STORY: "The devil in the detail,"  by reporter Christine Jackman,  published by The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age on February 16, 2014.

SUB-HEADING: "Henry Keogh was given a life sentence for murdering his fiancée in an Adelaide bath in 1994. But what if a key expert got it wrong, and she simply drowned?"

GIST: ""Nobody wants to think the unthinkable, which is, 'Maybe Colin Manock isn't an expert,' " Moles says, raising implications for the hundreds of court cases to which Manock is believed to have contributed evidence. "If he isn't an expert, his evidence is inadmissible. I would argue that, quite clearly, he wasn't and isn't." Certainly, Colin Manock was no forensic expert when he was appointed in 1968 as South Australia's chief forensic pathologist. At the time, he had no formal qualifications as a pathologist. His employers at the Institute of Medical and Veterinary Science, the state government department responsible for providing forensic pathology services, would later acknowledge they were desperate to fill the role at the time, but knew that they had appointed "a man who had no specialist qualifications in a specialist's job, and without [further study] this would have been a severe embarrassment". Ultimately, Manock was exempted from the five years' study and written exams normally required to join the Royal College of Pathologists of Australasia; he was made a Fellow of the College in 1971 after taking a short oral exam. But was that enough? Moles cites a number of troubled investigations since then, including that of Emily Perry, convicted in 1981 of attempting to murder her husband using arsenic poisoning. Perry's conviction was overturned by the High Court, which castigated the evidence presented as "reveal[ing] an appalling departure from acceptable standards of forensic science" and "not fit to be taken into consideration".