The Murder of Allison Baden-Clay

by David Murray

  Gerard’s world was closing in on him. He’d barely slept. On the passenger seat next to him, a copy of The Sunday Mail lay open on page five, where the story about his missing wife ran next to a photo of a beaming Gerard and Allison on their wedding day.

  An overpass loomed ahead as he continued along Musgrave Road. Underneath, there was an exit to the left to a bus interchange. A large sign read, ‘Buses only, No entrance’. Suddenly, Gerard rolled the steering wheel left, putting the car directly in line with one of the concrete pylons of the overpass. Mounting the footpath, the car drove straight into the massive column, instantly crumpling the bonnet and jolting Gerard violently in the driver’s seat. Gerard Baden-Clay, pillar of the community, had idiotically slammed into a pillar on a perfectly straight road. Getting out of his car, he lay face down on the bitumen.

  Paramedics and firefighters were alerted immediately and rushed over to him.

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ one of the fire fighters heard Gerard say.

  Gerard told paramedics he must have looked down at his phone and crashed.

  His lawyer, Darren Mahony, was on the scene before police. When detectives from the MIR arrived, Gerard was already on a stretcher and wouldn’t talk to them. Raised into an ambulance, he was taken to hospital as a precaution.

  Acting Inspector Mal Gundry and Detective Sergeant Chris Canniffe went to check out the scene of the crash. Orange traffic cones surrounded the car to prevent further accidents. There was no obvious reason why the blue hatchback – which Gerard had borrowed from his friend Rob Cheesman – had crashed into the concrete pylon. No other cars were involved. No skid marks were visible on Musgrave Road. Gerard hadn’t braked, it seemed. The detectives and passers-by scratched their heads. Back at Brookfield, Mark Ainsworth was briefing Allison’s family and trying to ignore the incessant ringing of his mobile phone. Eventually, he excused himself and went off to take the call.

  When he came back to the family, his face was bright red. ‘Gerard has just crashed his car.’

  Gerard had been wearing a seatbelt, and it was a relatively minor bingle.

  If he was trying to harm himself, it didn’t seem a serious attempt. Police had photographed his injuries twice. It seemed pointless to try to muddy the waters with new ones, if that were his intent.

  Only 48 hours had passed since he reported his wife missing, and things were spiralling out of control.

  7.15 pm

  The Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital emergency department was a constantly busy place. On any given night, its 18 beds were filled with drunks from the nearby Fortitude Valley nightclub precinct, injured children, patients in cardiac arrest or drivers and passengers pulled out of car wrecks. After crashing into the concrete pylon, an emotional Gerard Baden-Clay was occupying one of the beds. To be safe, emergency department doctors had put Gerard in a Philadelphia collar, commonly used for whiplash victims to stabilise the top vertebrae until X-rays can be taken.

  Senior Constable Cameron McLeod, one of the first detectives to speak to Gerard at Brookfield two days earlier, raced to the hospital on the chance of a confession. McLeod found Gerard crying hysterically behind a curtain in the emergency department.

  ‘I’m not answering your questions,’ said Gerard, whose sister, Olivia Walton, and a legal representative were at his side.

  Gerard may have been wondering what would become of the forensic examination he’d missed. The arrival of specialist forensic medical officer Dr Leslie Griffiths cleared that up: the accident had bought Gerard only a brief reprieve. In the doctor’s possession was the Forensic Procedure Order to examine Gerard. Detectives wanted any injuries documented as soon as possible. Griffiths obliged by working the Sunday night. Police had briefed him on the car accident before he set to work.

  The Queensland Health forensic medical officer was a highly experienced expert in his field. He held a Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery and a Master’s degree in forensic medicine. He was a qualified pharmaceutical chemist and had given evidence at all levels of the justice system.

