Crime Immemorial

In the summer of 1976, a forty-six-year-old hotel manager in Australia would check into a fancy hotel and never check out.

Rex Keen lived in Bowen on the coast of Queensland, but on August 9th, 1976, he traveled to Brisbane to attend the Queensland Royal Show, which he did every year. Another thing he did every year was stay at the upscale Lennons Plaza Hotel; many of the staff there recognized him, and later told police that he was a “lovely fellow.”

On the evening of August 13th, Rex was apparently seen by numerous witnesses in the bar of the nearby Crest International Hotel. He was talking to a companion, described as a slender, feminine-appearing man with long hair pulled back into a ponytail and carrying a woman’s handbag over one shoulder. The men were chatting and drinking together, and nothing seemed all that out of the ordinary.

However, at approximately nine a.m. on the morning of August 14th, 1976, a maid at the Lennons Plaza entered Rex Keen’s room to clean it, and spotted a large puddle of blood on the bathroom floor. She fled the room and returned with a manager, who discovered Rex Keen dead beneath the bedclothes. He had been savagely beaten about the head until his skull had fractured, and he had also been stabbed more than a dozen times. He was clad only in a robe; all of his other clothing, as well as a camera and over a thousand dollars in cash, was missing from his room.

Immediately, police sought the man who had been spotted drinking in the bar with Rex on the night before his murder. Some investigators speculated that the man had been a male prostitute who had targeted Rex because of the large amount of money he carried. The viciousness of the slaying, though, seemed to indicate a personal motive, rather than simply a robbery turned ugly.

A composite sketch of the man with the ponytail was circulated far and wide, but his identity was never established. Because of the “effeminate” look of this particular individual, most theories surrounding Rex Keen’s murder posit that Rex himself was secretly gay and was murdered by an illicit lover, or was perhaps the victim of a hate crime perpetrated by someone who saw him and the feminine man drinking together.

Finally, in 2022, authorities discovered that their theories had been quite close to the mark when they arrested a then-73-year-old man named Benjamin Jansen, whose DNA had been identified in Rex Keen’s hotel room in 2019.

According to Jansen, he and Rex had indeed been talking in the bar, and Benjamin agreed to go to Rex’s room for a room-service meal. According to Jansen, once they got to the room, Rex told him that he wanted to take his picture, and would “pay for the meal with his body.” At this point, Jansen asserted, he had feared an unwanted homosexual advance, had panicked, grabbed the camera from Rex’s hands, and had viciously bashed Rex multiple times in the head with it. He then claimed he fled the room, leaving Rex bleeding on the bed.

Benjamin Jansen was found guilty of the violent crime and was sentenced to nine years.