by David Murray
Allison’s disappearance hadn’t made the Friday night news or the Saturday papers. Journalists on the police desk of The Courier-Mail had filed a story on the Friday, but missing persons cases were run of the mill and it was bypassed in the rush to get the paper out. I spoke to Strutt and editor Scott Thompson and they were both intrigued. An experienced news reporter, Suellen Hinde, was on the early morning shift and was already working on the story. She filed a couple of hundred words for the website – the first to be written on the case – and the media story came to life.
I found an address for Gerard’s parents, Nigel and Elaine, and Hinde headed to Brookfield to try to speak to them. When she arrived, they didn’t want to talk. Through the door, Elaine curtly ordered her to leave the property. In most missing person cases, relatives go to considerable lengths to get their loved one’s face in the public eye and to keep it there as long as possible. Gerard’s parents didn’t want a bar of the media.
At Brookfield, Hinde talked to the top man, Detective Superintendent Ainsworth. While she was out, I’d been calling Gerard’s friends and business associates. Picture editor Kevin Bull and photographer Jamie Hanson searched our archives and found a photo of Allison and Gerard together on their wedding day. By chance, staff photographer Steve Pohlner had photographed them for the popular Sunday Mail weddings pages 15 years earlier. They looked to be the perfect couple.
That night the story was on the TV news. The next day, the report of Allison’s disappearance ran prominently in the Sunday Mail. The story of Allison and Gerard Baden-Clay would soon be dominating the media in Queensland. At our regular Tuesday news conference, where we discussed ideas for the coming weekend, Allison’s disappearance was on the agenda for stories to pursue. Every news outlet in town was on the case.
I started making calls to anyone who may have had a connection to the couple. Among the first things I was told was Gerard had a mistress. There were suggestions he was in financial distress after the January 2011 floods, and had a major falling out with business partners. Those circumstances suggested there was more to the clean-cut well-spoken western suburbs real estate agent than met the eye.
Shithouse
Saturday 21 April 2012
Gerard and his sister, Olivia, arrived at the Brookfield Showground bright and early for the first full day of searching for Allison. Sergeant Greg Matthies, one of the Search and Rescue Management Coordinators (SARMACs), was setting up the forward police command post for the day. Matthies knew Gerard had called in a lawyer and was refusing to provide a formal statement, and was surprised to see him. He shepherded Gerard to a log near the cricket oval. Other officers milled about and one of them switched on a digital recorder as they sat down on the log to speak.
‘How you feelin’, Gerard?’ Matthies asked.
‘Shithouse,’ Gerard replied.
Matthies said he’d need some information to help with the search, and asked Gerard to go back through events again.
Gerard repeated what he’d told the police the previous day: ‘Um, I went to bed, ah, about ten o’clock last night. Oh sorry, the night before …’ he started.
Matthies asked if Allison had gone to bed, and Gerard said he had started to think she had. When he had made the bed in the morning, he said, he had pulled the doona up on his side but Allison’s was already up.
‘So she must have done that when she got up.’
Allison had told him the night before of her plans to leave home by 7 am for the conference. She had been excited about attending it.
‘So, um, I, I, I got up and started doing my usual routine, you know, sh–shit, shower and shave.’
There it was: that awkward phrase yet again.
He’d checked his emails on his phone while sitting on the toilet, Gerard continued. He was shaving as his middle daughter was waking up, and cut himself in the rush.
He had turned his wife’s hair rollers on to warm, knowing she took about 45 minutes to an hour to get ready of a morning: ‘And she’d had her hair done the night before. So I knew, you know, she would want to, and she was going to a seminar with, you know, two or three hundred people, so she’d want to be looking her best. And that takes longer, you know.’
He told Matthies about his wife’s usual walking routes, and said his sister and father had driven to his house on the Friday morning when Allison hadn’t returned. ‘That’s my dad’s car that’s parked there, which he’s a bit frustrated about ’cause he needs it,’ he said, motioning towards his house down the road. ‘It’s been held at the house.’
Matthies asked after Allison’s mental state and whether she had been up or down.
