The Murder of Allison Baden-Clay
Page 6
‘In WWII parlance – Dad’s Army,’ the expert explained, in a reference to the British TV comedy of a bungling band of soldiers of advancing years. A separate record shows Nigel was one of almost 30,000 people awarded a Rhodesia General Service Medal.
I show the same expert the photo of Nigel in his camouflage fatigues, with his rifle in hand. The expert identified the weapon as an FN FAL rifle, commonly issued during the Rhodesian Bush War: ‘Just the general appearance of his webbing … is how a relatively inexperienced soldier would have it. I do not think he would be anything other than “your average Joe”,’ he said.
As the battle for control of the country raged, blood was spilt on all sides. In one shocking incident in September 1978, a heat-seeking surface-to-air missile shot down an Air Rhodesia flight en route to the capital, Salisbury. Of the 52 passengers and crew on board, 38 died in the crash and a further ten were gunned down on the ground. A second Air Rhodesia flight was shot down in February 1979, killing all 59 aboard. The twin disasters hit home to Nigel and Elaine, who were fortunate not to have been aboard after flying the same route around that time.
An email from Nigel and Elaine to Robin Clay – sent decades after those incidents and published online – shows their memories of the time remain vivid: ‘We flew to Kariba for a holiday without the children between the two [air] Disasters. In some ways it seems like yesterday, but in others it seems a lifetime ago.’19
In 1980, as the country gained independence and became Zimbabwe, the Clays joined the exodus of whites. Nigel, Elaine and their three children headed to Australia. Gerard was ten years old. Later, in a court affidavit, Gerard said the family made the move ‘after forming the view that it would be safer to live in Australia’.
They spent ten days in Perth as guests of a woman who had been involved in Guiding for 60 years.20 Links to Baden-Powell afforded them special treatment wherever they went. The family lived in Melbourne, with one of Nigel’s cousins, for their first eight months, before moving to Toowoomba.
With the new start in a new country came another significant change – the Clays began calling themselves the Baden-Clays, in a nod to their famous ancestor.
Schoolboy
Toowoomba Grammar School headmaster William Dent had a reputation for memorable speeches and did not disappoint in his farewell to the class of ’87. The year produced some of the best and brightest to graduate from the century-old private school. Among the students was 17-year-old Gerard Baden-Clay.
Despite the considerable academic and sporting achievements of pupils that year, Dent, as dry as they come, couldn’t resist delivering a final rebuke. He bemoaned the ‘remorseless tide of litter’, the untucked shirts and ‘raucous guffaws and uncouth bellows’ in a speech which would have made him front-page news today.
‘I have frequently imagined,’ he deadpanned, ‘what fun it might be one day to produce a gun and shoot stone dead the first boys I saw with their socks round their ankles, their shirt-tails hanging out, their hair uncombed or their elbows on the table. A few corpses scattered strategically about would not add much to our litter problem and would probably serve as a salutary warning to other potential offenders.’1
It was a speech the Baden-Clays, with their formal ways and appreciation for old-world etiquette, would have particularly appreciated. They had moved to Toowoomba – a conservative farming city west of Brisbane – in 1981. Here, Gerard attended Gabbinbar State School and then Toowoomba Grammar School. There were 696 students, 408 of whom were boarders, at Toowoomba Grammar when Baden-Clay was in his final year.
With parents who lived locally, Gerard had been in the dayboy minority. Charles Wiles was in the same year and social group at Grammar. He took away good memories of Gerard – though not of their old school or home town. As soon as he could, Wiles left town and went on to run a contemporary arts centre in Cairns, about as far away as he could get from Toowoomba without leaving the state.
‘I don’t reckon he did it,’ he volunteers when I phone around old classmates before Gerard’s trial. ‘I remember him being a really nice guy at school. There are a lot more people at school I would have thought would have turned out to be a murderer than him.’
