By Riley Walter and Jessica McSweeney
Right from the start, detectives suspected something was amiss with Aaron Govendir’s story – a home invasion in the middle of the night, an unknown assailant claiming to be a police officer and a robbery in which nothing valuable was stolen.
It just didn’t add up.
Denise Govendir was allegedly murdered by her husband, Aaron Govendir.Credit: Dean Sewell / Nick Moir
Then there were the inconsistencies in Govendir’s account of how his wife of almost 30 years, Denise Govendir, 53, ended up bound with cable ties and bludgeoned to death in the bedroom of their home at Dover Heights in the early hours of March 10, 1998. Investigators noticed.
Within 48 hours of his wife’s gruesome murder, Govendir made an emotional public appeal for help to find Denise’s killer.
“The police tell me that somebody out there probably knows something about what happened, or who did it,” Govendir, then 55, said.
After less than a minute, he left the press conference sobbing, without answering questions about who may have killed his wife. He never made another appeal.
Then on Thursday, decades of police suspicion, two cold case homicide squad investigations, a coronial inquest identifying him as the lead person of interest, a $1 million reward for information and several public appeals culminated in Govendir’s arrest for allegedly murdering his wife.
The 81-year-old was arrested at Springwood Police Station after being questioned by detectives and charged with Denise’s murder. They finally had their man more than a quarter of a century later.
“We will put to the court that this person who was arrested and charged today was the sole person responsible for Denise’s murder,” homicide squad commander Detective Superintendent Danny Doherty told reporters.
A reinvestigation in 2021, combined with a public appeal in 2023, had corroborated existing police evidence. New medical evidence obtained since the reopening of the case had also strengthened the “very convincing and compelling circumstantial” brief of evidence.
Since the early days of the police investigation, Govendir has been a key suspect in his wife’s murder.
A 51-page submission by Inspector Mark Murdoch to then-coroner Jacqueline Milledge in March 2004 not only named Govendir as a suspect, but also provided in great detail his possible motives.
One theory was the couple’s looming divorce.
Denise Govendir was killed at her Dover Heights home in 1998.Credit: NSW Police
“On the evidence, Aaron Govendir stood to lose a very substantial amount of money in any property settlement stemming from the divorce,” Murdoch said.
People noticed Govendir becoming increasingly bitter whenever an equitable split of the couple’s assets, including their $1 million Dover Road home and $1.8 million in assets in a property investment company, of which Govendir was a director, came up in conversation after divorce proceedings started, Murdoch said.
According to Murdoch, there was a “significant” amount of evidence, albeit circumstantial, linking Govendir to the murder, although the “investigative finger” was not being pointed solely at him.
Police quickly dismissed robbery as a motive after camera equipment, binoculars, mobile phones, cash and wallets were left behind by the supposed burglar in the couple’s untidy bedroom.
Also left behind were the black cable ties used to bind Denise and her husband, who claimed to be left unconscious from a blow to the head by the mystery intruder, until after his wife had been killed and her murderer had fled in her 1997 Ford Laser sedan. Police found the car 11 days later less than two kilometres from the Dover Road home.
Irit Bloomfield, a saleswoman at a hardware store near the Govendirs’ home, told police she remembered serving a customer in February or March, 1998, who told her he wanted to “tie something up”.
Aaron Govendir made an emotional public appeal to help find Denise’s killer in the days after her death.Credit: Nick Moir
She directed him to the cable ties and saw him take a packet from the shelf. “Hi, Aaron. How are you going?” a colleague asked the customer.
“What we’ll allege in the facts is that there was no break-in, there was no bogus police officer,” Doherty said on Thursday. Instead, the robbery was “staged” by Govendir to cover his tracks, he said.
Govendir did not join his children last November when a $1 million reward for information about his wife’s murder was announced. Doherty said the arrest brought “mixed emotions” for Govendir’s family.
“That family has been holding the burden of grief for some time, but they’ve also kept a lantern of hope for the last 26 years and today we were able to give them the news that they’ve been waiting for,” Doherty said. “At the end of the day, it’s never going to bring their mother back and we’ve now charged the man responsible, who is their father.”
“Emotionless” at the time of his arrest, Govendir was refused bail and expected to appear in Penrith Local Court on Friday.
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