Australia 1976 Cold Case Solved — A Witness Saw His Face on Day One

Australia 1976 Cold Case Solved — A Witness Saw His Face on Day One

A 73-year-old man has been brought to justice over a cold case killing in 1976. Rex Cable Keen was found dead in a Brisbane hotel room. At about half past 10:00 on the night of Friday, the 13th of August, 1976, a room service attendant at Lennon’s Plaza Hotel in Brisbane knocked on room 1205 with a tray of drinks. She spent 20 seconds looking at a man police would not name for another 43 years. He opened the door. The guest staying in the room was behind him. And she handed the drinks over and went back to work. The description she gave police was not vague. He wore his hair in a ponytail tied back with leather.

Not long after she left, guests on that floor heard a disturbance in the room. Nobody knocked. The man in 1205 stayed alive in there for hours, and nobody came. Police had a witness who had stood an arm’s length from the killer, and in 1976, nobody could search for a man by his face. His mother died without ever being told how her son died.

Rex Keen had come down to Brisbane that week for two reasons. He had a medical appointment, and the Ekka was on. Bowen, where he lived, is more than 1,000 km up the Queensland coast. A trip to the city in 1976 was not something a person did on a whim. It got planned around an appointment and a show. He arrived on the Monday, and he was booked to fly home on the Saturday.

He stayed at Lennon’s Plaza the way he always did when he came down. The staff there knew his face. On the Friday night, he went for a drink at the Carlton Crest. At some point that evening, he got talking to another man at the bar. The two of them had never met. They drank together, and when they left, they left together and went back to room 1205.

At about 10:30, the drinks arrived at the door. Not long after that, the guests on that floor heard something going on inside the room. It was loud enough to notice through a wall. Nobody rang downstairs. Nobody knocked. The noise stopped. The corridor went quiet and the hotel got on with its Friday night. Rex Keen did not die that night.

A court was told decades later that he stayed alive in that room for hours. The cleaners let themselves in the next morning. Rex Cable Keen was 46 years old and he managed a motel at Bowen on the North Queensland coast. His family described him later as hard-working, resilient, and respectable, and said he was highly regarded by the people around him. He was somebody’s son, somebody’s brother, and somebody’s uncle.

He had been struck about the head repeatedly with something heavy and he died of those injuries. Things were gone from the room. His clothes and thousands of dollars were missing, and so was his camera. It mattered more than anybody standing in that room on the Saturday morning could have known because it was what had been used on him.

Early reporting described a bashing and a stabbing. Queensland police were still describing it that way in their own statement on the day of the arrest in 2019, more than four decades after the fact. What the Supreme Court eventually accepted three years after that was a beating delivered with a heavy camera and nothing else. Those are not small distances apart, and the file carried the first version the whole way through. The court’s version came from one place. Everything anybody knows about what was said inside room 1205 comes from one man, and he is the man who walked out of it. There is no recording. There is no witness to the conversation. Rex Keen never got to say a word about that night to anybody.

By the standards of 1976, police had a lot. They had a room service attendant who had stood in a doorway and looked straight at him. They had drinkers from the Carlton Crest who had watched the two men together for part of the evening and who could say what the pair had done and roughly when they had left. They also had the hotel. Lennons was a working hotel in the middle of a capital city on a Friday night with staff on the desk and guests on every floor. And they had a description that was not a man in a dark jacket seen from behind. He was distinctive. Witnesses gave police the ponytail tied with leather and described him as noticeably effeminate.

Police expected to have him in custody inside a week. They never found him. Detective Inspector Damien Hanson of the homicide group put the problem plainly many years later. There were things available in a modern investigation that simply did not exist in 1976. No cameras in a hotel lobby. None of the ordinary ways a person gets located now. They worked it hard for months, and they never put a name to the man from the bar. The description went out. Officers worked the pubs and the hotel and the people who had been in both, and then the leads ran out.

In 1976, there was no way to search for a man by what he looked like. The only route from a description to a name ran through somebody who already knew him. And whoever that was did not come forward. He had walked in through the front of that hotel and back out the same way. And the trail ended at the footpath. Subscribe so you don’t miss how DNA from a 1976 hotel room finally named him 43 years later.

Homosexuality was a crime in Queensland in 1976. It stayed a crime until 1991, which made Queensland the last place in Australia to change that law. A gay or bisexual man in Brisbane in 1976 had every practical reason to keep his life quiet and every practical reason to be careful about who he talked to and what he reported. That matters for the investigation and not only for the history. The people who had been in those bars or who knew who drank where were being asked to help police in a state where saying the wrong thing about the wrong pub could cost a man his job.

Some of the people who might have helped in 1976 had good reason to say nothing at all. Violence against gay and bisexual men in Australia in that era was regularly written off or under-investigated. And whole groups of those deaths have since been reopened by courts and inquiries in more than one state. None of that excuses what happened to the Keen file. It is what the file was sitting in the middle of.