‘She’s, she’s been predominantly up, you know. We’ve had, had our ups and downs,’ Gerard replied.
Asked if there was anyone Allison might contact or confide in, Gerard nominated her friends Kerry-Anne Walker and Wendy Mollah.
Matthies asked more questions about whether there had been any issues between them on the Thursday night, and whether Allison would harm herself.
‘She, she had a history of depression and, um, that sort of thing. But that’s, you know, pretty well managed by her medication and that sort of thing. But, um, but it never, never led to anything like that.’
When Matthies moved on to marital problems, Gerard bristled, asking him to keep his voice down. Even here, with his wife missing and his home a crime scene, Gerard was worrying about his reputation. Matthies apologised and didn’t push the issue, no doubt wanting to try to keep Gerard onside.
The conversation was winding up, and Matthies thanked Gerard for being helpful. Shortly before they went their separate ways, the officer remembered to ask Gerard what Allison might be wearing.
‘Ah, just grey three-quarter-length pants and, um, and a, and a sort of a singlet top, probably. And ah, a, and the day before, um no … must have been Wednesday, um, which was the last day she went for a walk, um, she wore a, a sloppy joe, ah top, ’cause it was, ’cause it’s a bit cool.’
Asked what his plans were for the day, Gerard said he wanted to do whatever he could to help find Allison: ‘Some of the guys yesterday said, you know, I said I wanted to go looking and that sort of thing, and they said not to.’
Matthies did not comment either way, and Gerard went off to find his sister. He had a morning medical appointment to get to, with Dr Candice Beaven, the Kenmore GP to whom he would offer his business card.
Search commander Mark Laing was disappointed to arrive just after Gerard left. There were many questions he wanted to ask.
Gerard never once returned to the search base.
Because of the rapport he established with Gerard on the Friday, the personable Indooroopilly detective Chris Canniffe became the Major Incident Room’s family liaison officer. It was an unusual case, as normally the role involves dealing with a victim’s family in one group as police search and investigate. In the Baden-Clay investigation, Canniffe became liaison officer for both Allison’s family and Gerard’s family separately.
As soon as Canniffe got into the Indooroopilly CIB on the Saturday morning, he phoned Gerard and asked for the name of the mistress he had mentioned to police the day before. At first Gerard didn’t want to give him the name. When Canniffe said he would find out in a couple of calls anyway and was only asking as it would save him time, reluctantly, Gerard named Toni McHugh.
Canniffe wanted McHugh’s phone number too. Gerard baulked at providing the number, telling the detective he would need to call him back.
Not long afterwards, Toni McHugh’s phone rang – it was Gerard warning her police would want to talk to her.
Ewen Taylor, the methodical forensic coordinator, arrived at Allison and Gerard’s Brookfield house early on Saturday, but someone had been there before him. Officers guarding the home told Taylor of a 5 am visit from Gerard’s father, Nigel, who had wanted back his Holden Statesman and the vacuum cleaner. The car, however, was still in the driveway, where he had parked it the day before. The crime s
cene guards had strict instructions to turn away anyone other than a select group of police.
Nigel’s Statesman was the first car police forensically examined at the scene. Officers found a Swiss army knife in the console, which was tested for blood with no result. With the day warming up, Taylor was concerned about the forensic officers sweating through their protective clothing and contaminating the cars. He arranged for Gerard and Allison’s Prado and Captiva to be towed to a police vehicle examination facility, where the cars could be examined indoors in the cool.
Meanwhile, at Indooroopilly, police in the Major Incident Room were poring over the photographs of Gerard’s facial injuries. At the MIR, the assembled detectives look at situations from every possible angle and everyone gets a hearing – anyone can throw up suggestions for debate. They realised they needed a ruler next to Gerard’s marks to document their size to take the evidence to the next level. And looking at Gerard’s Windsor knot and starched collar, they wondered what other injuries could be unseen beneath his neat shirt.
‘Get him back here,’ one said.
