The Murder of Allison Baden-Clay

by David Murray

  Her room was at the front left-hand side corner of her house on Brookfield Road, and she was used to the general noise from the traffic that flowed past her window. This was something else. It came from farther down the road, towards the Brookie store. She lay there listening out for more noises, before eventually nodding off once more. A second sound, much like the first, woke her again. She thought about getting up to see her husband, Greg, who was yet to come to bed.

  The two of them ran the Brookfield Tennis Centre next to their house. Greg, for a time, had been a top-flight player. He’d made it all the way to the world’s most prestigious tennis tournament, Wimbledon, only to be bundled out in the first round. Braun’s singles appearance at the All England Club, in June 1973, ended swiftly with a 4–6, 4–6, 2–6 defeat to Allan McDonald from New South Wales. It was an unusual and ugly year in the championship’s distinguished history. When Yugoslav star Nikola Pilic was banned from the tournament for refusing to play Davis Cup for his country, the newly formed Association of Tennis Professionals flexed its muscles and organised a boycott. A bloc of 81 players, including reigning champion Stan Smith and 16 men’s seeds, sat out the tournament, Australian legends John Newcombe, Roy Emerson and Ken Rosewall among them. In their absence, Wimbledon officials filled the ranks with an assortment of grinders and hackers who might otherwise never have made it onto the hallowed courts. For Braun, the once-in-a-lifetime shot at the title was still exciting.

  Braun’s world ranking went on to peak at 269 in July 1978. Since then, his skills have been put to good use at the Brookfield Tennis Centre, established by his family way back in 1965, with its four synthetic grass courts. Braun became head coach and owner, alongside Susan, an accountant who works as the business manager. Private courts are scattered throughout the suburb’s oversized backyards, but players need lessons and competition. Open seven days a week, it is a never-ending job. Even when the lights are switched off at 10 pm each weeknight, with their house next door, Greg and Susan rarely log off.

  Susan lay in bed waiting for a third sound to follow the earlier disturbing noises. When there was silence, she decided against fetching Greg and fell back to sleep.

  Kholo Creek

  Friday 20 April 2012

  Early hours

  Fourteen kilometres to the west of Brookfield, Brian and Mary Mason were in bed in their house at Anstead. Mary, a Qantas flight attendant, was rostered to work on a return flight to Sydney on the Friday morning. She had gone to bed early and had to be at work at 5.15 am. Brian, a real estate agent at LJ Hooker at Kenmore, had a busy day ahead so he’d also had an early night.

  Both were sound asleep when Brian’s German shepherd, Sasha, started howling. Sasha was locked up in a large enclosed verandah at the back of the house at night for her own protection – Brian didn’t want her swallowing a cane toad or coming off second best in a tangle with a taipan in the tall grass on the acreage property.

  The Masons’ home was up a rough dirt driveway off Mt Crosby Road, on top of a rise that dropped steeply to the Brisbane River. Big gum trees dotted the property, where the grass was dirt dry from a long pause between rains. Sasha’s wolf-like howl echoed through the house, waking Brian. At first he stayed in bed, thinking the dog might settle. But the howling continued, waking Mary too from her slumber.

  ‘I’ve got to get up in a few hours. Will you do something about that dog,’ she said, rolling over.

  Brian reluctantly got out of bed. He didn’t look at a clock, but judging from what Mary had said about having to get up shortly, it must have been around 12.30 am to 1 am, he thought. Knowing the exceptional good senses of German shepherds, he guessed there was probably a stag outside disturbing the dog.

  Sasha was still in full voice and looking out into the bush, in the direction of the small bridge where Mt Crosby Road crossed Kholo Creek, when Mason came up behind her. Grabbing her collar, he tapped an open palm on her snout and told her in no uncertain terms to be quiet. Finally, the howling came to an end. But in the newfound silence in the house, Mason could hear other dogs howling from surrounding properties plus some mumbling voices. Walking back to his bedroom, no sooner had he closed the door than Sasha too started howling again. Brian got back under the covers and apologised to his wife. ‘Look, I don’t know what’s going on. Something’s spooked those bloody dogs. They’re all doing it. I can’t shut it up. If they’re all going, she won’t stop.’

