The Murder of Allison Baden-Clay

by David Murray

  Constable Ash took note of the vehicles parked at the front of the house. Nigel’s silver Holden Statesman with BWANA vanity plates and Gerard’s white Toyota Prado with SETTLED plates were parked on the drive. Allison’s silver Holden Captiva had been reversed into the carport to the right of the house.

  It was autumn and the row of trees alongside the carport had shed their leaves. Their bare, straggly branches stretched over the corrugated roof. The unstoppable vines encircled the trees and the metal posts of the carport.

  Constable Ash and Constable Hammond followed Gerard up the weathered front steps. The front door opened to a lounge room. A flat-screen television was perched on a wooden cabinet, next to a piano with a music book propped open above the keys. A black L-shaped couch and ottoman faced the TV. It was where Allison was supposedly curled up when Gerard last saw her. A blanket and basket of laundry sat on the end of the couch. Dated, dusty-pink carpet covered the floors. The white walls were dotted with scuffs and scrapes from the wear and tear of family life.

  Photographs documenting Allison and Gerard’s life as a couple and their growing family decorated the walls, cabinets and tables. The master bedroom lay to the left; the children’s bedrooms were at the opposite side of the house, beside the carport. At the rear, the carpet gave way to terracotta tiles, running through a crowded home office, dining area and kitchen.

  A glass sliding door opened to a back patio swathed in leaves, where a rusting gas barbecue was pushed up against the house. Thick clusters of fern thrust their way onto the patio from the overgrown yard, where an old Hills Hoist leaned at an angle. A line of mature trees along the back fence screened the house from neighbours. Gerard and Allison rented the house for $460 a week. It was dirt cheap for a family home in the prestigious suburb of Brookfield.

  Hammond set about taking down some details about Allison. With Gerard’s permission, Ash took the chance to have a look around. His instincts were telling him this was more than a frazzled mum gone AWOL. Alarm bells were ringing.

  Ash went into the master bedroom. Strangely, in a house where the youngest child was five years old, there was a baby monitor on a bedside table. In the ensuite, he found no signs of a fight. Neither were there traces of bloodied tissues or toilet paper Gerard may have used to mop up after a shaving mishap. Something wasn’t right. He didn’t buy Gerard’s story.

  Gerard was cooperating so far, but the injuries on his face and his marital troubles couldn’t be ignored. Ash went outside to the patrol car and phoned his supervisor, Senior Sergeant Narelle Curtis, the Brisbane West district duty officer, who was at Indooroopilly Police Station. He asked Curtis to come down and see for herself.

  Gerard Baden-Clay, successful businessman, community leader, role model and happy family man had just become the focus of police suspicion. How had he ended up here? Over coming days countless strangers would wonder the same as they saw Allison’s smiling face in newspapers and on news bulletins: the beautiful bride on her wedding day, posing for happy snaps on honeymoon, with her children.

  As a child Allison had dreamt of being famous, but not like this.

  Ballerina

  The line stretched out the door of the Margaret Street dance studios in the Brisbane CBD when the Australian Youth Ballet Company (AYBC) held its inaugural auditions in July 1978. More than 220 girls and boys nervously waited to perform in small groups in front of a panel of eagle-eyed experts. The judge with the final word was a striking Eastern European dancer, Inara Svalbe. Dressed in a chic turtleneck, she wore her hair scraped back in an impossibly tight ponytail, not a strand out of place. Her knee-high boots clicked loudly on the thin wooden floorboards as she circled each new group, sizing them up.

  Svalbe, the artistic director and co-founder of AYBC, had a grand vision. She planned to harvest the best of the best from established dance schools around the country, then run them through the same paces as professionals. Fewer than 30 dancers aged eight to 14 would be accepted. Children, and their parents, couldn’t grand jêté fast enough to try out for the exclusive new company.

  Along with the majority of hopefuls that year, ten-year-old Allison June Dickie didn’t make the cut. She shouldn’t have taken it personally – Svalbe didn’t even select her own daughter, Krista Reeves, who was desperate for a place in the group too. Like Reeves, Allison did make a shortlist of reserves, who would be offered a place with the AYBC if another child quit or did not take up their position.

