A bloody mess - Bonus Content

A poche production. At the sentencing of Sunil phrase, the judge, Justice Allen Blow, stressed the importance of evidence like blood and luminol positive areas at the crime scene, absence of carpentals, etc., in contributing to Sunil phrase's guilt beyond reasonable doubt. "Mount Mitchell will read the segments." I'm satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that Ms. Neal Fraser used the ropes and winchers on the yacht to lift Mr. Chappell's body onto the deck. That she manuvered his body into the yacht's tender, that she attached an old fashioned fire extinguisher weighing about 14 kilograms to his body. That she traveled away from the four winds in the tender with the body for some distance, and that she dumped the body in deep water somewhere in the river. The evidence upon which I've based these findings includes evidence as to blood found on the four winds, blood found on a torch on the four winds, the state of the ropes and winchers on the four winds on the 27th of January 2009. The absence of the fire extinguisher and of sections of carpet from the saloon of the vessel, the finding of the tender on the morning of the 27th of January. The scientific examination of the tender, DNA matching of samples from the blood on the yacht, and lumen or positive areas of the tender with Mr. Chappell's DNA and the evidence that Mr. Chappell. In this bonus program, we're going to explore the topic of blood and the lack of it at the crime scene, which is the four winds yacht and the four winds dinghy. The yacht was contaminated by flooding and salvage and over 20 people were on the yacht in the first 24 hours. There were no pristine photographs showing exactly how the yacht was found, making this a challenge for all investigators. There are only three ways to solve a crime and that is through the physical or forensic evidence, the eyewitness accounts, or the offenders and missions or confessions. But even if you don't have all three of those things present, you've always got behaviour at a crime scene. You've just got to be able to identify that behaviour and interpret it. This is Chris Zillingsworth, who's had extensive experience investigating hundreds of homicides with New South Wales police. She's an FBI-trained profiler, and she now specialises in analysing the behaviour of offenders and victims in violent crimes to interpret what happened. There's a ton of behaviour present at this crime scene that is not logically consistent with soon-year phraser as the offender, but it's instead entirely consistent with theaving activity by criminals. So the sabotage of the boat was done to destroy evidence of the offender DNA prints and perhaps blood. It was not done to conceal the crime. So destroying an entire crime scene with water in this case is classic criminal activity to avoid detection. It's like torching a stolen car that's been used to commit a crime. In episodes 10 and 11, we explored crime scene clues and were able to establish that at least two people were involved in the crime. Now we are going to delve into the major problems with analysing the blood at this crime scene and how the forensic officer reported her findings in court. The thing that particularly interests me is that the forensic scientist gave extensive evidence about the existence of blood-stained, blood-spatter and a more serious of blood that were in the boat and in the dinghy. Of course, extremely significant in the minds of the jury. There can't be any possible date about that. But the test that was used to identify the existence of this blood was a test that should not have been laid into evidence. Dr Bob Moles is a legal academic who has written many outstanding books and articles on miscarriages of justice and forensic investigations. He reviewed the transcript of Sunil phraser's trial and was particularly concerned about the Luminol evidence given a trial. It's Luminol and Luminol is what one would call a screening test and it was often referred to as a screening test for blood. That was an inappropriate way to describe it because it is in fact a screening test for at least 100 substances, only one of which is human blood. The others involve animal blood. It involves certain number of soils or traces of soils, paints and vanishes and bleach-based cleaning agents. So if any of those things had been present, they would have caused a positive response to Luminol and then the remarkable category is Luminol can give the appearance of a positive response when it's actually not responding to anything. And that's occasion by what they call auto-luminasing. The Luminol has a certain glow about it and if you over spray, it will spontaneously produce that glow even though it's not actually reacting to anything. And the forensic scientist said that she wanted to get better photographs for court. What are the problems there? Well, what she said she had to do was in order to get the glow up so that it would show inappropriately in the photographs and she could get a good photograph, she'd have to spray it more than once. And a known problem with Luminol is that if you spray it a second or third time, the over spray will cause it to auto-luminase. So in fact, you will have a positive response but in fact, it's not actually responding to anything. The major point here is that Luminol test results are inadmissible. They should not be allowed into evidence because they are not probative. They don't actually indicate the existence of any particular substance in and of themselves. What Luminol can be used for, his as its name implies, it's a screening test, indicative of a possibility and then once you've got that possibility established, then you have to follow up with a confirmatory test. And without a confirmatory test, Luminol test results should not be admissible. And the remarkable thing here is that that was the significant problem that occurred in the IRA bombing cases in England. It occurred in the 70s. The problem was discovered in the early 90s and the courts there. And everybody would know about the Gildford