by David Murray
Milne noted the significant soft tissue loss, particularly from the face, forearms and lower left leg, could indicate injuries in those areas that were now impossible to detect. It was speculative. Allison had been exposed to the elements too long for certainty.
There were no fractures to the skull, nasal bone or ribs. There was no evidence of sexual assault. The lungs did not have the appearance of drowning.
Milne examined Allison’s history. She had suffered from asthma and had been prescribed Ventolin and Seretide inhalers, but her condition did not appear to be severe. He noted she had been prescribed Zoloft, or sertraline, for depression.
‘This had been a long term condition,’ wrote Milne, ‘being present after the birth of her first child in 2001.’
Allison had a history of high blood pressure and diabetes associated with pregnancy, and as a child had probable low thyroid function.
Levels of the antidepressant sertraline and its metabolite desmethylsertraline would be found in the blood. Sertraline overdose could cause vomiting, lethargy, difficulty walking, seizures, a rapid heart rate and death, Milne noted. Reaching conclusions on the amount of the drug was difficult, not least because decomposition could have altered the levels in the blood. Only blood from the liver was available, which wasn’t ideal. Normally, Milne would have taken a specimen from the blood vessels in the legs. And the sertraline could have been expected to move around the body after death, so he could have been seeing a distorted level. Milne found that as a consequence of the effects of decomposition, there was ‘insufficient evidence’ to say sertraline overdose was the cause of death. Her blood-alcohol concentration of 0.095 could be attributed to processes in the body after death.
‘In my opinion the cause of death cannot be determined,’ Milne concluded. ‘The degree of decomposition was significant and this limited interpretation of all facets of the post mortem examination. It is most likely the effects of decomposition destroyed or concealed evidence of the cause of death.’
At about 3 pm on the day of the autopsy, forensic odontologist Dr Alexander Forrest, examining the body and using dental records, confirmed the woman was Allison.
Police kept a lid on the results of the post mortem. For all anyone knew throughout the remainder of the investigation, police knew exactly how Allison died.
Gerard was in the money, or at least stood to be. Allison had three life insurance and superannuation policies and Gerard wasted no time in trying to claim them. Life insurance companies generally ask to be told as soon as possible when a policyholder dies. Gerard took the advice to the extreme end of the range. On the day the body was found under Kholo Creek Bridge, he advised insurers of the discovery. The following day – autopsy day – he further advised insurers he planned to claim on her policies. Pathologist Nathan Milne had not yet confirmed the body was Allison when the insurers were contacted. Subsequently, Gerard sought a death certificate as a matter of urgency. When he received it, he lodged claims on each of Allison’s policies and asked they be expedited. Altogether, the policies provided for a $975,000 payout upon her death.
In the months leading to her disappearance, Allison and Gerard had been frequently in touch with their financial adviser, Tommy Laskaris, about reducing their life insurance cover. One of Gerard’s policies, a Whole of Life Plan with AMP, dated all the way back to 1981 when, at ten, he first moved to Toowoomba and his father worked as a life insurance salesman. Gerard took on other policies over the years, which added up to a total payout of $3 million if he was to die. Allison followed his lead and took out a policy with TAL in April 2000. She took out a separate Asteron Life Policy in March 2008. A third, separate superannuation policy included death cover.
Allison and Gerard had only just discovered they both had an extra level of death cover through their superannuation funds. Amid the couple’s other financial challenges, their insurance premiums were overdue and they started trying to reduce the payments. On 17 April, just three days before Allison was reported missing, she emailed Laskaris asking what he’d found out about reducing her policies. The same day, Laskaris inquired with insurers about scaling back Allison and Gerard’s cover by $200,000 each. When Allison died, her cover had not yet been reduced.
Gerard – the sole beneficiary of Allison’s will – stood to pocket the payout as long as he was not found to be involved in her death.
Police went to speak to Gerard on the day of the post mortem and found him in the office of Peter Davis SC, a heavy-hitting barrister of more than 20 years’ experience. Gerard was calling in extra legal firepower.
