DID SHE DO IT?
The grandmother jailed for murder
On the moonless night of January 26, 2009 a body was dropped into the cold water of Tasmania’s Derwent River, never to be recovered. The deceased was Robert Chappell – Bob to his friends – a 65-year-old physicist who worked in the Royal Hobart Hospital’s oncology unit where he was completing one final project before retirement. When his partner Sue Neill-Fraser arrived at the marina the following morning after police called to say her yacht was sinking, the full extent of the tragedy was not yet apparent. The first thing she asked was, “Where’s Bob?”
Neill-Fraser stood at the water’s edge, telling Constable Shane Etherington her partner Bob had been working on the yacht, which had been giving the On couple the moon less troubles incenight they of January purchased 26, it in Queensland in December. He’d had 2009 to repair a body some was dropped panels that into had the been cold
mysteriously loosened, she said. She water told of the Tasmania’ s officer she Derwent believed River, somebody never had boarded the boat and prised them free in order to smuggle drugs into Australia, and she asked if the police had sniffer dogs that could investigate this theory. When police searched the empty yacht they noticed blood on the steps to the saloon. Winch ropes were not as they should be and there was blood spatter on the stairwell walls. Bob was missing.
Nine months later, Neill-Fraser was charged with his murder. She pleaded not guilty but was convicted and is presently serving a 23-year jail term for murder.
The mother of two has staunchly maintained her innocence, telling The Weekly in 2015: “I think he was the victim of a random or opportunistic incident,” and that she feels like she’s “been sent off to a strange planet.” Supporters have lined up behind her, calling for reviews and a Royal Commission. Venerable defence barrister Robert Richter said the conviction was the greatest miscarriage of justice in this country since Lindy Chamberlain.
Yet Neill-Fraser’s attempts to have her conviction set aside have repeatedly failed. An appeal, a High Court appeal and the coronial investigation all found Neill-Fraser was responsible for Bob’s death. In his report, Tasmanian Coroner Glenn Hay said Bob’s family – he was the father of three children – just wanted the legal processes to end, “so that they may grieve and move on with their lives as soon as they can”.
Now, 10 years after Bob’s death, the Tasmanian Supreme Court is poised to decide whether Neill-Fraser deserves one last shot at freedom. “New and compelling” evidence was uncovered that was significant enough to persuade the courts to again consider the case.
Former Victorian detective Colin McLaren, working with documentary filmmaker Eve Ash, spent years raking over the case files, re-interviewing witnesses, gathering new statements and collecting affidavits that support Neill-Fraser’s version of events. Central to their case is a statutory declaration sworn by a young woman whose DNA was found on the yacht after it became a crime scene. In 2010, Meaghan Vass said she had never set foot on the vessel. In 2017, she said she was there the night Bob vanished. Subsequent developments, though, have thrown the declaration’s integrity under suspicion.
It is a case that has bitterly divided the apple isle. Allegations of corruption and conspiracy have been levelled by both sides. A lawyer who was agitating for Neill-Fraser and two witnesses have been charged with conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. Neill- Fraser’s insistence she is innocent has spawned one documentary, a play, an investigative TV series and three books. She is a grandmother who, as Colin McLaren put it, never had so much as a parking ticket, but apparently killed her partner of 18 years in cold blood. The trial judge, Justice Alan Blow, called it “an intentional and purposeful killing”.
At the conclusion of Neill-Fraser’s trial in 2010, much of the information around Bob’s disappearance and probable death remained shrouded in secrecy. Since then, enough details have been uncovered that Neill-Fraser has been granted one last-gasp chance. Now a 64-year-old inmate confined to a wheelchair, she waits behind the ruthless walls of Risdon Prison for the final judgement that will settle the matter: is she an innocent woman, tragically wronged, or a cunning killer whose plan to get away with murder at sea ran aground?
A fatal decision
It’s hard to imagine a more idyllic location that the glittering waters of Hobart’s Sandy Bay, where Bob Chappell made the fatal decision to spend Australia Day doing repairs on his 17m ketch, Four Winds. The small cove is home to the Royal Yacht Club of Tasmania, which is famous as the end point of the Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race. While Bob worked, Neill-Fraser had lunch with his sister, Ann Sanchez. Being a public holiday, the yacht club restaurant was closed, so they ate meat pies and took a few photos in the gentle afternoon sun.
Neill-Fraser then took the dinghy out to the Four Winds. In her version of events, Bob wanted to spend the night on the yacht repairing it, so she left her mobile phone with him, took the dinghy back to dry land and went home to bed. She later added to her initial account that she returned to the marina in the dead of night. She says this trip was prompted by what would prove to be an eerily prophetic
“I think he was the victim of a random ... incident.”
phone call from a man she had never met. Richard King called Bob and Neill-Fraser’s house on the night of January 26 because he was worried about Bob’s daughter Claire, who had phoned him in an extremely distressed state, convinced her father was going to die on his yacht.
