A Witness of Fact: The Peculiar Case of Chief Forensic Pathologist Colin Manock

Written by Drew Rooke

Narrated by Lockie Chapman

For nearly three decades, Dr Colin Manock was in charge of South Australia's forensic pathology services. In cases of unexpected or unexplained death, it was his job to determine when a person took their final breath, and whether they had died naturally - or not. But Manock did not have the necessary training for such a specialist role, and made serious errors in several major cases. The full extent of his wrongdoing, and the exact number of cases impacted by it, remain a mystery more than twenty-five years after he retired. In this book, Rooke examines several of Manock's most controversial cases. A WITNESS OF FACT describes how an entire legal system has failed, how unsafe verdicts have been swept under the carpet - and how forensic evidence that is admitted in courts of law is dubious more often than we would like to think.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Aurora Audio Books
• Release date: Oct 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781399137720

Drew Rooke

Drew Rooke is a freelance journalist and author whose work has been widely published, including in The Monthly, The Saturday Paper, Kill Your Darlings, and Overland. His first book, One Last Spin: the power and peril of the pokies, was published by Scribe in 2018. He is a 2021 Our Watch Fellow.