Truck driver found Wayne Chant's body in Kiama

By Megan Levy
Updated November 5 2012 - 8:10pm, first published March 24 2009 - 4:31am
Wayne Chant
Wayne Chant

A truck driver was eating a banana during a break from driving when he discovered the dismembered torso of a man at Kiama, the NSW Supreme Court has heard.Raymond Jones said he was standing at the truck stop on October 6, 1992 when he detected a "rotten'' smell near his rig.The torso, wrapped in what looked like a curtain, belonged to 47-year-old Wayne Robert Chant. His legs and one arm were found in two other locations.Mr Chant's wife, Joyce Mary Chant, 57, has pleaded not guilty to his shooting murder, but guilty to a charge of improper interference with human remains. "I was standing there, eating a banana and I walked up to where the smell was,'' Mr Jones told the court today."I don't know why I went and had a look, but I went and had a look, it seemed to be some sort of animal. "I noticed it had hair on it, not like an animal."Crown prosecutor Mark Hobart SC has told jurors that Chant killed her husband some time between the beginning of August 1992 and October 6 the same year, when the first of his body parts were found. The Crown alleges that the accused shot the man at their home in Revesby, and took the body into the backyard and dismembered it.The Crown alleges Chant put his hands in a container, filled it with cement and put it in a builder's bin in Menai.A leg was found on the foreshore of the Georges River, while another leg and a left arm were discovered nearby. The only part that Chant held on to was her husband's head, which she placed in an esky filled with cement and hid in their backyard, he said. Later, her son Jamie Chant, who was in juvenile detention at the time of the killing, allegedly helped her dispose of it. He later told police he didn't come forward because ``he feared the same thing would happen to him''. Chant was charged with her husband's murder in 2007 when advances in DNA technology allowed for the identification of her husband's body. She pleaded guilty three weeks ago to getting rid of his body, but her lawyer told the court the killing had been an accident.Barrister John Spencer has told the jury Chant was a "battered wife'' who had suffered for years at the hands of her husband. The trial continues.

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