Ford, the Birmingham 6th and the Maguire 7th and the Judith Ward case. And I can't imagine that there would be a forensic scientist on the planet who doesn't know about those cases and the problems that occurred. And in those circumstances, it's quite remarkable that the same errors could then have occurred in a recent case in Australia by referring to screening test results as if they were probative. We're going to come back to this Luminol bomb shell later in this episode. But first, let's explore the other problems with this crime scene. Remembering that police and the prosecution had confidently built around Sunil Fraser. This is a crime scene that doesn't resemble a crime scene for a homicide. A crime scene of a man being murdered and then taken away from that scene in a dinghy, which is a crime case. I've been bashed over the head. You would expect to have lashings of blood all over the place and drag marks of blood and blood it in secondary areas. Colin McLaren has investigated countless homicides and crime scenes. He said we need to start with Bob Chappell's nose bleeds a month before Bob went missing. We listened to Sue's first record of interview with police where she described the very start of the journey from Brisbane to Hobart with the yacht delivery crew. Here are some excerpts. At least 35 knots and it was nasty. It was rough and rolling and horrible. I got sick but I always get sick and I warned everybody. It'll be 12 hours and then I'm over it. I think he might have got a nose bleed just a short one at this point. I really can't remember. The guys might remember, I really can't see. So the next day a winders aren't bobbing up with his significant nose bleed. I can't the next day we set off. I think. Look, I. You'd have to ask David. Paul Peter. Ask David. I've got a feeling it was the next day Bob had the nose bleed that worried us. And I wasn't all that compassionate because I. It wasn't a bad nose bleed and I thought I'd look at it stop. Until one of them said have you ever had a nose bleed before and he said never in my life and that I must have met up sort of thought then. That's something we need to look at. So was a significant nose bleed? It didn't stop. It stopped. Right, it did stop. It stopped. Where did he suffer? Where was he on board when he suffered at all? In the pilot house. Right. And did he move around in the other areas? Yes. So we've moved on there to the subject that is incredibly important to the Korean case. The Korean case says that in the pilot house on the yacht there was blood that was. Bob Chappell's blood. And they were lying on that in their case. They say basically that Sue came on board at a certain time at the end of Australia day and there's been some sort of altercation. She killed Bob. He made the head with a wrench and who knows because they've got no murder weapon. But they construct this Korean case that this violence occurred in the pilot house on the yacht and therefore there would be blood. blood. Yet here we have a situation here that early on the interview we've got Sue saying Bob suffered a bad nosebleed. At Sue's trial it was established with witnesses that Bob's nose bled intermittently over the first three days of the voyage and then he went into hospital at Southport where he stayed four to five days, then flew directly back to Hobart while Sue continued the journey with the two professional crew. It wasn't like a gushing nosebleed, it was just a drip. Now Bob did something, I don't know, just. I can't remember what it was, but he, I know what he did, he got down into the engine room and looked at the filters and tried to pull something and I can't remember what it was and that started the nosebleed again. So at this point you actually mourned at a. We were in the Southport Yacht Club World Booth. And looking straight at their club and nose started bleeding again and he went up on deck, I slept in the pilot house that night because I was worried about it. We went to a local clinic, the doctor there, the GP plugged it and said I think it'll be alright and I didn't because I'd seen it and I said look, I think it's going to go down the back of his throat, I think you need to call it a rancid or something. The nosebleed on the boat, where was Bob when he was in the engine room that, so what time of night or day was this when this one happened? Oh, afternoon. Right and he got it in the engine bay. So, I don't know. And I don't know. You got to go this stage, you would be going through that steel door. You'd be going, yeah and you'd be like, I do you know what I think started it lifting the steel, lifting the steps, I think that's what started it. Okay, so did you see any blood on this occasion that had to be cleaned up? No, no, it's blood is anywhere or didn't bleed unless it's either the table or it's either the chair. Oh no, in fact, I feel dreadful. I forced him outside because I didn't want him, my kids will tell you, you know, don't bleed on carpet, no side. Don't bleed on the carpet, go outside. It's a really bad bleed enough to go to hospital. The saloon was carpeted and the cockpit area was outside. He did bleed out in the cockpit. Right, yeah. But normally he had a cat in saloon. Not in the saloon, but he did definitely bleed in the part of house somewhere. I can't remember. There were a few drops. I think he cleaned it all up. In the parts in the part of house? Yeah. Do you remember actually cleaning up those drips all? No. At this point, you can see Sue shakes her head, no she didn't remember cleaning it up. But one of the delivery crew, David Casson, said Bob mainly bleed in the cockpit area and a small amount in the engine room, but he said they cleaned it up. And in the month before Bob's disappearance, Sue and Bob entertained people several times. No blood was evident in any photos during that month. There was a torch located in there with some blood on as well. We were just trying to work out how the blood might have gone to that adult and torch. We had a torch in the cockpit. I don't know, it was the orange one. We had two orange