The Murder of Allison Baden-Clay

by David Murray

  The effect of Allison’s disappearance was that a range of officers dropped what they had been doing and put any plans on hold in order to join the search and investigation.

  In the Homicide offices on level two of the Queensland Police Service (QPS) headquarters in Roma Street, Detective Sergeant Peter Roddick finally had some clear air. Roddick, a physically imposing man made more so by a shaved head and direct stare, was in a small team of detectives who had spent almost two years reviewing another prominent case, the 1991 murder of schoolgirl Leanne Holland, 12, at Goodna, west of Brisbane. The man convicted of Leanne’s murder, Graham Stafford, had his conviction quashed in the Court of Appeal after 15 years in jail. A retrial had been ordered and police had taken another look at the evidence. The weighty report on the Leanne Holland case had only been finished that week, but any chance of some downtime evaporated when the Homicide Squad’s Detective Inspector Damien Hansen briefed Roddick on Allison’s disappearance about 3 pm Friday.

  Roddick drove out to Brookfield with a cold case investigator, Detective Sergeant Mark Brand, that afternoon. Viewing photographs of Gerard’s facial injuries, Roddick could only agree the case looked deeply suspicious. Other detectives from the squad would soon join them on Operation Kilo Intrigue.

  Acting Inspector Ewen Taylor, the Metropolitan North police region forensic coordinator, was looking forward to some well-earned time off. Taylor and a colleague had been sharing the forensic coordinator’s role for two years, after their predecessor took extended leave to work in the mines and didn’t come back. It had been a relentless and brutal couple of years in the vast area he was responsible for north of the Brisbane River. Take the case of a mum who had killed her 14-year-old daughter, and then plunged to her death from Story Bridge. Or a husband who had bludgeoned his wife to death with a car tow ball. Long hours had grown into long weeks and long months as he was called from one horrific crime scene to the next, with only the rare break.

  A man who enjoyed maintaining his fitness, Taylor relieved the pressure of his job, and stayed sane, by jumping on one of his mountain bikes and heading into the hills. Finally, that Friday, it looked like he would be able to get in a decent ride over the coming weekend. He was in the office at Alderley, north Brisbane, mentally mapping out his riding routes when Sergeant Julian Dash phoned at 1.25 pm Friday.

  ‘You weren’t hoping to have a weekend off, were you? Because you’re not going to,’ said Dash, who had just photographed the scratches on Gerard’s face and uploaded them to the police Forensic Register.

  The lauded register was developed in-house in the QPS and had been adopted in jurisdictions around the country. It allowed evidence to be uploaded from the field and stored in a central database for easy access to forensic officers and investigators. Taylor had personally photographed injuries in more than 600 cases and, as a supervisor, had viewed at least three times that many. When he logged on to the Forensic Register and brought up Dash’s photographs of Gerard’s face, the injuries were consistent with scratches he’d seen from assaults in the past.

  With all thoughts of mountain biking gone, Taylor, the consummate professional, phoned to check in with Acting Inspector Gundry, who was at Gerard and Allison’s house, and made sure there was a crime scene warrant; there was. Next Taylor called the head of the Scientific Section and said he would need some help on the new case, then contacted the Scenes of Crime officers at Indooroopilly and New Farm and asked them to meet him at Brookfield. Scientific officers specialise in advanced ballistics, bloodstain pattern analysis, document examination and fire and explosives investigations. Scenes of Crime officers are trained in the collection and recording of evidence, such as fingerprints, DNA, shoe sole impressions and tyre marks.

  Heading out to Brookfield that Friday afternoon, Taylor’s pivotal role overseeing forensic examinations on Operation Kilo Intrigue had begun. Numerous police were milling around the suburb when he arrived at four o’clock. His first action was to make sure the uniformed police guarding the scene kept a log of events, recording who was coming and going. He grabbed a roll of police crime scene tape and pulled it across the front driveway, blocking off the only entrance to the property. From then on, anyone who entered had to be in full Personal Protective Equipment – boots, a fluid-barrier suit, gloves and a facemask – to prevent contamination of the scene.

