by David Murray
Fuller’s words tumbled out rapidly at the start, rushing jurors into the trial. He slowed to tell the jury ‘a little bit about her’ – her marriage, children and home on Brookfield Road. How Allison had a normal day, and then was gone.
‘The Crown case, ladies and gentlemen, is a circumstantial one, and the Crown says that Allison Baden-Clay did not die of natural causes, that she in fact died at the hands of her husband.’
Fuller went through the story. There was a lot to take in, but it all built up to the scratches on Gerard’s face: ‘Allison Baden-Clay’s mark upon him,’ he finished.
The trial’s first witness was Ewen Taylor, the tireless police forensic coordinator, who talked the jury through the process of gathering evidence and described the solemn day he lowered himself down from Kholo Creek Bridge. Photographs of Allison’s body reappeared on the screen. Still, there was no change to Gerard’s blank stare in the dock.
Next up was Sergeant Murray Watson from Indooroopilly Police Station. Watson had helped Gerard evict tenants from a property in Chalcot Road at Anstead in 2010. A ‘cult’ in the house was feared to have stockpiled weapons, and Watson had met Gerard there at least three times. It was around the corner from the Kholo Creek bridge, and his testimony was intended to demonstrate Gerard was familiar with the area. But when defence barrister Michael Byrne stood, he had a card up his sleeve. Watson had known Gerard for years through organisations such as the chamber of commerce and Rotary.
‘And you regarded him as being “one of the nicest guys in the world”, didn’t you?’ asked Byrne.
‘Yes. I would say that’s true,’ replied Watson.
The words hung in the air. It had inadvertently turned into a glowing character reference for the accused.
The Crown’s theory was Gerard had taken Allison’s body down an embankment on the right-hand side of the bridge. Underneath the bridge, he simply rolled her over a ledge to the muddy creek bank below. She lay there until she was found. It would explain the lack of footprints or any other disturbance in the mud around her.
Senior Constable Ashley Huth described the treacherous conditions on the muddy bank when he rappelled from Kholo Creek Bridge with Taylor. He said he had also conducted a thorough search for blood around Gerard’s home and didn’t find any.
The first day of the trial had moved faster than almost anyone expected. A few things stood out. There had been no mention of Allison’s $1 million in life insurance. In earlier court hearings, the payout had been cited as a motive for the cash-strapped Gerard to murder his wife. And absent from the witness list read out to the jury were Gerard’s former business partners Phill Broom and Jocelyn Frost. Fuller had told Allison’s family he wanted to keep things simple and clearly he meant it.
Day two of the trial began with more grim evidence about the discovery and examination of Allison’s badly decomposed body. Again, Gerard sat through it passively. Justice Byrne had ruled in a pre-trial hearing the prosecution could not present evidence that granular brown material found on Allison’s brain may have been a subdural haemorrhage.
At trial, pathologist Nathan Milne said Allison’s only injuries were a probable bruise on the internal lining of the chest wall, perhaps from a mild blunt force, and a chip from her lower left eye tooth. Milne suspected the body was under the bridge in the position it was found within hours of death because of features including hypostasis – the settling of blood with gravity on her right side – and other changes he observed on different parts of the body. He found nothing to suggest Allison drowned, overdosed or fell from the bridge, but conceded in cross-examination he couldn’t rule these out.
Simpler murder trials had gunshot or knife wounds to present to the jury. This wasn’t one of those cases.
Last song
The repeated refrain from the next set of witnesses was that Allison had seemed normal – happy in fact – on her last day alive. Fiona Christ had a pleasant 20-minute chat with Allison at Brookfield State School when they were dropping their children off at prep at 8.30 am on Thursday 19 April 2012. Allison was excited about the birth of her nephew the previous day and mentioned picking up Olivia Walton from hospital after she had suffered a crippling headache. They spoke about the school cross-country ahead that day and finalised sleepover plans – some of their children were to stay at the Christs’ and some at the Baden-Clays’ on the Friday night. The Mother’s Day stall was coming up and they put their names down to help with the morning set-up. There was nothing out of the ordinary.
