Recently, Supporters of Susan Neill-Fraser held two Candlelight Vigils for Sue and her partner of 18 years, Robert (Bob) Chappell.
A vigil, of course, can be a number of things, but one definition in the dictionary is: a time of watchfulness, of keeping awake while others sleep.
While the recent vigils were a time to think of Sue and to honour Bob, the definition of ‘watchfulness, while others sleep’ is the purpose of the Support Group: to draw attention to a very unsafe verdict and consequently, a miscarriage of justice.
If the police and courts got it so right in the beginning, what have they, and the coroner, got to fear from an Inquiry, or a referral back to the Court?
As it stands, the ripples of suffering are not detained with the inmate at the barbed wire fence and the prison gates; they ripple far out into the community, beyond family and close friends to people who have never met Sue but feel the disquiet of her trial and imprisonment on what must be the quintessential circumstantial case to stand side-by-side with Lindy Chamberlain with no body, no eyewitnesses, no weapon and really, no evidence.
I had not planned to be the person speaking at the Candlelight Vigil on Friday, 13 June this year. I had invited a person from the prison who might have told us a little of Sue’s daily routine, her garden projects, her fresh vegetables and her battle with the bandicoots and rabbits!
But the ripples of prison constraints were felt beyond the prison gates: the person I invited was unable to address the vigil. As a last minute change of plan, I decided to speak myself and this is part of that speech.
Many people assume that I am an old friend of Sue’s and therefore, I am naturally biased in her favour. But that is not true. My contact with Sue was to wave to her as I left from a visit with her mother, a friend of mine for over 20 years. Sue’s house was beside the gate of their Bagdad property where she had her Riding School. Occasionally, we would say “Hi” or “Bye” as our paths crossed. My first conversation with Sue was in prison after she was arrested, charged and refused bail. I visited with her for 2 hours. This was the beginning of my friendship with Sue. I never met Bob.
Like the many people who knew Sue, and many who knew Bob as well, I, too, was surprised to hear that her partner was missing on 27 January 2009 and then stunned on the evening news to hear a detective say that she seemed more interested in the property than the person. My antenna went up at this quite judgemental and damning statement; not the usual ‘police speak’. I turned to my husband and said, “The police don’t like Sue. I think they are going to charge her with murder”. And 8 months later they did, and then I felt it was time I visited Sue and got to know her.
I had worked the best part of 20 years in the Justice Department of which 5.5 years I was a welfare officer in Risdon Prison. When I retired, I had not expected to step back on prison property again.
A year after that visit, I sat through the trial in the Supreme Court. All the years I had sat as a probation officer in the Magistrates’ Court, I never felt that an innocent person had been found guilty of a crime. I sometimes thought a magistrate’s sentence was a bit tough, or sometimes rather lenient, but never that he or she got it wrong. I never felt I witnessed an unsafe verdict.
When I attended the trial, I was aware of Sue’s unease about her relationship with the police. She had felt so uneasy, she had gone to the Ombudsman for help, but his advice was to make a written complaint to the Commissioner of Police. Shortly afterwards, she was arrested.
Although her confidence in the police may have been bruised, both of us believed the issues would be sorted out in court. In fact, her words to me were, “Bring it on”.
But now we feel bruised by the courts as well: the criminal, the appeal, the high court and the coroner. We feel that truth is peripheral to the law; all that matters are their own rules, constraints and traditions.
On one day, during the trial, a lady was arrested and brought into court, having failed to appear as a crown witness that morning. Her excuse was that she had written to the prosecutor explaining why she wouldn’t come. Then, when giving evidence, she looked at Sue and said, “The lady in the box is not the lady I saw”.
You see, she had made a statement to the police that she had recognised Mr Chappell on the beach and he was with a lady who was talking to him in a loud voice. When I heard this, I sat on the edge of my seat thinking, ‘Now we are getting to the truth of this matter: the court will say, “Hang on a moment, we seem to have an identification problem”.’ But that didn’t happen; the case rolled on and later, during cross-examination, Sue was accused of berating Bob on the beach for overfilling the dinghy with fuel on the strength of this woman’s statement.
In other words, Australia Day 2009 got off to a bad start and ended with Anger, bang. Maybe once, maybe twice, as the Crown prosecutor surmised. Bob is murdered; if not by a wrench that was mentioned 27 times, then by ‘a screwdriver or something’. But the witness had the wrong lady on the wrong day. Outside court, after giving her evidence, she pointed to Bob’s sister as the lady she saw. But Bob and his sister had been on the beach together the day before, 25th January.