  Forensics had advanced in leaps and bounds in the decade or so he had been working in the field. The era of waiting days or weeks for fingerprint matches was long gone. Scenes of Crime officers had at their disposal a mix of black, white and fluorescent powders to render prints visible on coloured surfaces. On a big job like this, fingerprints could be photographed, loaded onto his rugged Panasonic Toughbook laptop at the scene and sent wirelessly to the Fingerprint Bureau for searching, with a result in 20 to 30 minutes. DNA results could now come back within days or a couple of weeks, not months.

  Initially, Taylor arranged for tetramethylbenzidine (TMB) tests for blood in sinks, on dirty clothes in the laundry, and on the vacuum cleaner that Gerard’s father, Nigel, had loaded into the back of his car at the house that morning.

  When he took in everything about the home, applying his customary logic and common sense, Taylor picked up on some details that seemed odd. One was that Gerard told police he went out looking for Allison in the couple’s Holden Captiva, which was reversed into the side carport. To get it into this position, Gerard would have had to reverse awkwardly around his Prado, which was parked in a much more accessible spot in front of the house. Why hadn’t Gerard taken the Prado?

  When Taylor looked in the back of the Captiva, something didn’t seem right with that either. The third row of seats was folded down to create a large boot area, where a pram for dolls and boxes of toys were all neatly arranged. If Gerard had been out driving the streets in the Captiva looking for Allison, why were the items still so ordered? The toys looked like they had been recently placed in the boot.

  It was 10 pm when he packed up that night and briefed Gundry and Detective Superintendent Mark Ainsworth, who was returning from his leave the next day.

  Forward command post

  Friday 20 April 2012

  The mums arriving for the fitness class at the Brookfield State School oval thought Allison and Gerard’s house must have been burgled. Police cars anywhere in Brookfield were an unusual sight. And these were impossible to miss. Gerard and Allison’s home was on the main road into Brookfield – just before the turnoff to the primary school and only a couple of hundred metres from the general store, the commercial hub of the community.

  The mums – and some dads – gathered at the school oval every Friday at 9.15 am for what they called their weekly torture session with Rocket Fitness trainer and former boxer, Daniel Crawford. At one stage, Allison had limbered up for the group fitness classes, but threw in the towel after two or three sessions, confessing ‘hardcore’ exercise wasn’t for her. The other mums would occasionally see her out and about in the mornings, getting some more sedate exercise. She was a dawdler, not a power walker. Moseying along, it seemed she was out for fresh air rather than fitness.

  As the exercise group went through their paces that morning, the police presence grew at Gerard and Allison’s house. By the time the hour-long session was over it was evident that something was seriously amiss. Police cars and vans were now starting to assemble at the Brookfield Showground – there were uniforms everywhere. Someone told the group Allison was missing.

  The two separate but equally important police operations revved into high gear at about the same time. While Gundry was frenetically formalising the criminal investigation, based at the Indooroopilly CIB office, resources were being skilfully mustered for the very public search, based at the showground.

  Police Inspector Mark Laing was one of two men leading the search. Known universally as ‘Sharky’, Laing had held a variety of positions in his policing career. A former accident investigator and police prosecutor, he had spent a harrow
ing two-and-a-half years reviewing the long-running investigation into the murders of Neelma, Kunal and Sidhi Singh. The Singh siblings were found dead in a spa bath in their home at Bridgeman Downs, north Brisbane, in April 2003. Nine long years later, Neelma’s former boyfriend, Max Sica, was being tried for the murders, and Laing had spent weeks assisting the prosecution.

  On the morning Allison was reported missing, Laing was at the district office at Station Road, Indooroopilly. By early afternoon, when police at the scene phoned to say Allison hadn’t returned and a forward command post had been set up at the Brookfield Showground, Laing phoned his colleague, Detective Acting Superintendent Shane Dall’osto, who was temporarily the officer in charge of the Brisbane West district, and the two arranged to meet in Brookfield.

