NSW:Fate of Keli Lane's baby still a mystery

AAP General News (Australia)
12-13-2010
NSW:Fate of Keli Lane's baby still a mystery

By Margaret Scheikowski

SYDNEY, Dec 13 AAP - Fourteen years after Tegan Lee Lane was born at a Sydney hospital,
her exact fate still remains a troubling mystery.

Although a NSW Supreme Court jury has now found her mother Keli Lane murdered the newborn
baby, the verdict does not shed any light on what actually happened to her.

How and when was Tegan killed, and how did her mother dispose of her body?

The facts of the case, described by a coroner as bizarre and surreal, would not be
out of place in a pulp novel.

But even a hack writer would have been pushing the bounds of credibility with a plot
where a young, very social athlete gives birth secretly to three babies, adopting out
two.

The water polo champion managed to do just that, hiding her pregnancies and births
from her friends, family and even her long-term lover, footballer Duncan Gillies.

The couple had a regular sex life and Lane's expanding body was clad in a swimming
costume at her regular pool sessions.

Ms Lane, now 35, denied murdering two-day old Tegan, her second baby, on September
14, 1996 after they left Sydney's Auburn hospital.

The crown claimed she had a four-hour "window of opportunity" from when she left the
hospital to when she arrived at her mother's house to get ready for a wedding.

But prosecutor Mark Tedeschi QC couldn't say how she killed the child or what she did
with the body.

Her barrister, Keith Chapple SC, said the crown had not even proved Tegan was dead,
let alone that her mother caused her death with the intention to kill her.

Lane did not give evidence at her trial, which began in August, and which sometimes
attracted large crowds.

She told police she handed Tegan over to the infant's father, a man with whom she had
a brief and secret affair.

She first named him as Andrew Morris, then Andrew Norris, and said he was accompanied
by his partner "Mel" and his mother when he took custody of Tegan.

But the crown labelled her account as "inherently unbelievable" and absurd, contending
this man was a fictitious person.

Mr Tedeschi asked why the man would automatically accept he was the father and why
would his partner automatically accept another woman's baby.

He also cited extensive but fruitless nationwide police searches for a man fitting
Lane's description and for Tegan.

He maintained Lane had not wanted to be burdened with Tegan, or her other two babies,
as she wanted to pursue her sporting, sex and social life.

She also was "extremely fearful that if her family found out about these pregnancies
that they would reject her and abandon her".

In 2005, her father, retired policeman Robert Lane, told the inquest into Tegan's suspected
death that he and his wife Sandra were "floored" when police revealed the existence of
grandchildren they never knew they had.

But he said he would never have disowned his daughter if he had known, adding "I love
her too much".

"We wish she'd come to us and she would have got the support from the very start, and
this thing wouldn't have blossomed and bloomed into the serious thing it is today".

Lane's then husband also gave evidence in 2005, saying she only told him about the
three births the previous year.

They had a child together and he described her as a "fantastic wife, a wonderful mother
and I love her dearly".

"There's no way in the world she would ever do anything to harm a child," he said.

The couple have since split up.

Lane was only a teenager when she had terminations in 1992 and 1994, before secretly
carrying three babies to term over the next five years.

Despite having to dash to hospitals to give birth and to go through the complicated
adoption processes for her first and third babies, no-one around Lane knew anything.

How did she manage to hide not just her physical changes, but her emotions in relinquishing
her babies?

How did she manage to attend a wedding and appear "normal" just hours after murdering Tegan?

Lane told the adoption agencies numerous lies about her situation and the two infants'
fathers, but the defence said this was to protect her privacy.

Citing as an example the issue of contraception, Mr Chappell said she may have wanted
to keep private "things she was not really proud of".

But her secrecy has had far-ranging effects, including the shock caused to the men
who fathered her first and third babies.

As a result of the police investigation, the men only discovered they were the fathers,
through DNA tests, about a decade after the adoptions.

Just as Lane's parents and brother missed out on having any relationship with her three
children, the men and their families were not given the chance to know or rear their offspring.

As Tegan did not undergo a blood test before she left hospital, her paternity is unknown.

Was he Duncan Gillies or Andrew Morris/Norris or another man?

By its verdict, the jury rejected the possibility Tegan was handed over to another
person or died accidentally.

The jury did not believe there was a reasonable possibility that Tegan was now a living
breathing 14-year-old schoolgirl.

But only her mother knows what really happened to the baby, a mystery only she can solve.

AAP mss/tr/msk/was

KEYWORD: LANE AAP BACKGROUNDER (WITH PIX AND FACTBOX)

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