Taylor got a call from the MIR at about midday asking for new photographs. He asked a Scenes of Crime officer, Sergeant Anthony Venardos, to meet Gerard at Indooroopilly Police Station to take the photographs. Gerard had given his consent.
This time, after taking photos with a ruler beside the scratch marks, Venardos asked Gerard to remove his shirt too. Until that moment, there had been considerable police speculation about the scratches plainly visible on his face. As Gerard unbuttoned his business shirt, he must have been nervous about what he was about to reveal.
On his chest, there was a painful looking mass of scratches or bruises. There were more scratches on the left side of his neck and near his right armpit. A caterpillar had bitten him at the school cross-country the day before, Gerard explained.
When Gerard had been photographed by police a day earlier he had, perhaps out of habit, smiled slightly for the camera. On this second occasion, he looked grim. His day had started badly and was getting worse.
Detectives gathered in the MIR to look at the latest photographs. There was a stunned reaction to the newly discovered injuries.
Back at Brookfield, as the examination of Gerard’s home continued, Taylor saw a man wandering the grounds of the childcare centre next door, getting close to the crime scene. He went to investigate and discovered it was Allison’s father, Geoff Dickie, forlornly searching for clues that could lead to his missing daughter, like any dad would do. Taylor tried to comfort him, telling him police were doing everything they could and gently directing him back to the forward command post at the showground.
Before Geoff left, Taylor asked his thoughts.
Geoff was prepared for the worst. Allison would never, ever willingly leave her daughters, he told Taylor.
Allison’s cousin Jodie Dann, her nerves frayed from worry and lack of sleep, was at home with her husband, Jonathan. It was the morning of his birthday.
‘I can’t stay here any longer. I need to go out there,’ she told him, and they drove to Brookfield, arriving well before lunchtime.
Initially, they thought they might not stop, but as soon as Dann got there, she knew she had to see Priscilla and Geoff. She found them waiting with one of Gerard’s friends and hugged the couple. Geoff sobbed and sobbed.
Dann turned to Jonathan and asked him to please go home and get chairs and food: ‘We need to stay here. This is where we need to be. I’m not leaving.’
Dann phoned her mum and dad, Mary and Noel Dann, who were in Hervey Bay. Noel was Priscilla’s brother, the second eldest of the ten siblings. ‘This is serious. You need to get here,’ she said, and with that they were on their way.
The sun set on another frustrating day. Priscilla and Geoff were to stay at Jodie’s south-side home, in her parents’ granny flat.
As Dann and Geoff crossed the road together to leave the Brookfield search base, it was dark. A memory intruded into Dann’s thoughts. When she and Allison were kids, Jodie would sleep beside her cousin on sleepovers and Allison would put her fingers in her mouth and rock back and forth to doze off because she was scared of the gloom. It seemed so poignant now.
Geoff looked as though every bit of vitality had been drained from him.
‘Jodie, she is out there somewhere, in the dark,’ he said.
Bloodstain
Sunday 22 April 2012
It was now two days since Gerard reported Allison missing. Police at the Central Exhibits Facility’s vehicle examination area at West End were about to go over each of the couple’s cars with the proverbial fine-tooth comb. Allison and Gerard had only had their Holden Captiva for eight weeks, after trading in a more expensive Lexus to save money. When the silver Captiva had rolled out of the showroom of the Village Motor Group at Petrie on 24 February, it was brand new with only 72 kilometres on the clock. The couple had named it Sparky. They’d had the white Prado, which they called Snowy, for years.
Senior Constable Michael Kelly, a forensic scientist from the Brisbane Scientific Section, was assigned the role of examining the Captiva. Nearby, another scientific officer examined the Prado.
In the Captiva’s boot area, the neatly arranged doll’s pram and other toys had moved around during the trip to the inspection site. Kelly and the police photographer assisting him, Sergeant Brett Schnitzerling, took out the toys and folded up the third row of seats. Kelly found himself staring at the plastic panel on the driver’s side in the third-row seating area. A dark stain on the panel was dripping towards the floor. Schnitzerling thought it might have been spilt soft drink.
