TWISTS AND TURNS
NEILL-FRASER APPEAL
SUSAN Neill-Fraser was wheeled into the Hobart courtroom on Monday about 10am. Convicted of murdering partner Bob Chappell aboard their yacht on Hobart’s River Derwent, she had spent the last eight years in Mary Hutchinson Women’s Prison.
For the ailing grandmother, the next three days of appeal could determine how long she would continue to languish there.
For her supporters, who shuffled in each morning with notepads and court-provided hearing aids, it was a chance to have affirmed their belief justice had been denied.
For police and prosecutors, it would, at long last, be the final chapter of a case they believed they had got right from the very start.
For the media, it was a feast.
Witness Meaghan Vass
MEAGHAN Vass squirmed in her seat, jumped up, shouted, cried and banged her fists on the court table. To say the first witness called by the defence would rather be elsewhere was an understatement. Every question asked by high-profile defence barrister Tom Percy QC seemed to pain her.
She didn’t know, she couldn’t remember, she had a mental block, she had nothing more to offer.
But the “cold hard truth” was that the statement she’d recently signed and which put her on the yacht the night of Bob Chappell’s disappearance was a lie.
“I was made to sign that out of fear,” she stated repeatedly.
Ms Vass was a homeless 15year-old when the Four Winds was found sinking on its mooring off Marieville Esplanade, Sandy Bay, on January 27 2009. A pipe had been deliberately cut allowing seawater to flood the vessel. Mr Chappell, a 65-year-old chief radiation physicist at the Royal Hobart Hospital, had spent the previous day tinkering around on the recently purchased yacht. He was never seen again. At the 2010 murder trial, the prosecution successfully argued Neill-Fraser had killed Mr Chappell on board (no weapon was ever found), winched his body on to their dinghy and disposed of it in the water.
The fact that Ms Vass’s DNA was found aboard the 53foot ketch has remained an enduring mystery of the murder but a lightning rod for those who believe Neill-Fraser is innocent and the jury’s verdict unsafe.
An explosive affidavit signed by Ms Vass in April this year seemed, finally, to explain all. It outlined how she was on board the day Mr Chappell disappeared, with people she declined to name, and that Neill-Fraser wasn’t there. In the statement, Ms Vass said she would release Neill-Fraser if she could and “nobody understands [her] grief”.
The statement was tendered as evidence but not before Ms Vass completely disavowed it.
“None of that was true. I was made to sign that piece of paper,” she told Justice Michael Brett who is presiding over the appeal.
“I was threatened to be put in the boot of a car over that statement.”
Witness Paul Wroe
IF Ms Vass’s testimony was remarkable for what evidence she withdrew, the next witness’s statements were extraordinary for what they added.
The man not only put a former violent criminal in the area about the time of Mr Chappell’s disappearance but also fingered him for multiple murders.
The witness sensationally claimed Paul Wroe, who at the time lived aboard his yacht moored in the area, was a “serial killer” who hated Mr Chappell.
That the witness claimed to be an agent for ASIO and was
I was made to sign that piece of paper... I was threatened to be put in the boot of a car over that statement
Witness MEAGHAN VASS
prepared to lie to have NeillFraser set free was later illuminated by Director of Public Prosecutions Daryl Coates SC.
Two days later, Mr Wroe, 60, didn’t waste time letting the court know what he thought about his former drinking buddy’s claims.
“Just for the record I intend to sue [him] … for making defamatory accusations,” he said in court.
Neill-Fraser’s lawyers have sought to place others, including Mr Wroe, at the Sandy Bay foreshore around the time of the murder to raise doubt about whether she was responsible for the killing.
Mr Wroe happily agreed that he was living in the area at the time and knew of the Four Winds.
But he said he’d never met Mr Chappell or Neill-Fraser and had never boarded their yacht.
The defence revealed Mr Wroe had a lengthy criminal history, including for violence which saw him jailed in 1997, however, the witness said this behaviour was firmly in his past.
Mr Wroe denied ever saying he wanted to “pull out” Mr Chappell’s teeth because he was a “condescending old c...” and revealed he’d given his DNA to police investigating the case in 2012.
The forensic evidence
FORENSIC expert Maxwell Jones, of Victoria Police, was called to assess the presence of Ms Vass’s DNA found aboard the Four Winds.
He told the court the DNA was typical of primary contact, another way of saying Ms Vass was on the yacht, but couldn’t rule out it was from secondary transfer. At the murder trial, the prosecution argued Ms Vass’s DNA may have ended up on the yacht after being transferred from someone else’s shoe (21 people boarded the Four Winds in the days after Mr Chappell’s disappearance).
Mr Jones could not rule this scenario out.
“Unusual things do happen, so I can’t exclude a very rare occurrence,” he said.
The hearing, launched under never before used appeal legislation requiring “fresh and compelling” evidence, was adjourned until March.
Other witnesses
Grant Maddock: The Sandy Bay artist, who then had long hair, said he was rowing a white dinghy in the area on the night Mr Chappell disappeared.
The defence will say this new evidence casts doubt on arguments at the trial that the person in a dinghy was NeillFraser. Chris Smith: The experienced boat salvager said the person who disabled an alarm for the Four Winds’ bilge pumps, which remove water coming on board, would need to have knowledge of electronics.
He also sighted coins on the foredeck which the defence say support its theory Mr Chappell was lifted out of a different part of the boat by two people and coins fell from his pocket. Mark Reynolds: Neill-Fraser’s daughter Sarah Bowles told media on Wednesday that this case was about “the scientific evidence”.
In March, they will call “key scientific expert” Dr Reynolds, a crime scene expert, whose evidence will be used to discredit the police’s winching reconstruction aboard the Four Winds.
The reconstruction was used to support the prosecution’s case that Neill-Fraser alone could have winched Mr Chappell’s body from the yacht to be disposed of.
Mr Percy has told the court the “fresh evaluation” of the winching experiment would show it “lacked any genuine scientific veracity”.