and yellow. Yeah, yellow one. And he did bleed on it. I know. It's yellow one too. Yeah, it's the same as our orange one. But that was in the cockpit. Right. And I think he did bleed on that. Okay. The problem is Sue goes from being sure he bled on the torch to our think he bled on the torch. And which torch is she talking about, the yellow or the orange one? So we can never be sure of our starting point. The suggestion of a cough or sneeze was noted on the police investigation log three months into the investigation. But it was never confirmed. At the trial Sue was asked about Bob's nose bleed. And she said he certainly sneezed, but it was never ever. The nose never ever gushed blood ever. Bloodstained pantonialysis is a crime event reconstruction tool. And we're all pretty familiar with the fingerprint discipline and the DNA discipline. And they tell us for who that might have been involved. Bloodstained pantonialysis has been described a bit as a retrospective window in that sometimes the blood depositions can give us information on the physical events that were responsible for the deposition. So it can be a very powerful tool. It's very certain stance the pen and case specific, but sometimes it can tell us a lot and sometimes it can't tell as much at all. That was Mark Reynolds, who is a specialist forensic investigator, who has worked extensively with homicide and forensic investigations with WA police. He has been a member of the FBI Scientific Working Group on blood patent analysis, as well as university teaching roles and specialist forensic consulting in Australia and overseas. I'm not investigated over 400 homicides. I have a master's degree in forensic science and a PhD where I looked at on my earplugs and patent analysis. In episode 11 we covered Mark's work on the winters and ropes in the Sunil phrasochase, but he also looked at bloodstained evidence and he gave evidence that Sue's lived to appear in 2018. I was asked to look at the bloodstained evidence within the yacht itself. Also the examination of the dinghy, or the tender, both from an aluminum perspective and also a presumptive and concymmetry blood testing point of view. In this particular case, the assumption that there's no pre-existing bloodstains actually isn't available in the examination of the four winds catcher and all the dinghy because prior to this event happening Mr. Chaffell had quite significant nosebleed. If there's pre-existing bloodstains within the yacht, lumino doesn't tell you you've got a posse reaction and that's a pre-existing bloodstain. It just says I have a posse reaction, so there's no ability to discern between pre-existing bloodstains versus those directly attributable to the death of Mr. Chaffell. You will just get a posse reaction. The bottom line about lumino is it's just an indicator. It's an intelligence tool. It's not something that you will go, "Hey, positive lumino reaction there for I must be blood." Positive lumino reaction, we need to do more scientific investigation to ascertain what is reacting and why. Bob's blood nose certainly added a further complexity to the bloodstain analysis, but in 2019 there was a report by I witness Megan Vass, who said in a 60 minutes interview that she was on the yacht that night with two men and witnessed an argument that escalated. Bob was allegedly hit a few times and there was a lot of blood. Megan only ever says in the cabin, no more specifics. This was affirmed in her 2019 affidavit and again in court on day one of Su's appeal in 2021. And when she saw the blood she panicked and vomited on the deck, the vomit being the likely source of her large volume DNA. She recanted the next day at the appeal. However, three weeks later Megan confirmed in a wrongful convictions report that her 60 minutes interview and her 2019 affidavit were correct. So now we have an eyewitness who saw a lot of blood that has nothing to do with a nose bleed. In my review of the case, I looked at almost everything for ANSI. I would say that I can find little if any scientific support for the prior prosecution hypothesis that she was responsible for his death and that she used winches to remove his body from the bow. I don't see any scientific support there at all. I know there's been the development of a hypothesis that the deceased was struck with a large ranch or similar. I don't know where that's come from. That's just plucking something out of the air. There's no evidence to support that you don't have a body to do injury referral back to a weapon. It's a little bit frustrating for me as a scientist because I don't prefer it unless there's science and his evidence. This is kind of grown legs of its own. There was blood on two steps leading into or out of the wheelhouse and these were described by the first two responders as drops of blood. Unfortunately, the steps with that blood was not moved to the side for over an hour so there was foot traffic during the salvage of the boat. Initially, those steps were kind of propped up to the side of the wheelhouse and on two of the three stairs there was bloodstaining identified back to Mr. Chaffell. However, the bloodstains themselves were altered significantly. I think by the addition of a few. to a point that it was incredibly difficult to draw firm conclusions how they might have got there. At the trial, one of the delivery crew, Peter Stevenson, was shown photos of the blood on the steps and asked if it was from Bob's nose bleed at the start of the journey. He said, "No, it was not." He also said, "We cleaned the boat when we got to Hobart, so it wasn't there then." And did you see the photo of the saloon couch which was under the starboard hatch, which had elongated circles around Bob Chappell's blood? There's evidence that during the first photographic record, the general area of the saloon was in disarray. There was cushions all about the place, etc., etc. So we need to be very careful that our starting premises are correct. One of the things we do know is that the cushions in the saloon at the back of the couch were above the water level. We