No body. No weapon. So it’s a circumstantial case and it can be put together using ‘links in a chain’ or ‘strands in a cable’ – but only if those links or strands are sound. They ain’t.

And then there’s the evidence repeatedly given by the look out girl in the years since the trial, directly against what she told the jury. She fessed up.

You’d think this would require serious attention to giving her an immunity from prosecution. You’d be wrong. Seems that it has been decided to write her off, even sink her, thereby giving me continued good luck.

Now those who decide things in Tasmania seem to have decided to let both the look out girl and the wrongfully convicted woman rot while I roam around.

If you think that’s a tad unfair then only an independent Commission of Inquiry can expose all the twists, turns and knots in this story.

If you support such an Inquiry then let the Chief Justice know. Do that by pasting the following short note into the Supreme Court’s website contact form as follows:

Go to https://www.supremecourt.tas.gov.au/contact-us/  

Dear Chief Justice,

Please advise the Premier and the Attorney General that the interests of justice, along with community confidence in our police, our prosecution service, and the courts, warrant an immediate independent Commission of Inquiry into the conviction of Sue Neill-Fraser for the murder of her partner Bob Chappell.

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For those listeners with an interest in advocacy skills in courts/tribunals please explore the 20 episode podcast 'Advocacy in Court - preparation and performance'.

Available on Kindle is an inexpensive book by the same title. The author is Hugh Selby. Also on Kindle by Hugh are 'Liar Games' and ' The Bone Cancer'.

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Seeing as I saw his body sinking I know there was none of his blood in the yacht’s dinghy. That dinghy wasn’t there when he sank.

But the prosecution showed the jury this impressive photo showing the reaction of luminol to something in that dinghy.

Most likely it was bleach.

But the main forensic scientist told the jury that she knew from her experience that it was reacting to blood.

I don’t have no know how in science stuff but since she signed off on a number of tests that showed there was no blood in that dinghy I can’t understand how her experience is better than the test results.

I get that the police had this theory that the woman they charged put the body in the dinghy but I didn’t know you could just make stuff up.

It’s neat to know that it’s OK to invent it. Maybe I’ll do that too in future.

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There’s good evidence from unrelated people of what dinghies were around that day and earlier, near the Four Winds, like the one that we used to get out to the yacht and get back from it.

The police ignored that evidence.

Our look out was in a bad way so I grabbed a red jacket from the yacht and put it over her. When we got back to shore the jacket was left on a fence where the police found it.

Then they lost it for a couple of days in the police car park. When they found it they forgot about losing it. It was years after the trial when they fessed up.

But our luck continues because, as of 2021, the police have refused to retest it using today’s best tests and taking account of extra DNA profiles in their data base. Maybe they’re afraid of what they’ll find.

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I don’t how this got through. It’s so crazy. This well-meaning dude stops for a drink of water on the riverside and sees yachts and their dinghies. He describes in some detail a dinghy where he saw some old guy on board its yacht. Those details are all written down by a copper. No way he was looking at the Four Winds or its dinghy.  We know that cos the dinghy he describes is so different. But the police then sign him up to their redoing of his account so he is seeing the Four Winds and its dinghy. Why’d they do that?

Then it gets to the trial and one of the coppers sends a message to the prosecution about the original notes of what he told the police on the phone. The message isn’t given to the Prosecutor and it isn’t given to the Defence team who accept the fabricated redo as good evidence. Who wants to say that the devil doesn’t score big time?

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Our scuttling attempt failed. But we got lucky and we’ve stayed lucky. The police were told about attempted break-ins to boats but they ignored that information. Sue Neill-Fraser had even noticed that we’d had a look around the boat a while before. But the coppers decided that she’d fabricated her note about that after the killing. The fact that there was no evidence to support that theory didn’t stop em.

They took a different tack on our look out girl’s spew on the deck. Their own scientist thought it was her direct deposit, but they turned it round to claim that it came in as secondary transfer from someone or something else. Guess that’s why nobody bothered to check her evidence at the trial when she said she’d never been on a yacht.

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If there’s no dinghy tied to the yacht then the yacht’s empty right?

We were into a bit of harmless pilfering and we was disturbed cos we didn’t know he was aboard. Anyways he tried to stop us, got hit, and went over the side with bubbles and all. Course we didn't have no plan to attack him. He attacked us.

We tried to sink it to get rid of any evidence.

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When an innocent person is wrongly convicted there are many losers, apart from that innocent person. We, the community, who put our trust in our legal system are all losers.

Every legal system can be subverted by the misconduct of those employed to make it work, whether as police, prosecutors, defence lawyers, politicians, judges, and even the media.

This episode sets out the environment which first created and has since sustained yet another example of the awful consequences that flow when poor police investigation is coupled with lawyer error then followed by political opportunism or indifference.

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For those listeners with an interest in advocacy skills in courts/tribunals, please explore the podcast 'Advocacy in Court - preparation and performance'.

For those listeners who are litigation lawyers or their witnesses, please listen to the podcast 'Witness Essentials'.

Available on Kindle is an inexpensive book also called 'Advocacy in Court: preparation and performance'. The author is Hugh Selby. Also on Kindle by Hugh are 'Liar Games' and ' The Bone Cancer', both of which include examples of court room advocacy.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.