{"id":937882,"date":"2026-10-23T08:02:14","date_gmt":"2026-10-23T08:02:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/937882\/"},"modified":"2026-10-23T08:02:14","modified_gmt":"2026-10-23T08:02:14","slug":"steven-frederick-johnson-found-guilty-of-cold-case-murder-of-christopher-jarvis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/937882\/","title":{"rendered":"Steven Frederick Johnson found guilty of cold case murder of Christopher Jarvis"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Supreme Court jury has found an elderly former police officer guilty of murdering Warrnambool father Christopher Jarvis more than 20 years ago.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Mr Jarvis, who was 38, has not been seen since he disappeared from his Wangoom home near Warrnambool on June 13, 2006.<\/p>\n

During the 21-day trial in Warrnambool, the court heard that Steven Frederick Johnson, 74, orchestrated a violent attack on Mr Jarvis, his tenant, over $2,210 in unpaid rent.<\/p>\n

Johnson murdered Mr Jarvis with a baseball bat before dumping his body in bushland.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Mr Jarvis’s car was later found burnt out at a tourist lookout on the coast near Warrnambool.<\/p>\n

His body has never been found.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Members of Mr Jarvis’s family cheered and celebrated in court when the verdict was delivered, while Johnson’s family members sat in shock.<\/p>\n

\"Man<\/p>\n

Christopher Jarvis has not been seen since 2006. (Supplied: Australian Missing Persons Register)<\/p>\n

Johnson, 74, had pleaded not guilty to one charge of murder over the disappearance.<\/p>\n

The jury deliberated for four days before returning a guilty verdict.<\/p>\n

No bail application was made, and Johnson will return to court for a plea hearing on December 14.<\/p>\n

Speaking outside court, Mr Jarvis’s family spoke of their relief at the guilty verdict.<\/p>\n

“It’s been the longest 20 years to finally get what we’ve wanted \u2014 a little bit of closure, so we can hopefully move on,” his daughter, Bree, said.<\/p>\n

Mr Jarvis’s son, Cale, said he hoped Johnson “rots in his dirty little cell for the rest of his life, and thinks about his actions”.<\/p>\n

A long time coming<\/p>\n

The murder was initially treated as a missing person case, before police began reinvestigating and arrested Johnson in 2022.<\/p>\n

The Supreme Court, sitting in Warrnambool, heard Johnson fired a starter pistol in Mr Jarvis’s ear on the day of the attack before bundling him into his own car.<\/p>\n

He then drove the man to the nearby Framlingham Forest, where Johnson killed Mr Jarvis by hitting him over the head with a baseball bat and buried him in a shallow grave.<\/p>\n

\"a<\/p>\n

Prosecutors believe Christopher Jarvis’s body is somewhere in Framlingham Forest, near Warrnambool. (ABC News: Jean Bell)<\/p>\n

The murder was carried out the day before the men were due to appear at a contested hearing in the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT) over the rental dispute.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Supreme Court jury has found an elderly former police officer guilty of murdering Warrnambool father Christopher Jarvis…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":937883,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[54966,1108,48,43,75309,44,504217,41,39,42,40],"class_list":["post-937882","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-christopher-jarvis","tag-court","tag-crime","tag-headlines","tag-murder-trial","tag-news","tag-steven-frederick-johnson","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/937882","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=937882"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/937882\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/937883"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=937882"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=937882"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=937882"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}