  Before long, Allison, a pretty, reserved girl from Ipswich, a regional city 40 kilometres west of Brisbane, was called up. By May 1979, she was leaping across stage at the Twelfth Night Theatre in Bowen Hills in the AYBC’s ‘world premiere’ of three original ballets. Supportive parents, word of mouth and adept marketing made for sell-out audiences. The show was scheduled to run at 8 pm on four consecutive nights but was so popular a 5 pm matinee was added.

  Svalbe’s origins were anything but glamorous. Born in a refugee camp in Bavaria, she moved with her family to Australia when she was two and grew up in Brisbane. She took up ballet at three and went on to dance with The Australian Ballet as a student, then performed soloist roles with the Royal New Zealand Ballet and principal roles with Ballet Theatre of Queensland. Svalbe started teaching at Oxley in 1968. Shortly after, she began running classes at a church hall in North Ipswich, where Allison Dickie was an early pupil.

  Svalbe was the first to admit she herself never reached the lofty heights to which she aspired – nothing short of being the best was good enough for her. She brought this same determination and passion – almost obsession – to the AYBC. In the lead-up to performances she would regularly be up until 2 am or 3 am, finishing hundreds of elaborate costumes on her over-heated Elna sewing machine.

  Svalbe likened herself to an artist with an unfinished masterpiece in her head. She couldn’t rest until her ballet company was running exactly as she had envisioned. A Sunday Mail reporter who visited her home in Kenmore, in Brisbane’s west, in the early 1980s found ‘costumes everywhere. Not quite hanging from the ceiling, but over chairs, dangling from picture frames, in heaps on the floor, spilling over tables. Spangled tulle, sequined brocades, gleaming satins, rich brocades plus the occasional crown, some masks and ballet shoes’.

  More than 30 years later, I knocked on the front door of the same house, unannounced. Daughter Krista, now in her 40s, opened the door, with her mum not far behind. Although the visit was unexpected, the two women welcomed me inside.

  Her home was heavy with memories and mementoes. In a storage room, she pulled down five dusty, leather-bound photo albums and for the next hour we pored over photos and ballet reviews from the late 1970s and early ’80s.

  Each year Allison and the other dancers had to re-audition to keep their places at the company. Like everything else with the AYBC, the auditions were designed to replicate standards in the world of professional dance. So intense was the pressure that afterwards Allison and the other girls and boys would huddle together and cry their hearts out, convinced they wouldn’t make the grade.

  While there was pressure on everyone, Allison was a particularly sensitive young girl. Such was her distress at the prospect of failing that sometimes she would be physically ill before performances. But she always picked herself up, finding the strength to push through.

  Allison and the other dancers travelled the country for performances that were often sold out. Co-founder Ken McCaffrey roped in a bevy of big names to lend their support. John Field, director of the Royal Academy of Dancing in London, and Australian ballet legend Sir Robert Helpmann became patrons. Invitations to perform started flooding in. One such invitation was to the 1980 International Festival of Youth Orchestras and Performing Arts in Aberdeen, Scotland.

  Before the trip, Allison was profiled in her local paper, Ipswich’s Queensland Times. The Redbank State School student was just 11 years old but was already ambitious, focused and prepared to work for what she wanted. Ballet lessons, she told the paper, grew progres
sively longer as the week went on: one hour on Monday, two hours on Wednesday and Thursday, two-and-a-half hours on Friday, three-and-a-half hours on Saturday, and a peak of nine hours on Sunday. All that training had made Allison supremely fit and rail thin.

  Allison’s parents, Priscilla and Geoff Dickie, were preparing to join her on the tour. Priscilla, speaking to the paper for the same article, told of the family’s sacrifices for Allison to pursue her dreams.

  ‘Geoff sometimes has to put up with meals on the run because we have to get Allison off to ballet classes … You have got to have determination for ballet and you have got to enjoy it and Allison does both.’

  Allison grew up in a regular working-class family in an archetypal blue-collar neighbourhood. Geoff was a fireman and painted houses on his days off. Priscilla was a librarian at Allison’s school. They lived in a modest house at 2A Spencer Street, Redbank, once a village named for the red soil of its riverbank, now a suburb of Ipswich. Redbank was home to Queensland’s first coal mine, opened in 1843, and was the site of the state’s first industrial strike. Over the years, Allison’s large extended family had toiled in a local meatworks, brickworks, woollen mill and railway workshops.

