by David Murray
Watching from the dock, Gerard shook his head almost imperceptibly in disagreement as Justice Byrne spoke. Allison’s family held their breath, but yet another decision went against Gerard. The murder charge stood.
Death of a salesman
Thursday 26 June 2014
No one really thought Gerard would take the stand. Well, almost no one. Among the few exceptions were a couple of detectives who had spent time with him. They had a bet with colleagues that Gerard, so convinced of his own charm, would testify. Allison’s cousin Jodie Dann shared their certainty. Dann knew prosecutor Todd Fuller’s view was that Gerard’s lawyers simply wouldn’t allow it – it was too big a risk. But while his reasoning made sense, Fuller didn’t know Gerard. Dann was sure his arrogance would get the better of him.
Michael Byrne had requested the court start later than usual, to give the defence time to talk to their client about his decision. Proceedings were scheduled to start after 11 am.
As Gerard talked to his lawyers, lines were forming outside Court 11 and the overflow court upstairs. Crowds had built steadily throughout the three weeks of the trial and, since an early stoush over seats, court staff had introduced a numbered ticketing system. The Baden-Clay and Dickie families each had eight reserved seats. Everyone else lined up and was given a ticket according to their order in the queue. It was unprecedented. There hadn’t been this level of public interest in a trial in living memory. The ticket colours changed each day to stop people reusing old numbers. Priscilla’s nine siblings alone exceeded the number of allocated seats, so Allison’s huge extended family and close friends joined members of the public and media in the chilly early-morning queue for tickets. On this day, it felt like a waste of time. If Gerard declined to give evidence, as expected, the trial would be adjourned until Monday.
For the first time since the trial began, the charismatic Detective Superintendent Mark Ainsworth arrived outside Court 11. Jodie Dann gave him a big hug before other members of Allison’s family made their way over to greet him. Ainsworth, who was on leave, didn’t want to take anyone’s seat, so he went upstairs to the overflow court. When he found it was full too, he went to the media room where he found some space.
Outside the courtroom, friend Helen Wilson spoke fondly of Allison’s habit of always turning the conversation away from herself to ask about others. Allison would have been shocked so much of her private life had become public property.
The trial resumed at 11.27 am and Michael Byrne rose to drop a bombshell: ‘Your Honour, Gerard Baden-Clay will give evidence, will call evidence and will produce evidence in the trial.’ Gerard was rolling the dice and betting on his ability as a salesman to convince the jury of his innocence.
It was an extraordinary development. As word spread through the court complex, the media conducted a quick straw poll with legal eagles. No one could remember the last time an accused in a high-profile murder case had testified. It would expose Gerard to many uncomfortable questions on cross-examination, but he knew the jury wanted to hear him say he didn’t kill Allison and he wanted to be heard.
There was also a feeling in the wind that, despite presenting the bones of a strong case, the prosecution had failed to land any knockout blows. So much so, that when news broke Gerard would give evidence, those following the case on crime forum Websleuths congratulated prosecutors for luring Gerard to the stand.
‘Represent weakness to induce a bluff – perfect poker,’ wrote one. ‘Well done … It’s not every prosecutor who can get a defendant on a murder charge to strut on to the witness stand.’
It wasn’t quite what the prosecutors were aiming for. Now Gerard had upped the stakes. He was not going down without a fight.
At 2.53 pm Brisbane’s most infamous former real estate agent moved from the dock to the witness box and was sworn in. For most of those present, it was the first time they’d heard his voice, the rounded vowels a remnant of his African childhood. Everyone in court realised they were witnessing dramatic events. After two years of maintaining a steadfast silence Gerard was about to tell all.
Unfortunately for him, he got off to a faltering start. His defence counsel, Byrne, asked how long he had been married to Allison, and Gerard replied they were coming up to their 14th wedding anniversary. Byrne took a breath then launched into the question everyone was waiting for: ‘Mr Baden-Clay, did you kill –’.
‘Sorry. It would have been coming up to our 15th wedding anniversary,’ Gerard cut in. Scriptwriters couldn’t have matched it for black comedy.
Regrouping, Byrne repeated the question and this time the answer was a firm, ‘No I did not.’
‘Did you fight with her on the evening of the 19th?’ Byrne continued, batting short, rehearsed questions to his client.
‘No, I did not,’ Gerard responded, on cue.
‘Did you, at that time, leave your children alone in the house to go to the Kholo Creek bridge?’
‘Definitely not. Never.’
‘Did you ever take any steps to dispose or conceal Allison’s body?’
‘No.’
