The Murder of Allison Baden-Clay

by David Murray

  During the search for Allison, there was only one occasion when Gerard spoke in public about his missing wife, and it went disastrously. Channel Nine crime reporter Alyshia Gates was waiting at the front of his parents’ house at Kenmore on Tuesday 24 April. It was four days after Gerard reported his wife missing, and the day after Priscilla and Geoff Dickie made their emotional public appeal for help to find their daughter.

  Gates started work around 5 am, and was the only journalist outside the Baden-Clay house early that morning. With the rest of the media pack elsewhere, Gates and cameraman Bill Heckelmann – a veteran with Nine for 40 years – got the scoop. Gerard and his sister emerged from the house, about to go for a drive, and the TV crew pounced, approaching Gerard on the driveway with the camera rolling. Instead of turning on his heel, Gerard strode over to the slim, blonde reporter and they started talking.

  ‘I’m trying to look after my children at the moment,’ Gerard said, his voice strained and high-pitched. ‘We’ve got three young girls and we, we really trust that the police are doing everything they can to find my wife, and we really hope she will come home soon. And, um, I need to go now to an appointment. I’d just, we’ve got such great family support, my sister and family here, and they’re looking after …’

  He didn’t quite finish the sentence, apparently unable to go on. But if he was fighting tears, they never came.

  Olivia Walton, realising her brother was engaging with ‘the enemy’, rushed over and stood behind his left shoulder.

  ‘There’s been no contact, no contact at all?’ the reporter asked, as Gerard went to leave.

  ‘I’ve spoken to the police about everything,’ replied Gerard, ‘and I’ve had no contact from her at all.’

  ‘Is there anything that may have, was she upset before she went away?’ pressed Gates gently.

  ‘No, and the police – I’ve tried to help the police as much as I can, we all have; everything we’ve got. So, thank you. I’m sorry,’ said Gerard, wrapping up the conversation.

  Gates, surprised she’d snared anything from Gerard, tried to keep him talking. ‘Were you injured in a car crash a couple of days ago?’

  ‘I was hurt a little bit but I’m okay. Okay. Thank you. Thank you very much,’ Gerard said, and walked off.

  ‘Thanks for your concern,’ added Olivia, stepping in. As her brother retreated, she took the opportunity to enlist support for the search: ‘We just appeal to the public to please help us in any way they can. We need to find her.’

  Olivia couldn’t negate the alienating effect Gerard had created; his worry had come across as forced at best. It wasn’t as if he’d faced a grilling. Gates didn’t ask, ‘Did you kill your wife?’ Gerard had been treated respectfully, yet he still couldn’t get out of there fast enough, and had neglected to appeal for public assistance to find Allison.

  Gates had been a journalist for 12 years, predominantly covering crime, and Allison’s disappearance was easily the biggest story of her career in terms of public interest and the demand for stories from her office. Back at the Channel Nine studios at Mt Coot-tha, she watched the video over and over with colleagues. Gerard didn’t come across as genuine.

  Others reacted the same way. One of Gerard’s former workmates, who felt she knew him as well as anyone, watched the news that night and turned cold. When Allison went missing she didn’t think there was a chance Gerard was involved, despite all the scuttlebutt. But that night, watching his performance on the evening news, she was taken aback and turned to a friend watching the news with her. They were both thinking the same thing: ‘He’s not telling the truth.’

  Gerard’s code of silence extended to his daughters. A school friend lived near Brookfield Showground, and there was an open invitation for the girls to drop around any time if they needed a break. On Thursday 26 April 2012, almost a week after Allison was reported missing, Olivia arrived at the friend’s house with the girls.

  While they were there, Allison’s middle daughter made a comment about her missing mother then quickly hushed up: ‘I’m sorry. I know I am not allowed to say anything until the debrief at night,’ she said.

  That morning, police equipped with a search warrant had conducted a raid on the Kenmore home of Nigel and Elaine Baden-Clay, where Gerard was staying. When Gerard eventually read through the warrant, he started wailing. The offence listed on the warrant was murder.

