No body, no parole: Wife killer’s bid for freedom rejected

Clive Anthony Nicholson sentenced to life in 2006 for the murder of his wife Julie Rose Cowen-Nicholson, whose body has never been found, has lost his latest bid for parole.

Detectives outside the Gold Coast home of Julie Rose Cowen-Nicholson and her husband Clive Anthony Nicholson.

A man jailed for the murder of his wife, whose body has never been found, has lost his latest bid for parole.

Clive Anthony Nicholson was sentenced to life in 2006 for the murder of his wife Julie Rose Cowen-Nicholson three years earlier.

Although he initially denied any knowledge of what had happened to his wife Nicholson did not contest he had killed her.

Instead he raised several arguments at his trial namely that he acted in self defence, or provocation, that he did not intend to kill her and the act which killed her was not a “willed act”. The jury rejected the arguments and he was convicted of murder.

Before he had been arrested Nicholson had fired off several letters to various people including police and spoke of hitting his wife with a hammer.

He also told police he had disposed of his wife’s body in the ocean off the Southport Spit on the Gold Coast.

Before he became eligible for parole he spoke to police in November 2017 relating to no body no parole considerations and maintained he had taken Jodie’s body to The Spit and placed her into the ocean.

Julie Rose Cowen-Nicholson.

Clive Anthony Nicholson.

At that time the law mandated that the Parole Board had to refuse parole to killers in cases where the victim’s body had not been found unless satisfied the prisoner had co-operated in helping to identify the location of the remains.

Before Nicholson’s first parole application could be heard in January 2019 he reached out to police and changed his story dramatically in an interview with homicide detectives.

He now claimed that he did take Jodie’s body to the Southport Spit but then travelled on to Cedar Grove near Logan and buried her there.

Nicholson was allowed to go to the area with police however an extensive search failed to find anything.

The Board knocked back his parole application in July 2021 however the decision was set aside following a successful application for judicial review.

Following this the Board again considered his parole application but rejected it a second time by making Nicholson subject to a no co-operation declaration.

He appealed this decision before Chief Justice Helen Bowskill on two grounds which she rejected on Thursday.

“I am not persuaded that the (Board’s) decision is legally unreasonable; nor that the Board failed to discharge its statutory task, by not dealing with aspects of the submissions put to it by the applicant in relation to his credibility,” she said.