PUBLISHER'S NOTE: Networked Knowledge has described Investigative Journalist Debi Marshall's book, 'Banquet: the untold story of the Adelaide Family Murders', as "a shocking insight into the perverted and disgraceful world of Dr. Manock, former chief forensic pathologist in South Australia." I find it hard to believe that such a dreadfully flawed man could be appointed to the lofty position of 'Chief Forensic Pathologist' of South Australia - and that the government would betray its public trust to this very day by covering up his lack of qualifications, incompetence and dishonesty - utterly indifferent to the all-too many miscarriages of justice he has caused,
Harold Levy; Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog;
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PASSAGE OF THE DAY; "When he was questioned about his failure to do histopathology [studying tissue slides down the microscope to understand the aetiology of disease processes – an essential component to any complete autopsy according to the experts] he is reported to have said, ‘No, I didn’t want to have any dealings whatever with the living – my interest is only the dead. [Histopathology is an essential investigative tool for doctors and used extensively on patients both living and dead.] Manock said, ‘I wouldn’t have attempted to do histopathology. That was not my thing. There were plenty of people who could do it for me. I could get through mountains more work by passing that material on to others.’ [But his deputy Dr Ross James who was trained in histopathology explained to the Medical Board that Manock did his autopsies on his own without reference to him on these issues. It was also determined that his so-called histology findings in cases like the baby deaths and Keogh cases were without any scientific support.] He said ‘I don’t think I made any significant errors in the work that I did by not knowing what it [the histology] was. ‘I knew what could be done and I knew how it could be done, but I didn’t have the expertise to do it myself.’ [This is clearly contrary to what he told the court in many of his cases when he said he had examined the tissue slides to determine cause of death]."
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NETWORKED KNOWLEDGE MEDIA REPORT: Banquet – the untold story of Adelaide’s Family Murders- Debi Marshall, VintageBooks (Penguin, Random House) 2021; (This page has been edited by Dr. Robert Moles);
GIST: "This is a well-written but chilling book about the ‘Family Murders’ which took place in South Australia.
It involved the bizarre and horrific deaths of young men who had been lured into vehicles, drugged and then violently assaulted at parties where they died from their injuries.
Further details are available here.
In chapter 24 of Marshall’s book, she provides an outline of several Dr Manock’s cases which we have covered in our book A State of Injustice.
The background to his experience and qualifications (or lack of them) and the various cases he has worked on over the years.
These include the cases of Frits Van Beelen, Derrance Stevenson, Emily Perry, Gerald Warren, Terry Akritidis, Peter Marshall, the Baby Deaths of Joshua Notttle, Storm Deane, William Barnard, and the terrible case of Henry Keogh.
The shocking Mintabie incident and the case of Derek Bromley.
In chapter 29 Marshall recalls a meeting with Dr Manock when she speaks with him over lunch at a restaurant. Her report is as follows:
Dr Manock explained that his new wife Gabrielle is a dominatrix who does sexual things with her clients which includes whipping them.
He said he doesn’t live with her he just ‘loves with her’.
She describes herself as ‘Cuntress Gabrielle’ on her website and boasts she has a
medical suite with an operating table along with a padded cell – dark and isolating. Manock said he liked electrical stimulation and hinted at where he liked it being applied, ‘Anywhere on the body, but obviously some areas are more sensitive than others.
’ He said he had been a client of Ms Gabrielle before they became married.
Marshall asked if he knew people who get sexual satisfaction from dissection.
Manock said he knew of those who’ve had testes removed from the scrotum and put back again and testes removed from the scrotum and from the body entirely.
He said as a registered medical practitioner there are many reasons why he shouldn’t be involved in things like that and that he still wouldn’t even though he was no longer registered.
However, he said what his wife does is her business.
‘I don’t interfere. I may advise some things are more painful, less painful, more likely to give satisfaction…’.
He said he wouldn’t encourage his wife to do such things, and possibly advise against it. ‘I don’t think it’s a process she’s capable of doing appropriately – under an anaesthetic. And they don’t want an anaesthetic.’ ‘I wouldn’t say you can’t do it. I’d say, “I wouldn’t do it”.’
But if asked he would explain how to avoid blood loss using appropriate ligatures and blood vessel ties – if it’s to go back inside the body it needs to be a dissolvable one – and avoid infection, get rid of bacteria etc.
