Australia 1997 Cold Case Solved – Arrest Shocks Community 

Keith Lee’s June last year, Sheperton, Victoria. The last known sighting of the man police say killed Megan Rose on the Sunshine Coast in 1997. On the morning of the 18th of July 1997, somebody walking through the coastal reserve at Point Cartwright on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast noticed a cask of wine sitting on a bench near the cliff edge.

 A glass was lying in the grass beside it. Past the lighthouse, the headland drops away to bare rock and open ocean. The walker went to the edge and looked over. There was a woman lying on the rocks at the bottom of it. She was 25 years old. Police looked at the wine, the height, and the alcohol in her blood and recorded it as nonsuspicious.

Her family were told she had taken her own life. That finding stood for 25 years. Then a cold  case team pulled the file and read one document in it properly. Her mother waited 27 years for an arrest she is now too ill to follow. This is how they finally caught the killer.

 Point Cartwright sits at Bedina on the point where the Malula River meets the Coral Sea. There is a concrete lighthouse at the top of it. Below that, the grass runs out and the land falls away to rock. On a clear day, it is one of the best views on that coast and people walk it constantly. At night, it is empty.

 There is no lighting on the reserve, no houses on the point, and no reason for anybody to be up there once the sun goes down. The reserve is a 15-minute drive south of Marula, which is where Megan Rose had been living. Somebody drove her white Suzuki hatchback there in the dark. It was found the next morning in a car park near the reserve.

 The car matters because somebody had to get it there. That is a stretch of coast road driven in the dark at some point between 8:00 and first light by a person nobody saw. Whoever arrived first that morning was looking at an arrangement rather than a scene of violence. A drink poured and set down, a glass put aside, and a woman gone over the edge.

An arrangement like that can be made by one person or by two. And which of those it was is the question this entire case turns on. Megan Louise Rose was 25 years old and she worked as a disability and aged care nursing assistant. That is the job she chose. Shift work, physical work, looking after people who could not look after themselves in a part of Queensland where the money and the attention went to tourism and the care sector sat underneath all of it.

 She had a supervisor at a nursing home on the coast, a woman named Susan Booth, who gave evidence about her nearly three decades later. The people who knew Megan as a colleague, a friend, and a daughter have ended up in a witness box describing somebody they last saw when they were both young. Megan had moved from Regional Victoria up to Queensland about a year before she died.

 She came with her partner, a man 19 years older than her, and the two of them were living in a unit on Keith Royal Drive at Marula. She had a mother and a family who have spent the last 29 years waiting on this. That is most of what the public record holds about who she actually was. Court files and news reports preserve the circumstances of a death, not the shape of a life.

 And Megan Rose has been described in public almost entirely in terms of a headland she was found beneath. She had a job that mattered and people who needed her at it. On a Thursday night in July, she was at home in a unit at Marula and by the following morning, she was dead. On the evening of the 17th of July 1997, Megan was at the Marula unit.

 Her partner’s account to police was this. He last saw her at about a quart 7 when he offered her a warm drink and she said no. Then he left the room. When he came back at about 8, she was gone and so was her car. He said he didn’t see her leave the house. He said he tried to call her at 11 that night and she didn’t answer.

 That 45minute window between a quarter 7 and 8:00 is the whole of it. It is the last verified sighting of Megan Rose alive and it comes from one person. On his account, another 3 and 1/2 hours went by between finding her gone and picking up a phone. Everything police built their finding on in 1997 came out of that account.

 There was no independent witness to her leaving the unit. No one who saw the cargo and nobody at Point Cartwright who saw anybody at all. The autopsy found alcohol and drugs in Megan’s body. Her blood alcohol was.148, which is nearly three times the legal limit for driving. There were also traces of oxazipam, a medication prescribed for anxiety, for sleep, and for alcohol withdrawal.

 Both of those facts cut two ways. A reading like that is consistent with somebody drinking alone at a clifftop. It is also consistent with somebody who was in no condition to make that drive or to defend herself. That combination, plus the wine at the top of the cliff, plus a young woman at the bottom of it, gave police a reading of the scene that took about as long as it takes to say out loud.

