by David Murray
Flegg asked Gerard to return it, but he kept stalling and wouldn’t give it back. The key person of interest in a murder probe was running around with a Cabinet minister’s phone.
Flowers for Allison
Friday 11 May 2012
Every question about Allison’s death remained unanswered. Police knew her funeral would be charged with emotion. As the date approached, detectives in the Major Incident Room were throwing around ideas. During this brainstorming, they hit upon a unique trap to catch a killer. A magistrate granted warrants approving their plan: hours before the funeral, a tiny recording device was hidden among the dozens of flowers draped over Allison’s rosewood coffin.
The plan was to close St Paul’s Anglican Church at Ipswich to all except immediate family before the service. Gerard was told he had time to visit Allison alone, as she lay on a bed of satin. Perhaps, in the solitude, he would tearfully apologise. Perhaps he would confess. It was a long shot, but modern policing is as much about lateral thinking as it is old-fashioned legwork.
On the day of the funeral, all the detectives investigating the case joined mourners gathering outside the 153-year-old, brick, Gothic Revival church, the oldest in Queensland’s Anglican network. But their bold plan was brought unstuck when someone from the church, unaware of the arrangements, opened the doors early and mourners started respectfully shuffling inside. Gerard would not have a moment alone with his wife after all. The misunderstanding barely mattered, as Gerard was running concerningly late. So late that Allison’s family began to wonder if he was going to turn up at all.
His demands to speak last at the funeral had been denied and, minutes before the 11 am service was to begin, he hadn’t arrived. Priscilla Dickie nervously turned to family and said he wasn’t going to come. Allison’s cousin Jodie Dann, sitting one row behind search commander Mark Laing, was feeling sick. Would Gerard really carry through on his threat and keep his daughters away from their mother’s funeral?
‘I think I’m going to throw up,’ Dann whispered.
‘Use this,’ Laing replied, handing over his police cap.
Dann took the hat. But it wasn’t needed. With three minutes to spare, Gerard strolled into the church with the girls. Allison’s three devastated daughters sat in the front left pew with their father and aunt, Olivia Walton. Priscilla, seated in the front row on the opposite side, couldn’t take her eyes off the girls, seated in front of the coffin and a large framed portrait of their mother.
Her heart on the verge of breaking, Priscilla stood up, walked to the front row and wedged herself next to the girls, sending Olivia to join her husband, Ian, in the row behind. For most of the rest of the service, Priscilla cuddled the youngest of the girls.
Laing couldn’t take his eyes off Gerard. Several times, Laing’s partner nudged him to try to stop him staring, but he was lost in a cloud of grief. On the front of service booklet was a photo of Allison – taken on the steps of Customs House, to mark her engagement to Gerard – and the message, ‘Celebrating the life of Allison Baden-Clay’. The Dickies had refused to put a Scouts emblem on the booklet. Allison might have carried the Baden-Clay name, but her links with Baden-Powell and the Scout movement ended there.
Allison’s sister, Vanessa Fowler, and brother, Ashley Dickie, delivered the eulogy between them. Ashley told the service he was just two weeks old when Allison, in grade one, took him into her class as a living, breathing show-and-tell. Later, he had to grin and bear it when Allison and Vanessa used him as their very own doll.
Vanessa spoke of Allison’s achievements, the most important of which were her daughters. Allison was the reading volunteer at school, the tuckshop lady and the mum who took her girls to ballet, music, choir and netball. She was the one constantly striving to improve herself, while always putting the needs of others before her own.
‘She could laugh for herself, by herself and at herself, long after the punch line had been delivered,’ said Vanessa.
The eulogy had not been shown to Gerard in advance and it became rather pointed as it went on. Allison – found 14 kilometres from home – had a ‘love of chocolate and loathing of exercise’ and would sit on the bed with a diet book in one hand and a sweet in the other, Vanessa told her fellow mourners. ‘[At school] she was always the last one out of the change rooms and the first one in, dragging her feet around the oval and making any excuse to get out of PE. Exercise and going to the gym were just not her thing.’
Vanessa kept her composure until the end. She had a promise to make to her sister: ‘Allison, there are many questions that are unanswered, many pieces of the puzzle that need to be put together, and we, your family, pledge to you that we will have these questions answered. We will bring you justice because you deserve nothing less. “Why then, why there, why now?” we cry. “Why did she die?” The heavens are silent.
‘What she is remembered for depends on us. How we choose to live will decide its meaning … She will be remembered for her acts of kindness and love. Allison, your loss has been felt throughout the country, by people who do not know you. Your passing has heightened the need for all of us to provide a safe and peaceful community and world for our children. You have been taken from us far too early but you will never be forgotten by all those who knew you and loved you.’
Allison was loved, and sorely missed. More than 600 people gathered at the funeral to pay their respects. There were too many to fit in the church, so some stood outside. Two guards of honour formed. Students from Ipswich Girls’ Grammar, Allison’s old school, and members of the Queensland Fire and Rescue Service, Geoff’s former workplace, lined up on each side of the sloping bitumen road to the church for the coffin to be carried to the waiting hearse.
