by David Murray
Apprentice Melissa Hayes, massaging two shampoos and then a conditioner into Allison’s hair, didn’t notice anything, save how quiet she was. Allison was miles away.
When she stood to leave the salon, it was night. Staff swept the floors and polished the counters in preparation for a 7 pm close. Walking to the door, Allison steeled herself for the confrontation ahead at home. Gerard was going to have to answer her questions. She had knelt before him for so long, but not any more.
As for her hair, this time she was happy with the colour. The next day, at least, she would be ready to take on the conference.
PART II – THE VANISHING
Allison Baden-Clay was propped up on the couch watching The Footy Show, her husband told police, the last time he saw her. It had been a relatively unremarkable night.
For others around Brookfield and beyond, the night had been punctuated by sounds and happenings that were far from usual. In some cases, the sounds in the night had made the hairs on the back of their neck stand to attention and sent them out into the darkness to investigate.
Tzvetkoffs
Thursday 19 April 2012
7 pm to 9 pm
Kim and Julie Tzvetkoff lived on the corner of Brookfield Road and Boscombe Road, opposite the Good Shepherd Anglican church, a childcare centre, and the little blue house where real estate agent Gerard Baden-Clay lived with his family. From high up on a hill on the left-hand side of Brookfield Road on the drive from the city, the Tzvetkoffs had noticed the Baden-Clays coming and going over the years, but the two families had never met.
On the evening of 19 April, Julie had been at a guitar lesson and arrived home at about seven. Her husband, Kim, turned up ten minutes later. He was unusually late home and would remember glancing at the clock on the wall as he walked in. It had been a long day for both of them, and they had a rest in the lounge before getting up to make something to eat. Both were in the kitchen when they heard the same sound, though they would recall it differently.
To Julie it was a sharp, hard yell. It lasted for a matter of seconds and no words were formed. She couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman, and put the time at between 8 pm and 9 pm. Kim was closer to the door. He would remember a startled or shocked yell. He was convinced it was a woman and felt she had been trying to shout something but had managed only to get a couple of words out. He put the time at between 7.30 pm and 9.30 pm. It was an atypical noise for the area, and for a few moments afterwards Kim kept an ear out for any further sounds, but there were none.
One thing the Tzvetkoffs agreed about was that the sound had come from opposite their kitchen – across the road, around the home of the Baden-Clays. They went to bed at 10.30 pm, with their windows and door shut.
Ironically, the Tzetkoffs had been caught up in their own legal drama a year earlier. Their adult son, Daniel, was at that moment under witness protection in the United States – the star witness in a billion-dollar money laundering case. An IT whiz kid, Daniel Tzvetkoff had developed software for the processing of online payments right when the online poker companies were looking for someone to handle their booming transactions. Most banks wouldn’t go near it because of uncertainty about the legality of online gambling, so Tzvetkoff pretty much had the market to himself. Soon his company, Intabill, was boasting of 5000 clients in 70 countries and the money was rolling in. In 2008, at the tender age of 24, this unheralded kid had everyone scratching their heads when he began splashing his cash around. He was unmasked as the mystery buyer who had stumped up $28 million for a half-built Gold Coast mansion – the highest price ever paid for a Queensland house. He’d also splurged $7.5 million on a super yacht, $3 million on a Fortitude Valley nightclub and several hundred thousand on luxury cars, including a black Lamborghini Gallardo, which he drove with the personalised number plate BALLER. A relatively modest purchase in comparison to his others, in 2006 Tzvetkoff also paid $1 million for the house his parents now called home at Brookfield.
Perhaps predictably, the fall was as spectacular as the rise. Tzvetkoff’s clients Full Tilt and PokerStars began to suspect they were being ripped off. They came calling for tens of millions of dollars they claimed the Brisbane boy genius owed them. At the same time, US authorities, separately investigating the booming poker industry, found gambling transactions were being disguised as payments for products such as golf balls to circumvent US laws. Intabill foundered. Tzvetkoff went to ground before inexplicably deciding to roll the dice and head to Vegas for a gambling convention. Dudded associates, pinching themselves that they weren’t dreaming when he arrived, called authorities and he was arrested at gunpoint.