‘She seemed fine and she seemed happy,’ said Christ.
Michael Byrne, in cross-examination, wanted details of Allison’s depression. Christ said Allison first told her of being depressed after her eldest daughter was born in 2001 and that she had spent a lot of the time on the couch around that period. Gerard stayed home to support her.
Asked about other incidents, Christ answered that Allison was unable to drive their children to a camp in late 2011 because her antidepressants made her nauseous and dizzy.
Raising the birth of Allison’s nephew, Byrne made a statement of his question: ‘Were you aware that Allison had desperately wanted a male child?’
Christ, who had just told the court of Allison’s happiness at the birth of her nephew, said she wasn’t aware.
Anne Swalwell also ran into Allison outside the prep classroom about nine that morning. Swalwell’s daughter took jazz ballet lessons with Allison at the school. The two women discussed the upcoming Mother’s Day stall. Swalwell was organising it, and Allison said she would ‘have to get time off from the boss’ to make it.
‘It was all just, you know, banter. Friendly banter. She seemed happy that morning, actually,’ Swalwell said.
Karen Nielsen, an owner of real-estate training firm PRET Australia, had a four-hour meeting with Allison at Century 21 Westside that day. Allison wanted to grow the business and they discussed strategies. Nielsen thought Allison was ‘extremely positive’ and they arranged to meet again.
As they were finishing, Allison wanted to take Nielsen to meet Gerard. He was on the phone when they first went into the room and Allison picked up a photograph of their three children and showed it to Nielsen. When he hung up the phone, Allison introduced Gerard. Nielsen left about 1.30 pm.
‘She was extremely involved and engrossed in what we were discussing the whole time I was there and we left on a positive note,’ Nielsen said.
Under cross-examination, Nielsen confirmed Allison had discussed being on a protein diet and exercise program. Allison had given her a piece of cake at lunch but wouldn’t have any herself.
Former Century 21 Westside receptionist Gabrielle Cadioli also remembered Allison being happy and engaged in her work that day. Cadioli said she and office manager Elizabeth Scully had told Allison to leave early for her hairdressing appointment that afternoon because there had been an accident on the freeway and it was clogging up Moggill Road. Allison said goodbye in the afternoon and added she had the real estate conference the next day and wouldn’t be back until Tuesday.
‘She was in a really good mood. Allison enjoyed training and she’d vocalised that to me before. She was having a bit of a joke and was laughing with us that afternoon as well,’ Cadioli said.
In cross-examination, Cadioli agreed Gerard was a good boss who put her through a business administration course.
Byrne then took Cadioli to a topic that was already becoming a familiar source of his questions – depression. On previous occasions, Cadioli admitted, Allison had spoken to her in general conversation about suffering anxiety and depression; Allison had wondered whether she had passed the illness on to her daughters.
Allison’s happy mood appeared to have vanished by the time she reached the hair salon on the afternoon of 19 April. Hairdresser Monique Waymouth said Allison was there for her third appointment in just over a week because she was unhappy with her hair colour.
‘She seemed a little bit stressed when she came in, and then she was fai
rly quiet,’ Waymouth said.
This may have simply reflected Allison’s frustration at returning to the salon to have a colour redone.
The next witness called was one of the few people Allison confided in during the last months of her life. Wendy Mollah had tipped her off to Gerard’s affair with Toni McHugh after hearing the talk around Brookfield State School. Mollah told the court she met Allison through the school, where they had children in the same grade: ‘She was a wonderful mother. Most of her time was spent doing things for them.’
The two friends had signed up to a course called ‘Real Estate Options’ about a year to 18 months before Allison’s death, with the hope of trying to make some money. It was more evidence of Allison making plans for the future, but this particular element had a twist: Allison didn’t want Gerard to know about the course. Mollah didn’t broach it at the trial, but some friends thought Allison was starting to make contingency plans for a future without Gerard.
