Keli Lane (born 21 March 1975), an Australian former water polo player and teacher, was convicted of the 1996 murder of her newborn baby, Tegan, and of three counts of making a false declaration.
She went on to hold a position as sports convener at Ravenswood where her credentials are listed in the school year book as a degree qualified teacher with honours.
[5] An elite water polo player at national and international level, Lane was a member of the silver medal-winning Australian Junior Women's team at the 1995 World Championships in Quebec, Canada in which she competed just months after giving birth to her first child, whom she gave up for adoption.
According to Lane, the affair took place at a unit block in Balmain on Friday nights after a drinking session at the Town Hall pub ("The Townie").
During police interviews, Lane claimed that she felt forced to hide her pregnancies because of her fear of the reaction of her parents and friends as according to investigations she could not be sure who any of the fathers of the babies might be.
It was reported that during the police interviews Lane said several times she felt alone when she became pregnant and told her mother in an intercepted phone call "I had no other choice", referring to why she gave the baby to Norris.
The inquest was presided over by the State Coroner, John Abernethy, and heard that police had undertaken an extensive search for the child, including attempting to match DNA samples.
The Coroner ordered that a death certificate would be issued for Tegan and recommended that the brief of evidence and transcript of the coronial inquiry be forwarded to the New South Wales Homicide Squad for assessment and if necessary further investigation.
Sightings of Norris were reported at the Sydney Aquarium but discounted as according to Caroline (Caro) Meldrum Hanna on the ABC Exposed Documentary post screening, Lane had told her "Andrew had no interest in water".
The matter was heard in the Supreme Court; presided over by Justice Anthony Whealy; with Mark Tedeschi, QC as the Crown Prosecutor; and Keith Chapple, SC defending Lane under instruction from Legal Aid; and began on 9 August 2010.
According to Supreme Court judge Peter Hammill, who acted in her defence in 2006, images would have been destroyed by revelations of the salaciousness of her sex life centering around numerous rugby players from The Manly Marlins club over which Robert Lane presided.
The major differences were the police searches that occurred in between, and the discovery that Lane had left Auburn Hospital not at 2 pm on the day Tegan disappeared, but several hours earlier.
[21] The Crown produced evidence that, as a motive for murder, Lane was prepared to abandon her children at birth to increase her chances of representing Australia in water polo at the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games.
[28] The same day, claims were aired in the media that a taxi driver saw Lane dump a baby in bushland, en route to Manly.
[34] In September 2018, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation aired a three part documentary, an opinion piece, which featured interviews with Lane, conducted via numerous six-minute telephone calls from inside jail of which a small percentage were included and edited down for production space.