PART 6
Splatters of blood, missing carpet tiles on a $200,000 yacht and what really happened to Bob Chappell
Andrew Rule
From: Sunday Herald Sun
March 03, 2013 12:00AM
IT'S not that hard to kill a little, frail man in his 60s. Anyone with a weapon and the rage or ruthlessness to use it can take a life in the time it takes to read this sentence.
But scuttling an ocean-going yacht is harder. It takes inside knowledge to know where "sea
" are - and to cut the toilet outlet pipe to leak water into the hull.
Even then, it takes time to sink a 16m craft. Up to 12 hours, according to the naval expert Tasmanian police asked to inspect the ketch Four Winds when its new owner vanished late on Australia Day four years ago.
That's why it had not actually sunk by the time dawn broke over Hobart's Royal Yacht Club the next day, which must have dismayed the would-be saboteur.
If Bob Chappell was murdered on board - and police, a jury and appeal judges say he was - surely it was his killer who tried to scuttle the yacht, too.
Sinking it must have seemed a quick way to trash a murder scene so forensic sleuths would have trouble finding clues.
Even if a sunken yacht were found quickly, it would take hours to salvage and pump out, destroying evidence in the process.
But who knew a yacht would take so long to sink? At daybreak on January 27, 2009, Chappell's $203,000 ketch was listing, but still far enough above the waterline for curious police to board it.
At first, it was a missing person case. It seemed possible Chappell had fallen overboard or staged his own disappearance after trying to scuttle the yacht. But, by the hour, it seemed more likely someone else was involved.
By day three, the words "foul play" crept into news updates about a mystery that had caught Tasmania's imagination.
Police did not reveal every sinister detail, but there were plenty. Such as blood spattered in the cabin, implying a blunt weapon attack.
Police thought it unlikely he had committed suicide or faked his disappearance. The spattered blood all but ruled out accidental drowning
And the fact five carpet tiles and a fire extinguisher were missing. When the yacht's dinghy was found, forensic tests showed blood in it.
The police suspected the carpet tiles had been ditched because they were bloodstained, and that the fire extinguisher would be an obvious choice to weigh down a body.
They learned the sea
had been modified in a way few people knew.
It looked as if Bob Chappell was not just missing, but murdered.
The respected chief radiation physicist at Royal Hobart Hospital seemed unlikely to be involved in anything criminal.
Police also thought it unlikely he had committed suicide or faked his disappearance. The spattered blood all but ruled out accidental drowning.
The first people investigators talk to when someone disappears is the last to see them alive, then their nearest and dearest: spouses, lovers, siblings and offspring. The homicide handbook says to eliminate them in order.
Police had two watertight reasons to talk to Chappell's de facto wife. She was not only his bed partner, but last to see him alive.
Sue Neill-Fraser was a textbook suspect - with pearls and hyphen.
Midsomer Murders had come to Tassie.
SUSAN Blyth Neill-Fraser gave the impression she had money to match her social position as a descendent of an old pioneer family. An impression strong enough for some to assert she would not have a financial motive for murder.
But it seemed that where Bob Chappell's charming partner of 20 years was concerned, the truth was elusive. Within days, police glimpsed another side to the charming woman who could not get her story straight.
The first policeman to talk to her the day after Chappell vanished saw she had her wrist strapped and a Band-Aid on her thumb.
The officer did not think about this until later, when he saw a photograph of her taken at lunch the day before - and realised there was no sign of Band-Aid or bandage. She must have hurt herself the night Chappell disappeared.
There were other odd things. A red padded jacket was found on the Sandy Bay waterfront near the yacht mooring. Neill-Fraser's adult daughters identified it as their mother's - but she denied it.
After forensics proved the jacket was hers, she admitted it.
The police installed listening devices and spoke regularly to Neill-Fraser while divers searched the River Derwent in vain, looking for a body.
Whereas other family members spoke of the missing Chappell in the present tense, his partner used the past tense, as if he was dead.
She also searched the internet in the first days, wanting to know how long before a missing person could legally be declared dead.
Some thought this a little calculating for a distraught woman hoping her man might turn up. It suggested she was keener on money - and more sure of his death - than she let on.
The police soon found what she already knew: that Chappell's will had been changed in her favour. She lied about knowing that, too.
When detectives took her onto the yacht, they told her not to touch the winch handle and other surfaces. She promptly disobeyed, effectively sabotaging forensic tests.
Police deduced that if Chappell had died in the cabin, a lone killer would have used the winch to haul the body up the companionway to drop in the dinghy and dispose of it.
Asked the next day about the previous afternoon, when Chappell had vanished, Neill-Fraser said she had browsed a Bunnings store for hours but had not bought anything.
She was definite about the Bunnings "alibi" then, but later retreated from it after learning she could not have been there for "hours" because the store had closed early - and she had not appeared on security film.