Facing 75 years in prison, Tzvetkoff turned informant, outlining the financial operations of major gaming websites to US authorities, eventually leading to an infamous poker shut-down dubbed Black Friday in April 2011. With his wife, Nicole, and son, Hugo, he went into witness protection.
He had cost a lot of people a lot of money, and placed the freedom of others at risk. It was lucky that the law got to him before some of the people chasing him for cash, a fact his parents were keenly aware of as they followed his plight from their Brookfield home.
Kim and Julie had purchased the house from Daniel in 2009, when things first started to go south. With all the bitter enemies Daniel had made, there must have been times when his parents were particularly nervous about sounds outside their home in the dead of night.
But it was the little house across the road, not their own, where the drama unfolded.
Shout, scream, thump, screech
Thursday 19 April 2012
10 pm
Climbing into her empty bed, Anne Rhodes stretched out and congratulated herself. Typically, when the Brookfield physiotherapist turned in for the night, her husband would have been there long before her. But tonight she had taken an early mark. Anne’s face was well known to locals through her work at the small family medical practice run from a brick house on Brookfield Road. She looked at the clock. Ten o’clock. Normally, she wasn’t in bed for another hour.
Minutes before, when Anne was brushing her teeth in the bathroom, she heard a disturbance from somewhere outside. There were raised, angry voices. She couldn’t make out what they were saying or if they were men or women or a mix of both. As she picked up a book for a quick read before she turned out the lights, she hoped it was not the new neighbours. Anne had moved into the Deerhurst Road, Brookfield, home 22 years earlier. It was a peaceful area, most of the time anyway.
A couple of years earlier, there was a nasty dispute between the two neighbours across the road. One accused the other of working as a backyard mechanic on the acreage property. Spray-painting fumes were billowing across the fence and incessant banging on the cars was hardly adding to the ambience of the natural bush setting.
Surrounding residents took sides and fired off personal and legal letters to council and each other. Both neighbours ended up moving out, which was why Anne was worrying about the new residents across the road.
Now settled into her book, Anne heard another disturbing sound. A woman’s scream, high-pitched and loud. In the silence of her room, she listened for the sound to repeat. It didn’t. But soon, there came another noise. A thud, like a car hitting an embankment.
The windows from her bedroom faced out towards Brookfield Road, in the direction of the childcare centre. She had heard cars crash around the area before.
As she started to get up, she heard a screech of tyres and a car speed off towards Brookfield.
There must have been an accident, she decided.
Tangled web
Thursday 19 April 2012
10 pm
Stephanie Apps’s teenage children were sorely testing her patience. Apps had taken her son, 13, and daughter, 15, with her to her mother’s house for the evening and then they’d stopped at Nando’s for dinner. On the drive back to their home on Boscombe Road, Brookfield, it was like World War III in the car with all the fighting between the two children.
When she finally pulled into the driveway at about 9.50 pm, she could barely wait until the car stopped to open her door and get away from them. No sooner were they all out of the car than all hell broke loose: her daughter and son were screaming at each other. Then Apps lost it too and shouted at them to cut it out. They paid no attention.
In the chaos, her daughter clumsily tripped on a ceramic pot plant at the front door, sending it tumbling. Smash. The pot lay in pieces. Knowing she was really in for it now, the 15-year-old ran off towards the driveway. In full flight, the girl ran smack bang into a spider’s web. Tangled in the sticky web, and with the prospect of some eight-legged killer crawling on her in the darkness, Apps’s daughter let out a piercing scream. It was the startled, high-pitched squeal of a frightened girl.
