Death on the Derwent: Sue Neill-Fraser’s story

By Robin Bowles

Don't fool yourself that the innocent never go to jail.

When Bob Chappell disappeared from his yacht, moored in the Derwent Estuary near the Royal Yacht Club of Tasmania's marina, on the night of 26 January 2009, he left behind his pipe and tobacco — something that his partner of 18 years, Sue Neill-Fraser, knew he would never willingly do. What she didn't know was that despite no body, no weapon, no cause of death, and no witnesses, she would soon become the only suspect in Chappell’s disappearance.

In their haste to wrap up the case, the police charged Neill-Fraser with murder. In her eagerness to assist police, she virtually talked her way into their hands. And after a lengthy trial that resulted in a guilty verdict, the judge delivered Neill-Fraser a crushing 26-year sentence.

But was the verdict unsafe? Many of Australia’s leading legal minds think so, and other reasonable hypotheses have been mooted about what might have happened on the Derwent that night. The Tasmanian government has changed its laws to give Neill-Fraser one last crack at proving her innocence, because that is what it's come to now — proving her innocence.

The result of years of investigation, and based on extensive interviews with all the key players — including Sue Neill-Fraser and her family, local underworld figures, and legal luminaries — Death on the Derwent is a riveting story of justice not served.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scribe Publications
• Release date: Feb 19, 2019
• ISBN: 9781925693669

Robin Bowles

In 1996 Robin read a newspaper report about the alleged suicide of Victorian country housewife Jennifer Tanner. Guessing there might be a book in the 'story behind the news', she closed her PR business for a year and wrote a best seller, Blind Justice, now in its eighth reprint. She has written a bestseller almost every year since. During her career as an investigative writer she also obtained a private investigator's licence. Some of the cases she was involved in inspired her novels, The Curse of the Golden Yo-Yo and Mystery of the Missing Masterpiece. Widely recognised as Australia's foremost true crime writer, Robin is also a national convenor of Sisters in Crime Australia. 'Robin Bowles relentless investigation, including over 50 hours spent interviewing Bradley Murdoch, reveals not only the complexities of a case investigated over thousands of kilometres, but realities of people and places which are almost alien to those of us who hug the green shores around the dead centre and populate that landscape with our deepest fears and worst imaginings,' Katrina Beard presenting the Davitt Award for true crime to Dead Centre, 2006.

Book preview

DEATH ON THE DERWENT

In 1996, Robin Bowles read a newspaper report about the alleged suicide of Victorian country housewife Jennifer Tanner. Guessing there might be a book in the ‘story behind the news’, she closed her PR consultancy for a year and wrote her first book, Blind Justice. She’s written a bestseller almost every year since, including the definitive books on the Jaidyn Leskie murder, Justice Denied, and on the disappearance and alleged murder of British tourist Peter Falconio, Dead Centre. She has covered the controversial murder of interior designer Stuart Rattle, and the equally controversial coroner’s finding regarding the death of Phoebe Handsjuk.

During her 20 years as an investigative writer, she also obtained a university diploma to qualify her as a private inquiry agent. She was a national convenor of Sisters in Crime Australia for ten years, and is now a proud ‘Life Member’. Robin lives in Melbourne with her husband, Clive, and her detective dog, Miss Deva.

Scribe Publications

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Published by Scribe 2019

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

Copyright © 2019 F.U.N. & K.Y. P/L

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

9781925713176 (paperback edition)

9781925693669 (e-book)

A CiP entry for this title is available from the National Library of Australia.

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scribepublications.co.uk

This book is for all those dedicated people all over the world who never give in and never give up in the never-ending fight for truth and justice — in particular, those committed to achieving justice for Sue Neill-Fraser.

I hope this book discloses the truth,

and that justice will be done.

