The chilling moment mum was arrested for murder
SARAH Bowles was devastated the father figure in her life was missing, but then came the shocking realisation that police believed her mother had killed him and the family home had been bugged.
Behind the Scenes
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IN a corner of Risdon Prison, encircled by barbed-wire and towering grey walls, sits a small, lovingly tended garden.
It’s blooming with herbs and brightly coloured flowers — a sight somewhat incongruous with the environment’s other residents, violent criminals, murderers and thieves.
But it’s here you’ll find convicted killer Susan Neill-Fraser most days, patting the soil and chatting to the ghost of her late partner, Bob Chappell.
In the almost 10 years she’s been incarcerated for his murder, the grandmother has had plenty of time to reflect on their relationship.
She says she misses Bob, a man she spent 18 years with, and that she can still picture him “so clearly” standing in the kitchen at home, beer on one side, pipe in mouth, cooking one of his amazing recipes.
In 2010, the grandmother was given a 26-year sentence (reduced to 23 on appeal) for Chappell’s murder.
But the 64-year-old claims she’s innocent and is currently in the midst of her final bid for appeal.
Her defence team argue that the prosecution case, which says Neill-Fraser attacked Chappell on board the couple’s yacht the Four Winds on Australia Day, 2009, and dumped his body into the Derwent River, is the result of biased and faulty detective work and that a miscarriage of justice has occurred.
Others, including the family of Bob Chappell, believe justice has been rightly served.
But for Neill-Fraser’s immediate family, who resolutely support her innocence, the past decade has been “horrific” — their lives up-ended in a way they never could have imagined.
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They’ve received death threats and spent years stuck in the middle of a community divided.
“It’s just completely derailed out whole family’s lives and the future that we all anticipated,” says Neill-Fraser’s youngest daughter Sarah Bowles, 34.
Since Neill-Fraser has been incarcerated, three of her four grandchildren have been born.
They’ve only ever met their grandma behind prison walls.
Recently, one of her granddaughters stopped seeing her. The process of being checked by sniffer dogs and scanned by metal detectors is too traumatising for the five-year-old girl to withstand.
It’s scary and intimidating and she doesn’t understand why grandma “Sue-sue” can’t just come to her house.
“Why did the police do the arrest on Sue-Sue, Mum,” the five-year-old asks.
“Did she break the rules by taking her hands off the steering wheel?”
It’s a painful question for Bowles but she does her best to answer it honestly.
“Some people think Sue-Sue did something really bad, but she didn’t and we’re trying to resolve it, but it just takes a long time and Sue-Sue needs to stay at that place until it’s all sorted out,” she tells her daughter.
Neill-Fraser’s case was the first case to be won in Tasmania on circumstantial evidence.
Chappell’s body has never been found, nor has a murder weapon and there are no eyewitnesses.
But on appeal, the conviction was upheld and the coroner’s court also found Neill-Fraser murdered Chappell.
For this final appeal to be granted, Neill-Fraser’s team must present “fresh and compelling evidence”.
They are confident they have it.
To Bowles, Chappell was a father figure who had been in her life since she was three. He played a “pivotal” part in shaping her career path to go into medicine; he spoke at her wedding.
To find out he was missing, and likely dead, was devastating.
But the realisation the police had pinned her mother as the prime suspect was annihilating.
“We were quite a family unit, it was very traumatic,” says Bowles.
“The grief process that we went through in those early hours, days, weeks and months was quite terrible and I guess I was trying to protect Mum alongside that because it was quite clear that the police were starting to look at Mum very early on — and so, it was weird.”
Then on a frosty August day in Hobart, the family’s worst fears were realised when Neill-Fraser was arrested.
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Bowles, then a 23-year-old nurse, was at work and turned her phone to silent during a meeting. By the time she emerged she had a litany of missed calls.
“I pulled up the newspaper and saw that mum had been arrested and I just kind of went into shock. I had to get down to the police station and get the lawyers on the phone, and that kind of thing so it was … it was terrible because I’d only just been with Mum a couple of hours earlier,” she says.
“I went down to the police station and I remember they handed me all of Mum’s stuff — they wouldn’t let me see her or speak to her — and they handed me her jewellery and her wallet and her handbag.
“I just remember holding her ring and it was so … it was quite chilling.”
