‘He was a grub’: woodchipper murderer launches appeal

A woman jailed for orchestrating a gruesome woodchipper murder plot claims she is the victim of a miscarriage of justice.

Sharon Graham is serving a life sentence after being found guilty of murder following a grisly plot to kill her former partner Bruce Saunders for insurance money.

Graham appealed Mr Saunders’ conviction, years after he was fed into an industrial wood chipper at a property on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast.

To make it look like an accident, all that was left of his body were his legs.

Graham’s partner, Greg Roser, is also serving a life sentence for murder after he beat Mr Saunders with a metal bar in November 2017 and put the body in the machine with the help of another man, Peter Koenig.

Koenig received a lesser sentence for accessory after the fact to murder after he testified at the trials of Roser and Graham.

Graham’s lawyer Andrew Hoare KC told the Queensland Court of Appeal on Friday his client was the victim of a perversion of justice.

He argued there was an error of law in Judge Martin Burns’ failure to direct the jury at Graham’s 2023 trial regarding Koenig’s privilege claim, which may have affected the verdict.

When asked if he knew there was marijuana in his vehicle, the truck driver, Koenig, claimed the privilege of not incriminating himself.

Mr Hoare said the jury could only reach a guilty verdict if it was convinced of Koenig’s credibility.

But he argued that Koenig’s claim of privilege calls into question his credibility as a witness.

The panel, made up of judges Debra Mullins, John Bond and Shane Doyle, responded by calling Koenig a “scumbag.”

“If the inference is clear that Mr. Koenig may be a marijuana trafficker, how does that realistically affect the jury’s reasoning in this trial?” Judge Bond asked.

“This was a man who, by his own account, used a person someone else had killed as an accomplice to cover up that person’s crime – he was a maggot!”

Judge Doyle said if Koenig was a “well-known drug trafficker” that made it more likely he would have been involved in the plot to kill Mr Saunders.

“People don’t approach upstanding citizens on the street to kill their ex-boyfriends,” he said.

The court reserved its decision.

Roser’s appeal against his life sentence was rejected in February.