Mollah told the court Allison had been around for dinner three weeks before she died, and seemed fine but was struggling to deal with the affair.
Gerard got in touch with Mollah through the school on the day he reported Allison missing: ‘He sounded very casual. I was surprised. If your wife is missing … He just said she’d gone for a walk and she hadn’t come back.’
On the day Allison vanished, her three daughters were taken to Indooroopilly Police Station to speak to detectives. Videos of the little girls talking to police one-by-one were now shown to the court. As soon as the eldest daughter appeared on court screens, Gerard’s face crumpled. Impassive and dry-eyed through the images of his wife’s body, he was instantly in tears at the sight of his daughter. Aged ten at the time, she was in her school uniform, with her hair pulled back in a ponytail, sitting on a wide brown couch with a fluffy toy orangutan perched beside her and a red box filled with toys at her feet. The two female detectives interviewing her were gentle but she dabbed at her face with a tissue and burst into sobs.
‘It was really just normal like every other night. She just put us to bed. She just comes in and says goodnight and gives us a pat,’ she said.
Shortly after going to bed at about seven o’clock, she got up for a drink of water and her mum was on the couch and her dad was coming up the front stairs in pyjamas and shoes. He said he was going to do the ironing. In the morning her mum was gone. Her dad was ‘trying to keep calm for us’ but she said she didn’t know what was going on in his head.
When police asked if her parents ever argued, she said: ‘If they do fight, it’s only little arguments that go for a couple of seconds and then they stop.’
When the second video was played, it showed Allison and Gerard’s middle daughter struggling to speak through deep sobs in a different interview room. Her mum had put the then eight-year-old to bed exactly as she did every other night: ‘She sings a song to me.’
Her mum checked on her again before going to bed, she said. The detectives asked her how she knew.
‘Because she told me she would,’ she answered.
They were just little girls, scared and missing their mum.
Thursday 12 June, day three of the trial, continued with police videos of the Baden-Clay girls. This time it was the youngest daughter. Just five years old, she was cradling a Teletubbies doll and tucked into the corner of the big couch under the orangutan toy. She kicked her legs up and down as she tried to answer questions from two detectives.
Three more videos were shown to the court from police interviews with each of the girls at Surfers Paradise station on 27 June 2012, a fortnight after their father’s arrest. The girls had not heard anything on the night their mum disappeared, they said. Detectives asked the girls about the toys found stacked in the back of the Captiva. The eldest said they had recently gathered up their old toys to give to charity. She hadn’t seen them in the boot of the Captiva before.
The trial moved on to witnesses from around the western suburbs who reported hearing screams, thuds, barking and other mysterious sounds at various times and places on the night Allison disappeared. Fiona White heard two high-pitched screams at around 9 pm or 10 pm that were like ‘someone falling off a cliff’. White, who lived in Clarkson Place at Kenmore Hills, couldn’t be certain of the day but knew it was around the time of Allison’s disappearance.
Brookfield residents Susan Braun, Anne Rhodes and Julie and Kim Tzvetkoff told of hearing various sounds between 8 pm and midnight. David Jenkinson, who lived at Karalee, about 500 metres from Kholo Creek Bridge, where Allison’s body was found, woke to the sound of barking dogs, then heard two thuds ‘like a cement bag or something heavy being thrown onto the ground’ and a car door close about 10.30 pm. Real estate agent Brian Mason told of the cacophony of barking dogs at homes near Kholo Creek after midnight.
Battle lines
Elaine Baden-Clay was making a statement without words. It took a while to register, what with everything else going on in the trial, but soon it was impossible to miss: every day, Gerard’s mother was arriving at court in the same loud purple jacket. Elaine had ditched her former sophisticated, feminine look and now sported severely cropped grey hair. And she seemed fixated with purple. Elaine wore a purple scarf and sipped from a purple water bottle. Olivia Walton donned a purple scarf too.