  Detective Sergeant Chris Canniffe was at the back of the house and heard Gerard howl, ‘I want to talk to Chris.’ Canniffe went to the front of the house to see what was happening. He found Gerard visibly upset, though not in tears. The charge on the search warrant was ‘preposterous’, Gerard said.

  That day, police interviewed Gerard’s former business partners Phill Broom and Jocelyn Frost at Indooroopilly Police Station. Broom’s lengthy police statement gave a withering assessment of Gerard.

  ‘Gerard has a public face which is ethical, moral and upstanding,’ he told detectives. ‘He is involved in all the right groups, but it’s always about what’s in it for him. He would lecture staff about lying but would continue this long-term affair. I didn’t appreciate how he could talk to me about being deceptive when he was living a lie.’

  When Broom quizzed Gerard about his double standards and messy personal life, he was floored by his response: ‘I asked him how he got into this situation and he said something like, “It’s a lot like being a baby shaker. You don’t think you’re a baby shaker until you’re caught shaking a baby.”’

  Broom added that Gerard had a ‘unique’ relationship with his family. ‘They are a family where what you see isn’t what you get. The family is very much about legacy.’

  Nightmare

  Sunday 29 April 2012

  Taking his three daughters to the Ashgrove Baptist Church, Gerard was dressed in his Sunday best. He had a pink business shirt, black trousers, a black belt with silver buckle and shiny black shoes. The girls, in pretty dresses, emerged carrying colourful balloons with messages for their missing mum scrawled in black pen. Among the words was ‘hope’, and, peculiarly, ‘forgiveness’.

  It had been nine days since Gerard reported Allison missing and a beard now concealed the problematic scratches on his cheek. Allison was nowhere to be found, but the night before there had been a potential breakthrough on a big, empty farm block at Upper Brookfield, where women’s running shoes and some silver tape had been found. Mark Laing, Ewen Taylor and other police were at the property until about 10 pm Saturday and did what they could with torches in the pouring rain. An officer guarded the scene until the morning, when police found more silver tape and a pair of gloves. The property was soon swarming with police, including officers on horseback and with cadaver dogs. Divers searched dams on the property.

  Detectives had asked Gerard to attend Indooroopilly Police Station after the Sunday church service to view the shoes and tell them whether they were Allison’s. On the way to the station, Gerard stopped at a park and dropped his sister and daughters off with Allison’s parents, as had been arranged.

  Since Allison had gone missing, Priscilla and Geoff Dickie had rarely spent time with their granddaughters, and only ever in the company of the Baden-Clays. The Dickies felt as though they were being watched by their daughter’s in-laws. At one stage, Priscilla had to take one of the girls to the toilet, and Olivia joined them in the toilet block.

  At Indooroopilly Police Station, while Elaine waited in the car, Gerard and Nigel were ushered into a room with Detective Sergeant Peter Roddick from Homicide and Senior Constable Cameron McLeod from the CIB. As soon as Gerard saw the shoes, he said they were not Allison’s. So much for the discovery.

  Never one to waste an opportunity, Roddick invited Gerard to change his mind and provide a formal statement. Roddick calmly but firmly told Gerard that the lack of detail provided to police on the day he reported Allison missing was hampering the investigation. Gerard’s description of Allison’s shoes was a case in point – he had told police they we
re white and blue, but not the brand or size or other information.

  No such luck. Gerard flatly told Roddick he wasn’t answering any more questions.

  Police needed fingerprints from Gerard and Nigel, so Roddick and McLeod waited for the pair to phone lawyer Darren Mahony for approval. Eventually, they consented and McLeod went off to arrange the equipment.