The reward was for information leading to a conviction. And the state does not put that kind of money up unless it believes somebody out there knows something. For this case, the answer came back that almost nobody did. The one person who did know had no reason on earth to ring. Rex Keen’s mother waited. She wanted to know how her son had died and why, and she was never told. She died without an answer. Nobody could tell her whether it had been a robbery or a fight or something decided before he ever got to the bar. The file did not know, and the one man who did had gone home to his own life.

Meanwhile, the man who had walked out of room 1205 was getting on with an ordinary Queensland life. He had taken the camera with him when he left. At some stage after that, he buried it near his home. It has never been found. His life and the file ran alongside each other the whole time without ever touching. In 1991, the year Queensland stopped treating men like Rex Keen as criminals, the file was 15 years cold and the man from the bar was 41. By 2017, when the parliament took the gay panic defense out of the criminal code, he was 67 and had never been asked a question about Brisbane. He was 69 in 2019 when detectives finally came for him.

Burying it took a decision, a location, and a shovel, and all of that happened after he had got home and had time to sit down. The rest of that life went by in the normal way through work and addresses and birthdays. It was the slow business of getting older in regional Queensland running along on top of one Friday night in Brisbane that nobody was ever going to ask him about. And a 46-year-old motel manager from Bowen stayed 46 years old in every photograph his family had.

In about 2017, the cold case investigation team inside the Queensland Homicide Group pulled the Keen file and started a review that ran for 18 months. Two things happened in it and both mattered. The first was forensic. Every exhibit from 1976 was gone through again. The material collected in that hotel room had been in storage since the year it was picked up. And the tools available in 2018 were not the tools that existed when it was collected.

The second was human. Investigators went back to the witnesses, the same people who had given statements as young adults and were now in their 60s and 70s. Some of them gave police more than they had given in 1976. Hanson was asked about that and his answer was about time rather than technique. “For some people it just does not come out at the time,” he said, “and things weigh on people’s minds over the years.” The other half of that answer is in this case’s own history. These were people who had first been asked in a city where saying certain things to police could cost them their job. By 2018 the law had changed and the cost had gone. What they had been carrying had not.

A description of a man with a ponytail had been in that file since the week Rex Keen died. What the review added was something that could be tested against a person. What the 18 months consisted of was rereading statements taken by hand in 1976, exhibit lists, property receipts, and phone calls to people who had long since assumed nobody would ever ring them about it again. The forensic result only mattered because somebody had gone looking for something to test. In January 2019, a DNA profile taken from material collected in room 1205 was matched to a living man.

He was not hiding anywhere. He was living at Bundaberg, about 4 hours up the coast from Brisbane, and he had been there for years. He had never been interviewed about Rex Keen. Not in 1976, not in the decades after, not once. Detectives spent another 6 months building the rest of the case before they moved. The profile put him in that room. It did not say what had happened in it, and by 2019, there was nobody left who could say except him.

On Monday, the 1st of July, 2019, plainclothes detectives arrested a 69-year-old man at Bundaberg and charged him with one count of murder. He was due in the Bundaberg Magistrates Court the following morning. Rex Keen had been dead for 42 years and 10 months. Police said his family had been notified, and Hanson said they would be going through a lot of emotion. Police would not comment that day on a motive or on what had been used in the room. Both of those answers existed by then. They were being held for a courtroom.

The arrest also did something quieter. It ended a proposition held by everybody who had ever touched the file, which was that the man from the Carlton Crest was gone and would stay gone. The man arrested at Bundaberg had a name, Benjamin Jansen. He was 26 years old on the night he walked into room 1205 and 69 on the morning police walked into his life. That is 43 years. Jansen had gone home from Brisbane, buried a camera, and then lived most of an adult lifetime without a single officer knocking on his door about it.

If Benjamin Jansen had been caught in 1976, Queensland law would have offered him a way out. Under Section 304 of the state’s criminal code, an unwanted sexual advance could be run as provocation. It was a partial defense used successfully; it took a charge of murder and reduced it to manslaughter, which meant it also avoided the mandatory life sentence that murder carried. That provision was known as the gay panic defense. It stayed in the Queensland criminal code until 2017.

The provision was never a license to kill and it never produced an acquittal. What it did was take the charge down one level from a crime that carried a mandatory life sentence to a crime that did not. So, a man who killed another man could tell a court that the other man had made an unwanted sexual advance. If a jury accepted he had lost control over it, he left that courtroom with a sentence a judge could choose rather than one the law imposed on the judge. Life, or a number a judge picked.

When the Queensland Attorney General finally moved to amend it, she said the state’s criminal code must not be seen to condone violence against the gay community or any community and that equality before the law is a fundamental principle. It did not go quietly either. In 2008, a 45-year-old man called Wayne Rucks was kicked to death in a churchyard at Maryborough, north of Brisbane. The two men responsible said he had made an advance at one of them. They were charged with murder and convicted of manslaughter. The priest at that church was a man named Father Paul Kelly, and he had a dead man in his own churchyard and a courtroom telling him why the charge had come down.