Afterwards, mourners approached Gerard to shake his hand or hug him tight. His eyes were red and misted. Others were waiting for their turn to console Gerard when a man in a dark suit moved purposefully through the milling crowd. Detective Sergeant Peter Roddick, from Homicide, stopped only when he came face to face with Gerard. Everyone else would have to wait. Roddick leant in close and they shook hands.
Those standing nearby thought Roddick sounded sincere as he offered his condolences. But there was something else about the approach. The detective was right up in Gerard’s face. The unspoken message for Gerard was there was nowhere to hide. Even at his wife’s funeral, he wasn’t safe from the detectives on his tail. Wherever he went they would be watching him. Gerard looked shocked to have been approached.
‘I just hope you find who did this,’ he said.
‘Don’t worry, Gerard, we will,’ Roddick replied, gripping Gerard’s arm firmly.
When Roddick walked off, Mark Ainsworth made his way through the crowd until he was in front of Gerard. Ainsworth had been at the forefront of Operation Kilo Intrigue for three weeks, but it was the first time he had met Gerard. The senior cop went to introduce himself but it wasn’t necessary.
‘I recognise you from the TV,’ Gerard said.
‘I’m sorry about the death of your wife,’ Ainsworth said as they shook hands.
Gerard repeated that he hoped police found the person who did this. Ainsworth assured Gerard they would.
The bug hidden on Allison’s coffin had been part of a highly secretive operation, but the cluey funeral director had put two and two together. As the service ended he had some concerns. If the covert recording device had batteries, they could explode in the cremation process. It was a potential workplace health and safety concern.
After the funeral, he warned a detective there wasn’t much time to remove any objects that may have been left with the coffin.
Detectives didn’t reveal much, but the expensive device had already been spirited away. It was a shame it hadn’t worked but they were undeterred. They were determined to solve this case.
No stone unturned
As pressure was mounting on Gerard, it was also being felt by police. With the search and rescue parts of the operation wound up, the investigation h
ad gone from the background to the forefront of the case. The public, and family, wanted answers.
The test results on the bloodstain in the rear of Allison’s Captiva were coming back in stages. First, when they were lacking a reference sample, police could only confirm it was female blood. Next, after Priscilla and Geoff Dickie provided DNA samples, police confirmed it was from a female offspring of the couple. Finally, after the discovery of Allison’s body, police had a definitive DNA reference sample. The blood in the car came back a match to Allison. The only other person who had driven that vehicle was Gerard.
Other incriminating evidence emerged in a forensic examination of Gerard’s iPhone. Downloading the contents of the phone had shown it was used to Google the words ‘taking the fifth’ just after 10 pm Wednesday 18 April, two days before he reported Allison missing. The American term, referring to the Fifth Amendment in the US Bill of Rights, is invoked when a person refuses to speak to police or in court because their testimony could be used against them. At 7.09 am on 20 April, six minutes before he phoned police to report Allison missing, Gerard also appeared to have searched the term ‘self-incrimination’. Ironically, the search itself seemed incriminating from a man whose wife had vanished.
The police Electronic Evidence Examination Unit also discovered an inconsistency in Gerard’s story: his iPhone was connected to a charger at 1.48 am on the day Allison vanished. Connecting an iPhone to a charger leaves a little-known electronic trail. Gerard had told police he went to bed at 10 pm and slept until after 6 am.
Although a case seemed to be slowly building against the high-profile estate agent, police had to keep an open mind. The detectives in the Major Incident Room at Indooroopilly set about checking every angle. And for every productive lead they chased down, there were hundreds of dead ends. Prominent cases, such as this, generated myriad tips and lines of inquiry. Often it was the work no one saw – that came to nothing – which was the hardest and most time-consuming.
Detective Senior Constable Grant Linwood from Homicide returned from leave on Monday 23 April 2012 and went straight into Operation Kilo Intrigue. Linwood had spent a good deal of the previous two years working on the investigation into Daniel Morcombe’s murder as it moved into the covert operation phase.
In the Morcombe case, undercover detectives used a Canadian technique known as the ‘Mr Big’ sting to convince serial child sex offender Brett Peter Cowan he was being recruited into a criminal gang. Cowan fell hook, line and sinker for the story ‘the gang’ was involved in drugs, guns, black market crayfish, prostitution and even blood diamonds. Before letting him in on the big stuff, they told him, the gang needed to be sure he wasn’t linked to any major crimes which could come back to haunt them. Thinking he was about to score a huge payday, Cowan confessed to abducting Daniel and murdering him on an isolated macadamia farm in the Sunshine Coast hinterland. Later, when he led the undercover operatives to Daniel’s remains in August 2011, he ended a long and painful search.
On the Baden-Clay investigation, Linwood would prepare a table of all the ‘person of interest and vehicle of interest’ sightings around Brookfield and Kholo Creek. It ran for pages and pages, ranging from men loitering on the street to mysterious vans and other vehicles. They all had to be ruled out as being connected to Allison’s disappearance.
The MIR went through the process of identifying known sex offenders in the western suburbs and checking their locations on the night. They looked back at other sex offences in the previous three months, such as random attacks on bikeways or peeping Tom incidents.
