The Murder of Allison Baden-Clay

by David Murray

  The man who had been the public face of the investigation, Detective Superintendent Mark Ainsworth, was in his office at Alderley when Assistant Commissioner Brett Pointing came in to tell him about the discovery of the body. Ainsworth got straight into his car. As he drove, it struck him what a long distance it was between the little creek he was heading to and Allison’s home. The drive seemed to take an age before he reached the police roadblock on Mt Crosby Road, where officers waved him through.

  He did the maths in his head. Walking that distance from Allison’s home would have taken about three hours and involved navigating narrow road verges, possibly in the dark. No one had seen Allison walking.

  The body had to be Allison, and he felt relief. Ainsworth had for some time suspected that the best police could do for Allison’s family was find her body so she could be given a dignified farewell, and hopefully piece together how and why she died.

  Allison’s cousin Jodie Dann had left the search base for a day to go into work. She had more than 70 domestic violence cases waiting for her in Ipswich Magistrates Court as the court advocate. She’d just made it back to her office late in the morning when her daughter, Ashley, phoned: ‘Dad says you’ve got to go straight to the search site.’

  Dann burst into tears as soon as she heard about the body. Like Ainsworth, she felt relief. What made her feel guilty as well was that from the word go she had been certain Allison was not alive. She was equally certain that Gerard was responsible and that he had to be held to account for what he’d done.

  Dann drove straight to Brookfield Showground, where an officer at the gate was under orders to keep everyone out.

  ‘I’ll run over you if you don’t move,’ she thought, and the officer must have seen the look in her eyes. Reluctantly he moved aside, but followed Dann down to where the rest of the family was gathered. Once he’d seen forward commander Mark Laing open her car door and give her a hug, the guard retreated to his post.

  Priscilla and Geoff arrived soon after. Laing and Dall’osto solemnly took them aside and broke the news of the discovery of a woman’s body. Allison’s parents were told police were unable to make a visual identification, but more likely than not, it was Allison.

  They sat together and cried. Laing told Allison’s parents he had failed them. He told them he was sorry.

  Geoff shook his head: ‘Mate, there was nothing you could have done.’

  Months after Allison’s death, Jodie Dann was in the Brisbane CBD for a conference on intimate partner homicide. As she walked past King George Square, she saw a small crowd gathered for the annual coming together of the Queensland Homicide Victims’ Support Group.

  Denise and Bruce Morcombe were there, talking to people about the Daniel Morcombe Foundation, set up to help keep kids safe. Dann decided on the spot to thank them. Whether Bruce and Denise knew it or not, they had been a source of strength for Allison’s family, who, during the hours and days of waiting at the search base, had talked about the Morcombe family’s incredible grace and resolve.

  ‘I’m Allison Baden-Clay’s cousin,’ said Dann, introducing herself to Denise. ‘Your strength gave us a lot of strength through that awful wait. We don’t know how you ever did it. Yours was years. Ours was days. I just wanted to let you know. Thank you.’

  The two women cried together for what they had lost.

  Bringing her home

  Monday 30 April 2012

  Forensic coordinator Ewen Taylor owed his start in the specialist policing field to a climbing accident. Back in 2000, when he was in general policing, Taylor had been a keen mountain climber. Venturing up a cliff face in the Glass House Mountains, in the Sunshine Coast hinterland, he made a rookie error and plunged 12 metres to the ground. He was lucky to survive. With that dislocated shoulder, he was told, he couldn’t keep tackling drunks for a living. The near-death experience led him to make the change to forensics. When Allison’s body was discovered under Kholo Creek Bridge, Taylor’s climbing and abseiling experience came to the fore.

  Taylor’s endurance had been tested as the investigation into Allison’s disappearance added to months of relentless work. Despite the taxing workload, he was committed to the case. On that Monday morning, he reluctantly tore himself away from the investigation to attend a forensic coordinator’s conference at police headquarters in the city. Colleagues looked at the dark shadows under his eyes and sympathised.