  Ten more minutes of tossing and turning passed before the howling died down again and the couple was able to drift back to sleep. It felt like minutes before the alarm went off to wake Mary for work.

  Pulling out of her driveway and turning right, her high beams lighting up Mt Crosby Road, Mary was still groggy after the disturbed sleep. About 500 metres up the road she blinked at the sight ahead.

  Two cars were travelling towards her in the direction of Kholo Creek Bridge. It was a rarity to pass anyone at this hour, and the two cars heading towards her on the opposite side of the road stood out even more. The car in front was driving at speed. Immediately behind it was another car with its headlights off, driving so close they were not far from touching.

  Mary had had such a peculiar night and start to the day already, and now here was one more bizarre occurrence. She frowned and concentrated on getting to work on time, but all these weird goings on stuck in her mind.

  PART III – INVESTIGATION

  Missing

  Friday 20 April 2012

  7.10 am

  Brookfield dad Steve Womal was in the habit of paying close attention to cars and people around his suburb of a morning. Womal was a fly-in-fly-out worker at the Cannington silver and lead mine, 1300 kilometres north-west of Brisbane. Every second week, when he wasn’t working, he would drive his son, 14, to the bus that would take him to Brisbane Boys’ College in Toowong.

  Since schoolboy Daniel Morcombe vanished from a Sunshine Coast bus stop in 2003, Womal had been extra vigilant around his neighbourhood. It had only taken a moment for a predator to lure Morcombe into a car, and Womal couldn’t bear the thought of it happening to his own flesh and blood. Often he would make a mental note of the number plates of passing cars, peer into vehicles to see who was driving, and have a good look at anyone walking around. Early in the morning, there weren’t usually many people out and about.

  Womal’s routine on school days was to drive his son from their acreage property in Upper Brookfield to the bus stop on Rafting Ground Road, just past Brookfield Produce, where residents stocked up on locally grown fruit and vegetables, pet supplies and hardware.

  Generally, he would wait in his car until the bus approached, then loop around to the general store on Brookfield Road to grab the newspaper. He would be back at his car in time to see his son wave as he went past in the bus.

  On Friday 20 April 2012, Womal looked at his watch as the bus passed with his son inside. It was 7.12 am, right on time. With the teen safely off to school, Womal started to drive home when he saw a friend, Phil Blair, near the showground, and stopped to say hello. Blair had been at a morning fitness session at the Brookfield State School oval.

  Simultaneously, Olivia Walton was out scouring the streets of Brookfield. Olivia lived in Townsville but had been visiting parents Nigel and Elaine at Kenmore. It had been a busy morning in the household. Nigel and Elaine’s younger son, Adam, had just become a dad to a baby boy in Canada and called them on Skype shortly before 6.30 am to show off the newborn. The video call was still going when Gerard phoned his parents at 6.46 am, and Nigel went out of the room to take the call. Olivia would later say the first she knew of any trouble was when her mum came into her room and closed the door behind her. Gerard did not know where Allison was; she had not returned from a morning walk.

  ‘I don’t want to alarm you, but Al’s missing,’ Elaine said.

  Olivia changed out of her pyjamas and drove off to search routes her brother said Allison might have taken. Olivia’s in-laws had lent her a car to use while in Brisban
e.

  Driving up Boscombe Road, with Brookfield State School to her left, she saw a groundsman on a ride-on mower and stopped to ask if he had seen a woman out walking. He hadn’t, so she continued on, turning left onto Brookfield Road. As she did, she glanced over to Gerard’s home across the road, where her father’s Holden Statesman was pulling into the driveway.

  Olivia continued on, past the real estate agency, general store, hair salon and the showground, and turned right at the Brookfield Road roundabout onto Gold Creek Road. Allison sometimes walked to an aged care home about a kilometre from the roundabout. Olivia passed it, driving another kilometre before turning around and heading back. Seeing two women walking on Savages Road to her right, she stopped to talk to them, but they hadn’t seen Allison either.

