The 13 questions baby killer Keli Lane should answer
The 13 questions that would nail baby killer Keli Lane’s guilt and forever silence her media attempts to protest her innocence.
The former NSW Director of Public Prosecutions has 13 questions he believes would nail down convicted baby killer Keli Lane.
In his new book Frank & Fearless, Nicholas Cowdery has criticised Lane’s repeated attempts to exonerate herself via the media.
The retired leading NSW prosecutor also points out how Lane narrowly faced a massive minimum sentence of 25 years in prison for killing her newborn baby.
Lane, 44, a former elite water polo player, Olympic hopeful and private girls’ school coach, was convicted in 2010 of the 1996 murder of her two-day old daughter, Tegan.
She was sentenced to a maximum 18 years prison and will be eligible after 13 years for parole in 2024.
Lane’s appeals to the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal and the High Court have both failed.
Lane has featured on Channel 7’s Sunday, twice on Channel 9’s 60 Minutes and this year from jail spoke to ABC-TV to air her claims of innocence on Exposed.
Lane’s claim was that Tegan’s father, named Andrew Norris or Andrew Morris, took the child from her after she left hospital on her way to a wedding.
Cowdery criticised “slipshod and misleading reporting” that he said risked “undermining public confidence in the … criminal justice system”.
“Keli Lane is a highly unusual individual,” he writes in Frank & Fearless.
“Since she has consistently refused to testify in her own case in any court, there has been no opportunity to put challenging questions to her.
“Television journalists have declined to ask the forensically pertinent ones.
“Why have journalists not asked such questions when they had the opportunity?”
The 13 questions Cowdery proposes go right to the core of Lane’s stories over the years.
Lane secretly became pregnant five times before finally keeping a sixth child.
Two pregnancies were terminated, two babies were adopted out and then there was Tegan.
After a child protection worker, John Borovnik, alerted police, they began investigating Lane. A coronial inquest was held and a fruitless search for a body or a living Tegan Lee Lane began.
These are abbreviated versions of some of the 13 questions Cowdery lists in his book:
1. When you were first told by police they were looking for Tegan … why didn’t you immediately seek out Andrew Morris or Norris?
2. Why did you give eight different versions of what happened to Tegan?
3. You told the Exposed ABC program that you handed over Tegan to “Andrew: in the foyer of Auburn Hospital” … this was the first time you had given that version … why have you now advanced another version. Which version is correct?
4. If you were intending to hand over Tegan to the natural father, why did you fill out a Medicare form putting her membership under your name?
5. Why did you lie to (a specific detective) that your friend Lisa had known Andrew Morris/Norris and had known about the birth of Tegan … and also tell him you didn’t know how to contact Lisa?
6. In 2004, your then husband found 13 “A Norris” entries in the NSW phone book and offered to ring them. Why didn’t you insist he do so?
Police later determined that the Balmain, Sydney flat in which Lane claimed she conceived Tegan with Andrew Morris/Norris, had never had such a tenant.
Last year, The Daily Telegraph exclusively revealed police interviewed a real Andrew Morris in Lane’s life with whom she’d had a brief tryst at a 1994 surf sporting event.
The one-off sexual encounter took place 18 months before Tegan was even conceived.
Cowdery also lists reasons why Lane rightly was found guilty, her motives, and the trial judge Anthony Whealy’s difficulty in sentencing Lane.
Cowdery reports the exchange between Justice Whealy and the trial’s Crown prosecutor, Mark Tedeschi, QC, in which Tedeschi argues Lane’s premeditated guilt in disposing of Tegan rather than just abandoning the child to die.
RELATED: ‘Unreasonable and obsessive’: New documents deepen Keli Lane mystery
“You could put a baby in a dumpster and leave it there,” Justice Whealy ventured.
Mr Tedeschi replied: “When Keli left the hospital she clearly had an intention that the baby was not going to survive.
“Keli left the hospital with the intention of killing a baby and did kill a baby.”
As has been reported, two hours after doing so Lane was attending the wedding of friends with her then boyfriend, Duncan Gillies.
Video footage has since surfaced of Lane, dressed in white, at St Patrick’s College, Manly with Mr Gillies.
Mr Gillies was unaware of the pregnancy and no mention of Tegan was made by Lane.
Despite Mr Tedeschi’s compelling Crown case, it was he who saved Lane from being incarcerated until 2036, when she would be 61 years old, Cowdery reveals.
At the time of Lane’s trial, “the new standard non-parole period for those convicted of child murder … was 25 years”.
Cowdery says Tedeschi saved Lane by arguing the new penalty could not be applied retrospectively, but that some would “call it a close shave”.
Cowdery was NSW’s DPP for more than 16 years, presiding over headline-grabbing trials that he recounts in his new book.
Frank & Fearless, by Nicholas Cowdery with Rachel Jane Chin. New South Books $34.99, is available at all good bookshops.
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