Murder of Bob Chappell

Bob Chappell, a 65-year-old radiation oncology medical physicist from Hobart, disappeared on 26 January 2009 while working aboard the yacht Four Winds, moored in the River Derwent off Marieville Esplanade, Sandy Bay. His body was never found. Chappell's partner of 18 years, Susan Neill-Fraser, had been with him earlier that day and returned to shore by dinghy, leaving him aboard. When police boarded the sinking yacht the next morning, they found blood on the steps, a blood-stained knife and torch, and evidence that a toilet pipe and a hidden seacock had been deliberately opened to flood the vessel — damage investigators concluded required intimate knowledge of the yacht.

A witness reported seeing a dinghy matching the yacht's tender heading toward Four Winds late that night. Over subsequent months, Neill-Fraser gave police and media a series of shifting accounts of her movements on the evening of 26 January, eventually admitting she had returned to the Marieville Esplanade area that night, contradicting her initial statutory declaration that she had stayed home. She was charged with murder on 20 August 2009.

During pre-trial proceedings, DNA recovered from the yacht's deck was matched to Meaghan Vass, who was 15 and homeless at the time. At trial in 2010, Vass denied ever having been aboard the yacht. The Crown argued that no stranger could have both killed Chappell and disposed of his body using the yacht's winch system, and that Neill-Fraser's changing account reflected consciousness of guilt. On 15 October 2010, a jury unanimously found Neill-Fraser guilty of murder; she was sentenced on 27 October 2010 to 26 years' imprisonment, later reduced on appeal to 23 years with a 13-year non-parole period.

A 2014 coroner's report reaffirmed the trial findings, concluding there was no credible evidence anyone other than Neill-Fraser was responsible. Subsequent appeals were unsuccessful, including a High Court special leave refusal in 2012. A second appeal was permitted after Meaghan Vass made a 2017 statutory declaration claiming she had been on the yacht with others and that Neill-Fraser was not present; the State alleged this declaration had been fabricated by a former detective, and three other people were separately charged over efforts to obtain exculpatory evidence. During the 2021 appeal hearing, Vass again reversed her account, ultimately conceding under cross-examination that she had never been on the yacht. The Court of Criminal Appeal dismissed the second appeal by majority on 30 November 2021, with one judge dissenting on the basis of a substantial miscarriage of justice. The High Court refused special leave to appeal that decision on 12 August 2022.

Neill-Fraser was granted parole in September 2022 and released on 4 October 2022, subject to conditions later including restrictions on public claims of innocence, which have themselves become the subject of a further legal challenge. Political figures including Andrew Wilkie and former Premier Lara Giddings have publicly questioned the conviction, while the case has also been covered extensively in Australian true-crime media.