CONTENTS

Introduction

PART ONE. THE DISAPPEARANCE

Prologue

1 Happy families

2 Man overboard

3 The missing wrench

4 Innocent or the perfect crime?

5 Secrets and lies

PART TWO. ‘TRIAL BY JURY’

6 Opening gambits

7 Building the case

8 Setting the scene

9 ‘The whole truth’

10 More suspicious circumstances

11 Putting the boot in

12 The verdict

13 Fighting for freedom

14 The filmmaker, the politicians, the lawyers, and the journos

15 The filmmaker, the investigator, and the police

PART THREE. THE UNRAVELLING

16 ‘s402A Criminal Code of Tasmania’

17 Vagabonds and petty crooks

18 Compelling new evidence

19 Conflicting evidence

20 Everyone wants ‘justice’

21 An inconvenient woman

22 Boarding the Four Winds

23 Billy**

24 Here we go again

25 Trying to keep up

26 More grist to the media mill

27 Karen

28 Further and better particulars

29 On the home stretch

30 McLaren

31 Tying up the loose ends

Acknowledgements

Cast of Main Characters

INTRODUCTION

The law will never make men free;

it is men who have got to make the law free.

HENRI THOREAU

For readers who do not know of me, I have been writing in the true-crime genre for the past 20 years. I have interviewed dozens of accused and thousands of people associated with them. I have also been privileged to encounter members of a growing band of individuals and institutions who act tirelessly, in our country and overseas, to prevent injustice and miscarriage of justice. Theodore Roosevelt said, ‘Justice consists not in being neutral between right and wrong, but in finding the right and upholding it, wherever found, against the wrong.’ There are now many people around the world acting upon this exhortation, and some of the leaders live in Australia.

We all like to think that if we have an altercation with the law, deserved or not, we will receive justice. But what is justice? What is the justice system? It is just a system. And like other systems, it can malfunction. Especially when you throw in passion, maybe murder, egos, tradition, liars, cheats, and thieves — all are part of the system.

The law is a series of rules that each human society lives by. The rules can differ from one culture to the next, but many of them overlap. If we ‘break’ these rules, the legal system (not the justice system) intervenes. The outcome is not always perceived as ‘just’. Sometimes it is plain wrong. But a lot of people have skin in the game from the commission of a crime to the delivery of a verdict. Lots of knots are tied along the way and sometimes those ‘knots’ are almost impossible to undo if a mistake has been made. At times, the legal system mistakenly assimilates justice to expediency.

I first became interested in the case of Sue Neill-Fraser in early 2015. I am very familiar with Tasmania, as I lived there from 1977 to 1987, working first as a nurse and then running a PR business. My parents lived there, and my kids and grandkids still live there, so I’m a regular visitor. As a nurse and later a PR professional, I learnt a lot about the unique way Tasmania is run — who’s who in the zoo.

Sometime in 2015, after all of Sue’s appeals were done, the mother of her daughter’s husband rang me in Melbourne, where I live. She was a reader of my books and wanted me to write something, to ‘help’ Sue. While I was thinking about it (I wasn’t sure anything I could write would change anything), during one of my visits to Tasmania, my son told me about the same case, and I realised that Bob Chappell, who was married to Yvonne long before he met Sue, had lived next door to my widowed mother for several years. Indeed, Bob had saved her life. Coming home at lunch time to collect some items while Yvonne was away with the kids on school holidays (he and Yvonne were separating), he found my 78-year-old mother on the ground in her back yard, having fallen over the day before and spent the cold night in the open with a badly fractured leg. She was already in shock when he found her, and he called the ambulance, contacted me at the hospital where Bob and I both worked, and generally saved the day. My mother was five months in hospital after that, so it had been touch and go. Just one of many coincidences you’ll find in this story. In a strange way, I felt I owed something to Bob to dig a bit deeper into the circumstances of his death.

As I looked into Sue’s case more closely, I found it wasn’t just her family who were concerned she’d been wrongly convicted: so was half of Hobart. Although she’d been previously unknown to most of them, the verdict had polarised the Tasmanian community. Many legal and justice campaigners around Australia were also very disturbed by how she’d ended up being sentenced, in a circumstantial case, to 23 years in prison. It was the first murder conviction in Tasmanian legal history with no body, and one of very few in the history of Australia. She continued to proclaim her innocence.