He started a petition to have the provision removed. It ran for years and drew close to 300,000 signatures against what he later described as resistance that was ideological rather than legal. Father Kelly kept pushing until the Queensland Parliament amended section 304 in March 2017. The amendment did not delete the provision. It narrowed it. Under the wording that passed, an unwanted advance can no longer be the basis of the partial defense except in circumstances of an exceptional character.

The Parliament’s own committee asked for the change to be reviewed in 5 years to see whether it had worked as intended. So, the door Benjamin Jansen would have walked through in 1976 was not bricked up. It was narrowed to a gap. And a court still has to decide what fits through it. So, the years Benjamin Jansen spent free were also the years in which the law slowly closed the door he would have walked through. He was arrested 2 years and 3 months after Queensland shut it. Subscribe so you don’t miss what he finally told a Brisbane courtroom about that night.

Jansen was charged with murder. The prosecution later accepted a plea to manslaughter. And manslaughter is what he was sentenced for. The version that went before the Brisbane Supreme Court came from him. On his account, he had met Rex Keen while drinking in Brisbane and had agreed to go back to the hotel room for a room service meal. He did not want a sexual encounter, he said, but suspected Keen was gay or Keen told him he could pay for the meal with his body and said he wanted to take his picture. He said Keen came towards him holding the camera and he thought he was about to be touched. So, he took the camera off him and hit him with it, meaning to knock him out.

The court heard he hit him with it up to a dozen times. The prosecution described that to the court in four words: a dramatic, complete overreaction. Then he took the clothes, the money, and the camera and he left. Nobody was called. Not an ambulance, not the front desk, not an anonymous phone box on the way home. A man who could have survived spent his last hours alone in a hotel room because the person who put him there chose to walk out.

Benjamin Jansen was sentenced on the 18th of October 2022 in the Brisbane Supreme Court by Justice Declan Kelly. Members of Rex Keen’s family sat in the courtroom for it. Justice Kelly went at the provocation argument directly. He set out what the so-called advance had actually amounted to: a suggestion about paying for a meal, a stated wish to take a photograph, and a man crossing a hotel room holding a camera. He said the overreaction had occurred in a different era when homosexuality was unlawful and was viewed differently by parts of society, and that what was called gay panic was a partial defense to a charge of murder at the time.

Then he said the thing Jansen’s own barrister had already conceded. There was absolutely no excuse for the way he reacted. The judge turned to the mother. He called it a sad and disturbing feature of the case that Rex Keen’s mother had died without ever knowing why her son was killed. He told Jansen that it had been in his power to come forward and explain what had occurred and that he did not. Every one of those 43 years was a year in which a phone call would have ended it. A letter would have ended it. Walking into any police station in Queensland would have ended it. What kept that woman in the dark was not the limits of 1976 forensic science.

The sentence was 9 years. He had already spent 1,205 days in custody between the arrest at Bundaberg and the morning of the sentencing, and the judge counted all of it. He was eligible to apply for parole immediately. The number of days he had served before that morning was 1,205. The room was 1205. Nobody has ever suggested that is anything other than a coincidence, and it is still sitting there in the record. That is the arithmetic this case ends on. The man who did it was sentenced 46 years after the fact and became eligible for release on the day he was sentenced. None of the time before the arrest counted against him because nobody had been able to charge him with anything during it.

Rex Keen’s family put out a statement after the sentencing and they were careful about what they wanted taken from it. They said that too often in violent cases like this one, the focus lands on the offender’s actions and motive, and that this produces misperceptions and speculation which only disempowers victims. So, they used their statement to talk about Rex instead: hardworking, resilient, respectable, highly regarded by his family and his community. They called the attack heinous, violent, and unjustifiable, and said it had been a source of suffering for decades.

And they pointed at the thing that had actually moved it. The case closed, they said, because witnesses came forward with information, and their hope was that other people sitting on old knowledge would do the same. That is a family whose case ran cold partly because a generation of people in Brisbane had good reason not to talk to police, asking the next family’s witnesses to talk anyway. They also said they hoped the outcome gave a glimpse of hope to families still waiting for answers of their own.

The camera was never recovered. Benjamin Jansen picked it up in room 1205, used it on the man who owned it, carried it out of a Brisbane hotel, and put it in the ground somewhere near his house. It is presumably still there. What moved this case in the end was the opposite of that. Something small was bagged in that hotel room in 1976 by officers who had no idea what it would one day be able to say. It sat in a storage box through all of it, through every year in which nobody was arrested and nobody claimed the reward. Rex Keen came down to Brisbane for a doctor’s appointment and the Ekka. He was booked home to Bowen on the Saturday. He never checked out of room 1205. If this case stayed with you, leave your thoughts in the comments.