Shadow of Doubt, the film about whether a woman convicted of murdering her husband is guilty, evoked murmurs of unease and rapid-fire audience questions when screened at a uni.
A murmur of palpable unease and a surge of questioning greeted the end of the screening of Shadow of Doubt in Canberra in December 2013 on Human Rights Day.
A medical man in the audience proposed a new solution to the bizarre puzzle: a ‘cerebrovascular event’, he said. He based his diagnosis on the fact the missing man was a radiation physicist, and a drinker and smoker with a recent history of nosebleeds.
If falling overboard unaided after a stroke is the answer, a woman near 60 is more than four years into a 23-year sentence for murdering a husband who died by accident.
Other animated questioners and commentators quizzed pro bono lawyer Barbara Etter and film producer-director Eve Ash. The pair is campaigning Australia-wide for Sue Neill-Fraser to be granted a retrial, under an archaic “petition for Her Majesty’s mercy” provision in Tasmanian law.
Civil Liberties Australia, which staged the free film screening at the Coombs Lecture Theatre at ANU to celebrate its 10th birthday, also believes the woman is innocent. She is a victim of poor police work, which led on to systemic injustices inflicted by the state.
Nominated for Best Australian documentary of 2013 (winner to be announced January 2014), Shadow of Doubt allows the key players in the head-shaking police/legal drama to tell their own story, without commentary. This is real life: more intense, complicated, puzzling and infuriating than anything that CSI or Law and Order can throw up on television. None of us live our lives in neat, 7-8 minute segments, linearly and logically.
What unfolds is that the Royal Hobart Hospital’s hi-tech machinery expert, Bob Chappell, disappeared overnight from a 16m cruising yacht at Sandy Bay on Australia Day 2009. The next morning, the yacht was discovered half-sinking on its mooring 300 metres offshore. There was – and still is – no body. No eyewitnesses. No hard evidence has ever come to light. No-one knows how he was killed, by what weapon(s)…if he was in fact killed. The Yacht No Body case is as mysterious as they come.
Confident police
The documentary allows a super-confident Inspector of Police, Peter Powell, to dismiss outright anything contrary to the carefully-crafted police line that she’s guilty.
Family, friends and independents challenge that the then-55-year-old with a bad back should be in Risdon Prison for murder, convicted of killing him with a wrench invented by the prosecutor and then endorsed as “likely” by the judge, and hauling his body up two sets of stairs using a winch, over the cockpit, over the railings, into a dinghy, single-handedly, then tipping the body overboard in the middle of the Derwent River.
All this occurred, according to the judge in his sentencing, alone and without lights on a black night while she remained the epitome of a calm, cold and calculating killer. Friends and relatives describe a warm, caring and compassionate woman who loved her husband, someone entirely different from the portrait the judge’s idiosyncratic analysis produced.
Critics of police say the documentary recounts a disturbing tale of a bungled police investigation constrained by tunnel vision producing biased evidence feeding into a flawed and misogynist legal system. That approach prevented proper investigation of possible – more probable and promising – lines of inquiry.
Chappell decided to stay alone aboard the Four Winds, a 16m (53-foot) Roberts designed cruising yacht, on the fateful night. He wanted to work on electrics and lighting systems on the yacht he and his partner of 18 years had bought in Queensland just months earlier, paying about $100,000 each of their own money.
The yacht had inspired their retirement plans to cruise Australia’s coast and the Pacific. It arrived in Hobart just before Christmas 2008. Within 35 days, half of the dream team was missing, eventually presumed dead.
Inspector Powell questions why Neill-Fraser told a later-admitted lie about her whereabouts on the fateful night (she claims it was a white lie to protect a mentally-disturbed relative). He highlights her incoherence about events, and inability to remember what she did on the afternoon of the disappearance. He claims that standing to benefit by about $900,000 inheritance was motive enough to murder a de facto partner of 18 years.
The police officer dismisses the DNA of Chappell’s son, Tim, found on a latex glove on board, as of no relevance. The fact of a 16-year-old homeless girl’s DNA also being found on the yacht, when she claims to have never been aboard, also does nothing to shake his confidence that police got the right person. That the girl lied about her whereabouts on the night is immaterial, he believes, whereas Neill-Fraser’s lie to protect family relationships is indicative of guilt, the inspector believes.
Police bootprint on carving knife
When the yacht was discovered half submerged about 6.30am on 27 Jan 2009, police, fire brigade and a commercial marine crew raced to save it from sinking. Literally in boots and gumboots, they obliterated any hope of proper forensic examination later. For example, forensic analysis found a carving knife on the floor of the wheelhouse that had the impression of the sole of a police boot on it, not the usual way to treat possible evidence.
Critics say that police added to slanted forensic and circumstantial evidence by selecting hand-picked haters of Ms Neill-Fraser to weave an intriguing web of false claims that she was other than a very loving wife. Apparently, speaking well, having a double-barreled surname, and being female are not traits endearing one to everyone.
The film features the convicted woman’s first husband, Brett Meekers, saying she could be “uppity”, and he could well imagine her attitude getting police offside. He’s the person half the island state still believes she had earlier killed, if you listen to scuttlebutt. Tasmania’s rumour mill is its most productive machinery, and it also claims she was connected with the suicide death of a young man some years earlier. That also is proven false.
Rumours may have helped spark the police investigation into Neill-Fraser. Whatever caused police to focus on her alone led eventually to a jury delivering a verdict that’s incomprehensible to many experienced and influential people from “the mainland”. Is there a different kind of justice in Tasmania, one that lawyers from other states and Canberra film audiences don’t understand?
