A Gold Coast businessman on trial for murdering his estranged wife will have to wait for the verdict after an undecided jury was released for the weekend.

September 6, 2019

A Gold Coast businessman accused of murdering his estranged wife amid their bitter divorce will have to wait to learn his fate after his undecided trial jury were sent home. 

John William Chardon, 72, denies murdering Novy Chardon, 34, on February 6, 2013 – the same day he received a letter relating to the custody of their two children.

The jury began deliberations on Friday following a three-week Brisbane Supreme Court trial, but is yet to reach a decision.

It was sent home for the weekend by Justice Ann Lyons.

Chardon’s trial has heard he misunderstood a letter from his wife’s divorce lawyer, becoming “furious” after reading it in the hours before she was last in contact with the women she considered her best friends.

“He thought he was being told Novy was going to have control of the children and would control when he could see them,” prosecutor Mark Green said in his closing remarks.

“There was no way in the world he was putting up with that.”

Mr Green said Ms Chardon was a woman emerging from her husband’s “dark shadow”.

She loved her kids and had just started a beauty business, he said.

It was a friend of hers, rather than her husband of 12 years, who called the police in the days after she disappeared. 

Mr Green told the jury the Crown doesn’t know how Chardon allegedly killed his wife or what he did with her body, which has never been found.

But it was likely something had happened to Ms Chardon in her bedroom after she returned home from dinner on the night she last saw her closest friends, he added.

The court heard Chardon received the letter from his wife’s lawyer mid-afternoon and was waiting in the garage at 9pm when the roller door lifted at the couple’s Upper Coomera home.

From the witness box, Chardon described how his wife ignored him when he confronted her about it, and then told him she was taking off.

But Mr Green branded him a liar, saying he had murdered her that night.

“He could have disabled her in some way, done something to her in the bedroom that let him get her out of the house and kill her out of the house,” he said.

The jury will continue to deliberate on Monday.