He said that sometimes people want to know what their innards look like. Some ladies apparently want a hole to be cut into the abdomen so their ovaries can be exteriorised – brought to the surface.
He asked Ms Marshall, ‘Haven’t you wondered what your ovaries are like?’ She said she hadn’t.
Marshall said she thought of the surgical procedures which had been conducted on the body of Mark Langley and Neil Muir’s macabre dissection. [See the NetK Family Murders Homepage]
However, Manock said that Gabby doesn’t do this sort of thing, she doesn’t do ladies.
He explained that the dungeon was set up to look like a medical situation – something Gabby was doing before she met him.
He said he gives her ideas - and she seeks his advice.
Manock explained that he cut up frogs, mice and worms from a young age and later shot rabbits, pigeons and goats – and stripping them.
He said he learned to shoot from the age of 12.
He said that Gabby hadn’t got a judge, at the moment, as one of her clients, but there has been a judge in the past.
When Marshall said Manock had been reported to have done 10,000 autopsies, he jumped in to correct her ‘one thousand’.
[An absurd response, being a figure significantly less than those he claimed to have done as a junior doctor whilst he was in Leeds before he started his devastating work in South Australia in 1968].
When he was questioned about his failure to do histopathology [studying tissue slides down the microscope to understand the aetiology of disease processes – an essential component to any complete autopsy according to the experts] he is reported to have said, ‘No, I didn’t want to have any dealings whatever with the living – my interest is only the dead.
[Histopathology is an essential investigative tool for doctors and used extensively on patients both living and dead.] Manock said, ‘I wouldn’t have attempted to do histopathology. That was not my thing.
There were plenty of people who could do it for me. I could get through mountains more work by passing that material on to others.’
[But his deputy Dr Ross James who was trained in histopathology explained to the Medical Board that Manock did his autopsies on his own without reference to him on these issues.
It was also determined that his so-called histology findings in cases like the baby deaths and Keogh cases were without any scientific support.]
He said ‘I don’t think I made any significant errors in the work that I did by not knowing what it [the histology] was. ‘I knew what could be done and I knew how it could be done, but I didn’t have the expertise to do it myself.’
[This is clearly contrary to what he told the court in many of his cases when he said he had examined the tissue slides to determine cause of death].
In his discussion of the family murder cases Manock said that one of the children was drowned in a house in the hills. ‘I won’t say whose house it was, but it was a lawyer. The place where I believe the drowning took place is in the basement of the lawyer’s house, and he was obviously involved in what happened in that particular case. The body was drowned in this particular swimming pool and it was then taken out and dumped somewhere else in the hope that I wouldn’t notice that it was a drowning.’
Marshall points out that the water in the pool would have been chlorinated and the body would then be rinsed in the hope that Manock would not notice when he did the autopsy that it was a drowning.
Marshall suggests it must have been either the Barnes or Langley cases for
whom he performed the autopsies.
She asks who the lawyer was and Manock declined to give the name but mentioned that he was a QC.
‘He provided the facilities where it happened and was involved in the removal of the body’. He laughed, and added, ‘Yes, and he was not the only lawyer who was involved.’ He then added, ‘other lawyers were involved. They were a tight scrum of people, all involved together. Not all lawyers but one certainly a QC and I
think another one probably was too.’
When asked if they were involved in the abduction of the young men he is said to have replied, ‘Yes. And carrying out sexual acts on them, with them, against their wills, sexual acts persuaded on them, but then it gets rough and they, ah, die – but part of the swimming pool was removing things like lipstick from the body.’
He said they were not particularly involved in the mutilation of the bodies and added, ‘I think drowning is a pretty nasty way to go anyway’.
Manock explained, in terms of the numbers of people involved, that there were probably a dozen all told, but five or six who were present at one particular situation.’
He explained that ‘One or two of them would be the hunting party; they would go out to get a victim and they were going to …’ ‘some sort of fair and seducing young men and, ah, they were of appropriate size and shape and were then taken elsewhere and promised other kinds of enjoyment. Barnes was one of them, he was drowned and, yeah, I can’t remember the details … I can try to look them up but they did not want to leave the body where it died, otherwise it would have involved the landowner – the lawyer – so the body was dragged out of the pool
and taken elsewhere.’
When asked about how he knew these details he continued, ‘Um – I can’t tell you the details, but I was aware of quite significant detail about the death and the place where the death occurred as to put the two together.’