also know there was a fresh, rope-burned mark directly above the blue couch, never explained by police or throughout the trial. Mark was cautious in his 2014 report, but we did not have access to the new evidence we unlocked a few years later. Now, for me, being too specific about what these blood stains mean, whether they belong elongated blood stains, or whether they be areas of luminol reaction containing smaller blood stains, as the scientists describe, is it getting to, nobody knows, the original start. We just don't know. I guess what's happened since you did your report is that we've found some witnesses that police never questioned, who provided us with a lot of new evidence about that hatch and what had happened there, that there were coins around it, plus some of the new photographs which you haven't seen had scuff marks on the wall next to that. So my question is, when you do the analysis of a blood pattern stain, do you take into account other bits of evidence at the time? Like obviously you have to take into account that the boat was flooded, but what about other witness statements? Oh, absolutely. You can't do this work in the dark. So at some stage there is a real need to join the evidence, the objective evidence that is found cross-reference with things such as witness statements, expert evidence reports, all those sort of things. If you look at Sue's first record of interview, she particularly says that he had that nose bleed in three areas, which she remembered, not the saloon, but definitely the wheelhouse in the engine room and also out in the cockpit. The important thing is at the start, all you want to do is collect the data, and we might see a pattern in a certain area. Before you even start the reconstructive thinking process, you collect what that pattern means, the size of the droplets, the shape of the droplets, the relative distribution, how many there might be. Are there stains on nearby, variably orientated surfaces, all that sort of stuff. So you collect that data and it's all recorded, noted and written down. A vast majority of friends that you investigate is vast majority of detectives will unconsciously start thinking about a theory before they've even finished collecting the data. And it's quite difficult from a psychological perspective to take that step back and go, "I'm not going to try and think about what happened here. I'm just going to collect the data." What I think happened in the Sunil Fraser cases, an early theory was developed, and the research then was performed to find supportive evidence without any consideration of possible alternatives. And that theory of Tasmania Police was that Sue had winched Bob's body single-handed out of the front entry hatch. In episode 11, Mark Reynolds clearly explains why the winch reconstruction by police was flawed. I'm reminded by Colin McLaren of the key principal detectives of face with when observing the crime scene, induction and deduction. The inductive reasoning by Colin observed the following eight facts that were fresh to the crime scene, not there before Bob was killed. The rope hanging in through the starboard hatch above the blue couch, the rope burn on that same hatch observed by Chris Dobin, the grey hairs with the skin observed by witness Chris Smith, the elongated blood stains on the cushions. The scuff marks on the wall next to the couch up near the hatch, the black scuff marks on the deck near the starboard hatch, the coins around the deck near the hatch that we heard about from witness Chris Smith and his son, and we saw in photographs that were only released in 2017. And the handle in the winch kept elsewhere on the mast right near that hatch. Colin McLaren's controlled reenactment proved the feasibility of two people getting Bob's body out of that slune starboard hatch. Two other experienced homicide investigators, Charlie Buzzerna and Chris Sillingsworth, concurred with this after their own analysis. Now, Sunil Fraser was accused of removing bloodied carpet tiles, the carpet squares. What do you think of that? I know that in the photographic record that I was provided with at some stage, the carpet squares were replaced. I know that police at some stage did put carpet squares back to a point that showed an area without carpet squares near the base of the stairs. Now, we know that's where the carpet squares disappeared from. You should have to be really careful with your starting premises, because you will get swept up in those starting premises. Everything will look really rosy, everything's fitting together, but you've got to completely wrong. And in fact, they didn't use carpet squares that were lying around the boat in other areas for that reconstruction. So we don't even know if carpet squares were missing at all. All I know is that the carpet squares were lifted in reposition by the water. All of the carpet squares down there found was a detailed search done to look for carpet squares I don't know. We know Sue didn't want Bob to bleed on the carpet, but was Sue really so clear-headed and strong to collect up carpet tiles, supposedly bloodied and the fire extinguisher, along with Bob's body and take them away in a dinghy for disposal. If, as the prosecution says, she was such a cold, calculating, cunning, criminal mastermind, you'd think that she'd have got her alibi-sorted. All that elaborate planning, and if it put into the sabotage and disposing of Bob's body, altering the crime scene to swap the police, and she can't even get her own story straight. So overall, it's the totality of the physical evidence, the victimology, and the behaviour that's evident at the crime scene, that definitively says Sue Neil Fraser was not responsible for Bob's death or his disappearance. Instead, everything lines up for the boat breaking the thieves to have been responsible. If Sue did it, allowances have to be made. Evidence ignored. Evidence skewed. Evidence lost. Logical lines have been quarried or investigation. Not followed. And strong suspects ignored. I think the thing that I go to is, well, we know Bob Chappell