  The medical collar prevented Griffiths from looking at Gerard’s neck, until doctors confirmed there was no serious injury and approved its removal. Examining the injuries on Gerard’s right cheek, Griffiths saw they were spaced apart and were several millimetres wide. They looked, to Griffiths, like fingernail scratches. There were already signs of healing, and Griffiths surmised the marks were at least 48 hours old.

  On Gerard’s right upper chest, Griffiths found the marks police had photographed the day before. Griffiths briefed police on his examination. Gerard had indeed suffered injuries well before his car crash, he confirmed. His later report made no mention of any examination or discoveries under Gerard’s trousers.

  Senior Constable McLeod secured an order keeping Gerard in hospital for a psychological assessment. Doctors gave his mental state a clean bill of health and he was released the next day.

  Please help us

  Having found no trace of Allison, police wanted Gerard to make a public appeal. Detective Sergeant Chris Canniffe approached Gerard’s lawyer, Darren Mahony, and put in the request. Gerard said he would think about it, but he was worried. A troublemaking journalist could ask him about the scratches on his face. When it came to the crunch, Gerard refused to do it.

  The next port of call for police, intent on a public appeal, was Allison’s parents. Geoff and Priscilla Dickie said they’d do anything to help find their daughter. The couple went to police headquarters in Roma Street in the CBD on Monday 23 April 2012. Detective Superintendent Mark Ainsworth and Detective Acting Inspector Mal Gundry escorted them through a side door into a media room, where waiting journalists, photographers and camera crews fell silent.

  Priscilla broke down as the cameras rolled. Through her tears she pleaded, ‘As a mother, please, please help us to find our dear Allison. Our lives will never be the same. We must, we must, must find her. She’s just so precious and she’s so loving. We desperately need your support. Please, please help us.’

  Geoff put his arm around his wife to comfort her. ‘Please help us,’ he urged, ‘because there are three beautiful little girls of Allison’s, wanting to see their mother.’

  It was raw emotion and would hit a nerve when broadcast around the country on the TV news that evening.

  Seated beside the Dickies, Ainsworth played down police investigations into Gerard. The Courier-Mail had that morning reported, for the first time, that police were treating the case as a ‘crime investigation’ and Gerard was a ‘person of interest’.

  To questions at the media conference about Gerard and the nature of the investigation, Ainsworth played a dead bat: ‘Her husband was the person who reported Allison missing. There have been numerous inquiries with numerous people.’

  But where was Gerard? His detour to hospital wasn’t yet public knowledge, and his absence was glaring.

  After Gerard had refused to make a public appeal, Olivia Walton contacted Detective Sergeant Canniffe. Walton told the detective she was ready and willing to front an appeal for her missing sister-in-law. But by then arrangements were in place; in Gerard’s absence, Allison’s parents were doing it.

  Priscilla and Geoff’s brave media appearance galvanised the community. Locals mobilised and joined the effort to find Allison. Police put out a call for residents to register dams and mine shafts and to check their properties; they were soon able to cross off their list homes all over Brookfield. Residents went out and searched on their own, trudging through the bush, shouting Allison’s name. Was Allison still alive after almost four days? No one could know. But they pressed on.

  Allison’s family, caught up in a terrible waiting game, fell into a routine. Her uncles, aunts, cousins and friends would come from everywhere to the Brookfield Showground. They joined Priscilla and Geoff each morning and stayed until dark, then resumed their vigil the next day. At first, they sat out in the open, on seats overlooking the big oval used for happier community e
vents, such as the annual show, cricket, horse-riding and fetes. After several days passed, the Brookfield Show Society threw open the doors of the country-style bar and an adjacent kitchen – where Gerard and Allison had once joined other parents at the Friday night burger bar. It gave Allison’s family some privacy as they waited.

  The peaceful little community came to resemble a disaster zone. It was as if a great flood or other calamity had struck the area. Searchers met en masse at the showground, rolled out maps and sketched plans on whiteboards. They set off on foot patrols, dirt bikes and horseback. The showground’s oval became a landing-pad for helicopters, which roared in and out repeatedly in the search for Allison. From the air, searchers peered down at the rugged terrain below. There were acreage properties and bush tracks all over the place. Allison could be anywhere.