  Now Nigel grabbed the opportunity: he had a few things to get off his chest. Gerard’s father said he had heard police weren’t happy with the level of detail in his statement, and insisted he had told police all he remembered. There was something else too. A woman he knew – a good Christian, Nigel added – had woken from her sleep three times in a row with the same disturbing dream. In it, she was in Allison’s body and was in a shed or some other dark place when a blanket was thrown over her head. Nigel told Roddick it was the first time he’d mentioned the dreams in front of Gerard, who was sitting silently beside him. His daughter, Olivia, however, had heard the story and was urging the family friend to call Crime Stoppers. Nigel wanted to know: had police been checking sheds in the area?

  His suggestions for the investigation continued: Olivia had been getting a weird feeling when she went near a creek on Rafting Ground Road. And that wasn’t the end of Nigel’s advice. He told Roddick he had received an email from his younger brother, Crispin, in Namibia. Crispin wrote to remind Nigel about the case of a family friend who went missing in Africa 25 years earlier. In that case, the friend appeared months later, 1000 miles (1600km) away, outside a home he’d lived in more than a decade earlier. He was still wearing the same clothes he vanished in, and had no memory of anyone in his family. Nigel said the moral of the story was police should go back at least ten years in Allison’s life.

  The Homicide detective could only agree. But, while Nigel sat there suggesting police chase down dreams, ‘weird feelings’ and old haunts, Roddick pointedly remarked that the man best positioned to share a wealth of information about Allison was in the room with them, refusing to provide a formal statement.

  Nigel retorted that when information was provided, police didn’t use it. Gerard’s father was particularly annoyed that a roadside mannequin police had erected to try to jog people’s memories had been left bald. Allison had long, flowing auburn hair. No one was going to recognise her from that, he said.

  Roddick explained that, in his experience, people remembered clothes before physical features.

  Noisy sobs interrupted the exchange. It was Gerard. Through the sobs, he told the detective he was trying to look after his daughters and return some semblance of normality to their lives. He said he wanted his Captiva and his Prado back. In the room that day, he seemed intensely focused on what police were doing with the cars and was keen to know when they would be returned, despite telling Roddick he had been offered many loan vehicles.

  Gerard also asked for a direct line to search commanders at Brookfield. He wanted more information but seemed oblivious of the fact that it was a two-way street. Detectives in the MIR and searchers at Brookfield were having no luck getting more information from him. The stalemate continued.

  Gerard and Nigel gave their fingerprints and then went to leave. Through the windows, they could see the media pack outside. They expressed their deep unhappiness to police about being hounded. Elaine had the car engine going out the front. They phoned her to say they were on the way out, then rushed into the sunshine and took off without a word to the waiting journalists.

  Roddick wasn’t the only one fielding questions from Gerard and his family about the return of their possessions. Detective Sergeant Chris Canniffe had rarely heard from Allison’s family in his role as the MIR’s family liaison officer. However, he had provided his mobile number to Gerard and found himself constantly taking calls from Gerard and Nigel, asking for their cars and computers back or appealing for ‘clarity’ on when they would be back.

  The search for Allison went on without Gerard. At the Brookfield Showground, Allison’s family wondered how long police would keep up the intensity. So far there had been no let-up. The search had only grown and SES volunteers were still out in force. Deep down, everyone knew it could not go on forever.

  Allison’s family found themselves talking about murdered schoolboy Daniel Morcombe’s inspirational parents, Bruce and Denise, and the immeasurable pain they must have suffered as they waited almost eight years to find him. How long could Allison’s family keep up their own vigil? They had lives waiting for them – work to be done, children to care for. Now the family sorted out who could stay at the Brookfield Showground and who needed to leave.

  To pass the time, they sat and discussed anything that could distract them from the awful circumstances that had brought them together. Mary Dann, Allison’s aunt, taught some of the others how to knit and they made wool scarves.

  Police had gradually been preparing them for the worst. Nothing was ever said directly. At first, search commanders had been updating them on how long a person could be expected to survive alone in the bush. Gradually, those briefings became less frequent and towards the end of April, they stopped altogether. By then, police had also started to mention eventually scaling back the search. The feeling was they were going to keep going at the same pace for at least a couple more days. Just a few more painstaking plans, grid patterns, helicopter flights and long days on foot, horseback and trail bike.