Her gobsmacked mum now had three reasons to be annoyed: the fighting in and out of the car; the broken pot; and disturbing the neighbourhood in the middle of the night. ‘You’re for it when I catch you,’ she thought, then gave her daughter a mouthful.
Apps had previously helped orchestrate a ‘grisly murder’ in her suburb, albeit a fictional one, as executive producer of a gory revenge film. The movie, Punishment, was filmed predominantly around the hills and valleys of Brookfield in 2008. Apps was quite chuffed to see Brookfield on the big screen, even if the plot did involve a double murder and torture with a nail gun and electric saw. But it was nothing like the real crime that was about to throw a pall over the suburb she’d called home for 15 years.
Scraps
Thursday 19 April 2012
11 pm
Scraps the dog sprang out of the warm basket at the foot of the bed. Tearing out of the bedroom, he sprinted down three short steps and cut to the left. A quick dash across the tiled floor brought him to the front door. Spinning in circles, madly yapping and scratching to get out, he was not going to be ignored.
Eighty-year-old Voni Brumm, startled awake by the racket, pulled back the bedcovers. Swinging her feet to the floor, she rubbed the sleep from her eyes and followed, confused. Scraps, a 13-year-old toy poodle crossed with a silky terrier, had joined her household as a medical companion for Voni’s late husband. Well trained, the faithful pet had never demanded to be let out in the middle of the night before.
It had been almost half a century since the foundation slab was laid for the Brumm house on Boscombe Road at Brookfield – while Voni was in hospital for the birth of her son Mark. Before Brookfield, Voni, her husband and their then 12-year-old daughter Kim were living in inner-city New Farm on the top floor of one of Brisbane’s first high-rises. Raising a girl in a glass tower was one thing. Adding a boy to the mix was another prospect entirely, so they bought their own slice of rural heaven at Brookfield.
It was an expensive choice even all those years ago. For the price of the land, the Brumms could have bought a top-of-the-range house at nearby Kenmore. But then there wouldn’t have been a 1-hectare block and wide-open spaces all around for the children to explore. Boscombe Road all those years ago was only a dirt track lined with pineapple farms and a handful of houses. Now the road was bitumen and branched off to dozens of homes.
When it came to change, the upstanding citizens of Brookfield could be a militant lot. When the Brookfield Road general store wanted a liquor licence, for example, residents blocked the move. When the Anglican hierarchy wanted to sell the Good Shepherd church on the corner of Boscombe Road and Brookfield Road to help pay for a cathedral development, a core group of parishioners – Voni among them – banded together and defeated the plan.
Brookfield residents might not have managed to stop time, but they had certainly slowed down the clock and the rate of so-called progress.
Voni’s son grew up happily roaming the fields around Brookfield and became a photographer, but had died suddenly at 43, from a brain haemorrhage. A memorial garden on the church grounds was named in his honour. Voni’s husband took the death hard. He had since passed away too. Voni stayed on in Boscombe Road with daughter Kim, her memories and Scraps.
Kangaroos and wild deer frequently came and went from the property during the night without a whimper from the pet. But on Thursday 19 April 2012, he was uncharacteristically bothered by something or someone in the darkness.
Kim heard the racket from her downstairs unit. She had arrived home at 10.45 pm and was getting ready for bed when the scurrying and barking started above her about 15 minutes later, putting the time at about 11 pm.
Flicking on the lights to the front porch, Voni had barely opened the front door a crack before Scraps squeezed through. In a flash, the little dog was off, disappearing into the pitch black near the fence line in the back paddock.
Neighbours to the right of Voni’s home had lovingly groomed gardens, a tennis court and swimming pool. They were away at the Munna Point caravan park on the Sunshine Coast for a holiday, so at least Voni didn’t have to worry about them being disturbed by the barking. Gerard and Allison Baden-Clay’s home was just around the corner on Brookfield Road, a couple of houses away. Kim knew Allison from children’s music lessons at the little Anglican church.
