Former Tasmanian DPP Tim Ellis SC was the prosecutor in the now infamous 2010 Sue Neill-Fraser murder trial. In a letter to wrongfulconvictionsreport.org, he accuses Hugh Selby’s March 16, 2026 article of “sadly lacking in the integrity he constantly accuses others of lacking.”
Dear Mr Urban
I enclose a response to Hugh Selby you might publish . If you do, please try to resist your usual ad hominem put down to any opposing view. Also , please leave the punctuation as it is . I wouldn’t want to be ” quoted’ on the basis of fraudulently changed quotation marks.
Tim Ellis
According to his wishes, we have published his letter EXACTLY as written.
17th March 2026
The Publisher
Wrongful Convictions Report
Dear Sir,
I am concerned that on the eve of briefing Legislative Councillors in Tasmania Hugh Selby choses to not only continue to peddle an account he knows to be incomplete and thus false , but continues to further embellish it . It concerns the alleged failure to disclose to the defence at Susan Neill- Fraser’s trial in 2010 that the witness Peter Lorraine had made a previous statement to Police which was different to that he subsequently signed and to his evidence at trial .
Mr. Selby says “In the 2010 Neill-Fraser murder trial the key witness to place her and the yacht dinghy at the yacht at the right time was a witness who was exercising on shore.”
The witness was not “key”. He did not “place her on the yacht”- he did not even claim to see her. He saw an elderly man .The was no “right time” as the time of the murder was not known nor sought to be proven.
Mr.Selby continues,” However, he was induced to sign a statement prepared by a second police officer that, falsely, had him identify the Neill-Fraser dinghy at the yacht.” There is no evidence he was “induced” in any way, and it is a snide and reckless comment to make without evidence. Whether “falsely” or not was a matter for the jury, not Mr. Selby .The witness was unable to identify the Neil –Fraser dinghy ( because he did not know it ) and did not purport to do so. This was a case of description, not of the “identification” Mr. Selby misleadingly claims. The witness described in evidence a two masted boat (and so not “clearly not” Neill- Fraser’s, as Mr. Selby claims) with a “very small”,” terribly small” dinghy tied close to the back which he couldn’t tell was inflatable, wooden or aluminium. In cross –examination he said it was dark in colour but he didn’t know if it was very dark. He said he couldn’t see an outboard motor.
The witness had earlier spoken to another police officer who took notes, and his description of the dinghy then differed in that he described the dinghy colour as “whitish cream to yellow”. This was not known to me at the time he gave evidence.
Mr. Selby claims “The first officer advised a member of the prosecution team in court of the original notes.
That should have resulted in the prosecutor being told of this “new” evidence, that new evidence being immediately shared with the defence lawyers, and the judge then being asked to decide whether the trial should proceed (with the witness being recalled) or be aborted.”
I am now unsure if I was told of the existence of the notes or was given them at that stage but I was made aware (after Mr Lorraine had given his evidence} that he had earlier spoken to police in a way which differed in respect of colour of the dinghy to his later statement, and to his evidence. .That was the extent of “new” evidence. I told defence counsel of this, at the earliest opportunity. So the first two of what Selby claims “ought to have happened” in fact did happen.
Defence counsel did not want the trial to be aborted and a solution was found in discussion between us that evidence would be led – without objection although it was hearsay- of what Mr Lorraine had earlier said, and that was done.
So not only was defence told the material aspect earlier omitted, the jury was too.
The trial Judge reminded the jury in summing up (at page 1525, transcript),
“(Mr. Lorraine) said at 503 that he saw a very small dinghy, at 510 that it was somewhat dark and very small, at 511 he said he couldn’t see an outboard. Sergeant Conroy gave evidence at page 914 that he’d spoken to Mr. Lorraine at the time of the initial investigation and that Mr. Lorraine had said things to him when he happened to run into him that didn’t find their way into Mr. Lorraine’s statement and that he said to him that the dinghy he saw was whitish cream to yellow.”
Although the failure to make me aware of the notes earlier was regrettable, it was rectified before the prosecution case finished and there was no material respect in which the defence was ultimately disadvantaged. That a much more accomplished lawyer than Mr. Selby ( an S.C., not a junior) made a forensic decision that there was no need to recall Mr. Lorraine, much less ask the trial be aborted, does not prove , as asserted, that the conviction was in any way unsound.
I mentioned that Mr. Selby well knows his narrative of the ” non- disclosure'” is quite incomplete and thus false. He knows it because the gullible Lara Giddings chose this as a matter from the pompously entitled Etter Selby Papers to highlight in a letter to the Mercury. I responded in the same way as now. Ms. Giddings’ retort, when it finally came weeks later, was puerile but there can be no doubt that Mr. Selby was aware of the exchange of published correspondence. For him to continue to use this to bolster his arguments without informing the reader (or Legislative Councilors) that nothing material in the earlier notes of the witness’ conversation was not made known to the defence and indeed to the jury is sadly lacking in the integrity he constantly accuses others of lacking.
T. J .Ellis S.C.
CONTEXT & COMMENT
Mr Ellis implies that I might “fraudulently” change quotation marks in his text; I’m happy to report I’ve been able to resist fraudulently changing his quotation marks.
As for Mr Ellis asking me to “resist your usual ad hominem put down to any opposing view” (such as?), my criticisms go directly to what he DID not his character. (For clarity: ad hominem means attacking a person’s character or motivations rather than a position or argument.) I remain profoundly critical of his prosecutorial actions, most notably the various impermissible speculations unsupported by evidence he put to the jury. The fact that the trial judge, Alan Blow KC (later Chief Justice of Tasmania until 2024), erred in allowing this is no excuse.
Mr Ellis continues to defend the conviction in the face of a torrent of media reports, books, TV documentaries and legal opinion (eg Justice Estcourt’s dissenting opinion to quash the conviction, at appeal), but fails to address the central failures at trial. Absence of evidence…like in his letter.