  And then what?

  Found

  Monday 30 April 2012

  Professor Daryl Joyce would usually go kayaking on a weekend, but in April 2012 he had two weeks of leave. It was so good not to have to rush to get out on the water this morning. The University of Queensland horticulture researcher, who was in his 50s, had taken time off work to set up a vegetable garden on his 1-acre block in Karalee, Ipswich. The Monday was his first day of holidays, and after a weekend of rain it was gloriously sunny. He planned a relaxing paddle to clear his mind before getting stuck into the garden. Joyce kissed his wife goodbye as she went to work then loaded his fibreglass kayak onto the top of his car and drove five minutes down the road to the Riverside Park boat ramp.

  It was about 8.30 am when he left home and he was soon bobbing in the Brisbane River, paddling upstream towards Ipswich. Joyce was a creature of habit; he always went against the tide on the journey out and cruised with the tide on the way back. Today was no different. Sticking to the left bank, he paddled for a couple of kilometres before crossing to the other side and turning back.

  Kayaking had been an enjoyable weekend hobby for about six years. The dad of three grown-up children used it as a chance to get some exercise and fresh air.

  On the days he paddled towards Ipswich, he liked to duck into Kholo Creek on his left on his return to the boat ramp. Years earlier, he’d found a beautiful, semi-tropical rain forest area where the tall trees formed a canopy overhead and the water became clear. He’d never seen anyone else on the waterway and felt he’d discovered an unspoilt secret. Since the floods of January 2011, a large tree had blocked access to the little creek at low tide. Today, his timing was spot on: the tide was high enough for him to cruise across the top of the fallen tree when he reached the creek mouth at close to 10 am.

  He was paddling under the big water pipes that crossed the creek. Then he saw her. The woman lying on her side on the exposed, muddy bank under the bridge ahead on his right. For a moment, Joyce thought she might have been sleeping. As he drifted past, he realised who it was. Allison. The three-quarter-length pants and running shoes, like the mannequin dressed the same way on the news. He knew instantly. As he passed her, the breeze carried the scent. She was dead.

  There was no way he could get out of his kayak onto the creek bank and he never took his mobile phone when he went to the river. Joyce paddled back to the boat ramp, drove home and phoned the Karana Downs Police Station.

  Mark Laing had a grin on his face. He had just concluded a formal meeting with a visiting officer. Laing’s colleague, a friend, had light-heartedly offered t
o take over the search because he couldn’t find Allison. Laing’s comeback was that the fellow officer couldn’t run a toilet without it getting backed up. Light banter helped ease the stress; Laing had had plenty of practice.

  Within half an hour the same colleague phoned Laing. ‘Mate, you’re not going to believe it,’ he said, and told Laing a body had been discovered. This was no joke. Laing took in a lungful of air and listened intently.

  Laing had never heard of Kholo Creek. It was at Anstead, on Brisbane’s western fringe, well beyond the search zone. He got behind the wheel of his car and drove out there. Officers were on the scene and had cordoned off the bridge.

  As he walked over to be briefed, it hit him. Allison was long gone. He could not have done any more. He could not have saved her. But he felt he had failed.

  The search coordinator had started pondering how to temporarily keep the discovery from the media when a Channel Seven news helicopter appeared overhead. Allison’s parents hadn’t been informed yet. Laing had to move fast.

  Priscilla Dickie had given him her mobile number. He called her. When she answered, Laing politely asked to speak to Geoff. He didn’t know why, but he felt he needed to talk to Allison’s dad first.

  Geoff and Priscilla Dickie were at a lawyer’s office in the city, getting advice on how they could have better access to their granddaughters. They had had enough of the irregular, brief visits with the girls and of being monitored by the Baden-Clays.

  Laing had no intention of breaking the news over the phone but he had to ensure Allison’s mum and dad didn’t hear it from anyone else. ‘I want you to come back. I need to talk to you, but I don’t want you to listen to the radio,’ Laing told him.