  The meeting was interrupted by a phone call from Detective Inspector Mal Gundry at 11.30 am. Gundry said a body had been found, and Taylor excused himself immediately. Before leaving headquarters, he dropped in to the Scientific Section and Photographic Section to pass the word on. He was at Kholo Creek in less than an hour.

  Studying a map of the area, Taylor noticed Kholo Creek ran through the Tyamolum Scout Campsite further upstream. Unbidden, Gerard Baden-Clay’s proud family connection to the Scouts came to mind. He shook his head. But right now he needed to concentrate on the job he was there to do. Taylor was determined to get it right.

  Uniformed police had been the first on the scene after the call from kayaker Daryl Joyce. They had spotted a steep path that led to a flat ledge under the bridge. From the ledge there was a vertical 2-metre drop to the creek bank and Allison’s body. Scenes of Crime officers followed the same route under the bridge to take some preliminary photographs; again, they didn’t get too close. One Scenes of Crime officer, Tony Venardos, was making his way to the body clad in full personal protection equipment – including plastic boot covers that covered the tread on his boots – when he slipped and fell awkwardly in the thick mud. Water Police and the Dive Squad came to Venardos’s rescue, and an ambulance took him to hospital with a dislocated shoulder.

  Gaining workable access to the body was going to be a challenge for the forensics personnel. Low tide was at 1 pm, so water would soon start rising in Kholo Creek. No one knew how long the body had been there or whether the rising tide would engulf her. It was a race against time to do their job – and do it thoroughly – before the water level peaked. Taylor, after discussions with detectives from the MIR at the scene, judged the safest and quickest way to get to the body was to rappel down from the bridge. Normally, a forensic coordinator might have stayed on the bridge to call the shots from above. But Taylor knew how to work the ropes and took the chance to handle the job personally. He’d worked the case from the start and felt a responsibility to Allison.

  Before he went down, Taylor phoned pathologist Dr Nathan Milne and asked him to come to the bridge. Milne reminded Taylor to make sure he took samples of the creek water to test later for diatoms – microscopic algae – which could indicate whether the victim had drowned.

  Scenes of Crime officers dusted for fingerprints before the ropes were hooked up. Senior Constable Ashley Huth from the Scientific Section was lowered down first, with the help of firefighters. Taylor followed. When they reached the creek bank, their gumboots sank deep into the thick mud, and without the support of the ropes, they would have gone face first. They were only a couple of metres from Allison but had to think carefully about how they would reach her.

  Leaning against their ropes, the two officers collected and bagged samples of water, plants, soil and insects. Neither Taylor nor Huth had ever experienced anything like the extremely difficult and dangerous working conditions they encountered that day.

  Initially the plan was to place bags on Allison’s hands to preserve potential evidence beneath her fingernails. When they got to the body, they found Allison’s inside-out, tangled up jumper was covering her hands and head. As the hands were already protected, the officers decided to leave them as they were. Taylor was glad to be under the bridge to make those decisions on the spot.

  When the pair had carefully completed all the preliminaries, it was time to remove Allison from that cold place where she had lain. A stretcher and a fresh, sealed blue tarpaulin were lowered down. Taylor and Huth carefully placed Allison inside the tarp on the stretcher. It was almost 5 pm. Whe
n she was secured, a team of officers on the bridge, including detectives from the MIR, heaved on the ropes to pull her up. Back into the light of day.

  Real estate agent and Mt Crosby Road resident Brian Mason had been following the search since the start. Sometimes he’d listen to an SES friend’s radio scanner. Mostly, the talk on the radio was dull, but that day it crackled with a real development – the discovery of a body.

  Mason’s friend phoned at 11.45 am to let him know. Washed up at the weir at Mt Crosby, his friend said, mistakenly, as it turned out. Mason told his wife, Mary, and phoned his boss, Julie Crittenden, who knew Gerard through the local business community. A news helicopter roared over the top of his property and hovered nearby, and Mason could see a cameraman hanging out one of the doors.

