Murder of Celia Douty

Celia Natasha "Tasha" Douty was a British-born Australian resort worker employed as a waitress at the Brampton Island resort in Queensland during the summer of 1983. On 31 August 1983, she took the ferry to the nearby town of Mackay for a dental appointment and stayed overnight, returning to the island the following day. After dropping off items she had purchased in Mackay, including birthday presents for her younger son, she took a newly bought red towel and went to the secluded Dinghy Bay. Police began searching for her when she failed to report for work on 2 September 1983. She was found dead in scrub behind the beach, her body covered by the red towel, which bore blood and semen stains. She had been beaten on the head with a stone, and her clothes and personal possessions, including her handbag, were missing and never recovered.

The investigation involved interviews with more than 300 guests and visitors on the private island, and the Queensland government offered a $30,000 reward, which went unclaimed. Witnesses on the return ferry recalled overhearing an argument between a couple, but police could not identify them at the time. A breakthrough came when a man contacted Queensland police to identify his brother, Wayne Butler of Sydney, as the man he believed had been arguing with his wife on the ferry. Butler was arrested in 1988 but released due to insufficient evidence. In October 1997, Butler's ex-wife went to a Sydney police station and told officers she believed he had committed the murder, though DNA testing capable of linking him to the semen stain on the towel was not yet available or advanced enough until later.

Butler stood trial in 2001. His former wife, Vija Samite Duffey, testified that he had been away from her for about four hours on the day of the murder but that this was not unusual. DNA evidence presented at trial indicated that semen on the red towel matched Butler's profile, with the prosecution stating the chance of another person sharing that profile was 1 in 23 × 10^15. The defence argued the DNA evidence may have been contaminated in the laboratory, but the prosecution rebutted this claim. Butler did not testify. The jury returned a guilty verdict after 90 minutes of deliberation, and Supreme Court Justice John Helman sentenced him to life imprisonment without parole.

Butler appealed unsuccessfully on 31 July 2001, arguing the verdict was unsafe and that the judge should have upheld a no-case-to-answer submission. In 2005 he sought a pardon from the Governor of Queensland based on new evidence from forensic scientist Professor Barry Boettcher, who questioned the laboratory results without asserting Butler's innocence. This second appeal was heard by the Queensland Court of Appeal in 2009 and dismissed on 1 May 2009, with Justice Patrick Keane finding no reasonable doubt that the semen on the towel belonged to Butler; President Margaret McMurdo and Justice Catherine Holmes concurred.