 She had driven out there at night, sat on a bench with a drink, and gone over the edge. That reading wasn’t absurd on its face. It fitted the scene. It fitted the toxicology and police in 1997 were not inventing anything. What they did was accept the most available explanation and stop. The death was recorded as non-suspicious. Because of that classification, extensive examinations weren’t conducted and no crime scene was ever declared at Point Cartrite.

 The partner gave his statement and it was accepted without follow-up. Nobody asked who had driven the car. Nobody asked why a woman that intoxicated had driven down the coast in the dark to a headland. Nobody looked at the relationship and nobody looked at the money. The file was closed. And a decision like that isn’t reversible in any practical sense.

 A crime scene has a short life. The moment a death is classified as non-suspicious. The tape doesn’t go up, the ground isn’t searched, the vehicle isn’t examined, and the exhibits aren’t prioritized. Everything that could have been recovered on the first day is gone by the second. Subscribe so you don’t miss how a cold case team finally read one document properly 25 years later.

 There were two objects at the top of that cliff and the court has since heard exactly what happened to them. A wine cask and a glass, both described in the record as suspected of being associated with the deceased. Photographed, noted. recorded as belonging to the scene and then handled as though none of that mattered.

 Neither of them was ever DNA tested. That is the first failure and on its own it is enormous. A glass is a drinking vessel. Somebody’s mouth was on it and somebody’s hands were on the cask. In 1997 DNA testing existed and was in use in Australian courts and if a second person had sat on that headland with Megan Rose, the glass was the object most likely to prove it.

 It wasn’t tested because the death wasn’t suspicious and the death wasn’t suspicious in part because nothing had been tested. And there is a second failure on top of the first. The court heard there is no police record of what happened to the cask and the glass afterwards. An audit was carried out and confirmed they are missing.

 There is no record of them leaving, no lab, no exhibit room, no disposal note, nothing. An exhibit is supposed to carry a chain of custody with it from the moment it is picked up. Every hand it passes through gets logged because the whole point of the system is that a court can be told exactly where a piece of evidence has been.

 For the cask and the glass, that chain stops in 1997. The two objects that sat at the center of this scene that were photographed and noted and described in the file cannot be produced today. Whatever was on that glass, whoever had held it, whoever had poured from that cask is unreoverable, not difficult to obtain or expensive. Simply gone and gone in a way that nobody has ever had to explain.

Megan Rose had a life insurance policy. The sole beneficiary was the man she lived with. It was worth $250,000. There is nothing unusual in that. Couples do this constantly and a payout to a surviving partner is the entire point of the product. The clause is the unusual part. The policy wouldn’t pay out on a suicide within the first 13 months. That is standard.

 Insurers write that exclusion in specifically so that nobody can buy a policy and then take their own life to fund an estate. Megan Rose died 13 months and 3 weeks after that policy was taken out. 3 weeks the exclusion lapsed. 3 weeks later, Megan Rose was dead at the foot of a headland. The death was recorded as a suicide and the policy paid.

 That fact sat in the paperwork the entire time. It wasn’t hidden. A $250,000 payout on a young care worker with an exclusion period that had only just run out is the sort of thing any detective reviewing a suspicious death would want  explained. Who took the policy out? Who chose the beneficiary? Who paid the premiums? None of it was asked because on the paperwork there was no suspicious death to ask it about.

 The insurer paid out. That money went to the man Megan Rose had been living with and within a few years he had taken it and left the state. The case stayed closed for a quarter of a century. Megan’s partner didn’t stay on the Sunshine Coast. He went back to Victoria and he lived there for years without anybody in law enforcement having a reason to think about him because there was no homicide investigation.

There was a closed file on a non-suspicious death. In 2022, Queensland cold case detectives launched a fresh investigation into the circumstances of Megan Rose’s death. 25 years is a long time to leave a file, and it is worth being honest about what that gap costs. Everybody involved is a quarter of a century older. Some of them are dead.