Courier-Mail photographer Nathan Richter had followed Gerard to Davis’s office too, tailing the real estate agent all the way from his parents’ Kenmore home to the city in a white-knuckle ride with graduate journalist Kris Crane beside him. Richter, who lived in Kenmore, had been assigned to Allison’s disappearance since the beginning and had become a thorn in the side of Gerard and his family.
Seeing Gerard get dropped off in the city, the photographer double-parked his car and sprinted through the crowds of city office workers to catch up. He got a photo of Gerard walking in front of a Pie Face store, phone to his right ear, covering the scratch marks on his cheek.
On returning to his car, Richter discovered his pursuit of Gerard hadn’t gone unnoticed when a car pulled up alongside him and the irate driver unleashed a barrage of abuse. The penny dropped. Richter must have inadvertently put himself between Gerard and a police surveillance team covertly tracking him.
That afternoon, solicitor Darren Mahony confirmed Gerard had sought additional legal advice from Davis.
‘My client is devastated by the loss of his wife,’ Mahony said in a statement. ‘His family is devastated. His primary concern is the welfare of his three very young daughters and attempting to provide some stability and normality to them given the tragic news and the unrelenting media barrage. Given the intense public interest in the matter, no doubt prudent people would understand the reasonableness of seeking such advice.’
With the discovery of the body, the police forward command post moved from Brookfield Showground to the Tyamolum Scout Campsite near Kholo Creek Bridge. Mark Ainsworth told media the search area extended more than 500 metres from the bridge, and a team of 25 detectives was working on the investigation.
‘Obviously there’s been a deal of rain on the Friday night and Saturday, so we’ve got to examine all that as well … if the body has washed down to its final resting place or something else happened,’ he said.
Even with the breakthrough of locating Allison’s body, the police had an overwhelming number of questions. They now knew where she’d been the whole time they were searching, but how did she end up there? And who was responsible?
Pandora’s box
A growing tide of public opinion against Gerard Baden-Clay had compelled Brookfield resident Hedley Thomas to act. Thomas, a leading journalist, had lived in Brookfield for 13 years. There weren’t many people in the little community he didn’t know. Gerard was not a close friend, but certainly an acquaintance. Thomas had chatted to him and had no problem with him. Surely the man he knew from shared shifts barbecuing burgers and sausages for school fundraisers couldn’t have killed the mother of his three children.
Based at The Australian’s Brisbane office, Thomas had built a career and formidable reputation from being unafraid to take a contrarian view. Everyone seemed to think Gerard had killed his wife. Thomas had told friends at a party within days of Allison’s disappearance that Gerard was the top suspect and it didn’t look good for him, but the journalist also wanted to believe differently. It bothered him that people seemed to be lining up to knock Gerard down, yet no one he knew openly bagged the real estate agent before Allison went missing.
Police seemed focused on Gerard, and Thomas knew better than most that a rush to judgment could lead to a miscarriage of justice. He earnt a Gold Walkley, one of the highest awards in Australian journalism, for stories exposing the Australi
an Federal Police’s flawed pursuit of Mohamed Haneef, a Gold Coast doctor wrongly accused of terrorism in 2007 and made to look guilty by misleading police leaks to the media. Thomas was concerned some of the media stories and public sentiment about Gerard were starting to take on a similar negative tone, perhaps encouraged by police.
Thomas thought Gerard might be getting bad advice. Everyone suspected the real estate agent had murdered his wife. If he wanted to stop looking guilty, he had to stop acting guilty. Stop running and start standing up for his wife. Show his face at the command centre at the Brookfield Showground. Make an appeal and help find Allison. He needed to speak up, not remain silent.
With police and public suspicions soaring, Thomas paid him a visit at the Kenmore home of his parents, Nigel and Elaine, on the morning of Monday 30 April 2012. They’d exchanged texts and Gerard had invited him over. Thomas was conscious police had turned the place upside down and that it was probably bugged. Inside, the two men suspiciously eyed the vase of flowers on the kitchen table. They went out into the back garden to talk.
