The cases of Colin Manock - SA

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Tues

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Dec 6, 2020
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Calls mount for a royal commission into SA’s former forensic pathologist.


Early one morning in April 1984, a rower discovered the body of Stephen Docoza in Adelaide’s River Torrens. It had been submerged in the water for several days. It was already beginning to putrefy.

The following year, Derek Bromley and John Karpany were convicted of Docoza’s murder. Critical to the prosecution’s case was the evidence of Dr Colin Manock, SA’s chief forensic pathologist, who performed the autopsy on Docoza’s body and concluded he had been severely bashed and then forcibly drowned.

This finding has since been disputed. In 2017, three independent forensic pathologists who each conducted an expert review of the forensic evidence agreed Manock’s autopsy was inadequate: bruising on Docoza’s body could have been caused by putrefaction or the post-mortem procedure, and all possible causes of natural or accidental death had not been sufficiently excluded. As one of the pathologists, Professor Anthony Thomas, said, “There is no substantive evidence for drowning in this case.”

Karpany was paroled in 2004, and although Bromley has already served his non-parole period he remains in prison because he refuses to admit guilt. Having exhausted his legal options in South Australia, he will apply to appeal his conviction in the High Court later this year in the hope of finally clearing his name.

Questions loom over Manock’s evidence, and not only in regard to the Docoza case. Dr Robert Moles, an internationally renowned legal academic at Flinders University specialising in miscarriages of justice, has been investigating Manock for more than 19 years. In his sunny home office in the Adelaide Hills, he tells me that what he has discovered is “manifestly absurd”.

In 1968, Manock was appointed as the director of forensic pathology at South Australia’s Institute of Medical and Veterinary Science (IMVS; now SA Pathology). It was a very senior, specialist position, but he had no formal qualifications or training in forensic pathology or histopathology. He had completed his undergraduate medical training in 1962, undertook short work placements in toxicology, cardiology, neurosurgery and obstetrics between 1962 and 1964, and had been employed since 1966 as a lecturer in forensic medicine at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom.

When the IMVS sought to appoint a senior director of forensic pathology in the early 1970s, Manock launched legal action to prevent what he argued was constructive dismissal. The court upheld his claim, thus cementing his position, but during the trial some concerning details emerged about his initial appointment in 1968. The then IMVS director, Dr James Bonnin, gave evidence that the institute was “desperate” to fill the position Manock was appointed to. He said that although Manock was “very young, relatively inexperienced” and “unable” to certify cause of death because he wasn’t properly trained, he was “the best applicant we had”. Bonnin acknowledged that having “a man who had no specialist qualifications in a specialist’s job” would be “a severe embarrassment”, but said he hoped Manock “would further study and progress” after taking up the role.

Manock did not complete further study. According to his own public statements, he conducted more than 10,000 autopsies and gave evidence in more than 400 criminal trials before retiring in 1995.

It was the case of Henry Keogh that first piqued Moles’s interest in Manock. Keogh was convicted in 1995 for the murder of his fiancée, Anna-Jane Cheney, who was found dead in the bath of their home. Based on apparent bruising on her left leg and haemolytic staining of her aorta, Manock concluded her legs had been held in the air and her head forced underwater until she had drowned.

When Moles reviewed the case five years later, it was “perfectly clear” to him that Keogh’s conviction was flawed. Other expert witnesses had testified that there was insufficient evidence to support Manock’s hypothesis, and that natural and accidental causes of death had not been properly ruled out. Moles became further convinced that Keogh was a victim of a serious miscarriage of justice when a re-examination of tissue samples of the bruises on Cheney’s left leg – which the prosecution had deemed “the one positive indication of murder” – found that some bruises could have been several days old and produced from day-to-day activities, and the supposed thumb mark might not have even been a bruise.

In 2014, a year after South Australia passed legislation allowing for a new statutory right of appeal for convicted criminals if fresh and compelling evidence emerged, Keogh successfully appealed his conviction. The Supreme Court said Manock’s murder hypothesis was “no more than mere speculation” and that he had “materially misled the prosecution, the defence, the trial judge and the jury”.

Moles cites many other examples of Manock’s alleged malfeasance.

Around 1978, Manock travelled to Mintabie, a remote South Australian town, where a man had been found dead. According to a senior constable who was present, Manock decided to perform the autopsy of the man’s body in full public view in the main street instead of in an available cool room. During the autopsy, he allegedly raised a ladle full of bodily fluids to the gathered crowd and made inappropriate remarks.