‘Did you ever do any clean-ups of the house?’
‘No.’
‘Or the cars?’
‘No.’
‘Or the surrounds of the house?’
‘No.’
‘The patio?’
‘No.’
‘The carport?’
‘No.’
‘Were you ever scratched by your wife?’
‘Never.’
He told the jury he and Allison ‘were planning to spend the rest of our lives together’. He was in contact with Toni McHugh, ‘but in my mind we did not have a relationship’.
With the big ticket items out of the way, the pace slowed and the tone softened. It was time for the defence to introduce Gerard Baden-Clay as a loving husband and father.
Byrne asked Gerard to recount how he and Allison had met. They had both worked at Flight Centre, he explained, before becoming momentarily side-tracked by business.
‘I fell in love,’ he said, ‘with the company, if you like, as well, and I did very well. I was regularly a top performer.’
He fell in love, too, with the company’s beautiful HR manager. They met when Allison had computer problems and he came to her rescue, he said, ‘And she got more and more problems with her computer.’
But he had competition. ‘Probably one of the most eligible bachelors within the organisation was my friend Ian Walton … In Flight Centre and indeed in the travel industry there aren’t too many straight, male eligible bachelors around.’
Gerard, of course, won out, and Ian went on to marry Olivia Baden-Clay.
‘I fell in love with her,’ he said of Allison. ‘I fell in love with her pretty well straightaway … I knew that she was the one,’ he said, breaking down in the witness box for the first time. It was about 15 minutes into Gerard’s testimony. There were many tears ahead.
He detailed their early years together.
‘I actually proposed to her underneath the Eiffel Tower at Park Road. That was …’ When Gerard paused, struggling to recall something, his barrister Michael Byrne prompted, ‘Close to Paris?’, obviously forgetting Gerard had popped the question at a replica tower just a kilometre or so down the road from the court house.
The more Gerard talked, the more relaxed and confident he became. He was warming to his task and those who had attended his wedding may have been put in mind of his epic 90-minute wedding speech. He also had a habit of digressing to strange details, such as where he and Allison were when Kieren Perkins won gold.
‘I remember clearly that we were at a caravan park … because we both loved swimming and watching swimming and tennis and that sort of thing, and that’s where we saw it, and people remember where they were when certain things happened and we were somewhere on a caravan park in the North Island of New Zealand.’
After they married, the couple planned a lavish extended trip around the world, but enjoyed a more tradition
al tropical getaway first. Here again, Gerard seemed focused on odd details, such as whether or not the resort had a television.
‘So the “honeymoon” honeymoon – [the] stereotypical part – was about 10 days at an exclusive island resort called Vabbinfaru in the Maldives, which was just wonderful. They had a theme of no – no shoes, no news. There were no newspapers, no televisions. It was just a wonderful idyllic sort of a setting. We did find whilst we were there, that there was a television at the place, because, in fact, the day we left Australia on our honeymoon, which was a week after we got married, was the day Princess Diana died, and we learnt that news after we’d cleared customs and my parents and Allison’s parents called down to us from the Brisbane Airport – through the observation deck, ‘Princess Diana’s just died,’ and we couldn’t believe it. We couldn’t comprehend it, really, I suppose. We had no knowledge. And the staff had a little television up above the bar at this resort and we watched the funeral there.’
Perhaps a more romantic memory from their first holiday as husband and wife would have helped Gerard’s case. But he was just getting warmed up; there were many more honeymoon tales to come.
He explained, in detail, the newlyweds’ stay at the International Scout Centre in Kandersteg, Switzerland, including a glowing account of how his illustrious forebear had founded it: ‘… a place where all the Scouts from all over the world could come at any time of the year to meet with each other and enjoy each other’s fellowship and that sort of thing, and also the alpine activities that were on hand there. It’s just the most magical place in the world.’
His enthusiastic storytelling was beginning to seem surreal. He started to resemble a guest of honour on This is Your Life, rather than a man on trial for murder.
He had no qualms about paying the occasional backhanded compliment to his late wife. Gerard’s job at Blockbuster International in London ‘paid very, very well’. Allison’s job with Dale Carnegie Training ‘hardly paid anything’, although it was ‘great experience for her’, he added. After London, they returned to Kandersteg and ‘it was fabulous, it was a wonderful, amazing experience’.
Life for the newlyweds took a turn for the worse, Gerard explained, when Allison took Lariam for their trip to South America. He described the time it was at its worst: ‘I remember it was Potosi because there’s a big silver mine there and also we went to another place and watched a soccer match, which was great, and we supported Potosi, and I bought a big flag and waved it around like an idiot as part of the away crowd, and there was a riot afterwards and that sort of thing. But that’s another story …’
Gerard catalogued the exotic locations they were in when her depression reared its head. She was anxious in a boat in the Galapagos and in the jungles of Venezuela.