This story is told in three parts. The first part is about the disappearance of Bob Chappell — the strangeness and mystery of it all. The second part summarises the way the case was dealt with by the legal system. The third part, and this is when it becomes really interesting, tells of the way the ongoing challenging of the legal system by concerned people was dealt with by others, who had skin in the game. In my 20 years of meeting and mixing with law-makers and law breakers, I’ve never experienced anything like it. In many ways, as someone who knows Tasmania and its culture and customs, its politics and its social setup very well, I was uniquely placed to write this book. And there was that link with Bob. I don’t want to spoil the story, so I won’t go into more detail yet.

Sue Neill-Fraser was convicted on circumstantial … I was going to write ‘evidence’, but actually, ‘stories’ is more accurate. I have no opinion I will publish as to whether Sue did or did not kill Bob Chappell, but I do not think she was justly convicted. I feel really sorry for members of the jury, copping so much criticism. They did exactly the right thing. It was the process that was flawed.

Here is a definition of circumstantial conviction, which has stood the test of time since 1875. (Just shows you how slow the law is to change.) Often quoted as a classic statement on the position, the definition comes from Lord Cairns in Re Belhaven and Stenton Peerage (1875) 1 App Cas 278 at 279:

... in dealing with circumstantial evidence, we have to consider the weight which is to be given to the united force of all the circumstances put together. You may have a ray of light so feeble that by itself it will do little to elucidate a dark corner. But on the other hand, you may have a number of rays, each of them insufficient, but all converging and brought to bear upon the same point, and, when united, producing a body of illumination which will clear away the darkness which you are endeavouring to dispel.

Circumstantial evidence is evidence of a basic fact or facts, from which the jury is asked to infer a further fact or facts.

The commission of a crime may be proved beyond reasonable doubt by circumstantial evidence, provided that:

(a) all the facts and circumstances from which the conclusion of guilt is drawn must be established to the satisfaction of the jury; and

(b) the jury must be satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that the conclusion of guilt is the only rational conclusion which is open on the whole of the evidence that the jury accepts. (If there is open, on the whole of the evidence that the jury accepts, any rational hypothesis consistent with innocence, the accused must be found not guilty.)

A conclusion of guilt may be drawn from a combination of facts and circumstances, none of which would alone be strong enough to support that conclusion.

You’ll find further reading references at the end of the book. I’d be interested, when you’ve read the book, to hear whether you think Sue’s case was decided correctly. If she gets a new appeal, that court may decide otherwise.

Robin Bowles

Melbourne

November 2018

www.robinbowles.com.au

[e-mail]

PART ONE

THE DISAPPEARANCE

The wilder and more ridiculous something is,

the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be.

ISAAC ASIMOV

PROLOGUE

Between 11.30pm and midnight on 26 January 2009, the summer night was balmy, but dark. A moderate south-east wind was blowing, and the cloud cover was low. To anyone looking seawards from Hobart’s Royal Yacht Club, the view was black. Unlit by starlight, or the moon, which did not rise until 4.25am, yachts at their moorings, or any other activity on the water beyond the marina, would have been almost impossible to see clearly, if at all.

However, a key witness in Hobart’s most puzzling murder inquiry told police that on that night he ‘heard an outboard motor and saw an inflatable dinghy with a single person on board [heading out to a mooring]. I thought the person had the outline of a female. I had the feeling this person was a female. I cannot be definite’.

Was this person motoring out into the darkness intent on murder? Was the person heading towards the 35-metre ketch Four Winds, or was the witness mistaken? Why was the witness sitting in his car on a deserted seafront at midnight on Australia Day? Did anyone else see that dinghy? Was anyone else there?

These are some of the many questions raised by one of Tasmania’s most baffling and unsatisfactory murder inquiries — the disappearance of Bob Chappell on the night of Australia Day 2009 and the conviction for murder of Sue Neill-Fraser, his partner of 18 years, on 15 October 2010.

The facts and rumours surrounding the event have polarised the close-knit Hobart community. Some call the story ‘the Bob Chappell murder’. To others, it is ‘that dodgy disappearance’. Others still call the story a ‘travesty of justice’. Whatever position one adopts, there are some incontrovertible facts.

There is no body. No cause of death. No murder weapon. No witnesses. No motive. No confession. NO EVIDENCE.