At the ANU screening, Andrew Wilkie, the Federal Member for Denison, which includes the area where the tragic events occured, clearly explained how things work in Tasmania, and the insular, idiosyncratic pressures between police, prosecutors, courts and the system in general. The next day, in the Hobart Mercury, he was calling for a re-hearing in the case.
For Tasmanian police, Ms Neill-Fraser’s guilt is a given. Guilty as hell. Everything down their long tunnel points to her…so she must have done it. I have no doubt Sue Fraser did it, says the police inspector in the film, getting the surname she was born with wrong.
Neill-Fraser’s supporters and family say he and his detectives got a lot wrong. They relied on a key evidence-giver whom the judge himself said was not always truthful, whose story of a plot 12 years earlier to kill her brother by dumping him overboard from a yacht was believed by the non-judgmental judge. The brother, Patrick, is alive and well in Hobart still, having apparently dexterously avoided a sisterly dunking for more than a decade.
Police found a shore-based midnight observer who saw a figure in a dinghy that from 50-100 metres away on a black night whom he was able to identify as “possibly female”. But the witness couldn’t describe the colour of the dinghy (it was white) or the colour of the dinghy’s outboard motor (it was a dark colour). The witness, who had gone to the foreshore to drink milk, described the Charonic figure as sitting on a thwart (bench seat) across the dinghy: the alleged dinghy had no such seat: you had to sit on the edge (gunwale) to steer the outboard motor which was also the rudder.
Disturbing phone call
Police Inspector Powell counters that the convicted woman originally lied about not going down to the Sandy Bay foreshore late at night after a disturbing para-normal phone call about 11pm, from a mystery man she didn’t know and had never met, informing her that Chappell’s adult daughter with a known psychiatric condition had that day had a premonition her father was in dire danger: the daughter wanted to go to the yacht that night and sail it away to save her father.
If you find such a phone call on the night Chappell disappeared bizarre, so did the Canberra audience. But they also launched into quizzing the experts, Etter and Ash, widely about the case, on aspects such as:
- the police and forenisic investigation, and why and where it was flawed;
- the defence approach, tactically and in terms of access to police material;
- the prosecution, and how it handled its theoretically impartial role;
- the judge, his management of the trial, summing up and sentencing remarks, and
- where to from here?
A show of hands demonstrated about 99% of the 100-strong audience – which included magistrates, barristers and solicitors, law and human rights lecturers, criminologists and Australian Federal Police officers, as well as a variety of ‘average’ Canberrans – believed Sue Neill-Fraser deserved a re-trial after seeing the film.
Among the audience, 56% were so moved by Shadow of Doubt that they signed a petition to the Tasmanian Premier, Leader of the Greens, Opposition Leader, Lower House and Upper House. The petition asks the legislators to pass a new law to permit a judge to agree to a further appeal if new facts and information come to light which cast serious doubt on the correctness of a conviction.
The next formal step is to lodge a formal “petition for Her Majesty’s mercy” (basically, asking for a new hearing). The decision-maker is the Attorney-General, and his is a political, not a judicial, decision. If he agrees, as he should, that there is so much unsafe about Neill-Fraser’s conviction that a formal appeal process is the only way to sort out the obvious uncertainties, he will instruct the Supreme Court to conduct such a hearing.
(As in virtually all miscarriage of justice cases worldwide, it takes years for the full truth to emerge as campaigners for justice have time to pore over the evidence and discover errors, anomalies, misconnections and misinterpretations, and bad information presented to the jury. It is three years since the trial: only about now is a full range of more accurate information available).
While the decision on the petition for mercy is formally the AG’s, the question is likely one for State Cabinet level. The Labor Party-Greens coalition is predicted to lose power, so the polls say, at the March 2014 election. Deciding to allow Neill-Fraser an appeal hearing would be the principled thing to do to leave behind a legacy of a civil liberties and human rights-supporting government which wants, like most of us, the truth to emerge.
CLA campaigning for Right to Appeal laws nationally
Regardless of the petition decision, Civil Liberties Australia is campaigning for Tasmania to “mirror” new right to appeal legislation passed in South Australia in May 2013. Such a law takes the decision for a new appeal in situations like that of the Yacht No Body case out of the hands of the politicians, and puts it back in the hands of judges. CLA is campaigning for a similar law to be introduced in all Australian jurisdictions, including federally.
CLA has briefed the Premier, Lara Giddings, and the Greens Leader, Nick McKimm: both personally and strongly supported the principle of such a law, and agreed to push for it. We briefed the Liberal Shadow Police Minister, Elise Archer, and the Shadow Attorney-General, Vanessa Goodwin, who both understood the principled basis of the law, but who did not give as firm a commitment to introducing it.
As well as pushing for the right to appeal law nationwide, CLA is supporting a national campaign, led by Dr Bob Moles of SA, for a Criminal Cases Review Commission in Australia. In England, the CCRC has overturned about 240 criminal cases in two decades.
There is no reason to think that miscarriages of justice are less frequent in Australian than in England. If you want to have your eyes widened, please go to a screening of Shadow of Doubt. Already seen in Hobart, Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra, and will soon be seen in other states and regional centres. It will be re-screened on Foxtel Ci channel on Australia Day 2014, the fifth anniversary of the Chappell disappearance, and it is likely to have a second season at the State Theatre in Hobart about the same time.
The Sue Neill-Fraser conviction and sentence is so disturbing it has produced this feature-length documentary, nominated for a major award. There is a play being written, and a song. The only other major criminal conviction in Australia that has produced such theatrical and cultural output is the Lindy Chamberlain ‘dinghy-took-my-baby’ case. The system of justice in Australia does not appear to have progressed much in 30 years.
– Bill Rowlings is CEO of Civil Liberties Australia