  Heading back towards the Brookfield roundabout, Olivia slowed the car to a crawl, wound her window down and turned her hazard lights on. Peering into the bushes, she yelled Allison’s name.

  Olivia had run out of call credit on her phone, so she was limited to sending Gerard texts and he would ring back. She asked him some basic questions about what Allison would have been wearing. He thought Allison would be in three-quarter length pants and a black or white T-shirt and could have a cap on.

  At 7.11 am, in a call of two-and-a-half minutes, Gerard asked Olivia if it was too early to call the police.

  ‘No, not at all,’ she said.

  As Olivia hung up, she spotted two men near the showground – Steve Womal and his friend Phil Blair. She parked the car and approached them too. They hadn’t seen a woman out walking, but Blair suggested Olivia should talk to personal trainer Daniel Crawford, who led the morning fitness class. She walked off to speak to him.

  Olivia didn’t name the person she was looking for. If she had, Womal would have known instantly who she was. Womal’s younger son attended Brookfield State School in the same year as Allison and Gerard’s eldest daughter.

  The first time Womal met Gerard was at the ‘burger bar’, five or so years before Allison disappeared. The bar opened on the first Friday of every month at the Brookfield Showground. Parents would supply meat and bread for the evenings and volunteer as chefs. Money raised went to the Brookie school. Womal and Gerard were on snags and steaks duty and exchanged small talk. Womal would always remember Gerard making a big show of welcoming Allison and his daughters when they arrived, calling her ‘angel’, and the girls ‘princess’. It all seemed a little over-the-top.

  Over the years, Womal sometimes saw Gerard wandering around the Brookie school in his gold Century 21 jacket. Gerard was always talking to people, making connections. Allison would drop the kids to school and pick them up.

  As a matter of fact, Womal had seen Gerard only the day before. The two dads had been watching the school’s cross-country race. As usual, Gerard was mingling with other parents; he was under the shady trees around the school oval, where the event started and finished.

  Womal recalled that Gerard looked immaculate in a business shirt, tie, black slacks and RM Williams boots. That was pretty much the way Gerard always looked when Womal saw him. Always dressed for success. Slick and professional.

  On the Friday morning when the alarm was raised that Allison was missing, Womal only knew what Olivia told him – that a woman had gone for a morning walk and hadn’t returned. Frankly, it struck him as strange. Why would someone be out looking so soon? It was only 7.20 am. Whoever was missing had probably stopped to chat to a friend or dropped in for a coffee somewhere. Surely it was a bit early to push the panic button. Shrugging, he made his way home. He had a paper to read.

  This is all routine

  Friday 20 April 2012

  8.30 am

  Senior Sergeant Narelle Curtis hung up the phone and spoke to the station’s shift supervisor, Sergeant Andrew Jackson. There was a situation at Brookfield, and they needed to go there. Two officers responding to a call out were concerned that a man reporting his wife missing appeared to have scratches on his face. She set off from Indooroopilly Police Station, with Jackson behind the wheel. As they arrived at the Brookfield Road house, Jackson activated his digital voice recorder. It would capture Gerard talking about the injuries on his face almost before they’d had a chance to say hello.

  ‘Cut myself shaving,’ Gerard volunteered.

  They went inside, where Curtis assured Gerard that the police would do their very best to find his wife.

  First and foremost, Curtis wanted to know Allison’s state of mind.

  ‘Pretty good,’ said Gerard, before adding she had a history of depression that had been managed by medication. ‘We haven’t really discussed it for a long time. It used to be a daily dose of Zoloft.’

  ‘So, Gerard, basically you and your wife are estranged, are you?’ asked Curtis.

  ‘No. No, not at all.’

  ‘All right. So there’s no indication that the marriage is going to break up?’

  ‘Um, I hope not,’ replied Gerard.

  After fruitlessly searching the streets of Brookfield, Olivia had taken her nieces to school and returned to find Gerard speaking to the police officers. He asked her to leave while he discussed some private issues with them, and she promised to be right outside if he needed her.

