A new twist has emerged in the case of baby killer Keli Lane after a man came forward this week to make a shocking never-before-heard claim.
Darryl Henson was a resident of an inner Sydney apartment block in the mid 1990s when Lane claims to have visited a unit in the building to have sex with a man she says is the father of her slain daughter Tegan.
Lane, 43, claims to have gone to the unit on Wisbeach Street, Balmain, on multiple occasions to visit the man, called Andrew Morris or Andrew Norris.
She has told a journalist investigating the matter for an ABC documentary that she did not kill Tegan because she gave the baby to the child’s biological father soon after giving birth in September 1996.
But police found no evidence to back up Lane’s claims about her relationship with Tegan’s father.
A witness has come forward claiming he saw convicted baby killer Keli Lane (pictured) visiting an inner Sydney apartment to see a man she claims she had a sexual relationship with
Darryl Henson (pictured) said he is ‘confident 100 per cent’ that he saw Lane leaving the apartment complex
Mr Henson was a resident of the Balmain apartment complex (pictured) at the time when Lane said she had a sexual relationship with a man called Andrew
Mr Henson lived in the building during the summer of 1995/96, when the sexual relationship is said to have taken place, and claims to have seen Lane visiting on several occasions.
He returned to New Zealand in October 1996 but was recently tracked down by journalists working on the ABC documentary ‘Exposed: The case of Keli Lane’.
Until now, no witness has ever come forward to say they had seen Lane visiting the apartment block.
Mr Henson told the ABC he is ‘confident 100 per cent that [he] saw her’, saying she was the ‘sandy-haired girl’ he witnessed around the building late at night.
‘I’ve got no reason to lie. I’d seen her coming and going through the carpark entrance, through High Street,’ Mr Henson claimed.
He said he would often see Lane and think she was ‘brave’ because she was not nervous about going out at late at night like others were.
Lane (pictured) claims to have had a sexual relationship with a man called Andrew, the biological father of her daughter Tegan, but he has never come forward
‘It was quite late. It was dark. Sometimes 1am. Because I used to work on my car until the early hours of the morning,’ he said.
He identified Lane through a series of pictures shown to him by the ABC documentary team.
Mr Henson was never interviewed by police as part of their murder investigation so his claims were not heard by the jury, although detectives reportedly made attempts to contact him.
He said the jury should have heard from him ‘just to clarify I did see her’.
Mr Henson’s claims have now been described as ‘very significant’ and ‘compelling evidence’ by the director of the RMIT Innocence Initiative, Dr Michele Ruyters.
Dr Ruyters said that if Lane had been seen in the vicinity of Wisbeach Street, while she was or was not with Andrew, ‘that immediately suggests that her story has an element of truth’.
Lane (pictured) was was jailed for 18 years in 2010 after a court found her guilty of murdering her daughter Tegan
No man named Andrew Morris or Andrew Norris has ever come forward, and a police investigation found a man by either of those names did not live in the apartment building at the time.
When police showed tenants who lived in the building at the time a picture of Lane as part of their murder investigation, none said they had seen her around.
Baby Tegan’s body has never been found.
Lane, from Sydney’s northern beaches, was jailed for 18 years in 2010 after a court found her guilty of murdering Tegan two days after giving birth at Auburn Hospital.
In the documentary, the convicted murderer told journalist Caro Meldrum-Hanna she was ‘certain’ she didn’t kill her baby – despite her own admission of being a serial liar.
In a telephone call from Silverwater Correctional Complex, Lane told Meldrum-Hanna she was adamant she handed Tegan over to her biological father in the hospital on September 14, 1996.
Exposed airs on the ABC at 8.30pm on Tuesday.