Gerard’s high school is one of nine Great Public Schools (GPS) of south-east Queensland, and was exactly how most would imagine a traditional, conservative school for boys. It could have been in England 100 years prior. The First XV rugby players were like gods, cheered on with a chant the rest of the school had to practise several times a week. Jason Little, a champion sportsman in Gerard’s year, would become one of the greats of Australian rugby.
In the playground, it was boarders versus dayboys. Rugged farm boys, raised tough out west then shipped off to boarding school in the big smoke, patrolled like sharks looking for an easy kill. Dayboys, Gerard among them, hung in a group, counting on safety in numbers. They’d play handball in the lunch breaks. Every now and again a boarder would pick one of them off.
‘It was classic bullying,’ says Wiles. ‘They’d grab you, hold you up against the wall and abuse you. Anyone who wasn’t into sport was ridiculed.’
Gerard saw his share of school bullies after moving from Rhodesia to Australia. Soon after his arrival, he defended a newfound friend in the playground and was punched in the eye for his efforts. Trudging home that day, he had walked backwards into the house to try to hide his shiner from his mother, but she somehow knew straight away.
Friendships were forged among the dayboys that would stand the test of time. One of the high achievers from Gerard’s grade immediately defends his former schoolmate when I contact him overseas. He tells me of having dinner in Brisbane with Gerard, Allison and their daughters not long before Allison went missing. Accusations Gerard murdered his wife soon after the get-together are clearly a shock. ‘I had an absolutely wonderful evening with Gerard and Allison and the kids,’ he says. ‘I think Gerard is an absolutely amazing father. I haven’t seen any father be as good a dad to their kids as Gerard was.’
He adds: ‘There’s absolutely nothing in the childhood stuff.’ I take that to mean there’s no deep dark secret from his early days in Toowoomba. He was a nice enough kid from a decent family. In our brief conversation, the friend expresses anger at police for not returning his call after he phoned them about the dinner. ‘You could probably ask the Queensland police why they don’t follow up the basics.’ He doesn’t want to be named or to talk any more.
Julian Lancaster-Smith, co-founder of Toowoomba’s Quality Desserts, is another student from Gerard’s year.
‘There were people in Toowoomba who were absolutely horrified,’ he told me ahead of the murder trial. ‘They thought there was no way in hell the guy we knew 25 years ago could do anything like that.’
Sometime after Gerard was charged, by chance, Lancaster-Smith and his wife were staying at the same caravan park as relatives of Allison. ‘They asked me about him – was he as big an arsehole then, as he is now. The guy I knew back in Grammar was just a normal guy. He probably got bullied a bit like I did.[The murder charge] was something I wouldn’t have predicted. Obviously he’s innocent until proven otherwise.’
Not all of Gerard’s schoolmates were so surprised. When I contact former classmate Fletcher Sigley, he reveals he phoned Crime Stoppers, while Allison was still missing, to nominate locations Gerard might have hidden her body. Particularly, he listed secluded areas Gerard knew from the Scouts and a stint of officer training in the army.
Sigley reasoned that pressure, stress, anxiety and depression could drive a person to do all sorts of things. Anyone could be capable of murder. The way he saw it, any man could be compared to a computer – it might run fine in standard conditions, but if you tried to open too many programs simultaneously, it slowed and could shut down completely. Gerard had always been very concerned about his image, and would have done everything to protect his good name. If Gerard had snapped and killed his wife he was unlikely to own up to it, Sigley thought.
When I contact a former teacher, he’s aware of the case but can barely recall Gerard. He says when news of Allison’s disappearance started making national headlines, and word spread of a Toowoomba link, he had to drag out his old yearbooks to remind himself who Gerard was. ‘He didn’t stand out in any way, shape or form that could have given any indication of what would happen down the track,’ he says.