People started speculating about the significance of the colour. Like most things connected to the Baden-Clays, it seemed to have a Scouting link. Purple was the colour of the World Scout Emblem, as chosen by founder Baden-Powell. It is also the direct opposite of yellow on the colour wheel. Allison’s family had publicly adopted yellow, but they were banned from wearing the colour as a symbol in court because of the risk it could prejudice the jury – the committal hearing had been a sea of yellow.
Unmistakably, the two families were on a collision course. They were already distant before Allison’s disappearance. Now, they were bitterly divided by fierce, competing loyalties. At Gerard’s trial, testifying one after the other, the two sides would tell two vastly different stories. One shone a light on the positive in Allison, and the other vividly highlighted the negative.
Nigel Baden-Clay was the first family member to testify, and started on the front foot by pulling up prosecutor Todd Fuller for pronouncing his son’s name ‘Ger-rard’, lengthening the second syllable.
‘Slight correction. We christened him Gerard [Ger-red],’ Nigel said crisply.
Nigel told the court of taking an anxious early-morning call out of the blue from his elder son: Allison hadn’t returned from a walk. Nigel drove to Gerard’s Brookfield home shortly after.
‘I noticed that he had cuts on his cheek and a bit of bandaid sort of coming off. He said, “I cut myself shaving this morning.”’
Fuller asked if Gerard and Allison discussed their relationship with him.
‘No they didn’t,’ Nigel replied. ‘They were a very private couple, and we were unaware of the depression that Allison was suffering until probably four or five years into their marriage.’
The answer was telling – Fuller hadn’t asked about Allison’s depression. It seemed Nigel couldn’t wait to throw it before the jury. Interestingly, he didn’t volunteer information about Gerard’s affairs when asked about the couple’s relationship – just Allison’s depression. In cross-examination, Byrne provided plenty of other opportunities, asking Nigel how he first learnt of Allison’s depression. Nigel said Allison had phoned Elaine one day and asked to see her.
‘Elaine explained to me that Allison had broken down in tears and told her that she was suffering from some illness, and she didn’t know what was wrong with her, and could Elaine advise her on who she might seek to help.’
Elaine put Allison onto her own GP, who referred her to a specialist psychiatrist. Asked for any manifestations of the illness, Nigel said the curtains and blinds would be drawn and the house in semi-darkness.
With that evidence and Nigel still in the witness box, the first week of the trial was over. Evidence w
asn’t being taken on Fridays, and he would have to return on Monday. He had been the 23rd witness. At this rate the whole thing could be wrapped up in three weeks.
Allison’s parents and Kerry-Anne Walker were told they would be among the next to give evidence, and faced an agonising wait over the weekend. Allison’s cousin Jodie Dann found doubts creeping in. Was the prosecution rushing? Were they getting everything they could out of the witnesses as one after another was checked off?
On Thursday night I received an email from a friend of Gerard’s who had been following the case through media coverage.
‘I am starting to think the prosecution don’t quite have enough,’ the person wrote. ‘I keep thinking they must have more – something up their sleeve – but it’s not looking great at this point (albeit with many witnesses to go). All those contradictory reports from neighbours today about times and dates and directions of noises did little for the prosecution’s cause in my opinion, especially in light of the girls’ statements that they slept through and heard nothing. Am I reading this wrong?’
Back in the Courier-Mail office, sentiment was similar, with colleagues already predicting a ‘not guilty’ verdict. As Gerard knew, in real estate and in life, first impressions counted. People took mere minutes to make up their minds. What had the jurors made of the first week? There was a lot of evidence to come, but so far there was a feeling things were going Gerard’s way.
The story of Allison and Gerard had been big news from the start, but the trial took the public’s interest to a new level. Crowds of court watchers were flocking to the trial. Their numbers were growing bigger and they were arriving earlier each day. By the time the glass doors to the building opened at 8.30 am, there would already be a long line. From there, it was a dash through security, a race to the lifts, then a new line would form outside Court 11. The courtroom door would be unlocked shortly before the start of proceedings at 10 am. Family members were allowed in first, then those in line took whatever seats remained.