Source : Perth Now news
Convicted Tasmanian woman Sue Neill-Fraser has used a new 60 Minutes Australia interview to put her case back in the spotlight.
She insists she was wrongly convicted of murdering her long-term partner, Bob Chappell, and wants people to re-examine the evidence.
In the interview, the 72-year-old again denied killing her partner, who vanished from the couple’s yacht, Four Winds, on Australia Day in 2009.
His body has never been found. No murder weapon was ever recovered. But in 2010, a jury found Neill-Fraser guilty of murder.
When asked what it felt like to be a convicted murderer, Neill-Fraser said it was “unreal”.
“I’ve never physically harmed anybody, ever,” she told the program.
Neill-Fraser spent 13 years in prison before being released on parole in 2022.
She has always maintained her innocence, and in the 60 Minutes interview she made clear she has no intention of dropping the fight.
“Sitting with a wrongful conviction is like having an infected thorn in your mind. It’s there all the time,” she said.
The case has long divided Tasmania and attracted national attention because it was built on circumstantial evidence.
Police alleged Neill-Fraser killed Chappell on the yacht, moved his body through the vessel, loaded it into the dinghy and disposed of him in the Derwent River.
Neill-Fraser said that version of events makes no sense.
“I don’t understand how you would get somebody up two flights of stairs,” she said.
“I have a slipped disc that I’ve had for about 35 years, and I would’ve had trouble lifting anything over about 10 or 12 kilos.”
She maintains she left Mr Chappell alive on the yacht after a routine conversation about electrical wiring.
“I said, ‘Goodbye. I’m going back now.’ And he said, ‘Yes, yes.’ He was focused,” she recalled.
“That was the last time I saw him.”
Suspicion hardened partly because Neill-Fraser gave police wrong information about her movements.
She first told officers she had gone to Bunnings that afternoon, but later accepted that was not true.
She also admitted she lied about going down to Sandy Bay that night, insisting that was to protect a family member’s privacy, not cover up a crime.
“I did tell one lie,” she said.
“But not in any sense of … trying to avoid responsibility for doing something wrong.”
Another flashpoint in the case is DNA found on Four Winds that was later linked to Meaghan Vass, who was 15 and homeless when Mr Chappell disappeared.
Years later, in an interview with 60 Minutes, Ms Vass indicated she had been on the yacht with two men and witnessed an attack on Mr Chappell.
That development seized on by Neill-Fraser’s supporters as potentially critical to her bid to clear her name.
But that evidence became more complicated when Ms Vass later changed her account during appeal proceedings.
Dr Bob Moles, a long-time critic of the prosecution case, told 60 Minutes the conviction remains deeply troubling.
“I think it’s actually more like a Monty Python sketch of a trial, to be perfectly honest,” Dr Moles said.
“If it wasn’t so serious it would be quite laughable.”
Dr Moles has argued that key forensic material presented to the jury was misleading, including images of the dinghy after it reacted to luminol, a preliminary test that can indicate blood but also reacts to many other substances.
Final testing did not confirm blood in the dinghy.
Neill-Fraser told the program that even she and her family were shocked by what they believed those images showed.
“There was every reason for the jury and everyone in that courtroom to believe that was blood,” she said.
“Including me. Including me and my family.”
The case returned to the spotlight again after Tasmania’s Supreme Court struck down a parole condition that had stopped Neill-Fraser from publicly claiming she was innocent.
The legal challenge revealed that material used to support the restriction included false case citations generated by artificial intelligence.
Despite losing earlier appeals, Neill-Fraser told the program she is still determined to clear her name.
“I don’t ask anyone to believe me,” she said.
“I do ask that they look at the evidence.”
And she made clear this fight is far from over. Asked if authorities hoped she would quietly move on, Neill-Fraser’s answer was blunt: “Of course.”
“I’m very inconvenient,” she said.