Gerard’s father made more of an impression. ‘I wasn’t totally rapt in his attitude, put it that way,’ the teacher says of Nigel Baden-Clay. ‘When people send their children to a private school, some do have a superior attitude to everybody, including the teachers. A number of parents were very snobby. It was just an impression I had. We had a couple of members of staff from Zimbabwe and South Africa. I’m not trying to be racist but the attitude that comes across sometimes is that “I’m better than you.”’
He’s not the only one left with this impression. The family moved into a home on the corner of Mackenzie Street and Range Street in Mount Lofty. It was a quiet, leafy street in an upmarket part of Toowoomba. Nigel was an insurance agent with AMP. Often he would pitch life insurance policies to neighbours and friends. The new arrivals and their prim and proper ways and proud family connections set off a wave of local gossip. One former neighbour was frank with his views about how the family fitted – or didn’t – into Toowoomba’s tight-knit community in the 1980s. ‘I have met a great many people from all tiers of society and none have come close to matching the incredible superiority complex exhibited by Elaine and Nigel. They were so utterly full of themselves that others of us found discourse with them embarrassing. My father and I took delight in referring to Nigel as the “insufferable Boer”. Elaine was far worse.’
The perception of the family wasn’t helped when Mount Lofty residents became aware they had added the ‘Baden’ to their surname, which left the impression they were trying to gild the lily somewhat.
‘As luck would have it,’ says the former neighbour, ‘the neighbourhood soon knew all about the “Baden” thing as a neighbour had been some sort of fashion editor on the Women’s Weekly and had known Nigel’s mother as “plain Betty Clay”.’
Another neighbour, who, like Nigel, also worked in insurance, had a different view. ‘I thought he was quite a decent fellow, Nigel. He was very hard working. He was fairly aggressive, I’d say, but you probably have to be, in insurance. He was typical of a South African or Zimbabwean.’
As far as Gerard and his siblings went, he said, ‘there was no problem at all. They were quite well-behaved children, they were just normal kids.’
Regardless of what others thought of the family, Gerard, Adam and Olivia always had each other. They’d regularly play Marco Polo in their backyard swimming pool, noisily splashing about for hours. When Nigel’s father, Gervas, visited, he could be heard for some distance as he playfully mimicked a hippo for his grandkids.
At the start of 1987, Gerard’s final year of school, the family moved to nearby Withcott, where they bought a house on 2.8 hectares at Meadows Road for $150,000. While still at high school, Gerard worked part-time at a Toowoomba restaurant, Squatters, and also picked potatoes and strawberries in the Lockyer Valley. He graduated from school with a high tertiary entrance score of 900. With that mark, he enrolled in a Bachelor of Business at Toowoomba’s Darling Downs Institute of Advanced Education.
Gerard had prospered under the watchful gaze of the fastidious headmaster and his future was looking bright. He left Toowoomba Grammar having made loyal friends who would be there for him in times of crisis many years later.
Accountant
1988 to 1994
There is a tendency for you as a young man starting out into life to feel that you are but one of a crowd, and so can drift along with the rest and you will be all right … Well, that is a rotten bad tendency. Remember, you are you, you have your own life to live, and if you want to be successful, if you want to be happy, it is you who has to gain it for yourself. Nobody else can do it for you. When I was a youngster a popular song was ‘Paddle Your Own Canoe’, with the refrain, ‘never sit down with a tear or a frown, but paddle your own canoe’. This was meant to give guidance for going through life – and very good too.
Rovering for Success, Robert Baden-Powell, 1922
The Ruthven Rush was an infamous annual event in Toowoomba that demanded equal doses of stamina and stupidity. Cheered on by classmates, local university students sprinted from pub to pub along the city’s major thoroughfare, Ruthven Street. At each venue they had to skol a beer before running to the next, until they either passed out or crossed the finish line or both. The rite of passage was a fixture of university life in the 1980s.