Voni didn’t know what could be upsetting her dog. It was too late and too dark to follow Scraps into the paddock, so she went back to bed, leaving the pet out in the night.
Screams
Thursday 19 April 2012
11 pm
Bruce Flegg was sitting up in bed talking on his mobile phone when he heard the sound. Somewhere outside, a woman had screamed. It was a single, unbroken sound that went for about three seconds before tapering off. Even though he was engaged in his phone conversation, he heard it clearly. It was loud. High-pitched. Disturbing. Definitely a woman’s scream. ‘Did you hear that?’ he said down the phone.
On the other end of the line was his friend Sue Heath, a customer service worker with Qantas at Brisbane International Airport. They had met almost 20 years earlier through the Liberal Party. Heath had her television on in the background while she was talking to Flegg. She hadn’t heard anything, but she could sense his alarm.
It had been just under four weeks since the Liberal National Party stormed to power in the state election, ending the rival Labor Party’s run of eight consecutive general election victories. Under the leadership of former Brisbane mayor Campbell Newman, they had decimated their opponents. The Liberal National Party now held 78 of the 89 seats in the state parliament. In his seat of Moggill, Flegg was easily returned with a large swing in his favour. In Opposition, Flegg had been shadow minister for education for two years. It was a portfolio he was passionate about. He had paid his own way to the UK and studied the school systems there. He’d written 20 or so education policies and had big plans for disabled and disadvantaged kids. Once in government, he was made Housing Minister instead of Education Minister and was bitterly disappointed. He knew nothing about housing – not even who the former minister was. That was politics. Seniority, factions and party room support came into play. Still, the grind of the election campaign was behind him and he had a seat at the Cabinet table, the heart of power in the state.
Leaping out of bed after hearing the scream, Flegg padded across the soft carpet in his room to the hallway. Telling Heath he would call her back, he walked to the front door and stepped out into the darkness. It was the first time he’d ever felt compelled to go outside to investigate a noise in the night. Standing out the front of his home, he strained to hear anything that might explain the chilling sound. A party perhaps, or an argument. There was only silence.
Flegg had bought the Nioka Street home in 2004, forking out $1.45 million for the privilege of owning a mansion on a sprawling 10,000 square-metre block on a ridge overlooking Brookfield. The elevated position of the house meant he could hear almost anything that occurred below the property. His bedroom was at the front of the house, facing the Brookfield Showground, about a kilometre away as the crow flies. That was roughly where the sound was from, he thought. A bar opened at the showground every weekend, and when the win
d was right, Flegg could make out entire conversations from revellers.
But it was Thursday and the bar was closed. Other sounds often travelled up to the house, seeming closer than they were. If possums ran across a roof seven or eight houses away, he would hear it. Along the rest of the street, residents were tucked away quietly in their million-dollar homes.
Out the front Flegg had a grass tennis court and a swimming pool, set in landscaped gardens, and the property then dropped down to a long street with a smattering of homes. He was convinced the scream had come from the front of the property, but with nothing to see, he went back inside.
His media adviser, Graeme Hallett, had only recently moved to Queensland from interstate and was staying in a back bedroom. Flegg knocked on his door. There was no response. Hallett was fast asleep and could not be roused.
While he was standing there he heard the second scream. It was softer, but still bloodcurdling, exactly like the first scream. The hairs on the back of his neck went up again. His unease grew. But there was nothing much he could do. There was no point calling police. He wouldn’t know what to say.
He called Heath back then returned to bed. In the half hour or so before he drifted to sleep, there was only silence outside.
Tennis
Thursday 19 April 2012
11.30 pm
Susan Braun was tossing and turning in bed, unable to sleep, constantly looking at the clock. The minutes seemed to take forever to tick by. She remembers that the clock showed 11.30 pm before she finally drifted off. Very soon after, a noise woke her with a start from her shallow slumber. It was an unpleasant sound. Unsettling. Maybe a scream or a yell. A human sound, but impossible to say if it was a man or woman.