  Priscilla had grown up in a house in Church Street, a few doors down from where she set up home to raise her own children. She was the daughter of Bill and Lily Dann. Bill was a sociable railwayman and a dyed-in-the-wool Labor Party member. When a bright young policeman was eyeing a move into politics, Bill threw his weight behind him to get endorsed as a candidate. The policeman, Bill Hayden, went on to become Opposition leader from 1977 to 1983 and governor-general from 1989 to 1996.

  When another Ipswich newcomer, Paul Tully, first ran for a seat on the local council in 1979, Bill handed out how-to-vote cards and drummed up support. Tully romped home in the vote and is today Queensland’s longest serving local councillor.

  ‘Billy Dann was the staunchest Labor supporter I ever had,’ Tully tells me.

  Bill and Lily had ten children: Priscilla, Noel, Julie, Kevin, Douglas, John, Stephen, Jeffrey, Louise and Bill. Money was tight and Lily was expert at stretching a dollar. She had just two cloth nappies for her babies. When one nappy was soiled she would wash it, hang it on the line and replace it with the other.

  Bill built his house with the help of a neighbour. Initially the home had just two bedrooms, and four kids shared the one double bunk bed. The Danns were Methodists and their children went to Sunday school, all decked out in spotless white clothes.

  Priscilla’s father and brothers were soccer fanatics. They trained in the evenings on a strip of grass behind the railway workshops, with a single light strung up to break the darkness. It was the beginnings of the Redbank Seekers and Bill ran onto the pitch as the team’s left back, with his eldest son Noel the centre forward. Noel was a Queensland under-18s representative player but gave up his place for religious reasons when they started playing on Sundays. Bill would have preferred his son to play, but respected Noel’s decision.

  Bill used to drive his big brood and their friends around in an old Whippet truck. Once, it broke down on the Indooroopilly bridge, when the Brisbane River crossing still had a toll. The toll master’s eyes almost popped out when he found a group of 13 kids piled into the back, on their way to a soccer game. Bill tried to teach his wife to drive in the truck, but at a tiny 142-centimetres, or 4 feet 6 inches, Lily couldn’t see over the steering wheel. Propped up on half a dozen pillows, she crashed during her lesson, and Bill threw in the towel.

  Despite her small size, Lily was no pushover. With a glint in her eye she would always tell the story of seeing Bill walking down the street towards home with another woman by his side. When he made it to the front door, Lily belted him on the head with a frying pan as a warning shot.

  When Bill died at 69 from leukaemia in 1989, 700 people turned up to his funeral. There were so many mourners, the highway through Redbank had to be closed off for the funeral procession. Bill Hayden, then Governor-General, sent a letter of condolence. Lily stayed on at Church Street into old age, when the government resumed her block to build a new highway. She eventually moved into a nursing home at nearby Riverview.

  Allison’s dad, Geoff Dickie, was also of Redbank stock; his parents James and Elizabeth Dickie lived there all their lives. Geoff’s was a considerably smaller family; he had just one sibling – a sister, Julie. He and Priscilla have known each other for most of their lives, meeting at primary school in Redbank. Priscilla grew up to be a beauty. At 18, while on a seaside holiday with her family, she was crowned Miss Redcliffe 1959–60.

  Geoff and Priscilla married in Redbank’s Methodist church in September 1962. The couple went on to have three children: Vanessa, the eldest; Allison, their middle daughter; and a son, Ashley, the youngest. Priscilla and Geoff had notched up almost 50 years of marriage, were happily retired and were preparing to renew their vows when Allison vanished. Their planned celebration was cancelled in the end.

  Geoff had always been a gentle, soft-hearted thinker. As adults, his children would say they’d hardly ever heard him raise his voice. Allison had inherited her father’s thoughtful ways. Priscilla was a go-getter. She wanted her kids to have every opportunity in life, no matter the personal sacrifices she had to make. And there were plenty.

  Along with many of the other ballet parents, Priscilla and Geoff pitched in as chaperones, drivers, carpenters, dressmakers and whatever else was needed to make the AYBC – and Allison’s participation – work.

  In July 1980, thanks to some committed fundraising from parents and children alike, enough money was raised for the AYBC to fly out of Australia for a month-long tour of the United Kingdom. It took in the youth festival in Aberdeen, Scotland, along with some other performances and sightseeing. Priscilla and Geoff joined their excited daughter on the flight.