Then, when the DNA of a homeless girl was found on the yacht with other unidentified DNAs, I held my breath and thought, “Now we will get to the truth”, but, once again, it didn’t happen. The girl’s DNA was not seen as relevant in the scale of things. She was not recalled for further questioning when it was learnt that, on that night, she had sought permission from a women’s shelter to have a sleep-over with friends on Mt Nelson, at an address that didn’t exist. So here she was, in the area that night, and was likely to be the same ‘dark-haired girl’ who had watched Sue tie up her dinghy during the afternoon and whom Sue had mentioned in her statement to police at the time.
Then, we sat through any number of confusing descriptions of dinghies seen at various times during Australia Day. Some were unequivocally Sue’s white dinghy with blue trim and Quicksilver written on the side. One witness helped her lift it and the motor out of the sand around 2 o’clock that afternoon. But quite troubling was a description of a shabby “battleship grey” dinghy with a lee cloth “rafted up alongside” the Four Winds at 3.55 pm. This witness was a man from the Australian Taxation Office and was very confident and certain of his facts, as one would expect from a taxation officer. I held my breath again.
Then, strange to say, two months after Sue was arrested, “a mature woman of sound mind” came forward and made a statutory declaration that was presented in court as an anonymous statement and became an exhibit. We learnt that she had seen a large mid-grey tightly-inflated dinghy attached to the stern of the Four Winds by four or five feet of rope. She had even drawn a diagram showing how close she had sailed past it at 5.00 pm that afternoon. My heart missed a beat when this very different dinghy became an issue and two witnesses had seen it. This would surely unravel the case for us. “Now we will surely get to the truth of the matter this time”, I thought. But no. The man from the Australian Taxation Office was dismissed as: simply being ‘cocky and confident’ doesn’t make you the last word on a subject, certainly not when it comes to describing a dinghy. The anonymous statement went into the ether as an anonymous witness could not be examined or cross-examined.
At Sue’s appeal, the Director of Public Prosecutions admitted he had made a mistake about the DNA in a latex glove; it was the DNA of someone else. The problem is, this mistake was cleared up long after the jury had heard the incorrect evidence; they had gone out to consider Sue’s guilt believing her DNA was in a glove used to clean up blood at a crime scene. The was damning evidence and it was wrong.
The jury were also shown a photo of the Quicksilver dinghy that looked awash with blood; but in fact it was the reaction to a preliminary test using luminol solution that may have reacted to the fuel Bob spilt in the dinghy. It did not stand up to a subsequent microscopic test that found it was not blood.
From a lay person’s point of view, without understanding the underpinning of our laws, to sit through this court case has been a life-changing experience for me. No longer can I blindly believe that our justice system is anxious to get to the truth. Anyone found guilty now leaves me thinking, “I hope that’s not another miscarriage of justice”.
Earlier this year, one of our supporters wrote an excellent, but unpublished, letter of support. She wrote “… the Sue Neill-Fraser case illustrates a common public misconception as to how our legal system actually works. The appeals process is very narrowly defined: it is not there to probe the question ‘Did we get this right?’, but rather to confirm ‘Was correct legal process followed?’ There is no further judicial mechanism for admitting new evidence. It all depends on what was presented at the original trial…
“…The issue here is not about ‘believing in’ Sue Neill-Fraser’s guilt or innocence. The question that needs to be asked is whether she got a fair trial. Those who perceive this as a devastating miscarriage of justice will not be silent on the issue. Nor should they be.”
On Wednesday 10 June, The Mercury published a short letter under my name. But the last four paragraphs, asking for law reform that would see a Criminal Case Review Commission, or its equivalent, established, did not get a run. My last and unprintable paragraph read:
”Without a mechanism to surmount the stumbling-blocks, Truth is a wistful hope and not a reality. What really did happen to Bob Chappell? There is too much doubt surrounding this case, hence our plea: Inquiry Please.”
Those who attended the recent lecture at the university by Stuart Tipple, Lindy Chamberlain’s lawyer, heard that he met with similar legal barriers in Lindy’s case. At the same time, he declared that it all comes down, in the end, to ‘people power’. At the Candlelight Vigil, the people who rallied were challenged that ‘people power’ is us: you and me. And it starts NOW.
As the year wears on and the presentation of the Petition becomes closer, so will our rallies increase. Come to these rallies, swell the numbers for our cause, bring your family, friends and neighbours, so that the politicians and the media will have to sit up and notice us. We will not be silenced. And we will not go away.
The Candlelight Vigil concluded with a haunting Lament played on the bagpipes: Flowers of the Forest to honour Bob Chappell and Amazing Grace for Sue.
For those people who say, “We think she is guilty: we read the judge’s summing up at her trial and the decision of the Court of Appeal as well as the reasons special leave was not granted for an appeal to the High Court”, these are some of the reasons why her supporters believe her trial was unfair, the verdict unsafe, and will fight on.
• Court of Criminal Appeals decision. Read for yourself, here
