of Criminal Appeal ruled he’d suffered a substantial miscarriage of justice, did he feel bitter?

No, he says, six years on. “No room for it, no time for it,” he says.

“I read three and a half thousand books while I was away and one of the best books, apart from (Nazi holocaust survivor) Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search For Meaning was by Nelson Mandela.

“And he said that hanging on to bitterness was like drinking poison and waiting for it to kill your enemy. The only person it hurts is you.”

These days Mr Keogh, now 65, says his life is back to normal, to something like it was before it took “a left-hand turn” when he was charged with murder in 1994.

“Totally,” he says. “It almost feels like the other 21 didn’t happen.”

Mr Keogh was released in late-December 2014 after the appeal court’s ruling.

The key issue behind the decision was the weight given in his 1995 trial to forensic evidence, subsequently accepted to be flawed, that purported to prove he held Ms Cheney down in the bath.

But the appeal did not find for an acquittal – there was other circumstantial evidence of opportunity and motive, such as $1.15m in insurance policies he had signed on Ms Cheney’s behalf – and the judges recommended a retrial.

Henry Keogh at the old Adelaide Jail. Picture Matt Turner.

That never happened and the muder charge against Mr Keogh was dropped.

Instead, the Marshall Government in 2018 gave him an ex gratia payment of $2.57m, some of which was being sought in court by a lawyer who says he worked on the case. Mr Keogh says that work was done on a voluntary basis and on Friday a judge ruled in his favour.

Mr Keogh’s release and payout raised the ire of Labor, which opposed the payment, and the Cheney family whose lawyer Greg Griffin said they were appalled that the money had been given to someone they believed killed Anna-Jane.

But Mr Keogh says those are not views he’s heard from the public.

“I actually expected that I would cop some aggravation, some flak, over the course of a few years since I’ve been out,” he says.

“But I put my hand on my heart and tell you not one person has given me any stick or even so much as a dirty look. In fact, I was surprised … I’ve had people say, ‘how are you going Henry, how are you really going?’. Or they’ll be sorry for what I went through. Or some will even apologise for the fact they actually thought I was guilty.

“I say there’s nothing to forgive. You only knew what you were told or read. And that was either wrong or a lie.”

Mr Keogh has said the government payout is less than half what he deserves, and if he wasn’t bitter admits he was at times deeply angry and despairing.

He says he believed in the justice system, and in the first five years expected he’d be released. But then, “I realised I was stuffed, that the probability of dying in jail was extremely high,” he says. “That was difficult, but then I came to realise that dead is dead. Does it really matter if it is inside or outside?

Former Finks MC members Matt and Tyson Ward (sitting), Henry Keogh and Arcofyre Founder and CEO Kirby Brownlow at the old Adelaide Jail. Picture Matt Turner.

“And I made my brother promise me that when I died, the family would refuse to take the body. Because if they were going to continue to plough all this money into fighting my appeals, and housing me, then I’m not going to let them sheet home the final insult to my family to pay for the funeral. Stuff them. They can bury me.”

Now, with other former inmates, Mr Keogh says he is working to fix one of the prison system’s biggest problems – the fact that so many who leave are quickly back inside.

Helping people when they come out could slow that revolving door significantly, he says.

And while he is not a social worker or criminologist, he says his “lived experience” of jail has given him credibility with prisoners and plenty of experience to learn from.

The prisoner rehabilitation service Arcofyre was set up in 2019, the idea of former inmate Kirby Brownlow who asked Mr Keogh to join with him.

Mr Brownlow, a former soldier and convicted armed robber, wanted to reduce the system’s high rate of returns – an estimated 45 per cent of those who are released are back inside the correctional services system within two years. Among others lending a hand are former bikies with the Finks and Mongols, brothers Tyson and Matt Ward.

People might raise their eyebrows at the names, Mr Keogh says, “but when you see them operating together as a team it dispels any doubt.” The ambition for Arcofyre is to be the premier organisation people could turn to and get meaningful help to break the cycle of being in and out of jail.

“I don’t judge people,” he says. “I didn’t want to be judged and I certainly wasn’t going to start pointing the finger at anybody. I firmly believe all of us are more than whatever has happened to us. Or the sum of the worst things we have done.

“With very few exceptions I think everybody is capable of change, if they have the right motivation, the right support and if they are prepared to work at it.”

Keogh is surrounded by reporters and cameras after the Court of Criminal Appeal found he’d suffered a miscarriage of justice and he was released from prison after 21 years. Photo: Mike Burton

He says it’s easy to judge people, but “most people don’t take into consideration that they’re not blameless”.

“Because if you take something from work, that’s theft; if you lie on your tax return, that’s also theft; if you say I’ll belt you, that’s assault; and if you don’t take no for an answer, that’s rape. And there’s plenty of people who’ve never faced court who fit into that category. So before anyone starts pointing the finger, look in the mirror.”

Don’t judge a book by its cover, he says.

“Once you talk to someone you realise the persona they project or the reputation they come with doesn’t always, if ever, bear a close relationship to what the person is really like,” he says.

“It soon became glaringly obvious to me that most of the people inside, they’re just someone’s brother, father, son, partner, and many of them had made bad choices, had poor or no modelling, or were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

And the other book that Mr Keogh rates, Jewish psychiatrist Frankl’s book about surviving the Nazi concentration camps? There’s a lesson in that for all of us, he thinks.

“He noticed that people who survived (the Holocaust) were mostly the ones who held on for something they had a hope in,” he says. “Those that perished were the ones who gave up. That reinforced in me the value of fighting and to struggle for what you believe in.”

But the book also provided a reality check.

“It’s so easy to fall into the trap of self-pity,” Mr Keogh says. “But when we take a truly close look at the reality of our circumstances it’s not the end of the world.”

Instead he says, “when we stop, look outside of ourselves for even just a moment and compare it to the far greater challenges others have faced or still are, for me it’s humbling, sobering and keeps me grounded. And for that I’m extremely grateful.”