  Laing made it to the showground at about 1.30 pm; Dall’osto had arrived ahead of him. There were already 20 to 30 police in uniform gathered for a search, and Laing and Dall’osto got straight to work.

  The two men coordinated the search for Allison from the showground, about 200 metres down the road from her house, for the next ten long, emotional days. Laing, a man with a soft heart and a huge capacity for work, was appointed the police forward commander.

  Allison’s large extended family was beginning to hear what was unfolding. Jodie Dann was at home in south-west Brisbane when her daughter Ashley noticed an alarming post on her Facebook feed at 6 pm.

  ‘Mum, this is a photo of Allison. It says she’s reported missing,’ Ashley shouted out.

  The QPS post said Allison Baden-Clay – Dann’s cousin – was missing. Dann tried to keep calm and told herself it could be some sort of prank, but she was scared. When she phoned police, they confirmed that Allison was genuinely missing.

  All her suspicions about Gerard over the years crystallised in her mind as she dialled the number for her mum, Mary Dann, Allison’s aunt.

  ‘He’s done it Mum, he’s done it. He’s killed her,’ she told Mary.

  Dann’s mum told her she couldn’t know that yet. But Dann was certain.

  ‘I’m phoning the police,’ she told her mum. And she did. That night she phoned Crime Stoppers, and told them what she knew of Gerard’s emotional and psychological abuse of his missing wife.

  ‘He’s killed her,’ she told the operator. ‘I’m Allison’s cousin. You can verify that. I’m a domestic violence advocate, I’ve worked in the area for eight years, and he’s killed her.’

  Dann couldn’t sleep. Her mind was racing. Where had he put her? Dann was thinking somewhere on Gold Creek Road. In a mine shaft somewhere. Maybe he’d made it look like suicide.

  Meanwhile at Brookfield, police were working late into the night. In the afternoon one of the detectives, Plain Clothes Constable Kellie Thomson, had once more tried the Find My Friends application on Gerard’s phone. The separate triangulation process had only shown Allison’s phone was in a broad area spanning several kilometres. Previous attempts that day to use the tracking application had failed but Thomson seemed to strike it lucky: after a 10-second delay, a blue dot appeared on the screen. It was pinpointing Allison’s phone to a home in Boscombe Road – it was the long backyard of Veronica Brumm, whose dog, Scraps, had demanded to be let out in the middle of the previous night. Police had searched the property throughout the day, and around 25 officers returned when darkness fell and fanned out in a line.

  Laing and Dall’osto were among them, shoulder to shoulder, eyes straining in the dark as Allison’s mobile was called. Their torchlights were off and there was complete silence. They were hoping against hope to see the glow of a display or perhaps hear a ringtone, or buzz. There was nothing.

  When that failed, the Rescue 500 helicopter roared overhead, equipped with heat-sensing equipment, which should have picked up Allison’s phone, provided it was still on. Nothing was revealed.

  Laing got home at 11 pm. It was a disappointing end to a long day. Tomorrow, they would redouble their efforts in the search for Allison.

  Test match

  The hapless batsmen in the Brookfield United Cricket Club didn’t know what hit them. It was 1994, and from the other end of the pitch, a medium-pacer came in and bowled them out, one after the other. By the end of the innings, he’d single-handedly knocked out the entire team, skittling them like bowling pins in a perfect strike. Detective Superintendent Mark Ainsworth’s ten wickets for 26 runs on his home ground remains the best bowling spell in the 65-year history of the Stafford Cricket Club. It was an effort Gerard Baden-Clay, a cricket tragic, would have appreciated.

  Ainsworth, born and bred on Brisbane’s north side, was an all-rounder for Stafford from primary school until a simple slip on duty in 2000 almost claimed his life. A rising star with the QPS, he was doing the night shift in the job he loved when a phone call came in about a rape in the caves under Story Bridge. Clambering over a spiked fence in search of the offender, he lost his footing. At first he thought a spike had caught his pants, until he saw blood pouring down to his boots. He’d sliced the branches of the femoral artery in his thigh. Two police colleagues clamped the wound and rushed him to St Andrew’s War Memorial Hospital at Spring Hill, saving his life and receiving commendations for their efforts. Ainsworth’s cricketing days were cut short, but once recovered, his police career continued on its upward trajectory.