disappeared and was likely murdered, so you might expect blood in the yacht. But so what? How does that prove that Sue Neil Fraser did it? Well, exactly. There's three levels, essentially, of evidence that we consider we have what they call source. Evidence, that is who's blood is it? And that's fairly. well, I was going to say fairly simple, but it's not. Then we have what they call activity level evidence, so what happened? What did the person do? And then potentially, if you're lucky, you might find evidence and sometimes the blood stains can help with this and its intent level evidence. What was the person thinking at the time they did the act that they did? When you have events that have complicating influences such as the boat sinking and interfering with all the evidence within the saloon, repositioning carpet squiers, repositioning cushions, diluting blood stains, shifting that diluted blood to other areas of the boat, the levels of complications just rise exponentially. This was a very complex, contaminated crime scene, and on top of that, Mark went on to tell me about problems with the examination of the four winds dinghy. Some of the things I saw, for example, is the lumenol examination of the dinghy. I don't recall any of the lumenol exposures of the images actually being in focus. Now, what happens when you take a lumenol photo? The camera has a very long exposure time. And if you hand-held the camera, you will get chased and it will be out of focus. either they didn't know how to do lumenol photography or they were lazy and didn't put the camera on the tripod. In the police investigation log, there is a report three months into the investigation that additional tests for blood in the dinghy did not work. Mark explained the lack of objectivity in some very important evidence. Some of the presumptive testing in the dinghy, there was positive presumptive tests in the lumenol positive areas. But what was not reported? Was there a positive presumptive test in the lumenol non-positive areas? So in areas where there was no lumenol reaction. There were concerns about the forensic officer, Deborah McCool, who was saying that every time she saw a red brown stain, that alerted her to the potential that it was blood. And she also talked about the level of sparkle and from her experience, that seemed a bit problematic. The forensic investigator, in this particular instance, applying the lumenol and insane from her experience. Now, the problem with her experience is that she doesn't have any previous experience that is exactly the same. Every lumenol examination will be different. Every strength of a lumenol reaction will be different and it's based on the substrate, the age of the blood, are there any interfering products there? Was the correct application of lumenol applied? Is the chemistry right? I shake a little bit when I hear forensic people say based on my experience. And I shake a little bit because they have no previous experience. I would suggest that that forensic examiner has never applied lumenol to a dinghy like that prior in her experience. So your experience is evolving with every scene that you examine. Now, there are many reasons why lumenol reacts. And there are many influences on how brightly it will react, the duration of the reaction. What are the color tones within the reaction? For example, lumenol will react with old blood better than it will with fresh blood. So there's all these little nuances, which has been recognized over time, will be different on each and every occasion. And therefore, unless you have confirmatory follower testing, to say that from my experience, the lumenol reaction was a good indicator that blood was present is completely and utterly scientifically flawed. And I presume there are no sparkle reference charts developed by scientists. No, there's not. And there's a very good reason for that. Because on each and every occasion, it will be different. So you can't develop using your term a sparkle reference chart. It's important to understand, though, that if you had a relatively strong reaction to lumenol, and there was sparkle in it, as a forensic examiner, I would be thinking, this may be a false reaction associated with a hyperchloric cleaning solution or something like that. Because normally, from my education experience and training, if it's a true lumenol reaction to blood, you generally don't get sparkle. I wanted to go back to the transcripts of the Sunil Fraser trial and see what the forensic officer had to say in court. I asked Mark Mitchell to read the Director of Public Prosecutions and the forensic's officer, Deborah McCool. Thank you. While we're speaking of this generally, could the witness be shown P38 for third set with a green band and a large folder? Does the photograph mark 13 show the dingy that you examined? Yes, that's correct. And as we go through it, and could you come perhaps to photograph 21, and what does that show? This is a photograph was taken to show the areas that glowed with lumenol screening test for blood. It's what happens is the chemical glow is quite-- the glow isn't very strong. To take a photograph, you need a very long exposure, so that's why it looks a bit blurry, because of the long exposure. But yes, you can see quite clearly there are some positive areas there with the chemical. Yes. And when you look at those, do you-- what are their particular strengths of the reaction that you can take note of? Yes. What we-- well, we take note of several things when we spray lumenol. We take note of the strength of the reaction, and how long lived it is, the actual color of the glow that you see, and just the manner of the reaction itself. So whether it's a constant glow, whether it might be sparkling, or you get a bright flash, which then dies down, because with experience, you can distinguish sometimes between false positive reactions with lumenol and true positive reactions with lumenol. And how it reacts, the color, the longevity, is all an indication of that. Thank you. Well, what the scientist said was that when you spray