Memories that were sharp in 1997 have been overwritten by decades of retelling, by news coverage, and by conversations with other people who were there. What they were looking at was a file with holes in it. A death classified in a matter of hours. A scene never treated as a scene. Exhibits never tested. A relationship never examined.

 A quarter of a million dollars that changed hands on the strength of a finding that nobody had ever properly tested. The problem for the cold case team was that they were 25 years too late to fix any of it. Whatever the cliffs had held in July 1997, the weather and the years had taken. The two objects that mattered were gone.

 What was left was paper, memory, and people. In June 2023, Queensland police announced a reward of $500,000 for information leading to an arrest and conviction over the death of Megan Louise Rose. Detective Senior Sergeant Tara Kentwell fronted the media. She appealed specifically to people who had known Megan around the time she died on the Sunshine Coast and in Victoria.

 She asked them to think back and provide anything at all, no matter how irrelevant it seemed. The announcement carried something else with it. Police recommended indemnity from prosecution for any accomplice who came forward first, provided that person was not the one who committed the crime. That is a specific piece of language and it says something.

 Police were not only asking for tips from the public. They were signaling that somebody else might know what happened at Point Cartrite and that the state was prepared to protect that person in order to hear it. Kentwell put it plainly later. It is never too late to come forward, she said, because relationships and loyalties change.

 People who were once scared may no longer be. That last line is worth hearing twice. Police were telling somebody in public that they knew fear had kept them quiet and that the fear might have expired along with everything else. Queensland detectives went to Victoria. On the 25th of June 2023, officers spoke with a man in Portland, a small town on the state’s southwest coast.

 It was a brief conversation. The next day, he was gone. His car, a silver Holden Captiva, was found at about 5 in the afternoon on the 26th of June in the car park at Cape Nelson Lighthouse, a clifftop outside Portland. A vehicle abandoned at a lighthouse on a headland with nobody in it. In 1997, a scene like that had closed a case in a matter of hours.

 In 2023, it did not work for a day. Police didn’t accept that a man wanted for questioning over a death at one clifftop had coincidentally taken his own life at another one. In July 2023, a Queensland warrant was issued for his arrest on a charge of murder. By then, he had a head start of several days.

 The same category of scene 26 years apart, read by two very different police forces. One of them closed a file. The other one opened a nationwide manhunt that ran for the next 18 months. He was seen briefly in Jalong, then in Sheperton. After that, the trail went cold  and stayed cold for a year and a half.

 What he did in that time, according to police, was build a second life. He had false documentation, including a driver’s license and a pensioner concession card. He opened bank accounts in a name that was not his. He received government welfare payments and subsidized housing under that name. Religious groups and charities gave him assistance, none of them with any idea that the man they were helping was wanted for murder in another state.

 He lived for a period in the Northern Territory and then he moved to Dural in the Hills district in Sydney’s northwest.  To the people in his unit block, he was David Japaljari. Detective Senior Sergeant Kentwell said afterward that he had been unwittingly assisted by government and charity support the entire time he was on the run.

 An active murder warrant sat in the system for 18 months while the man it named collected a pension under someone else’s identity. None of the organizations that helped him did anything wrong. A charity that houses an elderly man doesn’t run him against interstate warrants. A pension office processes a concession card. The identity documents were the whole mechanism. And they worked.

Subscribe so you don’t miss how a podcast listener finally ended an 18-month manhunt. In late December  2024, an Australian true crime podcast ran a series of episodes on the death of Megan Rose. One of the people who spoke on it was the accused man’s own adult child, Ren Dornong. Somebody listened to those episodes and rang the police.

 A member of the community had recognized him as a man that police were looking for. That is the part of this case that no amount of forensic work produced. Not a lab result, not a database, a person who heard a story on a podcast, recognized something, and made a phone call. On the morning of the 2nd of January, 2025, officers from the Kuring Guy Police Area Command went to a property on Kenthurst Road at Durol at about 8:00 a.m.

 and arrested a 72year-old man on the outstanding Queensland warrant. Police allege he tried to bite an officer during the arrest. He was flown to Brisbane and charged with murder. He was also charged in New South Wales with assaulting police and with possessing identity information to commit an indictable offense, though those charges were secondary to the Queensland warrant.