  A natural leader, he’d joined the QPS in January 1980, fresh from graduation at Kedron State High. His uncle had been a policeman in Fingerprints and used to take him around on weekends to show him the job, sparking and nurturing his interest. In a career-defining moment, Ainsworth was seconded to Tony Fitzgerald QC’s inquiry into entrenched corruption stretching to the top of the police service. Hand-picked for the role by Jim O’Sullivan – a future Queensland police commissioner – he was one of five surveillance operatives on the inquiry, tailing bookmakers and crime figures.

  Roles followed in the former Criminal Justice Commission, as a detective in various CIBs, and secondments to the Australian Crime Commission and to the Queensland Floods Commission of Inquiry examining the devastating events of December 2010 and January 2011. But if Ainsworth thought he’d seen it all in his policing career, the Baden-Clay investigation was about to show him otherwise.

  Ainsworth was at the end of a three-week holiday when he came into work a day early, on Friday 20 April 2012, to get on top of the workload he knew would be waiting for him as the Metropolitan North Regional Crime Coordinator. His role was to oversee investigations into major crimes, in an area spanning dozens of suburbs and hundreds of thousands of residents north of the Brisbane River. The phone tended to ring at all hours of the day or night, and he’d ensure the right resources were in place for the murders, sieges, sex assaults, armed hold-ups and missing persons cases that routinely occurred in a city of more than two million.

  Acting Inspector Mal Gundry briefed Ainsworth on Allison’s disappearance.

  The next morning, Saturday April 21, was an early start. Gundry and Ainsworth led a 7.30 am briefing in the MIR at Indooroopilly Police Station, opposite the sprawling multi-level shopping centre, to detectives drawn from the local CIB, Homicide and surrounding stations. Officers from Forensics, Intelligence and other specialist areas filled the room.

  Getting detectives to work on the investigation wouldn’t be an issue – it was harder to get them to go home. A mum was missing and they wanted, desperately, to find her.

  Ainsworth’s next stop was the Brookfield Showground, where he checked in with officers at the search HQ. The showground was the home of the Brookfield United Cricket Club, trounced by Ainsworth in his cricketing days. The investigation would be more of a test match than a one-day event, and this time Brookfield was firmly on Ainsworth’s side.

  He would become the public face of the police search for Allison Baden-Clay.

  Newsroom

  It was midday when my partner, Catriona Mathewson, phoned to ask if I’d heard of anything happening at Brookfield. She was on her way to visit her sister on Friday 20
April 2012 and had gone past Allison and Gerard’s house. At the time, I was working on investigations on The Sunday Mail.

  ‘There are police everywhere,’ she said.

  A journalist, her curiosity had kicked in. Drug raids were being reported on the radio bulletins. She wondered if it was somehow connected. Her sister, who lives in a beautiful cul de sac beside a picturesque Brookfield creek, was trying to guess the reason for the unusual, and large, police presence. Within days police divers would be scouring that same creek and a waterhole in the massive search for Allison Baden-Clay. But that morning there was nothing being reported anywhere about Brookfield.

  Catriona phoned again in the afternoon and told me even more police had arrived in Brookfield, including a forensics van. The Baden-Clay home had been cordoned off with blue and white police tape.

  In the late afternoon, police issued a brief media statement about a missing mum. The few sentences gave no hint of the major investigation already unfolding. I realised that if forensics had been called in and the home sealed off, this was shaping up as more than just a missing persons case.

  I Googled the name in the media release, Allison Baden-Clay. The search came back with profiles of her husband, Gerard, showing his great-grandfather was Scouts founder Robert Baden-Powell. That evening I phoned Sunday Mail news editor Sam Strutt on her mobile to let her know there might be a significant story developing. When I hung up, The Australian’s investigative journalist, Hedley Thomas – married to Catriona’s sister Ruth – phoned from their Brookfield home and asked if I’d heard anything about the case. He knew the family involved.