IF TEGAN LANE were alive today, she would be 13. Police have never found her body, but they believe they have finally gathered the evidence to prove her mother, Keli Lane, killed her soon after her birth in 1996.
It was one of three times Ms Lane, a national representative water polo player, gave birth without her partner, her family or her fellow athletes knowing.
Ms Lane, now 34, will face the Supreme Court in Sydney on December 4, charged with Tegan's murder, almost three years and nine months after a coroner concluded the missing girl was dead, but stopped short of calling it foul play.
Police would not reveal yesterday what new evidence, if any, had led to the murder charge. The Director of Public Prosecutions served the indictment, suggesting it had been considering the police case for some time.
Yesterday morning Ms Lane was at her northern beaches home. It is understood she is separated from her husband, whose name she used but which has been suppressed to protect the identity of their daughter. This girl is Ms Lane's fourth child - the only one she has raised.
Keli Lane was a 21-year-old water polo star when she gave birth to Tegan at Auburn Hospital on September 12, 1996.
Two days later, she left the hospital in a taxi at 2pm. Tegan has not been seen since.
At the conclusion of an inquest in February 2006, Coroner John Abernethy described the case as surreal. Ms Lane chose not to give evidence. Her barrister, Peter Hamill, SC, insisted Ms Lane was innocent and suggested Tegan was still alive.
Ms Lane was two days shy of her 20th birthday when she had her first child, a girl, at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in March 1995. She had cried when hospital staff brought her a cake.
On the hospital record she named the father as Duncan Gillies, a rugby player and her boyfriend at the time. But the
inquest - starting nine years later - would hear he was not the father. Furthermore, he had no idea she had been pregnant.
Ms Lane gave up this girl for adoption and was soon back in the pool, training to represent Australia at the Junior Water Polo Championships in Canada.
Eighteen months later, she gave birth to Tegan. She was still with Mr Gillies. By now she had been spending four nights a week at his Gladesville home. Yet again, however, he did not notice she was pregnant, and he would tell the inquest this made him feel like a fool. They broke up in 1998, but he said he would never know if he was Tegan's father because Ms Lane had left hospital before DNA samples were taken.
It was not until May 1999 - with the arrival of Ms Lane's third child at Ryde Hospital - authorities started to ask questions. Where was Tegan?
Ms Lane had chosen to give up the third child. A Department of Community Services worker, processing this adoption, noted the hospital record of Tegan's birth, but no other paperwork.
Later, Ms Lane would tell Detective Senior Constable Richard Gaut that Tegan's father was Andrew Norris.
The first public appeal for Tegan came with the launch of the inquest in October 2004. As the close of the inquest in 2006, the coroner asked police to do more work on the case.
They had already checked school enrolments for all girls in Australia born on September 12, 1996. While they found a Tegan whose father was called Allen Norris, DNA tests proved she was not the one. Now police checked records for girls with different birthdays, but a similar age, in NSW. After the inquest the police's unsolved homicide unit went further and tried to find Tegan by checking records of all girls in Australia of her approximate age - close to 100,000.
(Me too).