So what was she really doing that afternoon - and, vitally, that evening?
She told police she had stayed home all night after a telephone call that ended about 10.30pm. But telephone records showed that she had dialled the *10# "callback" service at 3.08am to see if anyone had called.
It meant she had been out until 3am - and lied about it.
APART from revenge, the classic murder motives are sex and money. Sometimes both.
No one thought Bob Chappell, the mild-mannered, ageing medical boffin, had been killed in a fit of jealousy.
Financial motives seemed more likely - although evidence would be put that Neill-Fraser, 10 years younger than Chappell, also had tired of his "stinginess" and craved adventure. She told three men she was leaving him.
Neill-Fraser had been unlucky in love. Her first husband, Brett Meeker, was arty, American-born - and seven years younger. He was also a farrier.
Jurors had to decide if the witness was a villain keen to please the police - or the sort of villain a cold-blooded woman might approach to set up a death in the family
Love bloomed in the early 1980s when he came to her riding school at Bagdad, north of Hobart, to shoe horses. Her mother, Helen Neill-Fraser, opposed the match.
The couple had two daughters, Sarah and Emma, before parting. Neill-Fraser took up with a man different in all ways.
Bob Chappell was English-born and Melbourne-educated, a longtime radiologist at Hobart's Holman cancer clinic. He was dedicated to his work and well paid. His first wife, mother of his three grown children, had left.
Susan was "horsey" and outdoorsy. Her main accomplishment had been taking equestrian courses in Britain before returning to Tasmania.
She was the elder of two children of Tasmanian-born Helen Hayes, who had married a Scottish businessman in the 1950s. Helen brought Susan and her brother Patrick back to Tasmania after divorcing their father in Edinburgh about 1960.
Helen was briefly a "matron" at Geelong Grammar, but has lived for decades in the faded gentility of her waterfront house overlooking Sandy Bay.
The family has been around almost as long as Hobart has. Their ancestor Thomas Hayes' gravestone at St David's Cathedral states he was one of the first free settlers to arrive, in 1804.
Generations of Hayes avoided what used to be called the "convict taint". But it caught up with them in late 2009.
UNLIKE other states, Tasmania had never used circumstantial evidence to convict a murderer. That was no comfort to the prime suspect when she was arrested seven months after Bob Chappell's disappearance.
By then she had tangled herself in a web of contradictory stories that had one thing in common, a prosecutor later said: they showed "consciousness of guilt".
The head of the investigation, Inspector Peter Powell, says the case was like any other missing persons inquiry for six weeks - until Neill-Fraser admitted lying about her movements the night Chappell died.
On March 4, 2009, Neill-Fraser still insisted she had not left the house on the night. But five days later, she told her sister-in-law by telephone that she had lied. Police were recording the conversation.
Days later, she admitted to a reporter she had gone to the waterfront that night. One reason she had to change her story was the police had security film of a car identical to hers passing a local bank after midnight, when she had claimed she was in bed.
It would be six months before she was arrested, but from the moment she admitted lying, her story crumbled.
A three-week trial began in October 2010. A damaging piece of evidence came from a "colourful" identity - the partner of a former friend - who swore Neill-Fraser once had discussed getting rid of her brother, Patrick, by pushing him from a boat so she could inherit all her mother's estate.
Jurors had to decide if the witness was a villain keen to please the police - or the sort of villain a cold-blooded woman might approach to set up a death in the family.
The jury returned a guilty verdict. But the fact it took 18 hours to reach suggested the defence had stirred up enough doubt to fuel a campaign by friends and family of the woman sentenced to 26 years, since reduced to 23.
Neill-Fraser's daughters Sarah Bowles and Emma Mills - attractive and articulate young women - are the most public faces of a campaign that has created a conga line of supporters.
They range from her mother's social circle to civil libertarians and activists who insist Neill-Fraser is on the list of wrongly jailed innocents.
Among lawyers agitating for a coronial inquest so that "new evidence" can be aired are those retained by Neill-Fraser and her long-suffering mother.
One of them is Barbara Etter, a former Western Australian assistant police commissioner who also happens to be suing the Tasmanian Government after being ditched as head of its Corruption Integrity Commission.
Two lawyers with political ambitions - Greg Barns and Madeleine Ogilvie - lead the push for an inquest they hope will produce material for a petition of mercy.
Neill-Fraser's supporters insist she is innocent, repeating her description of herself as Tasmania's "Lindy Chamberlain".
The lawyers are less shrill. At best, they think there was just enough doubt to scrape in a "not guilty" verdict.
Meanwhile, the best-dressed woman in Risdon Prison is keeping up standards. "She looks as if she's going to the golf club, not working in a jail vegetable garden," a lawyer says.
Bob Chappell's children maintain a dignified silence. His son, Tim, said last week the evidence and the verdict spoke for themselves.