1

HAPPY FAMILIES

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

TOLSTOY

Bob Chappell has not been seen or heard of since he disappeared in January 2009, and it is generally accepted that he met with foul play and is dead. He was a quiet man, physically slight, but strong in the brains department.

Bob had an air of ‘Alby Mangels’ about him — a bit like the caricature of the ‘mad scientist’: small, stooped, lots of brown, fuzzy hair and sparse beard, his ever-present pipe clenched in his teeth, or hand, or both. Anyone less likely to be murdered was hard to imagine. Bob was working as a physicist in the oncology department at the Royal Hobart Hospital, although approaching retirement, when he disappeared. Other than having a lot of grey hair instead of brown, his appearance hadn’t changed much at all over the years.

After his first marriage ended, his three kids (a son and two daughters) lived with Yvonne, and Bob lived alone, most of the time, until he met divorcee Sue Neill-Fraser in the early 1990s. Bob’s by then adult children were all happy that Bob had met someone younger, attractive, and outgoing, and with her own financial means.

Sue was born in 1954 in Scotland to Helen (formerly Hayes) and Patrick Neill-Fraser, who ran the oldest printing company in Scotland. Helen’s family has been socially prominent in Tasmania since the early settlement of Hobart. Thomas Hayes’s 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’, and were always considered part of the Establishment, which is very active and powerful in Tasmania. (But more on that later!)

When Sue was six, her parents divorced, and Helen brought her two children, Sue and younger brother, Patrick, to settle back in Tasmania. Sue recalls that ‘it must have been an uneasy social environment in Tasmania in the 50s and 60s, and probably quite difficult for Mum on her own with two young children’. The children, however, were unaware of any Establishment issues and Sue says she ‘had a blessed childhood, both in Scotland, collecting stray and injured animals in my parents’ large wooded garden and also in Tasmania, where I wasn’t subjected to the restrictions that would have been imposed in Scotland, such as being sent off to boarding school at an early age.’

They became well known and well respected in the horsey set of country Tassie: breeding, training, and riding — almost anything to do with the horse business. When Sue finished school ‘with an unremarkable scholastic record — I had to work like hell’— her mother took them all back to England, so that Sue could further her career working with horses.

Sue continued on to Ireland, to attend Burton Hall in Dublin, one of the pinnacles of horsey achievements. ‘I spent an amazing year, riding with a group of international students with expert tuition, in preparation for entry into the British Horse Society [BHS] Instructors’ Course,’ Sue told me. ‘At weekends there were either trips to the Leopardstown Racetrack or the Curragh [Ireland’s most important Thoroughbred racecourse], where we’d watch Ireland’s finest bloodstock in the Seller’s Plates and argue which horse we would choose to buy — if we only could.’

Sue passed her BHS exams and returned to Tasmania, with her mother. They bought a property, Moat House, at Bagdad, about 45 minutes north of Hobart, and established a riding school. In 1981, Sue married Brett Meeker, who was younger than she was and a farrier — nothing like keeping the work in the family! It was not a long marriage, but they did have two daughters, Emma and Sarah. Sue and Brett stayed friends after they divorced, and Brett is on record as saying, ‘Sue was an extremely loving mother who worked hard in order to give our daughters the best opportunity in life — the kids are a credit to her, she is an exceptional mother.’ Her elder daughter, Emma Meeker, comments, ‘Mum was a devoted mother, and Sarah and I are equally devoted to her.’

As Sue was brought up around horses, she can ride, train and — it has been alleged, if compassion is required — shoot horses with great skill.

In fact, like many of the rumours surrounding Sue Neill-Fraser, this was untrue. It was not she who shot the horses if necessary, but either her father-in-law, Art Meeker, who was an equine vet, or her husband, Brett, who came to Sue’s rescue when a horse needed putting down. Sue is a good enough shot to kill rabbits and kangaroos, though.

Sue is sharp and smart. She has dark, intense eyes and can talk non-stop. It’s both an asset and a drawback, as she was to discover later, to her peril.

During my first visit to Sue in jail in 2014, she told me she was introduced to Bob in 1989. ‘We shared many similar interests — books, travel, theatre, sailing on my 28-foot yacht [which she had bought with Brett Meeker, using money borrowed from her mother] with friends and their children, and group camping trips to the Freycinet Peninsula on the east coast. Bob would also take the girls fishing in his tinnie and taught them how to catch, bone, and cook flathead over a campfire.’

