Missing man Christopher Jarvis’s family fear police have bungled murder probe

The distraught children of much-loved Christopher Jarvis believe errors made early in the police investigation could have let an ex-cop later charged with his murder off the hook.

Christopher Jarvis’s family is still waiting for justice

EVERY week more than 150 people are reported missing to Victoria Police. Most are found within days or weeks but some are never seen again. Of these long-term “missing” some are suicides … and some are murders. This is the story of one case that’s still playing out.

Don’t blame the dead man’s heartbroken family for being angry about what happened, and what didn’t happen, after he vanished.

Don’t blame them for wanting to shame former local police for letting someone get away with murder, because it seems to them that investigators were lazy and pig-headed.

Don’t blame them for wanting to find the missing man’s remains so they can lay them to rest.

Don’t blame them for wondering what’s going on, given that an ex-policeman was charged with murder 16 years after their father’s disappearance — only to have the charges dropped within months.

Don’t blame them for fearing that the man they believe responsible for their father’s fate might die without facing trial because he’s 71 and even more shaky than the only witness who can testify against him.

The tears of the brokenhearted are understandable and their fears are reasonable. Their only hope now is to trust that the dedication and professionalism of the Missing Persons Squad will reverse the failures of the past.

The story starts in the months before the sinister events of the Tuesday morning of June 12, 2006.

Christopher Jarvis, 38, was living in a rented house on a country road near the Moyne Shire tip at Wangoom, near Warrnambool. His landlord lived nearby. That being Steven Frederick Johnson, a former Melbourne policeman who’d bought the Wangoom land to live on and make a living from.

Christopher Jarvis was living near Warrnambool when he was last seen.

Apart from the spare house Johnson rented to Jarvis, he leased adjoining land to the Shire of Moyne for the municipal tip. And he was paid to manage the tip.

Johnson was no great loss to policing but the tip business suited him.

For anyone who liked to collect cash by selling scrap, second-hand goods — and firewood taken from nearby bushland — running the tip was a productive hustle. But, as a landlord, Johnson wasn’t getting along with his tenant.

As Jarvis’s family recall it, the sticking point was that Jarvis, a former plumber, did repairs to the ramshackle house without charge but didn’t get a matching cut in rent, so simply deducted it from the rent money.

This rent versus repairs argument had turned into a battle between two stubborn men. In fact, the dispute was due to be heard in a VCAT case in Warrnambool the next day: June 13, 2006.

But Jarvis didn’t make it to court. Some time before 6.30am the day before, he walked out of the house to the silver Ford station wagon he’d previously bought from Johnson. He was due at work at 7am at the Warrnambool transport yard where he drove a truck.

Inside the house, his partner was asleep or busy and didn’t hear anything alarming. It wasn’t until his boss telephoned at 7.30am to ask why Chris wasn’t at work that the alarm was raised.

By 8am, someone reported a car on fire at Thunder Point, a scrubby reserve overlooking the ocean on Warrnambool’s western edge. It was Jarvis’s station wagon.

To most police, a torched car rings alarm bells because it usually means guilty people are covering tracks by destroying forensic clues. Cars can catch alight without human intervention, but it’s rare.

It was the police reaction to the half-burned car that nudged the investigation down the wrong path. Instead of seeing the probability or even possibility of foul play, local detectives locked onto the theory that Jarvis had either run away or had committed suicide. And for no clear reason had torched his own car first.

Christopher Jarvis with three of his children in happier days. Picture: Supplied

For the missing man’s children, the “runaway” theory was nonsense. Why burn your car near home when you could far more easily drive it across Australia if that was your aim?

As for self harm, his family and friends couldn’t believe that Jarvis was contemplating such a thing. But even if he were secretly suicidal, two burning questions stood out: why torch the car … and where’s his body?

For that matter, where were any footprints leading from the car towards the water at Thunder Point? Where was a suicide note, a farewell message, a final conversation or any sign of depression?

Christopher Jarvis’s step-daughter Nicole Raitt was 20 then and her three half-siblings Bree, Cale and Kyden Jarvis were younger. None of them could quite believe their father had torched his car and killed himself or somehow left the district on foot, never to be seen or heard from again. They said so. So did their mother. But nothing they said altered the attitude of the detective allocated to the case and so they were powerless.

Christopher Jarvis’ step daughter Nicole Raitt and son Cale Jarvis outside the Supreme Court. Picture: Aneeka Simonis

Christopher Jarvis’s now adult children (Bree, Kyden, Cale and Nicole) with their mother Belinda Christopher disappeared and his car was found torched Picture: Supplied

According to Nicole Raitt, the detective repeated a mantra that it was “a simple missing person case” with no evidence of foul play.

For 16 years, nothing changed. Until something did.

A woman who had been living with a local odd job man named Glenn Fenwick decided to tell the police what he’d told her. Which was that Fenwick had associated with Steve Johnson and had confided he’d helped Johnson attack Jarvis.

The Missing Persons Squad took the tip-off seriously and went to work on Fenwick behind the scenes. They eventually pulled him in for formal questioning after using undercover operatives to gain his confidence and lull him into confessing details no one else could know.

Once Fenwick started talking, he wouldn’t stop. He claimed that Johnson had enlisted him to help him confront Jarvis about the rent money on that fatal morning. He alleged they had a baseball bat and a starting pistol that looked like a real handgun, confirming the fact police had found the starting pistol and been handed the bat in 2006.

But Jarvis had allegedly fought back. The panicky attackers bashed him until he stopped struggling. He was dead. Fenwick alleged to police they had taken the body to the nearby Framlingham forest, a place Johnson knew because he cut firewood there.

Fenwick claimed they’d quickly buried the body in a shallow grave “near a stump” before dumping Jarvis’s station wagon at Thunder Point.

But which stump? There are hundreds of stumps in the forest, many of them appearing since 2006.

Christopher Jarvis was buried in a shallow grave near a stump in 2006.

The father’s station wagon was then dumped and burnt at Thunder Point.

Other things might happen in intervening years, too. Such as an ex-policeman being wary that his sidekick would not stay silent forever, prompting him to move the remains somewhere else.

Only one man knows if that’s what happened. But police went to great lengths to govern Johnson’s movements when he was bailed on $500,000 surety last June after months in remand.

He was fitted with a leg bracelet to monitor his whereabouts and ordered not to go near Framlingham forest.

But, to the shock of the Jarvis clan, that all ended eight weeks ago, when Johnson’s murder charge was withdrawn for what police and prosecutors describe as strategic legal reasons. Meaning that he is, until further notice, a free man.

The Herald Sun is not suggesting Steven Johnson is guilty, only that there were reasonable grounds for suspicion. His defence lawyers argue that the prosecution case against him is “very weak” and completely circumstantial.

Officially, that’s where it stands, which is why the dead man’s family and friends are so upset. They fear their chance at justice is slipping away.

All they can do is to trust that the Missing Persons Squad is playing a longer game. And that after Fenwick faces trial solo, that his evidence can be used against Johnson.

The squad has good form. These are the investigators who wove the web that caught the man facing trial for the murder of Carol Clay and Russell Hill at Wonnangatta in 2020.

One more thing. The Shire of Moyne closed the tip in December 2011, five years after Jarvis’s disappearance. Johnson apparently still owns the land where thousands of tonnes of rubbish fill acres underneath the ground.

If ever there was a place to bury bones where they’d never be found, that would be it.