Thomas wasn’t covering the story and didn’t intend to. But if Gerard wanted to end his frustrating silence and go public, he was willing to get involved. It would have to be no holds barred.
Their chat was off the record, so what Gerard said to the journalist is unknown. Gerard’s three daughters played around them as they spoke. The girls were all over their father, whom they obviously loved. One climbed onto Gerard’s lap and reached out with both hands to touch his new beard.
‘Daddy, when are you going to shave?’ she asked, interrupting the chat with Thomas.
‘I’m growing it for Mummy, until we find her,’ he replied.
As Thomas drove away from the Baden-Clay seniors’ house, leaving Gerard to weigh his options, he heard a breaking news story on the radio. While he had been talking to Gerard at Kenmore, a kayaker had discovered a woman’s body under Kholo Creek Bridge. Thomas knew it had to be Allison. He pulled his car over and, at 12.41 pm, sent a text to Gerard.
‘Gerard, brace the children for bad news. There are reports of a body being found.’ Gerard never replied.
Thomas arrived home feeling sick about the discovery of the body and believing police were too quick to judge Gerard. He said as much to his wife, Ruth, before they went to bed that night. He drifted off to sleep with the meeting, and tragic news, turning over in his mind.
That night he had a dark dream that would long unsettle him. He was back at Nigel and Elaine’s house, sitting opposite Gerard in the autumn sunshine. Only this time, as they spoke, Gerard’s hand casually reached over to a small box on the table between them, lifting the lid. First one, then dozens, then hundreds of angry wasps swarmed from the box and massed around Gerard’s face in a thick black cloud. Thomas frantically tried to swipe them away, unable to see Gerard’s face through the veil of wasps hanging over him. Gerard carried on talking, oblivious. Thomas woke with a start.
The journalist wanted to react with logic, rather than emotion, but he couldn’t shake the feeling his dream was significant. He asked his wife, Ruth, a fellow journalist and always a reliable sounding board, what she thought. It’s simple, she replied. His subconscious was telling him what his conscious mind had resisted – Gerard’s story didn’t ring true. The dream, she offered, symbolised Gerard opening Pandora’s box and spreading a stream of lies over their small community.
Ruth, like Hedley, had known Gerard and Allison. She felt heartbroken for Allison’s family and friends. The search had weighed heavily on the entire suburb. Brookfield was a small place and the Thomas’s daughter went to Brookfield State School with the Baden-Clay girls. Everyone at the school knew Allison and Gerard. Allison was always helping out with reading or maths, while Gerard, vice-president of the P & C, seemed a permanent fixture too in his eye-catching gold Century 21 jacket.
The school organised counselling sessions for students, but the intensive search had been inescapable: there were traces of it all over Brookfield. The main road in and out of the suburb led past both the Baden-Clays’ home and the police command post. Police had based themselves at the Brookfield Showground, just metres from the school and next door to the local shop. Uniformed officers and orange-clad SES workers seemed to be everywhere, day after day, searching, organising, asking questions. Children saw police divers combing the creeks and waterholes where they spent their summers swimming and larking about. And with vast tracts of uninhabited bushland to check, authorities called on residents to help by either searching their own large blocks or the swathes of state forest bounding the suburb.
Ruth and her daughter spent hours walking through the bush calling Allison’s name. Countless others had done the same. Overhead, helicopters circled endlessly, like the foreboding wasps in Hedley Thomas’s dream.
Still curious about his nightmare, and more than a little spooked, Thomas Googled ‘dream analysis’ and ‘wasps’. The results heightened his unease.
‘Wasps stand for “low” instincts, desires and feelings, especially rage, blind aggressiveness, hate or revenge,’ one site read.
Families divided
The mistrust was mutual when Gerard Baden-Clay sat across a picnic table from Allison’s father, Geoff Dickie, to discuss funeral arrangements. They were meeting at Rafting Ground Reserve, a popular park with a children’s playground on Moggill Road in Brookfield. Heavily treed and next to a winding creek, it’s normally a peaceful pit stop from the busy road beside it, but the meeting turned into a showdown.
