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

A 73-year-old man has been charged with an unsolved murder case committed in 1976.  Rex Cable Keane was found dead in a Brisbane hotel room .  At around half past ten on the evening of Friday, August 13, 1976, a room service worker at the Lennon’s Plaza Hotel in Brisbane knocked on room 1205 with a tray of drinks. She stared for 20 seconds at the man whose name the police would not name for the next 43 years.

He opened the door. The guest staying in the room was behind him.  She handed over the drinks and went back to work.  The description she gave to the police was quite vague.  His hair was pulled back into a ponytail, tied with a leather ribbon. Shortly after she left, the guests on that floor heard a noise in the room.

  No one knocked.  The man in room 1205 remained alive for several more hours , and no one came.    The police had a witness standing within arm’s length of the killer, and in 1976, no one could look for the man by his face.  His mother died without ever knowing how her son died.  Rex Keane came to Brisbane that week for two reasons.

  He had a doctor’s appointment and the play “Ekka” was in motion.  Bowen, where he lived, is more than 1000 km away along the Queensland coast.  The trip to the city in 1976 was not something spontaneous.  It was planned around the meeting and the performance. He arrived on Monday and was scheduled to fly home on Saturday.

  He stayed at the Lennons Plaza Hotel, as he always did when he arrived. The staff knew him by sight.  On Friday night he went for a drink at the Carlton Crest.  One evening he spoke to another man at the bar .  They had never met before.  They had a drink together, and when they left, they left together and returned to room 1205.

 Around 10:30, the drinks were brought to the door.  Shortly after, the guests on that floor heard something happening in the room.  It was loud enough to be heard through the wall. No one rang the bell downstairs.  No one knocked.  The noise stopped.  The corridor became quiet, and the hotel resumed its work on Friday evening.

Rex Keene did not die that night. Decades later, the court was told that he remained alive in that room for several more hours.  The cleaners themselves went inside the next morning.  Rex Cable Keane was 46 years old and ran a motel in Bowen on the North Queensland coast. His family later described him as hardworking, resilient, and respected, and said he was highly regarded by those around him.

He was someone’s son , someone’s brother, and someone’s uncle.  He was repeatedly hit on the head with something heavy, and he died from these injuries.  Things disappeared from the room .  His clothes and thousands of dollars were gone, as was his camera.  It mattered more than anyone standing in that room on Saturday morning could have imagined, because it was the one that was applied to him.

Previous reports described a beating and a stabbing. Queensland Police still described it that way in their statement on the day of the arrest in 2019, more than four decades after the fact.  After 3 years, the Supreme Court finally recognized the beating with a heavy camera and nothing more.  These are not small distances from each other, and the case involved the first version, which was taken from there .

  The court’s version comes from one place.  Everything that is known about what was said in room 1205 comes from one person, and that is the person who came out of there. There is no record. There is no witness to the conversation.  Rex Keene was never able to say a word to anyone about that night.  By 1976 standards, the police had a lot of information.

  They had a room service employee standing in the doorway looking right at him.  They had drinks with Carlton Crest, who had observed the two men together for part of the evening and could tell what they did and approximately when they left.  They also had a hotel.  Lennons was a working hotel in the middle of the capital on a Friday night with staff at the reception desk and guests on every floor.

  And they had a description that was not the man in the dark jacket seen from behind .  He was original.  Witnesses showed police a leather-bound tail and described it as noticeably feminine. The police expected to arrest him within a week.  They never found him. Detective Inspector Damien Hanson of the Homicide Unit clearly explained the problem many years later.

    There were things in modern investigation that simply didn’t exist in 1976. No cameras in the hotel lobby.    There are no conventional ways to find a person now. They worked hard for months and never got the name of the man from the bar.  The description has been sent. Officers processed the pubs and the hotel, as well as the people who were in both.

  And then the hints ended. In 1976, it was impossible to find a person by appearance.  The only way from description to name was through someone who already knew him.  And whoever it was , he didn’t show up.  He entered through the front of the hotel and exited the same way.  And the trail ended on the sidewalk. Subscribe so you don’t miss how DNA from a 1976 hotel room finally named him 43 years later.

Homelessness was a crime in Queensland in 1976. It remained a crime until 1991. Which made Queensland the last place in Australia to change this law.    A gay or bisexual man in Brisbane in 1976 had every practical reason to keep his life a secret and every practical reason to be careful about who he talked to and what he reported.

  This is important for the investigation, not just for history. People who had been to these bars or knew who was drinking where were asked to help police in a state where the wrong name for the wrong pub could cost a person their job.  Some of the people who could have helped in 1976 had good reason not to say anything at all .

  Violence against gay and bisexual people in Australia during that era was routinely dismissed or underinvestigated.  And entire clusters of these deaths have since been reopened by courts and investigations in several states.  None of this justifies what happened with the Kane case.  That was where this matter lay. The reward was information that led to a conviction.