Megan’s mother was told her family said that she is in paliotative care with high dependency dementia and that she understands this man has been apprehended. Her family had spent 27 years waiting to be able to tell her that. It arrived just past the point where she could hold on to it and it is not going to come back.

 Keith Le, he was 72 when they took him at Durol and 73 by the time he was committed for trial. In July 1997, he had been 44 years old, living in the unit at Marula with a woman of 25. The sole beneficiary of her $250,000 life insurance policy was him. No relevant criminal history has been reported in this case.

 He had never been charged with anything connected to Megan Rose or to anybody else in the 26 years between her  death and the issuing of that warrant. He was extradited to Queensland in January 2025. The charge was mentioned in Brisbane Magistrate’s Court on the 10th of January and then moved to Maruchidor whose courthouse sits a few kilometers across the water from the headland where Megan Rose was found.

 The committal hearing ran over two days at the end of April 2026. 11 witnesses gave evidence, including Megan’s mother and a man who had met Lee’s in custody on the day of his arrest in 2025. Crown prosecutor Sarah Dennis put the crown case, and it rests on four things. Le was the beneficiary of the policy. The suicide exclusion had expired 3 weeks before the death.

 He had staged events suggesting his own death by suicide and he had lived under an assumed name. The first witness called was Ren Dawnong. She had given three witness statements about this case between 2001 and 2009. The first two of them she told the court were incorrect and she gave the court her reason. She had been scared of her father.

 Katrina Willlet, a former partner of Lee’s, gave evidence by video link about a conversation she had with him before Megan’s funeral. She said she couldn’t recall all of it, but she remembered him saying he had gone looking for Megan on the night she died after she had stormed off following an argument.

 Michelle Bour told the court she had asked Lee’s directly in late 2020 or early 2021 whether there was anything police could get him for. She said he answered yes and that she was shocked. She said he told her he had snapped and that he had gone to the bottom of the cliffs afterwards and picked up Megan’s glasses. Under cross-examination by Lee’s barristister, William Prizeman, Bourke agreed she hadn’t received an explicit confession.

 She also agreed that after Le told her not to contact him again, she sent him messages, including a photograph of Megan and the words, “I will haunt you.” A witness who says an accused man told her he snapped is powerful evidence. A witness who has also sent that man hostile messages is a witness a defense barister can work on. Both of those things are true at once.

And which one carries more weight isn’t a question that gets settled in a magistrate’s court. On the 30th of April 2026, magistrate Christopher Callahan found there was enough evidence for the case to proceed. He noted that he hadn’t received all the information he was expecting.

 Some witnesses could not be called, and the crown said so in court. Le’s barristister, Simon Lewis, consented to the committal and said the remaining witnesses could be dealt with at a pre-trial hearing. Callahan asked Lee whether he wished to say anything or to enter a plea. Le said he hadn’t discussed it with his legal team. The court adjourned briefly.

 He came back and said, “No, your honor. An accused person in Australia does not have to say anything ever. And declining to enter a plea at committ carries no implication of guilt whatsoever. The plea will be entered in the Supreme Court. A trial date hasn’t been set. Everything in this video is drawn from what has been said in open court or announced by police, and none of it has yet had to survive a trial.

 Keith Lees will face 12 people who haven’t been chosen, and they will decide whether the crown can prove any of it beyond reasonable doubt. What is not in dispute is the part that came before any of it. Whatever a jury decides about Keith Lees, the way this death was handled in 1997 is a matter of record and nothing that happens in Brisbane will change it.

 There was a cask of wine on a bench at Point Cartwright and a glass lying in the grass beside it and a 25-year-old woman at the bottom of the cliff. For 25 years, those objects were treated as the explanation rather than as evidence. Nobody ever tested them. Nobody can test them now because nobody knows where they went.

 The case that reaches a Brisbane courtroom will be built out of paper, memory, and what people are willing to say. The physical evidence that sat at the top of that headland on a July morning in 1997 no longer exists. If this case stayed with you, leave your thoughts in the comments. More cases in the