  With his sister out of earshot, Gerard broached his cheating for the second time with police that morning: ‘I had an affair that ended last year. Obviously that has put a, a strain on the relationship. But we’ve been working through it. And in fact we went and saw a counsellor on Monday.’

  ‘Was there anything that came out of that session that would have upset your wife?’ asked Curtis.

  There wasn’t, Gerard replied. ‘Overall it was a pretty positive thing. There were some strategies. It’s about rebuilding the trust and everything.’

  The officers moved on to what Gerard knew of his wife’s movements.

  ‘What time do you think she got up?’ asked Jackson.

  ‘Did you sleep together last night?’ added Curtis.

  ‘I was saying before, I don’t actually know. I’m a heavy sleeper and I snore and that sort of thing. I went to bed before she did last night,’ Gerard answered.

  ‘What time did you go to bed? Where was she when you last saw her?’ asked Curtis.

  ‘She was watching The Footy Show, on the couch.’

  It wasn’t unusual, maybe once every fortnight or so, for one of them to sleep on the couch watching the TV, he said. ‘Whether she slept there or not, I don’t know. She, um, does, um, go walking in the morning.’

  Gerard’s voice was hushed and the digital recorder at times barely picked up what he was saying. He was calm as he explained that Allison’s walks were intermittent, but she would get up at 5 am to exercise two to three times a week. He and Allison were trying to lose weight before a planned holiday with friends over the Labour Day long weekend in a few weeks.

  ‘Last night, she went and had her hair done,’ he added. ‘Well, for the third time. It was, you know, coloured, and they stuffed it up the first two.’

  ‘What does she normally wear when she goes jogging?’ asked Jackson.

  Allison wore two outfits, Gerard said, for her exercise: either a black one or a grey tracksuit, which was missing. She also had a grey singlet top and sometimes wore a grey sloppy joe jumper. Her runners were not where she normally left them at the front door or anywhere else in the house. Her three-quarter-length pants, the ‘daggy old ones’, were missing too. ‘She bought some new Lorna Jane ones in black, but they’re here,’ Gerard told the officers.

  He obviously paid more attention to his wife’s wardrobe than most husbands, surprising officers by deducing what Allison must be wearing based on what he noticed was missing from her clothes drawers.

  There were two main routes Allison walked, Gerard said. One involved a journey to the Brookfield Village aged care home on Gold Creek Road. Olivia had already driven along there twice looking for Allison, he informed them. The second route involved doing a loop around the sc
hool to Brookfield Produce and back to their house. Neither was longer than a 2-kilometre round trip.

  Curtis broached the topic of the painful-looking injuries on Gerard’s face: ‘Gerard I have to ask this question. Those two marks on your face could be consistent with having been scratched.’

  ‘I was asked that this morning. I cut myself shaving.’

  Ordinarily on a Friday, Gerard said, he would meet with his sales team at 8.30 am to go through the properties listed for the weekend. The plan was different that day because Allison and his property manager, Kate Rankin, were going to a seminar in the city. Gerard needed to look after the kids and do the school run. He was up just after 6 am.

  ‘I do my usual, excuse me, shit, shower and shave in the morning,’ he said, for the second time that day. ‘This morning was no different. I check all my emails when I’m sitting on the toilet. I did that. Then I was rushing. I needed to get all the girls up. [My middle daughter] got up. And then I cut myself. She’s always the first to get up but she was late this morning. They were tired. They all had cross-country.’

  Curtis, returning to the couple’s relationship, asked Gerard if Allison had ever run off before.

  She hadn’t. Nor had there been an incident the previous night that could have set her off, Gerard said. ‘I mean, the counsellor on Monday suggested that we set aside 15 minutes a night, for Allison to be able to vent and grill me … and we did that.’ But that wouldn’t explain the day’s events, he said.

  Jackson asked if Allison, when she vented, screamed at Gerard.

  ‘No. She’s not like that. She had sworn at me in the past but she didn’t swear at me.’