At first impression, Sue and Bob made an odd couple. He was fairly taciturn, apparently introverted and wrapped up in his work; and Sue, by now divorced, was an organiser, entertainer, and extrovert. But despite the apparent mismatch, they began to hold dinner parties at Bob’s Allison Street, West Hobart home, and spend weekends away with family and friends at the country property in Bagdad.

According to Bob’s two older children from his former marriage, he seemed to enjoy the social aspect of his relationship with Sue. Sue’s children, Emma and Sarah, were about eight and six when they all became a family in the Allison Street house in about 1991. Sarah says, ‘In the beginning of Mum and Bob’s relationship, he would come and stay at the farm with us, and it wasn’t until the relationship became truly solid that we moved in with him.’

Sue told me, ‘My reasons for moving in with Bob were that he had to travel every day to Royal Hobart Hospital for work. He’d had to drive up to the farm previously and did not enjoy driving. We both felt it was a good idea, as we had been virtually living together anyway for over 12 months. We were both more mature, and a bit cautious, as it was a second major relationship for both of us.’

Both Sarah and her mother scoff at claims later made by detractors that Sue moved in with Bob to ensure that Sarah and Emma went to better schools.

Although Bob and Sue never married, Bob fulfilled his role as a loving if eccentric father figure until his death. Bob’s relationship with his own children was not close (sometimes years would pass before he saw or contacted his now adult kids, even though Hobart is a small city), but the offspring from the blended families got on pretty well when they did get together. Bob’s children put that down to Sue, who was nearly always the one who phoned them and asked them to family functions.

Also frequently on the guest list were Maria Hanson, one of Sue’s closest friends, and Phillip Triffitt, who, for several years, since he was 19 years old, had done odd jobs around the Bagdad property.

Sue originally began socialising with Triffitt through Maria Hanson, when Maria and Triffitt began a relationship. After they became a couple, they often visited Sue and Bob in Hobart as well, staying several days at a time, and if other house-guests were present, they were happy to sleep on a mattress on the floor.

When her daughters were still at school, Sue formed a property development company, Geosplit, with an old friend, Robert Martyn. Triffitt, who had a background with machinery and on the land, was often employed to do work on their Brighton sub-division. The company dissolved when all the lots were sold.

‘Phillip was very competent with practical tasks and could make do if the right equipment wasn’t available,’ Sue told me. ‘He was very interested in firearms. He loved talking about guns, but we thought that with him being from Ouse [which is a long way from anywhere in Tasmania], that was par for the course.’

The years passed with no more than the usual family spats: about Sue’s desire for lots of fun; Bob’s stubbornness and drinking a bit more than some thought he should; various other domestic issues, and the odd exasperated line from Sue, ‘That’s it! I’m leaving! I’ve had enough.’ But we all say that from time to time, and she never left.

Sue and Maria drifted apart a bit, as you do in some friendships. Sue felt Triffitt was having a negative effect on ‘fun-loving Maria from the riding school days’ and, as a couple, Sue and Bob were beginning to widen their circle of joint friends. Triffitt seemed to be obsessed with ‘how many guns he could stockpile, or the intricacies of rural siege fantasies,’ Sue told me, ‘and we began to distance ourselves when we realised Maria was encouraging Triffitt to threaten neighbours who had displeased her.’

In 1997, about twelve years before Bob disappeared, Triffitt confided in Sue about what Sue describes as ‘a fairly serious offence’. She believed he immediately regretted telling her and thought she might go to the police. Soon afterwards, Maria told Sue that ‘Phillip is very vengeful and could easily hide on your property with a gun. You should be worried about Emma and Sarah if you go to the police.’ Sarah says that the friendship ended when Bob and her mother began to see Triffitt as a threat. She was at Collegiate from 1996 to mid-1998, and she remembers the rift occurred during that time, as Sue would sometimes drive the sisters to school if she saw the threat as being heightened. ‘We were told to stay away from Phillip if he came near us.’