“She was deeply concerned that he was on a yacht,” Mr King said at trial. “She was so terrified she couldn’t put one word together and get it out in one piece ... Claire had been concerned over the last month by the chance that her father might suddenly die. I asked Neill-Fraser whether there was any truth in that and she denied it – well, overenthusiastically,” he said under oath.
This phone call, Neill-Fraser said, was what prompted her to drive to the marina. She said when she got to the water, the yacht was in darkness so she returned home. Phone records show that at 3.08am she dialled *10# on her landline, which would give her details of the last missed call. Neill-Fraser’s reason for not initially disclosing this trip to police was that she wanted to protect Claire, who, King confirmed, was suffering from paranoid delusions at the time.
In the morning Neill-Fraser phoned Bob on her own mobile, but got no answer. A few minutes later, the landline rang. It was the police asking if she and Bob could come to the marina. Their yacht was sinking.
One of the things that is certain about the night Bob vanished is that the $200,000 yacht, purchased with hopeful thoughts of retirement, was sabotaged. At some point on the night, a pipe was cut and a seacock was opened, allowing water to fill the hull. The automatic bilge pump had been deactivated and the alarm had been disabled. Part of the Crown case against Neill-Fraser was that whoever had scuttled the boat had intimate knowledge of its inner workings. A mechanic, a plumber and one of the sailors who helped bring the Four Winds from Queensland to Tasmania, Peter Stevenson, all gave evidence that they had told Neill-Fraser about the inner workings of the vessel, with Stevenson saying she seemed “reasonably familiar” with the plumbing side of things. Entered into evidence was a photo that showed her with the yacht’s manual open to a plumbing diagram.
Love or hatred
Stevenson also gave evidence relating to the motive for the killing, which the prosecution said was that Neill-Fraser wanted the relationship to end, and stood to make a financial gain from the demise of her partner. The relationship was “strained”, Stevenson said.
Bob’s son Timothy Chappell also told the court that “there was quite a lot of tension between them”, when he saw them.
Neill-Fraser gave evidence that, far from wanting to end the relationship, they had discussed the possibility of getting married on their boat on their 20th anniversary. They were planning trips to Vanuatu and New Zealand, she said, and the boat would be their retirement “shack” when Bob finally stopped working.
However, police and prosecutors believed that Neill-Fraser returned to the boat on the night of January 26, struck or bludgeoned Bob on the back of the head from behind with a heavy wrench, hauled his body onto the deck, and with the aid of winches, transferred it into the dinghy and dumped it into the cold Tasmanian water.
Damning evidence was given by Phillip Triffett, a former friend of both Bob and Neill-Fraser, who testified that in the mid-1990s Neill-Fraser had asked him to help her throw her brother overboard, in a manner very similar to the way Bob was said by police to have died.
“She asked for me to assist her to put Patrick overboard,” Triffett told the court. “He was to be just weighed down, pretty much.” As for the yacht, “I was to take it closer to the shore and sink it.”
He said he wasn’t sure if NeillFraser was serious, but she never said anything to make him think she was joking. Later, when the two of them were at Neill-Fraser’s house, she broached the plan again. But this time, the person she wanted to throw overboard was Bob.
“It started out by Sue saying about how mean
Bob was with his money,” Triffett said. “And Sue –
Sue started suggesting that, you know, like Bob was dangerous and she more or less said ‘he had to go’.”
There were other things for the jury to consider. The police noticed Neill-Fraser had a Band-Aid on her thumb and strapping around her wrist. It was a fresh injury. The photos she and Ann Sanchez had taken the day before while eating their lunch showed Neill-Fraser had no cuts to her hands and no strapping on her wrist – only a gold bangle.
Other things came into play. A red jacket that Neill-Fraser denied owning was revealed to have her DNA on it. And she lied to police. Crucially, she concealed the fact that she returned to the marina around the time Bob vanished. She also told police that she left Bob on the yacht, then drove to Bunnings and didn’t get home until it was starting to get dark, though this
was found to be impossible due to the store’s shorter public holiday trading hours. Police scoured Bunnings’ CCTV and found none of Neill-Fraser in the store. Her supporters have put this down to shock and confusion.
In court she said, “I’ve never harmed anyone knowingly or plotted or planned to harm anyone.”
The jury unanimously found Sue Neill-Fraser guilty after 18 hours of deliberation. Almost immediately, her devoted daughters Sarah Bowles and Emma Fraser-Meeker snapped into action, investigating their legal options. A band of supporters began lobbying for Neill-Fraser’s release and raised a $40,000 reward for information that would exonerate her. When Neill-Fraser’s appeal succeeded in only trimming three years from her sentence, she took the matter to the High Court.
She said in a statement: “I loved Bob deeply and would never have harmed him.”
Reasonable doubt?
Photos of Neill-Fraser from happier times show a smiling woman who wore her brunette hair cut in a blunt bob. She had met Bob at a ski lodge in the late 1980s when she was an active and social divorcee who operated a riding school with her mother. She farmed sheep and later branched out into property development. Adored by her two daughters and respected by her ex-husband, she had led a “blightfree life”, her defence lawyer David Gunson said at her trial.