  And the state doesn’t invest that kind of money unless it believes that someone somewhere knows something.  In this case, the answer came in a way that almost no one knew.  The only person who knew had no reason to call.  Rex Keene’s mother was waiting.  She wanted to know how and why her son died.  And they never told her. She died without an answer.

  No one could tell her if it was a robbery, a fight, or something that had been decided before he got to the bar.  The matter did not know. And the only person who knew went home, to his life. Meanwhile, the man who left room 1205 was living a normal life in Queensland.  He took his camera with him when he left. Some time after that, he buried her near his house.

  She was never found.  His life and work went hand in hand the whole time, never touching.  In 1991, when Queensland stopped considering men like Rex Keane as criminals, the case had been unsolved for 15 years and the bar man was 41 years old.  Until 2017, when Parliament removed the homosexual panic defence from the criminal code, he was 67 years old and had never been asked a single question about Brisbane.

In 2019, he was 69 when detectives finally came for him. It took a decision, a place, and a shovel to bury the matter, and it all happened after he got home and had time to sit down.  The rest of life went on as usual : work, addresses, and birthdays.  It was a slow aging affair in regional Queensland, lasting in addition to one Friday night in Brisbane that no one was ever going to ask him about.

  And the 46-year-old motel manager from Bowen remained 46 in every photo his family had. Around 2017, the Queensland Homicide Investigation Team’s unsolved cases investigation team took up Keane’s case and began an 18-month review .  Two things happened there , and both were significant.  The first was forensic. Every piece of evidence since 1976 has been reviewed again.

The material collected in that hotel room had been stored since the year it was taken.  And the tools available in 2018 were not the same tools that existed at the time it was collected.  The second was human.  Investigators went back to the witnesses, the same people who had testified when they were young, and now they were in their 60s and 70s .

  Some of them gave the police more than they did in 1976.  Hansen was asked about this, and his answer was about timing, not technique.  “For some people, it just doesn’t come out at that moment,” he said, “and things weigh on people for years.”  The other half of this answer lies in the history of the case itself.  These were people being questioned for the first time in a city where saying certain things to the police could cost them their jobs.

By 2018, the law changed and the price disappeared.  What they were carrying was not.  The description of the man with the tail has been in this file since the week of Rex Keene’s death.  This review added something that could be tested in humans. Those 18 months consisted of rereading handwritten depositions from 1976, lists of physical evidence, property receipts, and phone calls to people who had long believed no one would ever call them about this again .

  The result of the forensic examination only mattered because someone went looking for something to test.  In January 2019, a DNA profile taken from materials collected in room 1205 was matched to a living man.  He was n’t hiding anywhere.  He lived in Bundaberg, about 4 hours from Brisbane up the coast, and had lived there for years.

He was never questioned about Rex King.  Not in 1976, not in the following decades, not once.  Detectives spent another 6 months investigating the rest of the case before moving on.  The profile stated that he was in this room.    It didn’t say what happened there, and by 2019 there was no one left who could say it but him.

  On Monday, July 1, 2019, plainclothes detectives arrested a 69- year-old man in Bundaberg and charged him with one count of murder. He was due to appear in Bundaberg Magistrates’ Court the following morning .  Rex Keene was dead 42 years and 10 months ago.  Police said his family has been notified, and Hanson said they will be going through a lot of emotions.

Police did not comment that day on a motive or what was used in the room.  Both of these answers were already there at that time.  They were held pending a court hearing.  The arrest also brought something more peaceful.  He put an end to the assertion held by all who had ever touched the case, namely, that the man from Carlton Crest was not there and would not be there.

  The man arrested in Bundaberg was named Benjamin Jansen.  He was 26 the night he walked into room 1205 and 69 the morning the police entered his life. That is 43 years.  Jansen returned home from Brisbane, buried the camera, and then lived most of his adult life without a single police 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 penal code, an unwanted session could be classified as provocation.  This was a partial defense that was successfully used: the murder charge was changed to manslaughter, which meant avoiding the mandatory life sentence that the murder charge implied.

  This provision was known as the gay panic protection.  It remained in the Queensland Criminal Code until 2017.  This provision was never a license to kill and never resulted in an acquittal.  It merely lowered the charge one level lower, from a crime that carried a mandatory life sentence to a crime that did not .  So, a man who killed another man could claim in court that the other man had committed an unwanted séance.

  If the jury recognized that he had lost control of it, he would leave the courtroom with the verdict that the judge could have chosen, not the one the judge had given the law.  Life imprisonment or several persons selected by the judge. When the Queensland Attorney-General finally amended it, she stated that the state’s criminal code should not be seen as justifying violence against the gay community or any other community, and that equality before the law was a fundamental principle.

  This did n’t go quietly either.  In 2008, a 45-year-old man named Wayne Rucks was beaten to death in a churchyard in Maryborough, north of Brisbane.  The two men responsible stated that he had been courting one of them.  They were charged with murder and convicted of manslaughter.  The priest at this church was Father Paul Kelly, and he had a dead man lying in his own churchyard and in the courtroom explaining to him why the charges had been brought.