When asked about how many people might be involved in removing a body from the scene and to drive it away, he said, ‘Probably four’ adding that the two main people were probably lawyers, but not judges ‘on this occasion’ – the Barnes case.
When asked about the other boys he said, ‘I would have to get my list of people on the bar to recall which judge it was.’ He explained it was a long time ago – ‘the late ‘60s, ‘70s, and at that stage I think there was a judge involved.’
When asked if it was the Family Murders he responded, ‘We’re talking about the same group of people and it was called the Family later on.’
When asked how he knew these things, he explained, ‘I know it because I knew there were teenagers missing on that particular night and that what happened to them linked them – the similarities between the two of them – and they were obviously within the same group.’
When asked if he did the autopsies on those, he replied, ‘Not all of them, no. But I was able to look up what others had found at autopsies.’
He then discussed the Mintabie incident. He mentioned that the police sometimes gave him opals. He said he did a post mortem all the way out in the bush and ‘the police got them for me’. He said ‘There’s no autopsy room out there. The bloke was dead with a massive wound to the neck. They thought he’d been attacked with an axe, but when I did the post mortem I found he’d been shot with a 12-gauge shotgun … by someone from whom he was trying to steal opals … he was living rough in the bush. An aboriginal man.’
He said he could have taken the body back to Adelaid to do the autopsy, but that would have meant a long time wasted and a suspect running around in the bush, and he could hear things on the radio – and he had a shogun – so the most efficient thing was to give the police the information there and then.
When asked why the police gave him the opals, he said, ‘They thought I’d done a good job. They’ve got four-gallon drums full of opals. I did an open-air autopsy, but there were only a couple of policemen around and nobody else really
within 100 to 200 metres.
If anybody else claims to have been present, then they were using binos or telescopes; they were not within my clear eyesight.
Two people gave their versions to a TV program – they said they were both aborigines.
But both had tattoos on the backs of their hands, and that is against their religion.
They were stand-ins.’
In respect of the baby deaths he was asked ‘Is it possible those babies were battered to death?’ He said, ‘It’s probably – well … it’s quite likely they were battered but survived the battering and lived long enough to develop pneumonia.
That’s not unusual.’
In respect of one of the baby deaths he explained, ‘The father wanted to say goodbye to his dead son and turned up at the back of the mortuary with a shotgun.
The mortuary staff knew he was coming and the baby was dressed in baby clothes and put in some sort of knapsack on the back seat.
Dad took baby for a ride on the bike around the streets of Adelaide for about ten minutes and brought it back to the mortuary. There was no further problem.
He then became a reasonable person.’
When asked who decided to allow the baby to leave the premises he said, ‘It was a pretty complex decision, with the coroner, coroner’s officer, police and armed defender squad, but as long as he wasn’t going to take the baby away and do something to it, we couldn’t see anything particularly wrong with it. It was a last, um … communication between a father and his son.’
Manock said he wasn’t involved with the decision, adding, ‘I was involved with
suggesting how the baby should be dressed and how it should be held together after having a post-mortem.’
He said that it had happened on this occasion, which was not normal ‘Because
there were threats of armed violence at the time and we knew he had a gun. He had shown the gun on a previous occasion – not to me, but to the policeman who brought the body in from the scene of death to mortuary.’
When asked if he was afraid of this man he said, ‘No, I was afraid of the shotgun and how he was behaving with it.
Some people can look perfectly safe when they’re holding a shotgun
and some can look the opposite.
The first time I saw him, he was perfectly capable of doing someone some harm, but he quietened down when he realised he was going to get his wish.’ Manock then left the restaurant and Marshall said she reflected on Manock’s apparent first-
hand knowledge of the involvement of lawyers in the Family murders, revelations about the lipstick and the swimming pool and details of the baby deaths.
She said he appeared lucid and cognisant throughout the lunch, despite his claim to some fugue due to his stroke."
The entire media report can be read at:
http://netk.net.au/Manock/Manock61.pdf
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog.
- SEE BREAKDOWN OF SOME OF THE ON-GOING INTERNATIONAL CASES (OUTSIDE OF THE CONTINENTAL USA) THAT I AM FOLLOWING ON THIS BLOG, AT THE LINK BELOW: HL:
https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/120008354894645705/4704913685758792985
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FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."
Lawyer Radha Natarajan:
Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;
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FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!
Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project;
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