  Everyone wanted to help. Stephanie Apps, whose kids caused such a ruckus on the night Allison went missing, feared the worst when she found disturbed earth on her property and noticed a terrible smell. She called the police, who delicately dug up the dirt, only to find rotting food buried there. It turned out that while Apps had been away recently, the power went out at her home and her mum had dug a hole to dispose of spoiled food from the fridge, not expecting to create a police incident.

  Brookfield resident Will Truter visited the police command post to tell officers what he’d heard the night of Allison’s disappearance. Truter lived in Winrock Street, 4 kilometres from Allison and Gerard. He’d been in front of the TV in his lounge room with family at 10 pm when two screams drove him out of his comfy chair and into the darkness outside to investigate.

  His neighbour heard the same screams and yelled into the night that she was going to call the police, trying to scare off whoever may have been outside. The neighbour phoned Truter to check what he’d heard.

  ‘While I was standing outside, we heard a third sound,’ Truter told me later. ‘It was like someone screaming and someone kept a hand over their mouth. That was the last we heard.’

  Forward commander Mark Laing had seen plenty of missing persons investigations in which after a couple of days, the person sheepishly reappeared, having cleared their head. When Laing met Geoff and Priscilla and Kerry-Anne Walker at the search site on the Saturday morning, they told him straight that it was well outside Allison’s character to go missing.

  Laing didn’t know what to make of Kerry-Anne at first – Allison’s friend was so insistent the missing mum would never leave her daughters. The strength of her convictions soon convinced him that Allison was in dire trouble.

  At first, Laing only had an old wedding photo of Allison, from almost 15 years earlier. He needed a more recent photo, but the man who was in the best position to provide one, Gerard, had been making himself scarce. Instead, Allison’s sister, Vanessa, went to her parents’ home on the Gold Coast and found a more recent photograph for Laing, who arranged for hundreds of flyers to be printed with Allison’s photograph.

  A priority for Laing was to find out everything he could about Allison to assist in the search. He had a long list of questions. He would have liked to have known more about Allison’s mental state, her access to medication and money, whether she had any other relationships and precise details about her walking habits and outfits. Laing could never seem to get access to Gerard.

  The search commander told Olivia Walton he would write the questions down for her brother, if he needed to clear them through lawyers.

  By contrast, others were falling over themselves to help. A woman came to the search base and said she could round up 200 experienced horse riders if he said the word. State Emergency Service volunteers were turning up in droves – more than 400 would be involved. Recruits from the police academy were being sent out to help.

  Reports of people hearing screams and other dramatic sounds on the night of 19 April kept coming in. There were so many screams, it was as if several people had been involved in foul play in Brookfield that night. Laing had to stay focused.

  The primary search zone started at the house and moved outwards in an ever-increasing circle. Laing described the search pattern as like dropping a pebble in a pond – a splash in the middle, with ripples going outwards.

  Until Allison was found, Laing, Shane Dall’osto and the SARMAC officers would presume she was alive. They were driving a search and rescue operation. Allison could have fallen down a hole and be waiting for them to put the right people in the right place. The searchers looked at cliff faces she could have dropped off. Police divers were brought in to wade through dams and swimming holes. Fire fighters rappelled down mine shafts.

  Some nights, Laing would go to sleep worrying that only a handful of SES volunteers were confirmed for the next day. He’d get to Brookfield Showground the next day and find 60 volunteers there, ready to go. April 25, Anzac Day, fell on a Wednesday and was one of the biggest days of the search. People came from everywhere on the public holiday, asking to help.