Any person stopped by police for suspicious behaviour – or street-checked – in the Brisbane West police district in the lead-up to Allison’s disappearance was reviewed as a potential suspect. Assaults in the Brisbane West police district were examined for parallels. Two teenagers fighting over a skateboard, a road rage attack and drunks at a local train station were among the cases scrutinised.
The high-profile nature of the case also brought out everyone from the well-meaning to the misguided to the downright bonkers. One caller to Crime Stoppers reported seeing a deer running across a Brookfield road on the night Allison disappeared and thought it should be reported. Another provided details of a man supposedly having an affair with Allison – when police checked they found it was untrue and malicious.
On another occasion, detectives were in the MIR when Nigel Baden-Clay called to report a stranger – and a very strange one, at that – was in front of his Kenmore home talking about Allison. When the detectives arrived, they found colleagues in uniform had already put the man in the back of their police car. He was swinging a pendulum back and forth and insisted he was communicating with Allison before dramatically announcing she had revealed her killer.
‘And he lives there,’ he shouted, pointing to the Baden-Clay home.
Police found the man had also been harassing Scotland Yard about the disappearance of Madeleine McCann in Portugal.
Separately, a Crime Stoppers caller urged police to take account of the Cosmic Pendulum. Nigel himself passed on details of dreams for detectives to follow up.
Gerard too was fielding prank calls at his home and business. One caller rang the real estate agent saying he wanted to sell his home in Brisbane’s west. When Gerard inquired as to where the home was, the caller said it was at the corner of Murder Drive and Homicide Avenue.
On top of the information flowing to police, tips and rumours were flooding in to newsrooms. One persistent suggestion was that Nigel had taken his life in a park near his home. After the 50th tip within a few days about Nigel’s supposed demise, Courier-Mail investigative journalist Josh Robertson called Nigel’s Kenmore home.
‘Hello,’ Nigel answered. Robertson made his excuses and quickly hung up.
Another early focus of investigations was the vacuum cleaner Nigel loaded into his car at Brookfield on the morning Allison was reported missing. Aside from a ball of matted hair and fluff inside, police found tantalising pieces of a shredded document. Specialist document examiners spent weeks painstakingly reassembling the pieces like a jigsaw. When they were finished they discovered it was nothing more than an entirely blank piece of paper. Tests did not find any traces of blood on the inside or exterior of the vacuum.
In the search for Allison’s missing mobile phone, the police checks extended to rooftops and septic tanks. A Brookfield resident found a screw had been taken out of her septic tank and called police, who came out and checked it but found nothing to link it to Allison.
Scientific officers went over Gerard and Allison’s house in minute detail, checking for blood or other evidence. The entry and exit points, manhole, floor, furniture, kitchen knives, camping gear, keys, roof, drainpipes, carport, patio and a camping trailer in the carport were closely examined. Plants were growing over the septic system so it was clear it hadn’t been opened. Any stains were tested, including one on a kitchen scissors block and another in the carpet in the main bedroom.
Hope was pinned on the traffic camera at the Kenmore roundabout that Gerard had asked Dr Bruce Flegg about. On the night Allison went missing, it had recorded grainy vision of what could have been Allison and Gerard’s Holden Captiva. One of the Homicide detectives had a background in auto theft investigations and knew more about cars than anyone his colleagues had ever met. To the amazement of the other police on the case, the detective put together a ‘line-up’ of cars to compare with the blurry CCTV images from the roundabout and other witness statements.
Detectives borrowed a Holden Captiva from a car dealership and drove it to the roundabout at about the same time of night to see if it matched the vehicle in the footage, but nothing conclusive was revealed.
An officer of similar size to Allison volunteered to be a ‘body’, and they loaded her into various parts of the Captiva and confirmed she could fit.
Detectives conducted other experiments. Allison had been found wearing running shoes, and investigators wondered if laces looked different i
f tied by someone else. So the investigators tried tying each other’s shoelaces. They found the exercise was pointless because, even in the office, everyone tied their laces differently. One detective routinely tied his own laces differently on each shoe.
Any fragment that could possibly have been a piece of Allison’s chipped tooth was sent to forensic odontologist Dr Alexander Forrest to examine. Hundreds of tiny objects from the vacuum, cars and Brookfield home were dispatched to Forrest, but the missing tooth chip was never found. Most of the items turned out to be stones. Police liked to say no stone was left unturned.
Almost 1500 lines of inquiry were run out during Operation Kilo Intrigue, three times as many as the average murder investigation.
’Net detectives
Among all the outlandish tips and spooky dreams that peppered the Baden-Clay investigation, there was one ‘eerie feeling’ that would truly send a shiver down the spine of many. On 28 April 2012, a Brisbane resident using the cybername ‘Alicat’ logged on to the popular Websleuths crime site to contribute to a freewheeling discussion about the search for Allison Baden-Clay: ‘I’m out this way,’ she wrote, ‘and I keep getting eerie feelings around Kholo Creek overpass. I know it probably sounds silly, but it’s the “what if”.’
Two days later, Allison’s body was found under that exact overpass. It shocked many and fuelled a feeling on the message board, however misguided, that ordinary citizens could help contribute to the investigation.