lumenol, you can, with experience, tell by the quality of the glow, or the sparkle, or the longevity of the response, as to whether it's reacting to blood or some other substance. And of course, that is not a scientific method. That is not acceptable under any circumstances. Legal academic Dr. Bob Moles has written many excellent papers on this case, available on his website, networked knowledge. She says, on the basis of my experience, I've seen lots of these reactions. And I can tell by the quality of the glow or sparkle, or the length and duration of its response, as to whether it's actually responding to blood or to something else. And of course, the appropriate response to that is to say, well, then where is this published? Where in the journals do we have glow and sparkle charts so we can teach this method to other people? If that is, in fact, possible, then you've now transformed luminol from screening test into a confirmatory test. But without scientific testing, without publication, without it being peer-reviewed, without having a known error rate, it's nonsense. Is this something, therefore, that the judge, the prosecutor, and the defence lawyer should know? Oh, absolutely. Because if you're giving evidence as a scientific expert witness, you are supposed to be basing it on established scientific principles. And the most obvious thing, then, is to say, well, where are these scientific principles found? Where's the publication? Where's the book? Where's the source that you have used in which you've learnt this technique? And if somebody couldn't point to that and just say, oh, well, trust me, it's on the basis of my experience. That is an explanation that's been notoriously rejected in the miscarriage of justice cases. So for somebody to say, trust me, it's on the basis of my experience. I can tell you this. That is simply not acceptable. When we have a recent high court decision saying as much, the high court said, if you're a supposed expert witness, but what you're really informing the court about is your subjective impressions. That is not acceptable as expert scientific testimony. Now, this is very reminiscent of the scientists who gave evidence in the Lindy Chamberlain trial where we had to trust her about her recognition of fetal blood. She went through and described the experiments that she had conducted. And the inferences seemed fairly conclusive at the time that fetal blood had been found around the front passenger side of the car. And one of the pathologists also then said, it looks as though it's an arterial spray. So that would be confirmatory of a baby having its throat cut. But then it subsequently turned out that the material that it was reacting to was sound deadener from underneath the wheel arches. And it wasn't actually an arterial spray at all. It was the wind that was blowing it out in a certain direction that the pathologist thought was an arterial spray. So it's not organic. It's not an arterial spray. It's just sound deadener. So therefore, what are the jury led to think? Well, in most of these certain scarrotive justice cases, I wouldn't blame the jury one little bit. They're just ordinary folk representing the members of the community. And if they're getting wrong information, they may well come to the wrong conclusions. Almost certainly they will. But it's not their fault. In Lindy Chamberlain, the IRA bombing cases in most of the notorious cases, you couldn't blame the jury. What you would have to say is they've been given incorrect information. And therefore, they've been misinformed. And therefore, would have come to wrong conclusions. OK, let's keep going with the forensic officers' evidence. So just start here with the DPP. You said that the wheelhouse was relatively understood except the small silver-colored dish of tobacco. What appeared to be tobacco was there. And you said that red-brown apparent transfer staining was apparent on the steps. Could you explain that to us, please? Oh, yes, certainly. When you're talking about red-brown staining or staining that you suspect to be blood, it can be broken down into two broader categories. And the two broader categories are transfer type staining and drop type staining. So transfer staining is really exactly what it says. So what that means is that an object that's been wet with blood at the time has come into contact with another surface or another object and has transferred some of the staining to that. You've kind of stopped for a second there. I need to clarify something important before we go on. For Renswick Science Services Tasmania, the FSST, do all the forensic tests in Tasmania. So they would have done all the lumenol testing, DNA analyses, fingerprints, shoe prints, blood, spatter analyses, etc. Yes. Is FST an independent body from TASPOL? No. What? Not like a Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine, which is completely independent of Victoria Police. No, sadly it is not independent at all in Tasmania, and this is a huge issue. They work so closely with police. Bob Maul's renowned legal academic sent a powerful detailed paper listing specific concerns about the flawed forensic procedures. Forensically dissecting them. Yes. To the director of FST and instead of a courteous reply or acknowledgement in response, it was dismissed and the answer came from the Assistant Commissioner of TASPOL. Really? You know that glowing photo with the lumenol in the dinghy was shown in court and presented by a forensic officer from FST who gave evidence but she did not mention all the tests done in the lab that showed no blood in the four-winds dinghy. But she knew about them because she signed off the two key forensic biology reports. What's alarming is she falsely suggested there was blood by showing that photo and never revealing confirmatory tests were negative. Some of these tests were discovered through right to information years later. This information forms part of the Etter's Selby papers tabled in Parliament in Tasmania amongst many other non-disclosures and inadequacies of the police investigation. This