Andrew L. Urban.
In just 60 Minutes last Sunday (6/9/20), Channel 9 has shown how the Cooks, a circus family from the Blue Mountains, were persecuted by a preposterous police prosecution of a case that not only lacked evidence of any kind, but defied the most basic tests of common sense. Sadly, it is not the only humiliating failure of the criminal justice system in Australia.
In brief, NSW police were taken in by incredible – as in not credible, fantastical – allegations of brutal multi-child sexual abuses, which if true, would have resulted in some ghastly injuries to the victims. There weren’t any. A child lifted up by his penis between the teeth of an accused? A child made to bleed and drink his own blood? And much more … allegations made by an estranged family member and her small children.
Members of the accused family were attacked by the Riot Squad in their homes at dawn on September 1, 2017; they spent months in jail, fearing for their physical safety as accused pedophiles; after eventually being cleared by the DPP’s office of all 127 charges in February 2020, they have been refused an apology by police. Would it be too humiliating?
Virtually the entire case was based on the 27 interviews, across three years, that police conducted with the alleged victims. It eventually emerged that one of the children told his mother he’d been lying all along – a fact she withheld from police. Will she face charges?
Theresa Cook-Williams, 60, her brother Paul, 54, her daughters Yyani, 35, and Clarissa, 25, and their relatives Lachie and Lucy all appeared on 60 Minutes to relate their horror story in public.
ABSENCE OF EVIDENCE IS EVIDENCE
It was also on 60 Minutes (March 10, 2019) that the murder conviction of Sue Neill-Fraser was definitively upended with the Meaghan Vass interview that confirmed it was her DNA at the crime scene, the deck of Four Winds, and her description of what happened. Nothing to do with Neill-Fraser.
The Vass admission came after years of protests by lawyers and Neill-Fraser’s supporters against her conviction. Prominent Melbourne barrister Robert Richter describes the case as “a forensic disaster … no-one had any idea of how to investigate this kind of homicide in Tasmania.” And by pursuing Sue Neill-Fraser so vigorously, the police didn’t give enough weight to other evidence or leads, he says.
The DNA match with Vass (in March 2010) “would have set off alarm bells, but by then Neill-Fraser had already been charged. It would have been pretty horrible for them (police) to come round and say, by God we’ve charged the wrong person.” Too much humiliation? Richter says he wants to see a Royal Commission into the case.
Undercurrent, a thorough dissection of the Neill-Fraser case in 6 episodes, was never broadcast in Tasmania, where Neill-Fraser’s final appeal will be heard – subject to travel restrictions, thanks to Covid19. Her legal team are based interstate.
MASS MURDERER … OR NOT?
Robert Xie
There was no direct evidence that Robert Xie viciously murdered five members of his wife’s family in 2009, nor any credible circumstantial evidence.
Newsagent Min Lin, 45, Mr Lin’s wife Yun Li “Lily” Lin, 44, their sons Henry, 12, and Terry, 9, and Mrs Lin’s sister, Yun Bin “Irene” Lin, 39, were found dead in their North Epping home On July 18, 2009. Police took two years to make an arrest – but was it out of sheer desperation they charged Robert Xie? Police had failed to find any clues, any evidence, any murder weapon/s or any credible motive …. it must have been humiliating.
Xie is awaiting the findings of the appeal judges.
A GAP IN THE EVIDENCE
Gordon Wood was convicted in 2008 of the murder of Caroline Byrne, whose body was found early morning on June 8, 1995, on the rocks at The Gap, a notorious suicide spot on Sydney’s Eastern coast. In 2012 the Court of Criminal Appeal set aside his conviction and entered a verdict of acquittal. 
The Chief Justice made it clear in his judgement that even the most basic elements of the case had failed to be established. “I am not persuaded that Wood was at The Gap at the relevant time.” He concluded that the verdict of the jury could not be supported having regard to the evidence.
How humiliating for police and the prosecutor.
PSYCHOTIC EYE WITNESS
Derek Bromley was convicted of murder in 1984, wrongfully, in the opinion of several legal experts; now, his latest appeal (June 2018) floundered when South Australia’s appeal court “fundamentally failed to pay due regard to the rule of law and to the well-established principles governing criminal appeals,” according to legal academics Dr Bob Moles and Bibi Sangha. “The principles espoused in the Bromley decision are not only contrary to established authority but have never before appeared in any legal judgment in Australia, Britain or Canada.”
The appeal against that controversial finding is still pending.