Six years later, Manock examined the body of 15-year-old Gerald Warren, who was found dead on a dirt track outside Port Augusta. Manock determined that Warren had died after falling from a moving vehicle, and that the lined marks on his body were caused by the corduroy of his trousers. Only after two men confessed in 1991 to murdering Warren did the true story emerge: he had been beaten with a threaded pipe and repeatedly run over.

Between 1992 and 1993, three babies died suddenly in separate incidents. According to Manock, each died from bronchopneumonia. This was rubbished by a subsequent coronial inquest, which highlighted that all three babies appeared to have been severely abused: one, for example, had extensive bruising and a fractured skull. The coroner said Manock’s post-mortem examination in each case “achieved the opposite of what should have been its purpose: it closed off lines of investigation rather than opening them up”.

What shocks Moles even more than these and other cases is that successive state governments, the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions and the wider legal establishment, despite knowing for decades of Manock’s shocking record and of potential miscarriages of justice, consistently failed to intervene.

For example, in 2004 the then state solicitor-general (and current Supreme Court chief justice) Chris Kourakis commissioned an independent expert report into Henry Keogh’s case. It found major flaws in Manock’s evidence but was nevertheless the basis for the legal advice from Kourakis that kept Keogh behind bars until his successful appeal in 2014. The expert report was hidden from Keogh’s legal team for nine years without explanation. Kourakis’s advice remains confidential and the current state government is still fighting to prevent its public release. Mid last month, the Supreme Court stated that it supported the release of Kourakis’s review, but the state Civil and Administrative Tribunal is yet to say when this will occur.

According to Moles, the scale of Manock’s wrongdoing and the institutional complicity that allowed it to happen has “a strong parallel with the Lawyer X case in Melbourne” in which prominent criminal defence lawyer Nicola Gobbo was also working as a police informant.

The SA-Best party has recently joined Moles and other legal advocates in calling for a royal commission into Manock and the cases with which he was involved. Although this would be traumatic for many people affected, and could possibly see prisoners who committed a crime being released from jail because they didn’t receive a fair trial, Moles is adamant that it’s necessary if the legal system is “to maintain credibility”.

The state government disagrees. In a recent letter to one of Moles’s associates, South Australia’s deputy premier and attorney-general, Vickie Chapman, wrote, “I do not consider that investigation [into] Dr Manock’s work is necessary or justified at this stage.”

What Manock thinks of his own work became clear in 2004 at a Medical Board of South Australia inquiry into Keogh’s case. Manock accepted that parts of his forensic evidence during the trial had no scientific support. But, in his view, this wasn’t because the rest of the world thought differently from him; it was because “the rest of the world hadn’t caught up”
 
You'd expect the Chief Forensic Pathologist to have the right kind of training. When he made the wrong call on bruising that wasn't a bruise at all and Keogh was convicted for murder (subsequently overturned) they already knew he had no training in histapathology and he'd been (mis) interpreting bruises in autopsies for over ten years.

We're still discussing some of the cases he worked on across this board.

It needs a Royal Commission but who's going to call it with a possible risk to the findings on 10,000 post mortems?
 

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Tues

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The incompetency of 'Dr' Colin Manock has been responsible for countless cases of wrongful convictions and wrongful causes of death in South Australia. A few years ago the TV show Today Tonight Adelaide featured a 2 part special on Manock it started out showing him doing a autopsy out in the open while startled onlookers watched in disbelief and also showed his girlfriend and her fetish dungeon which he frequented. I don't think it is available to watch online anymore but maybe a email to Channel 7 Adelaide might be helpful.

 
The incompetency of 'Dr' Colin Manock has been responsible for countless cases of wrongful convictions and wrongful causes of death in South Australia. A few years ago the TV show Today Tonight Adelaide featured a 2 part special on Manock it started out showing him doing a autopsy out in the open while startled onlookers watched in disbelief and also showed his girlfriend and her fetish dungeon which he frequented. I don't think it is available to watch online anymore but maybe a email to Channel 7 Adelaide might be helpful.


We've got some links in the Family Murders thread to that. What a shocker.

I don't think he was involved in those but there's a new book out on that series of murders that suggests he might have been, without naming him outright. It's terrifying.
 

utility

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Around 1978, Manock travelled to Mintabie, a remote South Australian town, where a man had been found dead. According to a senior constable who was present, Manock decided to perform the autopsy of the man’s body in full public view in the main street instead of in an available cool room. During the autopsy, he allegedly raised a ladle full of bodily fluids to the gathered crowd and made inappropriate remarks.
Very professional!
 
