A 72-year-old man has been extradited to Queensland and charged with the alleged murder of his former partner almost 28 years ago.
Keith Lees was arrested in Dural, in Sydney’s north-west, last week after spending about 18 months on the run and was handed over to Queensland police on Thursday.
Lees has now been charged with the murder of Meaghan Rose, who was found at the base of Point Cartwright Cliffs at Mooloolaba on 18 July 1997.
The 25-year-old’s death was initially ruled a suicide, but detectives opened the cold case in 2022, offering a $500,000 reward for information and an arrest warrant for Lees the following year.
After fleeing Victoria in 2023 when police went to talk with him in relation to Rose’s death, Lees was believed to have been living in the Northern Territory, before moving to Sydney under an assumed name where he was arrested, Det Sen Sgt Tara Kentwell said on Thursday.
Kentwell said Lees “received assistance from a number of organisations, including religious groups” during this time – though the officer said she did not believe anybody in those groups “had any thoughts that he wasn’t who he presented himself to be”.
“It was media coverage that assisted a small group of people to identify this man,” Kentwell said.
Rose’s 88-year-old mother is in palliative care for high-dependency dementia. Her father died in 2014.
Kentwell said police believed there were still people out there who held “vital information” about the alleged murder and stressed that the reward was still live, as well as indemnity for any accomplice, not being the person who actually committed the alleged crime.
“It is never too late to come forward,” she said. “Relationships and loyalties change, people who were once scared may no longer be and we’d encourage those people to come forward.”
Lees had been on the run since Queensland detectives travelled to Victoria to speak with him in mid-2023, alleging they found his car abandoned the next day at Portland in the state’s south-west.
He later allegedly gave a false name when spoken to by other officers at Port Fairy, but was spotted again on CCTV at Geelong shopping centre, after buying new clothes, and was last seen at the Shepparton train station.
Rose had been living in a de facto relationship with Lees – almost 20 years her senior – and his son in Marcoola, on the Sunshine Coast, after all three had moved up from Victoria.
He was due to appear at the Brisbane magistrates court on Friday.