Derek Bromley was convicted of murder in 1984. It was said that he assaulted a person and drowned him in the river in Adelaide. He is in his 37th year of incarceration.
The Court of Criminal Appeal was provided with five expert reports as to the psychological state of the ‘eye-witness’ at the time of the incident. Although known to be psychotic and suffering from hallucinations and delusions on the night of the incident, the Crown told the jury that this did not necessarily make the evidence of his observations implicating Bromley unreliable.
The Crown’s own expert emphasised that it was now known that the cognitive disorder was more fundamental than had been represented at the time of the trial. Because of that, it was his view that nothing the witness had said about his ‘observations’ could have probative value. He added that the judge’s instructions to the jury were inadequate to inform them of the witnesses’ true condition.
Yet the appeal judges turned Bromley down. They face the humiliation of being found to be badly wrong – about the law itself, not just Bromley.
EVIDENCE DID NOT COMPUTE
Steven Fennell was given a life sentence in 2016 for the murder of 85-year-old Liselotte Watson on Macleay Island in Moreton Bay. Ms Watson was bludgeoned to death in her home in November 2012 and Mr Fennell had been in custody since his arrest in March 2013.
There was evidence Mr Fennell was on his home computer when prosecutors suggested he was at Ms Watson’s house cleaning up after the murder. That’s humiliating … basic police investigation failure or prosecutor incompetence?
Fennell, 60, returned home for the first time in more than six years on Thursday, following the ruling that a jury’s guilty verdict was unreasonable, as The Australian’s David Murray reported on September 12, 2019.
“I’ve said all along I don’t believe anybody intended to kill Mrs Watson, I believe it was a bungled burglary,” Fennell said after rejoining his wife Helen and son Adam.
Steven Fennell with his wife Helen and son Adam
In conclusion, we emphasise that we recognise and respect the excellent work and professionalism of the many police, detectives, prosecutors, defence barristers and judges who work in the criminal justice system. We trust they will help weed out the less respectable and less competent ones in their midst. And that they will support the need for reforms.
Incompetent, Humiliated Criminal System Fails Again: False Accusers Walk Free While the Innocent Are Crucified
In just one 60 Minutes episode in 2020, Channel 9 laid bare how NSW police were taken in by incredible , as in not credible, fantastical allegations of brutal multi-child sexual abuses against the Cooks, a circus family from the Blue Mountains. The claims, made by an estranged female relative and her husband (parents of the small children involved), defied basic common sense and medical reality. No injuries. No evidence.
One child later admitted lying about the whole thing a fact his mother withheld from police. Yet on September 1, 2017, the Riot Squad stormed their homes at dawn. Family members spent months in jail fearing for their safety as accused paedophiles. All 127 charges were dropped by the DPP in February 2020. No apology. No accountability.
The Cooks’ lives were incinerated: their circus school destroyed, reputations lynched, futures torched. Over 200 days in custody for some. Enduring death threats and prison trauma. The system that is supposed to deliver justice instead delivered a meat grinder.
The False Accusers: Protected, Unpunished, and Systemic
What happened to the estranged female relative who drove these grotesque fabrications? As far as public records show, nothing. No charges. No prosecution for false reports, wasting police resources, or the catastrophic harm inflicted. No book deal or reward surfaced, but also no reckoning. She simply walked away, while the innocent Cooks carried the scars.
This is not an outlier. It reflects a systemic reluctance across Australian jurisdictions to vigorously pursue false accusers in child sexual abuse allegations especially when the complainant is a woman in a family or custody-related dispute. While confirmed false allegations to police are relatively rare overall (studies consistently put the rate around 5%), deliberate fabrications or reckless exaggerations do occur, particularly in acrimonious separations. Family Court data highlights the problem: in contested cases involving child sexual abuse allegations, a significant portion are found to be deliberately misleading by the accuser. Yet criminal charges against such complainants remain vanishingly rare.
Police and prosecutors, operating under “believe the victim” imperatives and terrified of backlash, often treat these cases with kid gloves. Motives frequently include revenge against estranged partners or family, leverage in custody battles, attention, or deeper psychological issues. The result is a grotesque asymmetry: the accused face dawn raids, public branding as monsters, prolonged imprisonment, and lifelong stigma even when exonerated. The fabricator? Usually faces no meaningful consequences.
This reluctance spans jurisdictions, NSW, Queensland, Victoria, and beyond where the priority is shielding genuine victims, but the side-effect is shielding liars when evidence later collapses. The Cook case epitomises the outrage: an obviously flawed complaint from an estranged relative was pursued with “victory at all costs” zeal. When it predictably crumbled, the accuser escaped scrutiny while the family received silence. This double standard doesn’t just fail the wrongly accused it erodes public trust and ultimately harms real victims by fuelling scepticism.