On the Keogh case.

Vicki Chapman: There are two issues. One is this question of having an inquiry as to what
happened. I think it is very clear from the Court of Criminal Appeal exactly what happened.
Dr Manock’s evidence as an expert was relied upon. It was completely unreliable, in fact
manifestly so,
for the purposes of making it simply unsustainable to have a conviction be
maintained. Clearly, this was a person who for whatever reason had been appointed, you
know, decades before who was discredited and dismissed and his evidence wholly, you
know, rejected in that way.

The real question then is, well look, how many other cases in which he’s given an expert
opinion as to a cause of death or circumstances surrounding it,
that might come to the
surface? Well, in short, we don’t know the answer to that. Certainly a lot of cases have been
raised but whether any litigation that comes from them or a request that there be some
reopening of review.

But they’re not always just in cases where there might be an alleged murder scene but there
are a number of baby cases, for example, where reports were given by Mr [sic] Manock. I can
recall one where there was a decision of a child, an infant, ostensibly dying of pneumonia but
then had massive bruising over the child’s body. And you start to wonder about the reliability of the
evidence given. Now, to my knowledge there are no other known cases of which there is any flow on,
overturning of a decision, that’s resulted from that evidence, or compensation pending. But, we can’t rule
it out, obviously. We’re talking about a huge number of cases some of which may never be reviewed
because the relevant parties are dead or disappeared.

Narelle Graham: Vicki Chapman, State Attorney General.

 

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FAPope

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I feel that to add some equilibrium to this conversation. That it might be borne in mind that in all of the 400 plus criminal cases where Dr Manock gave evidence in. That the defence solicitors and QC's involved had the opportunity to review all of his evidence in depth by their own experts plus pathologists and have these pathologist's provide the court with their own views and interpretations of the evidence presented. There is a substantial number of these expert witnesses in the US and UK who were available for these reviews. Juries in so many if not most of these cases, chose to accept Dr Manock's opinions when subject to this extensive review and then cross examination by this States notable Defence lawyers and QC's. There are also several web sites originating in SA where Dr Manock's evidence is rightly challenged. That is the nature of our law schools and lawyers. These sites do fail to some extent in that they neglect to give balance and mention the bulk of OTHER EVIDENCE presented to juries that also contributed to convictions. Yes Dr Manock's reputation was extensively challenged re ‘time of death’ in the Stevenson case. Also re bruising in the Cheney case. It is probable his observations were correct in these cases but now falter under the technologies, scrutinies and standards some 20 to 40 years later. There is also comment that the state pathology section at that time was understaffed for the number of autopsies then performed and that this could allow oversights to be made. Did Dr. M fail upgrade to appropriate Professional Associations and advanced qualifications over the years. Maybe so, but he was a formidable and eloquent expert witness with the experience of over 9,000 autopsies.
 
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Tues

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Under Investigation with Liz Hayez on Wednesday, Colin Manock.
I wish it wasn't with Liz Hayes, am really not a fan of hers and so far the under Investigation episodes are just repeated well known articles.
 
The latest episode of Under Investigation doesn't appear to have gone online yet. In this short clip, attention is drawn to Manock's psychology.

There are many other things he should have been fired for but that he wasn't after this, is particularly vile. It's no surprise that he went on thinking he could do whatever he liked.

 
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A brutal watch for how utterly incompetent the man was, plus how complicit the powers-that-be were along his "reign". Did wonder if the show was going to even hint at any possible, rumoured link with The Family but they steered clear of that.
 
The Van Beelen case has paralells to the case against Bevan Spencer Von Einem of the family murders in that time of death could be brought in to question but that it was fibres evidence that helped sway the jury to a conviction.

The prosecution relied on fibres evidence from Van Beelen's jumper found with the victim. That was considered such strong evidence that it was used to reject Van Beelen's appeal and in the case of Von Einem, it was solid enough for him to admit he had contact with the victim.

Van Beelen's defence claims the fibres evidence from his jumper transferring on to the victim's clothing, is dodgy, only similar at best and were fibres from the victim's tartan skirt.

I think he has one more shot left to overturn his conviction. In his 70s now but I imagine if he didn't do it, he'll keep trying to die an innocent man.

I'll drop this link in given I've just read it and don't want to go hunting for it again, it's very interesting.

 

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