  He started a petition to repeal this provision.  It operated for years and collected about 300,000 signatures against what he later called a resistance that was ideological, not legal.  Father Kelly continued to press until the Queensland Parliament amended section 304 in March 2017.  The amendment did not eliminate the provision.

She narrowed it down. According to the adopted wording, an unwanted advance payment can no longer be the basis for partial protection, except in exceptional cases . Parliament’s own committee has asked to review this change in 5 years to see if it has worked properly.  So the door through which Benjamin Jansen should have walked in 1976 was not bricked up.

They were narrowed down to a slit, and the court has yet to decide what goes through it. So the years that Benjamin Jansen spent at large were also years when the law slowly closed the doors through which he would have had to pass. He was arrested 2 years and three months after Queensland closed. Subscribe so you don’t miss what he finally said that night in Brisbane court.

  Jansen was charged with murder. The prosecution later accepted a plea of involuntary manslaughter.  And it was for involuntary manslaughter that he was convicted.  The version that was considered by the Brisbane Supreme Court was his own.  He said he met Rex Keane while drinking in Brisbane and had to go back to his hotel room to order room service .

  He didn’t want a meeting, he said, but he suspected Keane was gay, or Keane had told him he could pay for the dinner with his body and said he wanted to take a picture of him.  He said Keane approached him with a camera and he thought he was about to be touched.  So he took the camera from him and hit him with it, intending to knock him out.

  The court heard he hit him with it up to a dozen times.  The prosecution described it to the court in four words: a dramatic, completely exaggerated reaction .  Then he took his clothes, money, and camera and left.  No one was summoned.  No ambulance, no reception, no anonymous phone booth on the way home. A man who could have survived spent his final hours alone in a hotel room because the person who put him there decided to leave.

  Benjamin Jansen was sentenced on October 18, 2022, in the Brisbane Supreme Court by Justice Declan Kelly. Rex Keene’s family members sat in the courtroom for this.  Judge Kelly directly responded to the provocation argument.  He explained what the so-called advance actually meant. An offer to pay for the meal, an expressed desire to take a picture, and a man crossing the hotel room with a camera.

  He said that such an overreaction took place in a different era, when it was illegal at home and perceived differently by some in society , and that what was called a gay panic was a partial defense against a murder charge at the time. Then he said something that Jansen’s own lawyer had already admitted.  There was absolutely no excuse for his reaction.

The judge turned to his mother.  He called it a sad and disturbing feature of the case that Rex Keene’s mother died without ever knowing why her son was killed.  He told Jansen that he always had the right to come out and explain what happened, but he did n’t. Each of those 43 years was a year when a phone call would have put an end to it.

A letter would put an end to this.  Walking into any police station in Queensland would put an end to this.  What kept this woman in the dark was not the limits of forensic science in 1976.  The sentence was 9 years.  He had already spent 1205 days in custody between his arrest in Bundaberg and the morning of sentencing, and the judge took all of those days into account.

  He had the right to immediately apply for parole . The number of days he had served until that morning was 1205. It was 12:05 in the room. No one ever suggested that it was anything other than a coincidence, and it still lies in the record. This arithmetic calculation ends this matter.  The man who did this was convicted 46 years after the fact and was eligible for release on the day of sentencing.

None of the time before his arrest counted against him, as no one was able to bring any charges against him during that time. Rex Kane’s family released a statement after the sentencing, and they were careful about what they wanted to take out of it.  They said that too often in cases of violence like this, the focus is on the actions and motives of the offender.

  And that this breeds misconceptions and speculation that only disenfranchises victims.  So they used their statement to talk about Rex.    A hardworking, resilient, respected man, highly regarded by his family and community.  They called the attack heinous, violent and unjustified and said it had been a source of suffering for decades.

And they pointed out what really set things off. The case was closed, they said, because witnesses had provided information, and they hoped that other people, drawing on old knowledge, would do the same.  This is a family whose case has gone cold, partly because a generation of people in Brisbane had good reason not to talk to police, asking witnesses from the next family to speak anyway.

  They also said they hope the outcome will provide a glimmer of hope to families still waiting for their own answers.  The camera was never found. Benjamin Jansen picked it up in room 1205, used it against the man it belonged to, took it out of the hotel in Brisbane and buried it somewhere near his house.  She’s probably still there.

In the end, it was the opposite that set this case off .  Something small was taken from that hotel room in 1976 by officers who had no idea what she would ever be able to say.  It had been lying in a storage box all this time, during every year in which no one was arrested and no one collected the reward.

  Rex King came to Brisbane for a doctor’s appointment and to Ekka.  He was booked home in Bowen for Saturday.  He never left room 1205. If this case has stuck in your mind, leave your thoughts in the comments.  More solved cases in the playlist.