  A second helicopter appeared, around Kholo Creek Bridge. Mary had gone off to check the mail and came running back with news police had closed off Mt Crosby Road. Mason went to look and found that two police officers had parked a vehicle across the road from his driveway, another police car was down at the bridge and two officers were peering over the railing. A journalist arrived with a photographer who was carrying a long lens, and a police vehicle drove past towing a boat.

  Mason realised his friend’s tip was not quite right. The body wasn’t at the weir; it was under the bridge up the road from his home.

  ‘She’s under the bridge,’ Mason said to an officer at the roadblock, seeking confirmation.

  The officer replied that he didn’t know.

  Gerard’s affair with Toni McHugh wasn’t yet public knowledge, but Mason had already heard the worst kept secret in real estate. ‘Well, I might know more than you do. This is what happens when you have an affair with one of your staff members, the wife finds out, they have a squabble, she gets herself done in and ends up under that bridge,’ he told the startled officer.

  As he retraced his steps up his driveway, it dawned on him: his dog Sasha’s out-of-character barking had happened on the night Allison disappeared.

  Back inside his home, he told Mary the search was over. Then he asked his wife to recount the story she had told him about her drive to work in the early hours of the morning on Friday 20 April, when Gerard would report Allison missing. Mary told him she had seen a car with its headlights off, tail-gating another car.

  ‘You’ve got to talk to the police about this,’ he said.

  Mary was going to Perth that afternoon. She phoned Crime Stoppers when she got back days later.

  Meanwhile, other things came to mind for Brian Mason, like Sasha’s odd behaviour in the days after Allison disappeared. The dog had sat at the front of the property, looking out into the bush in the direction of the bridge. She barely moved for days.

  After Dr Nathan Milne, senior specialist forensic pathologist with Queensland Health, received the call from police forensic coordinator Ewen Taylor, he hurried to the scene. With him were a forensic pathologist and senior forensic pathology registrar. He leant cautiously over the bridge to catch a glimpse of the body, and could just make out Allison’s head and upper torso.

  When Allison was winched to the bridge, the indent left behind in the mud indicated she was there for some time. Milne noted that the officers moved the body without significantly disturbing the position of the limbs or clothing.

  Under a marquee and lights from the fire service, Milne could see the woman wore what appeared to be a jacket – caught up around her head and neck and entangling her arms – and a singlet with a built-in bra, three-quarter-length pants and sneakers. The significant decomposition was consistent with death occurring at the time Allison went missing. Insects and insect larvae had attacked the soft tissue of the face, head, forearms and left lower leg. Part of the skull was exposed.

  Police anxiously awaited a determination about how she died. Milne couldn’t tell them on the spot from what he’d seen, and left the bridge at 6 pm.

  The body was taken to the government mortuary, and by eight o’clock was undergoing a CT scan. There were no obvious fractures. The horseshoe-shaped hyoid bone in the neck was intact, providing no evidence of strangulation, though not excluding it either. Milne told Mal Gundry there was no obvious cause of death, and they would have to see what came of a post mortem the next day.

  Detectives Chris Canniffe and Cameron McLeod went to the Century 21 Westside offices at Taringa to tell Gerard a woman’s body had been discovered. They were too late. When the officers arrived, Gerard told them he had found out online.

  His father, Nigel, was with him at the office and volunteered to formally identify the body.

  Allison was not in a state to be identified by sight, and the detectives said it would not be necessary.

  At the Brookfield Showground, the thoughts of Allison’s grief-stricken mother turned quickly to her granddaughters. The three girls were the only living link Priscilla Dickie had to her daughter. She felt a powerful need to see them, to drink in the signs of Allison she recognised in them, to connect with and console them.

  Geoff said he simply couldn’t call Gerard, not even to ask to see the girls. Desperate for the contact, Priscilla decided to ask herself. Leaning against a fence outside in the late afternoon, she phoned Gerard.

  ‘Can I just come around and see the girls?’ she asked her son-in-law.

  Gerard said no. He hadn’t told the girls anything yet. He was going to wait until there was confirmation from police that it was Allison.

  Priscilla was prepared to do things his way: ‘Okay, well I won’t tell them. I just need to see them. I just need to give them a hug.’