Bob and Sue became anxious about the level of threat they might face if Triffitt got nasty, and they decided to document all the illegal activities they knew about, as well as the threats made to their family, and typed up a letter outlining everything, saying if they were ever harmed, or if they disappeared, the police would know where to start looking. Sue mentioned this letter to Maria’s daughter, knowing it would get back to Maria. Bob and Sue put it away as insurance, and got on with their relationship. They heard that malicious rumours were being spread about Sue, with a view to discrediting her character, but generally ignored them. However, in April 2001, the rumours were becoming more vicious, including the inference that Sue had ‘been involved’ with a missing-person case years before — in particular, that Sue had something to do with the death of Dennis O’Day Junior.

Sue had told me about this incident on my first visit to her in jail. I subsequently read various statements from Triffitt and Hanson, made to the police. The young man concerned, Dennis James O’Day had been seeing one of the girls who worked for Sue on the Bagdad property. He would do the 40-minute drive from Hobart from time to time, hoping to spend time with her if she wasn’t busy. On 23 August 1980, he came by, stayed a short while, and then, when the girl told him she didn’t want to see him again, left in his car. Sue saw him arrive, waved him goodbye when he left, and thought no more of it, until media reports had him missing, believed killed. She gave a statement to the police. It transpired at the inquest into O’Day’s death in 2015, long after Sue was jailed, that there was not the slightest suggestion that Sue could have been involved in his death, and that ‘Dennis made two phone calls, one to his mother in which he told her he loved her, and the other to his father in which he told him he could stick his job,’ the Coroner said in his findings.

‘Around 10.30pm on August 23 1980, [hours after he’d left Bagdad] a person likely to be Mr O’Day was seen near his Mini Minor on the Lower Domain Road and by another witness nearby around midnight.’ The Coroner said he was satisfied that on the balance of probabilities Mr O’Day was dead, having taken his own life while distressed at the end of his relationship.

The young man was never found, despite his father, Dennis O’Day, being one of Tasmania’s leading private investigators. After Dennis junior disappeared, Sue consulted Dennis senior about the rumours being spread by Hanson and Triffitt, including the possibility of her role in the disappearance. He was still affected by his son’s disappearance and didn’t really want to believe, with no body and no cause of death, that he was dead.

Mr O’Day senior called on Sue about a week after her visit to him. He said he’d spoken to Maria, and told her she’d be in trouble if she persisted spreading dirt. He said that, through tears, she’d admitted that she’d ‘made it up’, and his view was that she’d had a fright and they’d have no more trouble from her. He also met with the Bellerive police, who told him they’d had a very similar conversation with Maria, and everyone was now convinced that she’d desist, having been made aware of the serious consequences if she did not.

In 2004, Bob and Sue had a big cleanout prior to going on an extended camping trip, and they came across their ‘insurance’ letter. Believing the threat was no longer an issue, they threw it out — ‘Something I was to bitterly regret doing,’ Sue told me during my visit.

In the year 2006–07, both of Sue’s daughters married: Emma to Jeremy and Sarah to Mark. ‘Bob was simply amazing,’ Sue recalls. ‘He worked tirelessly behind the scenes and made some excellent speeches.’

Also in 2006, as Bob’s retirement approached, the couple decided to buy an ocean-going yacht to revamp and, after Bob retired, to sail around the seas beyond the Australian mainland, in a sort of floating shack. Sue and Bob both loved sailing: Sue had previously owned a yacht, and Bob had owned a little tinnie from time to time. They both thought that once the mainstay of Bob’s job was removed, he’d find his days difficult to fill. In fact, even though he was semi-retired, he was part-way through the commissioning of a new machine used in cancer treatment at the hospital, and often decided, after saying in the morning he was staying home, to go to work after all. Sue was a dedicated walker, and they usually walked together from Allison Street to the hospital, and Sue then walked home. This was about a three-kilometre round trip, downhill on the way and steeply uphill coming home. She also walked almost daily from West Hobart to Marieville Esplanade, Sandy Bay and back, about four kilometres each way, also uphill on the way home — a hill, in my recollection, not for the faint-hearted. Sue used her long walks as treatment for a faulty vein in her right leg. If she didn’t walk, even with compression bandages, her leg would swell. Sarah recalls that Sue regularly called her, asking if she’d like to join her for a walk. In those days, Sue was trim and fit.