  The London performances went smoothly. ‘Thunderous ovation for ballet,’ read a headline back home after the first UK performance. When they reached Scotland, the AYBC dancers were the darlings of the festival. A full house watched their performance at Her Majesty’s Theatre, Aberdeen. Ahead of the show, a photographer from the UK’s Evening Express snapped Geoff Dickie carrying a 4-metre polystyrene prop through the streets of Aberdeen.

  ‘We’ve brought this thing 12,000 miles [20,000 km] – and we’ve got to carry it for the last four,’ he told the paper. Rolf Harris, at the time an untarnished star, met the dancers after one show and posed for photos.

  It was lucky that the UK tour had gone so well. An incident at the dorm in London shortly after the contingent landed had threatened to derail everything. Inara Svalbe’s daughter, Krista, had trained doubly hard to make the squad and was playing pool with one of the other dancers. The pair had an argument and Krista, enraged, hit the other girl before grabbing her bags and running into the streets. Allison set off in pursuit, determined to calm Krista.

  Krista would never forget Allison running after her. Allison was like that: naturally thoughtful, decent and kind. Everyone was protective of Allison in return. Her occasional bouts of anxiety had not gone unnoticed. At rehearsals, Svalbe tells me, Allison would sometimes become worryingly withdrawn.

  ‘We’d be doing “Sleeping Beauty”,’ says Svalbe, ‘and she’d be a fairy and dancing beautifully and smiling – at rehearsal they didn’t just do the steps; they did perform facially as well. They were smiling and acting. And then you’d find the next thing they’d have a break and she’d be sitting in the dressing room and she’d be rocking with her legs crossed. She’d be all withdrawn. That did worry me. In those days, you didn’t know what to say or do.’

  There never seemed to be a trigger, like a misstep or tiff with a friend – Allison was the least likely to argue with anyone. Afterwards, when the break was over, Allison would step back into rehearsals, bright and happy again, as if nothing had happened.

  Allison’s time with the ballet company came to an abrupt end in 1984. As she matured, she lost her lean figure, then lost
her place in the AYBC.

  ‘She got put on the short list. She’d put on weight,’ admits Svalbe, who also cut Krista over her size. ‘I was just so driven that everything had to be perfect.’

  Allison, at 15, was out of the ballet company she had loved. She never returned, but her experiences would influence the rest of her life. So much about Allison as an adult could be traced back to her ballet years. In many ways she would always be that young ballerina – quietly determined, striving for perfection, dreaming of being on a stage. She had learnt how to push through the tough times and to smile for the world, even when she was in turmoil inside. And her training had instilled a belief that hard work and perseverance brought success – that if you failed, it was because you didn’t try hard enough.

  The ballet days shaped Allison’s life in other ways too. The Europe trip, and other tours with the AYBC, gave Allison a taste of travel and the wide world beyond Ipswich. After finishing high school at Ipswich Girls’ Grammar School, where she was deputy head girl, the 17-year-old headed back overseas for a year-long Rotary exchange in Denmark.

  At a stopover in Japan, Allison shared a room with a fellow young Rotarian bound for Denmark, Linda Drinnan. Linda was from Camden, south-west of Sydney, and the girls became close friends. During their year abroad they travelled widely together. One whirlwind 18-day European tour took them to Paris, Venice, Vienna, Salzburg and Monte Carlo. Allison loved the romance of Paris more than anywhere.

  Allison’s best friend from school, Kerry-Anne Cummings, was also in Denmark on a student exchange. Both Drinnan and Cummings celebrated Allison’s 18th birthday at her host family’s home on the outskirts of Copenhagen. Drinnan, who later married and became Linda Ebeling, marvelled at Allison’s outward composure on their hectic trips from one country to the next. Linda was always leading the charge, with Allison calmly and unhurriedly following. Linda would have a map in hand, always sure where she was and where she was going. Allison, on the other hand, had no idea and never seemed to care. If you were to spin Allison around three times, she’d be lost – but not stressed. She was easygoing and slow, in a good way, Linda remembered. On one such trip, Allison and Linda stopped at a small trinket shop and bought identical ring and bracelet sets. The floral pink jewellery was a cheap but priceless keepsake of friendship and adventure.