Before they started talking, Gerard held up a digital recorder and asked Geoff if he would mind if he recorded the conversation. It came across more as a statement of intent than a request. Geoff – according to friends who recounted the conversation – had a rare flash of anger. He was there to talk about his daughter’s funeral. Why would Gerard want to record that?
Gerard said it was so he didn’t forget anything. The explanation was hard for Geoff to accept. It seemed more likely that Gerard was protecting his back, with the implication that he suspected Geoff might twist their chat, misreport it.
Showing no hint of being perturbed by his father-in-law’s anger, Gerard placed the recorder in a breast pocket. Not once had Gerard asked the Dickies how they were. Not once did he say he was sorry for their loss. Crows cawed in the background as they continued their tense discussion.
In the days leading up to the funeral, Gerard sent through a list of demands. He wanted a Scouts emblem printed on the front of the service notes. He wanted to see all the speeches in advance. He wanted to give his own speech at the funeral. And he wanted to be the last to speak. Allison’s family did not want Gerard to speak at all, but he had a bargaining chip. If he didn’t get his way, he warned the Dickies, he would not bring his daughters. The thought of the girls missing out on their mother’s funeral terrified Geoff and Priscilla.
Meanwhile, Gerard’s family and friends knew who to blame for the mounting tide of opinion against them: the media. The Baden-Clays adopted a ‘them and us’ approach, laid bare in a Facebook post from Olivia Walton’s husband. Ian Walton had left his Flight Centre career behind him and was a pastor at the Northreach Baptist Church in Townsville. Walton wrote, soon after Allison’s body was discovered that the family was ‘struck down but not destroyed’, quoting the Bible, and proceeded to rail against the reporting of the case. He said that the media was: ‘glorying in the most revolting and salacious gossip. They seem determined to do all possible to damage and destroy. They have virtually imprisoned us in the house! They have NO regard for Allison or her family – despite their “crocodile tears”.’ He added that there may be more and worse to come, and urged supporters not put their trust in what they read.
Dr Bruce Flegg was starting to have some serious concerns about his friendship with Gerard. When Allison first went missing, murder was the last thing on Flegg’s mind. He knew, through Gerard, that Allison battled depression and assumed she had simply run off. The newly appointed Housi
ng Minister had even offered Gerard accommodation at his own hilltop Brookfield home.
Several days into the search, Flegg still did not suspect foul play and visited Gerard at his parents’ home in Kenmore. ‘What happened to you?’ the MP asked when he saw the scratches on Gerard’s face for the first time.
‘I crashed the car,’ Gerard replied, somewhat disingenuously.
Another theory started to form in his mind. Gerard had asked him twice in recent months for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Flegg started to suspect loan sharks could be behind Allison’s sudden disappearance.
‘Mate, you haven’t borrowed money off the wrong people, have you?’ he asked. Gerard quashed the theory.
One thing that did stand out to Flegg was Gerard’s reluctance to speak about his wife at all – you’d think he’d want to talk about nothing else.
After Allison’s body was discovered, a phone call from Gerard rang alarm bells. Reports had just appeared in the media of a traffic camera at the Kenmore roundabout, where the road branches off to Brookfield. Afterwards, Gerard phoned Flegg and wanted to know all about the camera. He asked Flegg if he knew whether the camera recorded all the time. The request for information about the camera was a bit like Gerard’s request for loans – blunt, and a touch demanding. It was couched in terms of it being useful to help catch the killer, but Flegg couldn’t help but feel suspicious. He told Gerard he’d have to get back to him, but never did.
A couple of days later, police wanted to speak to Flegg. Detective Sergeant Gavin Pascoe, from Homicide, asked Flegg about his contact with Gerard. In particular, Pascoe wanted to know what phones Flegg had and whether he had given anything to Gerard. Flegg gave Pascoe a statement saying he hadn’t given Gerard a phone, car, money or anything else other than moral support, and to the best of his knowledge no one else had. It turned out that Flegg’s friend Sue Heath had taken the phone around to Gerard.