Nat Fraser ordered back to jail to await his fate

A BUSINESSMAN whose conviction for murdering his wife was quashed will remain in prison until a decision is taken over whether he faces a retrial.

Nat Fraser, 52, from Elgin in Moray, appeared at the Court of Criminal Appeal in Edinburgh yesterday, two days after the UK's Supreme Court, Britain's highest court, overturned his 2003 murder conviction.

Fraser was ordered to serve a 25-year jail term after being found guilty of hiring a hitman to murder his estranged wife Arlene, 33, in Elgin.

Mrs Fraser, a mother of two, disappeared from her home on 28 April, 1998. Her body has never been found.

Yesterday, after a brief hearing before The Lord Justice General, sitting with Lord Clarke and Lord Marnoch, Fraser was remanded in custody and told the next hearing would be on 8 June.

The panel of three judges heard the defence request more time to prepare their case in the event of a retrial.

As he was led away from the dock by two guards, Fraser turned to acknowledge a man in the public gallery who had called out his name and given him a thumbs-up sign.

Outside the court, Mrs Fraser's sister Carol Gillies, said: "Obviously, we don't want to say too much. We don't want to jeopardise the case.

"It's a very difficult time for us all. We feel as if we've been hit by a London bus to be perfectly honest with you.

"This has been an extremely difficult couple of days for us. We're a very quiet family and we've been thrown into the limelight. I'm shaking like a leaf. I don't know what to say to you."

Hector McInnes, Mrs Fraser's father, added: "Well, obviously, when we got the news on Wednesday we were really quite disappointed. Today was an anti-climax but that's how it goes.

"We've had 13 years of this. We're quite used to it. I'm very apprehensive obviously, but I think that's as much as I can say."

A central element in the case against Fraser involved Mrs Fraser's engagement, wedding and eternity rings, which went missing and re-appeared later in the police investigation.The Supreme Court said part of the prosecution evidence was that her rings were found in the bathroom of her house on 7 May, 1998.

Prosecutors suggested that Fraser had removed them from her body and placed them in the bathroom to make it appear that she had "decided to walk away".

But, the judges said, it later emerged that prosecutors had evidence from police to suggest the rings were in the house on the night Mrs Fraser vanished.

Fraser argued that the failure by the prosecution to disclose that information to his legal team infringed his right to a fair trial under Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

"The court holds that the trial would have been significantly different if the undisclosed evidence had been available," said one judge, Lord Hope, in Wednesday's ruling.

In 2007, the appeal court in Edinburgh, where Fraser was challenging his conviction, heard police and the local procurator fiscal may have known more about the rings than they told prosecutors.