A Bloodless Butchery Enabled by Institutional Cowardice
This wasn’t mere incompetence. It was a ritual sacrifice of innocent lives on the altar of bureaucratic self-preservation. Fantastical claims were elevated, exculpatory evidence buried, and medical impossibility ignored. The Cooks were hunted, not investigated — fed into the justice machine like meat into a grinder, emerging psychologically flayed while the operators shrugged and moved on.
The pattern is nationwide and damning: a system that deploys wolf-like ferocity against the accused but cornered-rat cunning to protect its processes and favoured complainants. Dawn raids for theatre. Charging on vapour. Lives incinerated, then defended with boilerplate about “tenacity.” The real humiliation belongs to police leadership and prosecutors too cowardly for contrition or reform.
Australians should be incandescent. This machinery can seize any family on whispers, destroy them, and shield the source of the poison. The Cooks’ crucifixion exposes a rotten core: prioritising narrative protection over truth, and institutional comfort over justice.
We need radical change ; automatic compensation for the wrongly pursued, independent oversight with real teeth, and a willingness to prosecute false accusers when evidence clearly warrants it, without fear or favour. Until then, expect more families fed into the grinder, more accusers walking free, and more proof that in Australia’s justice system, the innocent often bleed while the fabricators sleep soundly.
The Cooks survived the pyre.
How many more must be sacrificed before the system feels the flames?
This is a fraught topic. We wrote about the Cooks back in September 2020 and I’ve written two books about men convicted of historical sexual assault without corroboration. Sexual assault claims need not be corroborated in any Australian jurisdiction. Has the pendulum swung too far?
The conclusion at the end of this article is IMHO risible. The dumb filth are always looking for convictions and the legal sharks couldn’t care less about the truth. Wrongful convictions are looked upon as collateral damage as long as the revenue keeps flowing.
Yet another sad example of state-sponsored harm. Like Neill-Fraser case, taxpayers are none the wiser, but stand to be the losers in the end.
China is often seen to be this kind of a place, but we seem to overlook when it happens here, and yet we’re little better. Also like in China, journalists are now under threat from our government, for reporting the truth. So where are we much different? Has China really influenced us that much? It seems anything goes when there’s something to gain from it. What do our ‘leaders’ stand for? Whatever they like, so long as they’re in charge. Wake up Australia!
I watched 60 minutes tonight. Australia should be ashamed of our Police Force, our Judges and our so called justice system. I am appalled that any human can be treated worse than any animal. How can one ever move forward with so many scars. Makes me feel ill knowing it could happen to any one of us.
NOW IF ONLY WE CAN GET SUSAN FREE.
Comprehensive management of any police force is bound to be a most difficult task. The fact that officers are recruited from the ranks of the public means that they have to be chosen as the best possible material and then made into highly efficient workers.
There are always bound to be differences despite the training and competition for promotion must be steep. Any chosen for non-uniform roles bear the extra burden of needing to solve cases, to “get a result” as they used to say on The Bill.
Is it possible that the impasse in the Bob Chappell disappearance is because the situation has overwhelmed the team of detectives who conducted the investigation? If some or all of the detectives are privately convinced of Susan Neill-Fraser’s innocence then they must be numb with guilt and are not sure what to do next.
One pointer in this direction is the public statement on Sixty Minutes by Meaghan Vass that she knew and would name the guilty party as she was a witness to the crime. There has been nothing but silence from the Tasmanian police since then whereas if it had been a spurious claim one would expect them to jump at the chance of exposing it.
A deafening silence indeed.
If some or all of the detectives are privately convinced of Susan Neill Frasers innocence – then speak up – loud and clear – you ruined a woman’s life – don’t be scared of the corrupt superiors – the drug industry’s control – do the right thing ! You swore an oath – obey that oath – else we will be waiting for YOU at the PEARLY GATES – don’t you worry about that my friends ! You will go DOWN !
I cannot leave it alone. I cannot ignore it. I have to reply, comment, say something.
Great work Andrew, you and all others that contribute give me hope.
Not necessarily for my personal case, but hope that justice will prevail as long as people like you are prepared to step up and fight. I would rather go down fighting than passively watch others suffer. I like to think I am connected to and part of a resistance of Sisters and Brothers, that we share the same values of human life and freedom and it gives me faith and purpose of existence.