But Bowles was so convinced of her mother’s innocence she assumed the police had made a mistake, that they were just doing this to “rattle” her, that they’d soon let her go.
The detectives her family had got to know on a first-name basis during the seven month investigation were suddenly “unavailable”.
“It all became very impersonal, it was a very traumatic and confronting time. I didn’t eat for two weeks … it’s funny even talking to you and going back in my head, I can sort of feel the mild anxiety coming back. It’s quite visceral, really,” says Bowles.
Neill-Fraser’s three week trial commenced in October, 2010, and polarised Hobart.
Chappell, 65, was a well-known radiation physicist with the Royal Hobart Hospital. He was approaching retirement but wanted to complete one final project involving the commissioning of a new machine to be used in cancer treatment.
Neill-Fraser was a talented equestrian who came from a wealthy pioneering family. Her subdued manner and restraint from making public shows of emotion led many to believe this was indicative of her guilt.
More troubling was that her account of events seemed to be changing.
Neill-Fraser told police that on the day Bob Chappell disappeared, she rowed ashore in the afternoon, leaving Chappell on the boat to complete maintenance.
She said she went to Bunnings for several hours and then spent the rest of the evening at home.
However, CCTV footage failed to show Neill-Fraser at the hardware store and police identified a car similar to Neill-Fraser’s driving down Sandy Bay road just after midnight on January 27.
She later admitted she did return to Sandy Bay that night, after she received a concerning phone call.
According to Neill-Fraser, she withheld the truth from police because she was worried about embarrassing or upsetting Mr Chappell’s family. She also said the shock of her partner’s disappearance may have caused her to confuse events, which is why she incorrectly claimed she had gone to Bunnings.
Although perhaps legitimate, the contradictions in her telling of events didn’t look good, and irritated police, making them all the more determined to build their case.
“We were faced with her changing her story on numerous occasions … it caused us a lot of work and a lot of expense,” said Detective Inspector Peter Powell at the time, adding this had caused them to pursue many false leads.
In the months after Mr Chappell’s disappearance, Neill-Fraser’s family were frustrated by the police investigation. In their minds, this was a missing person and the police just weren’t doing enough. They further got the police off-side by hiring their own private investigator.
“Bob was just missing. We just didn’t know,” says Bowles. “We sort of oscillated between, ‘well, something really bad has happened and he hasn’t contacted us’ and we were there with the butcher’s paper, almost trying to draw a map of all possibilities of what could have happened, but over and over we’d come back to the same point that he hadn’t been in contact with anyone,” she says.
The family rang around hospitals and dementia units, in case Mr Chappell had been admitted without them being informed.
But soon, the harrowing truth dawned on them. The police weren’t treating this as a missing persons … their family matriarch was the suspect and their home had been bugged.
Over the years, prominent Australian names such as Adelaide law expert, Dr Bob Moles, former MP Lara Giddings and Victorian psychologist Eve Ash have spoken publicly about their belief that justice may have been denied by an improper trial.
This week, journalist Andrew Urban released a book Murder by the Prosecution, detailing his six-year investigation into the case.
But Neill-Fraser and her family don’t dare raise their hopes. They’ve learnt to steel themselves against the ups and the grave let-downs of the system.
Bowles does hold hope in one thing though: that there’s a chance Chappell may be alive. She admits she still does double-takes in the street, believing she’s seen him.
“I’ve clearly accepted at an intellectual level that he’s gone and dead but at the same time there’s something where I’m still hoping he’ll turn up, I guess,” she says.
Bowles has watched her mother, a once active, avid traveller, excited about the sailing trips she was planning with Chappell to faraway islands across the globe, transform to a frail elderly woman, constrained to a wheelchair.
“I think she’s putting on a brave face but I think there’s a sort of depth of sadness. There’s just a sadness that her world’s been reduced,” says Bowles.
The limitations of a life in prison recently became painfully apparent to Bowles.
Neill-Fraser called her after her court appearance was moved from Hobart to Launceston, necessitating a longer drive through the island and a brief but spectacular glimpse of freedom.
She told Bowles, that from the back of a police car, she saw the winter sun set over the forest-green mountains and a flock of newly born lambs playing on the midlands.
“It was just stunning,” she told Bowles.
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