Since she was jailed, Neill-Fraser has become a grandmother several times over and has grieved for her own mother who passed away. She’s known to her eldest grandchild, Lizzie, as “Susu” who calls on the phone. Being separated from her family is “soul-destroying”.
“I do believe he’s dead,” she told The Weekly in 2015. “He never would have allowed me to go through this.”
One woman who is convinced of Neill-Fraser’s innocence is documentary maker Eve Ash, whose film, Shadow of Doubt, has raised questions about the thoroughness of the police investigation. In 2016, Eve asked former detective Colin McLaren to assist her inquiry and McLaren also produced a book, Southern Justice, which details their years of probing.
Central to the case put forward by Neill-Fraser’s allies is DNA found on the yacht. Forensic investigators discovered a clear “puddle” of fluid on the deck of the Four Winds. For months it remained unidentified until a teenage homeless girl was arrested in relation to a theft, and the routine collection of her DNA matched the sample on file. Her name was Meaghan Vass and she had been living on the streets since she was 13. For Neill-Fraser’s supporters, Meaghan was key to her exoneration.
“There’s only one non-circumstantial aspect to this case that I can find,” McLaren wrote in Southern Justice. “One scientific fact that’s undeniable, if we believe in science. That’s a DNA
swab that’s on the deck of the yacht and that comes up to a young street girl called Meaghan Vass ... This same girl was running with a group of young men who were known for doing break-ins.”
McLaren wrote that he initially came to the investigation with an open mind, but over time was convinced there had been a miscarriage of justice. He goes on to say: “If there is no body, the most compelling evidence is usually required to convict someone of murder.” McLaren argues that thefts from yachts were common in Sandy Bay, and the police’s lax attitude to petty crimes meant boat owners often didn’t bother calling them.
Key witness Phillip Triffett stood to gain from his involvement in the case, McLaren said. The dinghy alleged to have been used to dispose of Bob’s body was said at trial to have tested positive for blood, but following Neill-Fraser’s conviction this was found to be incorrect. Similarly, the DNA evidence on the red jacket was found to be unreliable.
Ash and McLaren worked other leads. McLaren postulated a theory that the body had been removed from the saloon via the skylights – not dragged onto the deck as police and the prosecutor Tim Ellis had said. McLaren identified black scuff marks on the outside surface of the saloon roof and a rope that was found draped inside the saloon skylight hatch, above blood stains on the blue saloon lounge. Those blood stains, he said, indicated “that at some point [Bob’s] body was above where the drops fell”.
But he always circled back to Meaghan. The then teenager had given evidence during the trial, but it was brief and a little confused. She stated clearly that she had never been aboard the Four Winds, and had certainly not been on the yacht on the night of January 26, 2009, but she couldn’t say where she was.
Seven years later, McLaren tracked her down. On the night Bob vanished, Meaghan was not at the Annie Kenney Women’s Shelter in Montrose, where she lived, and nobody had been able to say where she was. After a phone conversation with McLaren and several attempts at meeting, Meaghan made a statutory declaration that contradicted her original evidence, signing a document on April 2017 that – if true – threw doubt on the state’s case against Neill-Fraser.
“I was on the Four Winds yacht on the night of Australia Day 2009,” Meaghan’s statement said. “I was there with people I will not name. I am scared. I do not want to give any details except that I was on the yacht. The lady Sue Neill-Fraser was not on the yacht. I have never met her. I do not know her. I just know she is in prison. And I have thought about her every day for the past eight years. Nobody understands my grief. I do not want to say any more. I want to be left alone.”
The statement formed part of the evidence Neill-Fraser’s supporters used to have her case considered for a second appeal. But when Meaghan was called to give evidence in the Supreme Court, she again denied being on the boat and said she was coerced into signing the document.
“I had been made to sign that statement out of fear,” she told the court in October 2017, according to media reports. The woman who brokered the meeting between Meaghan and McLaren has been arrested for perverting the course of justice.
Meaghan was the first witness to appear in support of Neill-Fraser’s application, but she recanted. McLaren, who had unearthed the admission that seemed to cast reasonable doubt on Neill-Fraser’s conviction, was called to appear before the Supreme Court hearing in February this year. He told the court Meaghan was a “fractious and conflicted” witness, according to the media reports. He stood by the statutory declaration that is a cornerstone of Neill-Fraser’s appeal application.
The judge hearing the case, Justice Michael Brett, will now consider everything that has been put before the court by those seeking to free NeillFraser, and those who believe she belongs in prison. No timeframe has been given for when he will make his decision.
After the emotional hearing, NeillFraser’s daughter Sarah Bowles said the family just wanted to uncover the truth. “All we’ve ever been really interested [in] is finding out the truth. Seeking justice both for Bob, and also for mum,” she said.
All anybody can do now is wait.
“If there is no body, the most compelling evidence is required.”
Southern Justice by Colin McLaren, Hachette, $32.99, and Death On The Derwent, Sue Neill-Fraser’s Story by Robin Bowles, Scribe, $32.99, are out now.