Once the decision was made to purchase a ‘floating shack’, Bob and Sue looked for nearly two years. Around August 2008, they went to Scarborough in Queensland and purchased a 35-metre ketch, called Four Winds. Sue thought it would be ideal for their sea cruising, although perhaps she did not have enough experience with big boats to realise that two inexperienced sailors might find it difficult to take the yacht to sea — although it later emerged that the previous owners had sailed it as a couple. The experts who sailed the yacht down from Queensland for Bob and Sue were not impressed with either of the new owners as candidates for blue-water sailing. They later told the police that the boat would need four experienced sailors to successfully take it to sea — even to sail it round the bay.

Sarah says, ‘That’s madness — you can motor in the bay easily with two! Same principles apply as with a smaller boat — drop sail and motor. Mum and Bob were looking to have additional winches installed, so that it was safer for two. But also, they had many discussions about hiring professionals to assist on long voyages. All of us in the family have some experience too (albeit limited!) I have noted also that in Mum’s email correspondence with Jeff Rowe, (the yacht’s vendor) she explicitly states that they do want to do blue water voyages and want to make sure the boat is equipped to do so. Mum also completed a TAFE course on yachting radio communications prior to purchasing the yacht — she and Bob studied together.’

The ketch was in pretty ordinary condition and cost them $203,000. After the purchase though, Bob was still worth more than $1m, with his house and superannuation, and Sue had about $80,000 in the bank and approximately 200 acres at Bagdad in her name. Sue’s elderly, widowed mother Helen was also quite wealthy — worth over $2 million, with her Sandy Bay house, land at Old Beach, and shares and cash totalling approximately $400,000. Evidence was later given to police that Sue had said she’d have to borrow money from her mother to pay for her share of the boat; another version had her saying she’d have to borrow money if she wanted to buy out Bob’s share.

Before Bob and Sue bought it, the Four Winds had been on the market for some time, and it needed electrical and plumbing works done prior to departing from Queensland. Part of the plumbing entailed putting in new pipes and closing off unused valves in the head (toilet). The work done on this particular bit of plumbing was to become very important in the months to follow. Other work done by electricians required some of the floor in the saloon area to be unscrewed to get at the cavity beneath. As the screws were fiddly to get in and out, the workmen left them in a jar on the chart table and simply repositioned the floorboards into the grooves between the pieces they’d removed.

Sue and Bob became convinced that a break-in had occurred while this contractor work was going on, and they made several complaints about the lack of security at the Queensland marina, expressing concerns about who had keys.

One of the contractors, electrician James McKinnon, told police on 12 February 2009 (after Bob’s disappearance) that during the 8–10-week repair process on Four Winds before she sailed south, ‘I had cause to call Sue Fraser, [who was still in Hobart] in relation to the boat being illegally entered. I had called the previous owner Jeff Rowe first to confirm if the boat had been entered by anyone. I noticed that ropes were tied differently [to the way I tied them] and I asked Jeff Rowe who else had a set of keys to the vessel besides me. Jeff Rowe stated that he had the only spare set. At the time, Jeff claimed that they were missing … Around that time I noticed things changing on the boat …’

It was obvious more money would need to be spent in Hobart to get the boat into acceptable order, but this didn’t deter Bob or Sue from the purchase. On 7 December 2008, they left Scarborough, having engaged Peter Stevenson and David Casson, professional sailors who were experienced in yacht deliveries, to help them learn the ropes and sail down to Hobart. Instead of being an idyllic maiden voyage, though, the adventure was doomed from the start.

Sue told me, ‘Due to a fuel problem after leaving Scarborough we put ashore, and Bob and I went to get some cans of fuel.’ They were very heavy, and Bob suddenly developed a haemorrhagic nosebleed. ‘He emerged from the engine room,’ Sue told me, ‘coughing and spluttering, spraying me and the yacht with blood.’

He had these nosebleeds from time to time, as Sarah, by then a registered nurse, later said. ‘I think Bob worried about having a