Novy knew of danger
Court hears wife feared Chardon
MILLIONAIRE businessman John Chardon wanted to kill his wife for two years before he finally snapped, a court has heard.
Conman-turned-police supergrass Peter Foster told the Brisbane Magistrates Court yesterday Novy Chardon, who was 34 when she disappeared in 2013, knew her husband John wanted her dead.
“Novy had said to (a friend) Debbie two years ago that if he kills me while we are in America ... if I’m found floating with a knife in my back down the river, it wasn’t suicide,” Foster told Magistrate Penny Hay on his third day in the witness box.
Chardon has been charged with Novy’s murder and is facing a committal hearing. Her body has never been found.
Foster claims that when they shared a cell in Wolston prison for six weeks in 2015, Chardon confessed to shooting the mother-of-two in the back of the head, using a makeshift silencer fashioned from a Kirks lime cordial bottle
I THINK HE KILLED HIS WIFE AND, PLAYING SHERLOCK HOLMES, I THINK HE KILLED HIS FIRST WIFE AS WELL. PETER FOSTER
then dumping her body in the Gold Coast Seaway so it would be eaten by fish.
Foster claims Chardon killed Novy after her divorce lawyer ordered him to get out of the marital home at Coomera. They were separated but were still living under the same roof, the court heard.
Foster alleged Chardon believed Novy, who he called a “whore”, didn’t deserve a cent of his multimillion-dollar fortune made in industrial lubricants.
Foster told Magistrate Hay that Chardon “decided he had to kill” Novy after they had a big fight at a restaurant during a Mother’s Day celebration in the US two years earlier.
He claims Chardon repeatedly boasted how smart he was, and said he wore disposable overalls and used ammonia to clean up after the killing.
A police forensics officer told the court she didn’t detect any significant “blood letting event” when she examined Chardon’s home, and only a chocolate box in the garbage had blood on it.
Foster read aloud to the court the copious notes he wrote in his book while sharing a cell with Chardon and testified that he believes Chardon “is very dangerous”.
“I think he killed his wife and, playing Sherlock Holmes, I think he killed his first wife as well,” Foster told the court.
Chardon’s ex died from an overdose of sleeping pills, Foster claimed.
But under cross-examination by Chardon’s barrister Tony Kimmins, Foster conceded that his notebook did not contain much about the sensational confession he alleges Chardon made on March 31, 2015.
The alleged confession occurred a day before a top-secret police bugging device was turned on inside the cell shared by the pair.