Kelly pushed a piece of blotting paper against the stain and a reddish blotch transferred to the paper with little effort. Next, he took a little of the chemical reagent TMB and applied it to the blotting paper stain. When blood is present, TMB reacts with haemoglobin and turns a blue–green colour. The test involves applying one to two drops of a TMB solution and one to two drops of a hydrogen peroxide solution to the blotting paper. Kelly watched as the paper turned blue–green. Blood.
His work wasn’t over. Taking a swab head, he coated it with a 70 per cent ethanol solution then touched it against the Captiva bloodstain. Testing the swab with a HemaTrace kit, designed to detect human haemoglobin, he watched as a pink line appeared. It was human blood.
Kelly recognised the mark as a transfer stain, the term used when a wet, bloody surface contacts a second surface. The drips were flow stains, from the blood dripping with gravity or some other surface movement.
The discoveries continued. From the base area of the bloodstain, Kelly delicately retrieved a single strand of blonde hair. The hair and blood from the side panel would have to undergo DNA testing.
There was one more chemical to use but it was applied the following day. Luminol, a macabrely spectacular test that has become a staple of TV crime shows, glows a vivid blue in darkness when it comes in contact with blood residue. Kelly sprayed it throughout the Captiva, looking for any signs of a clean-up. When the lights of the vehicle examination area were turned off, the side panel lit up blue. There was a solid stain and two eerily glowing drips trailing towards the floor. There was no other blood found in the car.
At Brookfield, Ewen Taylor took a phone call just after 1 pm Sunday, informing him of the discovery of blood in the Captiva. He passed the news to detectives in the MIR. It was early days, but the significance was not lost on anyone. Concern for Allison’s wellbeing heightened.
When vehicles have GPS navigation fitted, police can call in a forensic locksmith to unlock the data. Disappointingly, the Captiva didn’t have GPS. Taylor, suspicious about the positioning of the toys in the boot, suggested detectives enquire into who put them there. The rush was on to identify the blood, so Taylor put in a priority request for testing and arranged for a Scenes of Crime officer to collect Allison’s toothbrush and hairbrush for possible reference DNA. Next he called the police Fingerprint Bureau to the Brookfield house to check for pri
nts inside and out.
In the days that followed, fingerprinting of the Captiva, including the toys in the back, returned only one print. It was on the service book in the glove box and matched a garage employee who had serviced the vehicle. It was not relevant to the investigation, but was an indication of how thorough the examination was. Prints weren’t always left behind, so not much could be read from the absence of others.
While Taylor continued the painstaking search for clues at Brookfield, he received another call. There had been a car accident.
Crash
Sunday 22 April 2012
Detectives in the MIR at Indooroopilly police station stared at the latest photos of Gerard Baden-Clay’s injuries. What had happened to his chest? Footballers among them would recognise the welts as the kind of marks you suffered when an opponent grabbed at your jersey and ripped at your chest hair in the process. But now that they had seen what lay beneath his shirt, they wanted to see more. Gerard still had his trousers on, and who knew what they concealed.
‘Get him back again,’ said a senior detective.
Driving to the station yet again to be photographed, with his lawyer not far behind him, Gerard gripped the steering wheel. So much pressure now. He had the police on his back. The media on his tail.
This time, detectives had a forensics expert waiting for him, and a magistrate had signed a Forensic Procedure Order, giving police the green light to conduct an intimate examination so they didn’t need his consent.
As Gerard approached the Moggill Road police station at 3 pm, he could see photographers and TV crews crowding the front car park, waiting to capture his arrival. Rattled by the media throng, he kept driving. After doing a loop of the roundabout ahead, he doubled back on Moggill Road and took a left. He was in Musgrave Road, which is as straight as an arrow. One way. No oncoming cars. No big dips or bends. Just two, wide lanes running alongside the sprawling Indooroopilly Shopping Centre, the retail hub that had been there for more than 40 years. Like any other weekend, residents of the west filled the department stores, retail outlets and cinemas as Gerard passed. Entrances to multi-storey car parks flicked by on his left.