was just one of the many issues raised by Bob Maul's with the director of FST and you know many papers can be downloaded after this podcast for anyone interested. What does Bob Maul's have to say about this? And there was a very extensive evidence that was given about that by the forensic scientist and what the forensic scientist said was initially I was about to conduct an investigation to see if I could find traces of blood about the boat and when I approached this task I could either have used a preliminary screening test or I could have used a confirmatory test and she said I therefore chose to use a preliminary screening test and when I first read that I knew that this was a red flag issue. A preliminary screening test is one which can be used and it's rather like a polygraph and a police investigation which police can sometimes use to put a witness through a polygraph and see if there's any suggestions that they may be telling lies and if so then they might look at that person in more detail. But the police know that results of a polygraph test are not admissible in evidence but it's a useful investigatory tool. So if the forensic scientist had said she used a preliminary screening test to initially identify if there were areas of blood and then she was going to use a confirmatory test to actually confirm that it was blood then the process would be quite satisfactory. But if she says I'm going to use a preliminary screening test and then I'm going to come to court and give evidence about that results of the preliminary screening tests then we'd have the same objection as we would have to the polygraph but it's not admissible in evidence in legal proceedings and the reason for that is that evidence in order to be admitted has to be both relevant and probative which means that it must be capable of proving some fact an issue in the case. Now the truth about the preliminary screening tests and the reason it has that name is it's only a preliminary stage. A positive result from the preliminary screening test could be from anyone of let's say a hundred different substances and the forensic scientist said I can tell from the quality and duration of the glowing sparkle if in fact it's responding to blood or whether it might perhaps be responding to something else. That particular statement by the forensic scientist is what we call junk science. It has no scientific basis at all the idea that I can tell by the quality of the sparkle whether it's responding to blood or something else is clearly preposterous it doesn't make any sense at all so on my view the admission of the lume null evidence in certain circumstances where it ought not to be admitted is clearly an error that wants the conviction being set aside and we have authority for that if we look back to the cases in the UK involving the what we call the IRA bombing cases they use preliminary screening tests to swap the hands of the people who were thought to have been involved in the bombings and it was said that those swabs were positive but the substance of nitro glycerin. Nitro glycerin is of course a key component in used in bomb making and forensic scientists told the court it was quite clear that these people who were before the court had in fact handled nitro glycerin and that was very powerful evidence against them. They failed to explain to the court that these were only preliminary tests. If they'd been in contact with shoe polish if they'd touched their shoes then they would have given rise to a positive result. If they'd washed their hands with certain soaps that were commonly available the nitrates in those soaps would have given rise to a positive result and if they had been handling playing cards the plastic backing on the playing cards which was now traces which were on their hands would also be brized to a positive result and so when the six men involved in the bombing of six were taken off the train and Liverpool and their hands were swobbed what did they'd been doing on the journey from Birmingham up to Liverpool. Why they'd been sitting around playing cards together and so it's hardly surprising that they all gave positive results which were then presented in court as evidence that they'd handled nitro glycerin when in fact they'd handled nothing more harmful than a pack of playing cards. At the time of the trial the scientists gave very clear evidence that this was conclusive evidence about the possession of the substance of nitro glycerin in one way or another. It took nearly 20 years for the matter to come back before the courts and the courts then determined that the forensic scientists had not only given false and misleading evidence that the evidence had in fact been fortunate. Clearly the conviction was set aside but the clear misrepresentation of this evidence by the forensic scientists was at the most serious end of official corruption. In the case of Sunil Fraser the admission of Lume Loll evidence and plume row screening test as if it was in some way confirmatory of the presence of blood was a very serious error that had occurred and I can't see any way in which conviction could be upheld in the light of the revelation of the test in fact it's not in fact confirmatory. Let's go back to the excerpt between the forensic officer and the DPP. Sure. Okay, perhaps if you could go through the remaining photographs and see or just equate yourself with them. Okay so this these are just generalised overview shots of the dinghy after it's been fingerprinted so this is the right side toward the front. Any unfortunately because I gave an examination by I and made some notes of them the dinghy was fingerprinted so the specific stains that I might have mentioned as being brownish you probably can't see beneath the fingerprint powder unfortunately. The stains that I've described as a drop in run type stains were on the very front of the inner aspect of the inflatable area at the front but again you can't really see them beneath the fingerprint powder. This is toward the back obviously showing the left hand side or the port side. This is subsequent