SHE had been silent, seemingly serene, for the four months she was on trial. But when she was found guilty yesterday of murdering her newborn daughter, Tegan, Keli Lane unleashed an anguished wail, then collapsed in the dock of the Supreme Court.
Her cry of ''Oh, no'' was echoed in the gallery by her distraught mother, Sandra Lane, as court officers rushed to her aid and jurors fought back their own tears.
A paramedic tended to the convicted killer before she was taken into custody, to spend her first night in Silverwater women's prison.
It was a day of high drama. Lane, 35, spent much of it in tears, the tension rising as word emerged of developments in the jury room where, Justice Anthony Whealy told observers, ''there's some emotion being experienced''.
Lane sobbed as the foreman pronounced her guilty of swearing three false statements in affidavits about her first and third babies, who were adopted out.
The jurors were deadlocked on the murder charge but, after being given the option of reaching a majority 11 to 1 verdict, returned after lunch to convict Lane of murdering her second child, Tegan, 14 years ago.
Unknown to the jury, when the prosecution closed its case last month, the defence asked Justice Whealy to direct Ms Lane's acquittal, arguing there was insufficient evidence to prove murder.
The judge refused, saying "any reservation I may have about the Crown case should not result in the matter being withdrawn from the jury".
Yesterday Justice Whealy expressed ''great sympathy'' for Lane, but said to release her on bail when she faced jail for her crimes would only give her ''false hope''.
Though the verdict provided a partial answer to the mystery of Tegan's fate, precisely what happened to the infant may never be explained.
Tegan's disappearance - her very existence - went unremarked for three years, until records uncovered of her birth at Auburn Hospital on September 12, 1996 prompted a missing person investigation.
Detectives grew sceptical of Lane's claim she had given Tegan, at two days old, to the baby's father.
In a 2003 police interview, a record of which was made public yesterday, Lane denied that she or anyone else had harmed Tegan. Asked if she killed the child, she replied, ''No, I did not. I did not do anything like that.''
As police searched unsuccessfully for Tegan, Lane's hidden life was exposed, first to her stunned inner circle, then - in explosive fashion - at an inquest and trial.
Her sexual liaisons, two abortions and the three pregnancies and births she concealed from everyone in her life were publicly raked over.
Two of her erstwhile lovers learnt through DNA testing that they had fathered children with her, a decade after she gave the babies up for adoption.
A former boyfriend, Duncan Gillies, never suspected she carried two babies to term during their four-year romance.
Prosecutors said that Lane, a water polo player with Olympic ambitions, wanted to preserve her ''golden girl'' image and life as she knew it, and that in the 1990s raising children did not feature in her plans.
A persistent theme of the lies she told hospital and adoption workers was that her parents disapproved when, in reality, they were oblivious to her pregnancies. Her mother and father, a retired policeman, Robert Lane, supported her in court.
Writing in October 1999 to the worker handling the adoption of her third child, Lane said her parents had disowned her. "People dropped off me when they realised that I was going to relinquish the babies,'' she said.
"Society says that this is wrong; society says that people who do this must be mad, slutty or cruel. I just don't agree."
The previous month she had been examined by a psychiatrist, Debra Montgomery.
While Lane seemed "at a loss herself to fully explain her erratic behaviour", Dr Montgomery found no sign of psychiatric disturbance and "no past history of psychiatric illness''.
Lane finally told her parents about Tegan in January 2004, when intensifying police inquiries forced her hand.
In an intercepted phone call played at the trial, Sandra Lane grappled with the revelation.
''You told me that this young guy's taken the baby to raise it,'' she said. ''It is really unusual, you must admit yourself, 'cause it's just so unlike a young bloke to want to raise a child. That's the thing I just can't sort of grip.''
By then Lane had a fourth child and was set to marry the father. She had said nothing to him of Tegan until the month before their wedding.
Police tapped their phone and bugged their house while she tried to explain her ''stupid choices'' and referred to Tegan as ''the problem''.
''I couldn't really care about the details because I just wanted the problem to go away,'' she said.
Lane and her husband have since split.
"I used to worry so much about wanting to be a sports star and … achieving these wonderful things," she confided to a friend in 2004, as police listened in. "But the only thing I'm really good at is being a mum."
Lane faces sentencing on February 25.
