(ii) Disarray & Sabotage on the Mooring
Note: This is the second in a series based on the Susan Blythe Neill-Fraser murder case. The version submitted to UTAS and The Age Investigations team was not well written and thus like all good snippets of my head… it has been rewritten and is published here. I hope you enjoy the series: part 2 is 600 words long.
As Susan Blythe Neill-Fraser pulled her small white and blue dinghy up the small beach in the exclusive Hobart suburb of Sandy Bay she most likely looked out at the ‘Four Winds’ for at least a moment.
At 57 her dreams of travel and adventure may have out-scoped the more sedate retirement dreams of her long-time de-facto Bob Chappell. She may even have yearned for Galapagos in that moment as a family friend helped pull the dinghy across smooth white sand to the high tide mark. Nothing about that moment struck anybody as remarkable.
Bob, a 65 year old medical physicist, remained on board as the Four Winds slowly bobbed and swayed around its Sandy Bay mooring on the prevailing breeze, tide and currents. He would have been aware of the constant lapping of water against the hull and not-so-distant sounds from the nearby shore. He would have heard children playing, families enjoying their holiday and cars echoing from the cityscape as he performed minor repairs. He had every intention to stay overnight.
That was the moment where time stopped for Bob Chappell. At 2pm on Australia Day, 2009 the relentless life-clock in the sky took a last snapshot in sepia then faded Bob from Hobart’s face with a single sharp wink. The act of pulling Neill-Fraser’s dinghy across the sand at that exact point in time on that specific afternoon, however apparently unremarkable, was like taking an eraser to a blackboard. His body was never found and it is unknown exactly where or how he was murdered. Even the ‘why’ has been left to speculation.
A jumble of accounts are relevant to the next 18 hours. At around 4pm somebody saw a large grey dinghy with blue trimmings, with a tarp over the bow, tied to the side of the Four Winds. But police never resolved that question. Someone else said they saw a large grey dinghy later in the night and several people at various times, from land and water, said they saw “a woman” in a boat, one said possibly of middle age, although no two people saw the same woman in the same boat at the same time. And not a single soul could definitively state that they saw Neill-Fraser in any boat after 2pm on Australia Day.
By the next morning Bob’s outcomes could only be described as bleak. The Four Winds, still on her mooring, had her bow beneath the waves and police were summoned to investigate a potential crime scene. They found drops of blood on the stepladder, disarray in the wheel house and it soon became clear somebody intentionally opened the sea cocks and severed a sewage pipe in a failed attempt to destroy evidence.
Some items were missing: an epurb and possibly a fire extinguisher. Bob Chappell.
With growing concern, police scuba divers attempted but failed to locate Bob’s body in the deep harbour around the yacht and the event migrated from a crime scene into a murder mystery. Compounding that mystery, at least 21 people – tradesmen, police, search and rescue – were known to have contaminated Four Winds prior to the arrival of forensic investigators.
As the sun set over the Derwent River that first evening of the investigation the police were certain of two things. The first was that Bob Chappell was almost certainly dead. The second was that a murder conviction in Tasmanian courts without providing a body to the jury had never succeeded. Even if they uncovered a murderer after that point it would take a dramatic leap of faith for the Department of Public Prosecutions to pursue them.
[part 5 of this series will be published on this website in the next few days.]
Installments in the Neill-Fraser Story
- (i) Retirement dreams aboard the Four Winds
- (ii) Disarray & Sabotage on the Mooring
- (iii) The Scene at Marieville Esplanade
- (iv) The Ketch with a Billion Dollar View