to the Lume Loll examination so the area outlined in black there is an area that was positive with the Lume Loll screening for test for blood. Yeah that's a close view of that. All right and does that seem to show the staining? Yes it shows that there was something there that reacted certainly. That's around the same I think that's the same stain and closer again and that's just a shot of the overall dinghy and then that's the shot showing the Lume Loll positive areas. Right thank you. Now as to the Lume Loll positive areas what can you say about those? The strength of the reaction or whatever. Okay the strength of the reaction in the front of on the inside was very long lived and strong as was the area of staining towards the back on the port side. Unfortunately you can't really see the staining on the trim well you can a little I think on the trim at the front that also was strong and short lived. The area in the middle towards the back was slightly less gave a slightly a very strong glowing reaction, but we're a game long lived. This rundown here that you can see is just the chemical itself running down towards the back. Because the glow is very pale to some extent, even though I'm calling it strong and weak overall, even when it's strong, it's not particularly bright. So the exposure we spray multiple times to enable it to come out in a photograph. So that's why there has been some overspray of the chemical, which has then run down towards the back and pulled at the back. So when you looked at your luminor positive result, you followed it through by looking for red brown stain, which in another way is another way of putting blood, correct? Yes, that's correct, yes. And you said, therefore, it was likely to be a false positive result. No, I don't think I did. All right. Well, was it likely, therefore, it would be a false positive result? There are several areas of staining in the dinghy that based on experience and having seen lots of reactions, I would say probably are not false positive reactions. Now, part of the problem with luminol is that it's so sensitive it will react with dilutions of blood down to around one and a hundred thousand. So part of the problem is that you won't then necessarily see any obvious red brown staining, and you won't be able to do subsequent tests to actually confirm that what you've seen is or isn't blood, in fact. So it's common to get a false positive result using. Then appears this entry, weekly positive with H.S. screening for blood. There the next entry, no attempt to confirm presence of blood. That's correct. Was there a reason for that? Yes. When we take a swab of an item, even if we haven't seen any red brown staining, often we'll place it onto hemostics just to see if there might have been something we didn't see. Right. So in this case, that's what happened, and we thought a weekly positive result. Now, if we have a swab where there's no obvious red brown staining on it from a sample, even though it's weekly positive with our screening test, we'll often not then go on to try and confirm the presence of blood simply because we don't think there would be enough there. Even if there was any there to get a result. Right. And this is a classic example of this, isn't it? This idea that there's been no blood detected and the mixture in our profile has been found by something other than blood. I certainly can't say there was any blood present or not, because I haven't made any attempt to confirm it, but I do have a positive screening test. She says all her references to red brown stains are meant to be references to blood, but then she says she has no way of knowing whether blood is present. Mark, most people listening to this would glaze over and struggle to concentrate. If you were on the jury listening to the forensic scientists going through all of her stuff, what might you be thinking? Well, I'd be thinking, what's she saying? Why is she saying that? What does that mean? Was there blood or no blood? If there's blood, I mean, who's blood? I mean, what's going on here? What's she actually saying? Is she saying she did it? Bob Maul's told me that when the scientist says you can tell by the quality of the sparkle or the duration of the glow, whether the luminal is responding to blood or not, that is completely unscientific and prejudicial. That makes a junk science. Well, yes, and there are no studies to confirm that. You know that photo of the dinghy with the luminal? It was an overspray. That whole thing that looks like blood running down that you were looking at. That's luminal. It's overspray. Yes. It's luminal. That prejudicial photo of the dinghy glowing with luminal should never have been shown to the jury. They would naturally assume there was blood in that dinghy and the forensic officer knew there was no confirmed blood there. Again, one of the many reasons this case needs a commission of inquiry desperately. I get a little bit frustrated a lot because they keep the science all the time. They talk about forensic science letting the system down and it's nothing to do with the science. It's the fact that there's people involved and while there are people involved, we're going to get it wrong. You know, the detective should be jumping up and down about valid reliable forensics in all major cases because it's a dual pathway to support them. If the forensic support their case, it's incredibly strong. But if it doesn't support their case, they get nearly indication that they might be on the wrong track and they can look elsewhere. With so little evidence and so many problems with analysing the blood at this crime scene, it is yet again that we have to question how could Sunil Fraser have been convicted of the murder of Bob Chappell? The explosive at a cell-by-papers, Centre Tasmania's Attorney General and tabled in Parliament are publicly available. Key points have been summarised in a series of excellent articles in the wrongful convictions report by Andrew Urban. If you're concerned about justice for Sue, please sign the petition at savesu.com. or Apple podcasts.