  Gerard wasn’t budging. He said it wasn’t appropriate and they should talk about it the next day. There was media everywhere and he didn’t want to add to the circus.

  ‘Please, Gerard. I just need to hug the girls. I just need to see them. I can come to the house. They don’t even need to come outside. What if it was just for five or ten minutes?’ She was begging him now.

  ‘No,’ he said, and hung up.

  Death puzzle

  She was still wearing her rings. The gold wedding band was engraved: ‘G&A 23:8:97’. Her engagement ring, set with an 8-millimetre diamond, was on the same finger. For police, it was another layer of identification. It also meant that whatever had happened to Allison, she hadn’t been robbed of her jewellery.

  Dr Nathan Milne passed the two rings to detectives observing his post mortem examination at the John Tonge Centre at Coopers Plains, in Brisbane’s south, on Tuesday 1 May 2012. Officers were in place beside him in the examination room, and in a separate viewing room where there were rows of bench seating. The officers were from a multitude of units within the QPS, reflecting the size and strength of the team investigating Allison’s death: Detective Sergeant Rhys Breust from Homicide; detectives Cameron McLeod and Cameron Simmons from Indooroopilly CIB; forensic coordinator Ewen Taylor; Sergeant Nicole Tysoe from the Scientific Section; Senior Constable Kylie O’Sullivan from Scenes of Crime; and Constable Jackie Lucas from the Coronial Support Unit.

  The tags on her body bag read ‘Unknown Unknown’. When its seal was first broken, Milne had peeled back the blue tarpaulin wrapped around the body. Leaves and bark peppered Allison’s hair and body, and Milne set them aside, along with dirt and mud samples, for later examination. On closer inspection, Milne could see the tangled clothing he thought was a jacket the day before was actually a light-coloured Bonds jumper.

  He detailed his findings in a report compiled in the months following the autopsy: ‘The unusual position of the jumper may have occurred after death with movement of the body. It cannot be excluded that it was used as a ligature [cord],’ Milne wrote.

  He examined the clothes in more detail. She was wearing a purple size 12 Short Stories singlet with inbuilt bra, dark Katies pants, light-coloured underpants, white and blue Lynx size 9 sneakers and short white socks. It all closely resembled the clothes Gerard described when police arrived at Brookfield that first day, when he said Allison’s ‘daggy
’ old pants were missing and that she wore a singlet and sometimes a jumper on her morning walks.

  As Milne examined the jumper, the fingertip of a cream-coloured rubber glove fell out. He knew it wasn’t from the mortuary but couldn’t say where it came from. Officers who retrieved Allison from beneath the bridge wore gloves. In the difficult process of pulling her body to the top of the bridge, it was possible one of the gloves tore. Milne would later tell a court it was more likely the glove tip got there during the recovery of the body, rather than being deposited by a killer.

  Pink nail polish on her fingers was worn and absent in areas. Her height was 170 centimetres and weight was 72 kilograms. Decomposition had reduced her body weight. Discolouration of the skin, areas of skin slippage and mummification – accelerated loss of moisture – all matched the position the body was found in: signs Allison had been under the bridge all along.

  ‘This is suggestive of the body coming to be in the position in which it was found within a relatively short period of time after death,’ Milne wrote.

  Soft tissue decomposition meant Milne could not examine the eyes, ears, nose, lips and tongue. In the exhaustive examination that followed, hampered by the decomposed state of the body, he could only identify three possible injuries. The first was a possible subdural haemorrhage. From granular brown material found between the left side of the brain and the dura – the tough, outermost membrane covering the brain – Milne surmised there might have been an impact to the head with a moderate degree of force.

  ‘If death was the result of a subdural haemorrhage, it could have taken hours to occur after the time of impact,’ Milne wrote.

  Secondly, there was a chipped tooth, which could indicate a blow to the mouth region, ‘probably of a mild or moderate degree of force’. But there was no evidence of when the chip occurred. Thirdly, there was a bruise, or possible haemorrhage, on the left inner chest wall, which indicated there might have been an impact of a probably mild force to the chest area.