A mother accused of killing her son with a drug-spiked smoothie before making a $125,000 insurance claim has been found not guilty after more than two days of jury deliberations.

Maree Mavis Crabtree faced a five-week Supreme Court trial over the death of her son Jonathan, 26, in their Gold Coast home in 2017.

Crabtree was accused of preparing a smoothie spiked with prescription drug oxycodone, and later made a $125,000 insurance claim.

Maree Crabtree walks from court after being found not guilty of killing her son, alongside lawyer and advocate Deb Kilroy.© Cloe Read

When paramedics found Jonathan, his body was lying on a bed with an iPod and an iPad around him. There were also blank pieces of paper and a pen.

Crabtree called Triple Zero, and although her son was dead, she told the operator she could not be sure whether he was breathing or not, the prosecution said.

Crabtree pleaded not guilty to murder, attempted murder, and fraud charges at the beginning of her trial last month. The jury found her not guilty on each of these charges.

Upon hearing the verdict, Crabtree became emotional and put her head in her hands.

On Monday morning, Justice Martin Burns reminded the jury of their obligations and responsibility to decide the charges on the evidence, adding there was no burden on Crabtree to prove anything.

“It would be wrong to have regard to anything other than the evidence in the case in your deliberations,” he said.

“You know from the evidence before you that [Jonathan’s sister] Erin Crabtree died some years before Jonathan. There is also evidence that her death had an ongoing impact on Jonathan, who continued to grieve for his sister.

“However, there is no evidence before you about what caused Erin’s death, but there is nothing unusual about that. The parties do not have to explain every aspect of the family background.”

Burns said it would be “quite wrong to go speculating about the cause of Erin’s death, because if it had any relevance to this case, you would already know about it”.

Across four weeks of evidence, the jury heard testimony from Crabtree’s daughter and Jonathan’s sister, Tara Crabtree, who claimed she was a lookout for her mother as she crushed up the prescription painkillers while Jonathan was passed out in bed.

In her closing address, Deputy Director of Public Prosecutions Caroline Marco told the jury Tara’s evidence was honest and reliable.

She said the jury had heard Tara’s evidence that implicated her mother in the intentional killing of her brother, and of an earlier aborted attempt to kill him.

“You have heard of the evident antipathy [Crabtree] felt towards her son, and her desire to have him removed from the house and the financial windfall that presented itself to her when he died.”

Tara has been granted indemnity from prosecution in exchange for her evidence.

Maree Crabtree’s defence barrister, Angus Edwards KC, put to the jury in his closing address it was possible Jonathan took drugs to kill himself, or took drugs to get high and accidentally overdosed.

Edwards said the other possibility was that Tara could have killed Jonathan. He said Tara was the one person who had benefited the most, and that evidence proved that what Tara had said was a lie.

He said the evidence was overwhelming that Jonathan had suicidal ideation from 2012 until the night he died.

Jonathan had a “lot of demons”, Edwards said, referencing his violence towards a girlfriend, and threats to kill himself with drugs when they broke up.

Edwards told the jury there were more than 30 attempts by Jonathan to reach out to people before his death.