Gerard and his friends didn’t buy into the heavy drinking culture. Alan Hockings went to school with Gerard and started at the Darling Downs Institute of Advanced Education at the same time. Later it became the University of Southern Queensland. When I contact Hockings ahead of the trial, he says he’d spend hours playing the card game 500 with Gerard to pass the time when they weren’t in lectures or studying. ‘We were pretty boring really,’ says Hockings.
Their wildest escapade occurred in the uni refectory. They were having lunch one day when talk turned to sport and they challenged each other to a foot race. In a mad dash to prove they were the fastest, they barrelled over chairs, under tables and around other students. Years later, Gerard’s CV included a footnote from his uni days: ‘Winner, quadrangle race.’ Was it an embellishment from his impromptu race with Hockings? Or a separate, formal, race? There weren’t too many details on the CV.
Hockings told me he found out about Gerard being charged with murder when a friend at work in Brisbane pointed out the story in the papers. The charge didn’t match the boy he knew from school, or the man from university. ‘I remember saying to my workmate I didn’t think he was hot-headed enough for a crime of passion and wouldn’t be stupid enough to do anything premeditated,’ Hockings said.
While at uni, Gerard signed up for officer training with the Australian Army Reserves, as did his Toowoomba Grammar School classmate Fletcher Sigley. Sigley recalled army trucks arriving at the Toowoomba campus to pick up 30 to 40 people on a chilly morning around March 1989. Gerard and the other recruits were taken on a bumpy ride to Gatton, where the Queensland Agricultural Training Unit was based, for paperwork. Later they went to Brisbane for medical and psychological testing. Gerard gave the impression he was signing up out of a sense of patriotic duty and to continue a family tradition of service.
Military theory was combined with field trips, sometimes lasting weeks. Gerard was seeing a young woman who had enlisted at the same time. It was Gerard’s first serious relationship. When I phone her in London, she politely declines to talk about Gerard, but is willing to confirm there was nothing out of the ordinary about the relationship.
After three years of study, Gerard landed a coveted graduate job with chartered accounting firm KPMG Peat Marwick in Brisbane in 1991. Years later, in a court affidavit, Gerard said he earned his business degree over five years, so was only part-way through when he started with the firm. Australians were struggling through Paul Keating’s ‘recession we had to have’, and it was a major coup to gain a job with one of the big accounting firms, particularly before his degree was completed.
Gerard was hired alongside between 20 and 30 graduates that year and started his first real job in Central Plaza One, a newly opened high-rise office tower in the CBD, Brisbane’s tallest building at the time. Though their salaries were low – somewhere in the $20,000s – they were filled with excitement at beating hordes of other applicants to the prestigious posts.
Gerard sta
rted in the company’s audit division. Like everyone else, he was given the opportunity to complete further professional training to become accredited as a chartered accountant. While the other recruits in his year beavered away earning the qualifications, Gerard didn’t.
One colleague recalls: ‘It was unusual, so people knew he didn’t enrol. I think in my year he was the only one who didn’t. It’s probably not so unusual these days. Back in the early ’90s, it was. If you didn’t do it your career opportunities were somewhat limited.’
Perhaps the reason he lagged behind the others in pursuing his professional qualifications was that he was still studying for his degree. Gerard kept his head down and gained his Bachelor of Business, majoring in accounting, in 1992. He walked out of his golden job at KPMG the following year. He felt it wasn’t for him, and never became a chartered accountant or certified practising accountant.
Consciously or unwittingly, he was following the advice of his great-grandfather that a young man should not succumb to the temptation to drift with the crowd but should ‘paddle your own canoe’.
After a year as an accountant for a workwear company, he became a travel agent with the burgeoning Flight Centre chain in 1994. The company was aggressively recruiting university graduates at a time when jobs were hard to come by. Gerard was living at Wavell Heights in Brisbane’s north with his parents and brother, Adam.
The next year saw Gerard move into Flight Centre’s George Street building in the city to head a new 24-hour telephone service. More than just his professional life was changing. In his new office, he met his future wife.