  Forensic coordinator Ewen Taylor used the Anzac Day public holiday to go mountain biking from one dirt track to the next on the outskirts of Brookfield in search of potential dumping points. He was riding home that afternoon when he got a call to say a hiker had found blood on Goanna Trail in the Mt Coot-tha Forest, which fringed the end of Boscombe Road. Taylor pedalled furiously all the way home, changed into his overalls and drove to the Gap Creek car park to meet the hiker. Using GPS coordinates, he found the trail of suspicious red dots, and performed tests at the scene, which confirmed the presence of blood. But when Taylor looked around further he noticed bloody gauze and a syringe. He phoned the Queensland Ambulance Service, who confirmed they had been at the site that morning to treat a seriously injured mountain biker.

  Brookfield residents, trying to find any way to help, turned to baking and dropped off sweets and stews for the searchers with barely a word said. A local restaurant owner brought 400 bowls of food to searchers in two days. Allison’s family went home each night and toiled in their kitchens, preparing sandwiches and scones and other simple food. They offered what they could to the searchers.

  Sometimes simple gestures of support lifted the searchers just when they needed it. A Brookfield mum turned up at the showground with her daughter, who was no more than six or seven years of age. With the words, ‘Thank you’, the child handed Laing a drawing of police searching for Allison and also gave him a cupcake decorated with a face of icing and a cocktail umbrella. Laing took the treat home and kept it in his freezer for three months as a reminder of Brookfield’s kindness.

  Later, when the rain came, the Brookfield Show Society opened the doors to a hall alongside Brookfield Road. The society told Laing he had the run of the place for as long as he wanted – other events at the showground that might have conflicted or interfered had been cancelled.

  Every couple of hours, Laing would go and talk to Allison’s family and friends to fill them in on the latest developments. Priscilla’s mother, Lily Dann – Allison’s grandmother – turned up in a wheelchair and asked to meet ‘Sharky Laing’. Lily, 91 years old, was tickled pink when Laing greeted her by remarking, ‘Well, I know where Allison gets her looks from.’

  Allison’s family would ask Laing, ‘Is this what you do for every missing person?’ Laing, in turn, was impressed at how Allison’s family stayed strong and never interfered. They never put pressure on him or the other searchers. Laing put the pressure on himself.

  Privately, he was doing it tough. As the search dragged on, the mind played games from lack of sleep and the burden of responsibility.

  There came a point when he felt he had to apologise to Geoff and Priscilla: ‘I’ve let you down. I haven’t found your daughter.’

  Geoff reassured him the family had faith in the police: ‘It’s out of your control, mate.’

  The pressure was being felt in the MIR too. Allison’s disappearance was front-page news in The Courier-Mail every day and was leading TV news bulletins morning and night. Media crews pounced whenever anyone mo
ved. Each new front-page story was put up on the walls of the MIR, a reminder of the intense public scrutiny of their work.

  Even the ultra-experienced Detective Superintendent Mark Ainsworth was amazed at the public response. No single crime he’d worked on had ever garnered such attention or struck a chord with the community in the same way.

  Back at the search post, Laing was struggling with a lack of detail and wondered time and again where Allison’s husband was – the man who could have filled in most of the worrying gaps in knowledge.

  Gerard was telling friends his focus was on making things normal for his daughters, and that officers had banned him from joining the search for Allison. Laing and other senior police knew of no such order, and there was certainly nothing preventing Gerard from visiting the forward command post at the showground.

  Typically, during the search, Laing’s day started with 5 am phone calls. He’d go straight out to the search base in the morning and stay there late into the night. His day would end when he crashed into bed around midnight. He and Dall’osto would be the last to leave the Brookfield Showground each night. He did not set eyes on Gerard once.

  A little bit hurt

  If Gerard Baden-Clay hadn’t killed Allison, he was doing a fantastic job of convincing everyone he had. Absent from the search, refusing to speak publicly and dealing with police through his lawyers, Gerard behaved like a man with much to hide. He could have been the public face of the search. He should have been the public face of the search. He should have been a husband desperately hunting for his wife and the mother of his three children. He could have thrown his life open to police, whatever they might dig up and whatever the personal cost. But he didn’t do any of those things.