After speaking of Allison’s feelings of upset after a fatal flood that occurred pretty much on their doorstep during another stint working at Kandersteg, Gerard’s mouth was dry from talking and he guzzled water as he moved on to the couple’s return to Australia from their extended honeymoon.
‘She’d pretty much recovered from most of those episodes, but [was] still a little bit more anxious,’ he recalled. ‘Before, when we got married, she was just a world-beater, you know? She could do anything. She was just a bit more fragile, I suppose, and she found things with work and everything else a bit stressful. She decided to stop working at the end of June because my job was so good and we could afford to do that.’
But Gerard lost his job. He started working from his garage at home. Their eldest daughter was born in July the following year. Allison’s anxiety soared and she would have panic attacks if he left the house. At this point, according to Gerard, he did almost everything bar breastfeeding their baby daughter while Allison lay on the couch. He wired up an intercom between the house and garage so Allison could press the button and he could be in the house in ten seconds flat.
‘She certainly would change nappies and that sort of thing. But to be perfectly candid with you, it came to a point where I was doing 80 to 90 to 95 to nearly 100 per cent. Obviously, I couldn’t breastfeed, but I was doing everything in the home because Allison was in a depressed state.’
Outsiders would not have noticed Allison’s depressed behaviour – she was skilfully hiding it from the world, Gerard said.
‘I can tell you 100 per cent why I didn’t tell anybody was because I was protecting my beautiful wife. She didn’t want to tell anybody because she didn’t want to be seen to be incapable.’
His claim to stoic silence was contradicted by statements from colleagues and friends, who said Gerard spoke often of Allison’s battle with depression and the extra load it placed on him.
Their second daughter was born in December 2003 and he decided to go into real estate with his parents:
‘I went and spoke to all of the agents in the local area and interviewed them to see where I’d like to work.’
The day drew to a close. Gerard’s evidence would continue on Monday. It had been an intriguing performance. The biggest sales pitch of his career.
Monday 30 June 2014
Jodie Dann didn’t want to get out of bed. Didn’t want to face another day of self-serving testimony from Gerard. She rolled over and pulled the covers over her head. It was Monday, and Allison’s cousin had spent the weekend dwelling on Gerard’s evidence. Was the jury going to buy it? They didn’t know Gerard. Perhaps they wouldn’t see through him. The prospect of sitting through more of his long-winded stories was making her angry. Maybe she didn’t have to go? She thought for a moment before reluctantly getting out of bed and getting dressed.
Phenomenal scenes were occurring at court. Interest in the case had been high in the first three weeks, but Gerard’s decision to testify turned the fourth week into a frenzy. Anticipating a rush for seats, Courier-Mail morning police reporter Tom Snowdon arrived at court at 5.45 am to reserve a place at the front of the queue. A group of women who had come up from the Gold Coast arrived shortly after him. By the time the building’s doors opened at 8.30 am, more than 100 people were waiting. There was still 90 minutes before Gerard’s testimony resumed, and people kept flooding in. The record turnout forced a change of plans – the trial would be streamed live on screens in a third courtroom. And it wasn’t just any court. The ceremonial Banco court – the biggest in the complex by far, with a capacity to seat more than 200 people – would be utilised. Never before had three courts – plus a media room – been open for evidence in a single court case to accommodate public interest.
Outside Court 11, there was disappointing news for those who had lined up all morning hoping to get into the trial court. A staffer announced the public gallery would be open to family only.
I’d been in court every day with colleague Kate Kyriacou, and Allison’s family invited us to stay. Kyriacou had previously covered the Daniel Morcombe trial, using Twitter to report live from the court. She had found it invaluable, and readers wholeheartedly embraced this new era in court reporting. On the Baden-Clay trial, many journalists were using Twitter but no one was as fast or as thorough as Kyriacou. For friends and observers who couldn’t be physically present, it offered a simple way to keep up. It was not merely the immediacy this form of social media offered, but its scope for commenting and asking questions made people log on in droves. With no TV cameras allowed in court, one of the most common queries was about Gerard’s demeanour: ‘What’s Gerard doing now?’ Our Twitter feeds streamed live on The Courier-Mail’s website, with rolling coverage from court reporter Brooke Baskin in the tenth-floor media room.
Gerard’s testimony carried on from where he had left off – with a question from Byrne about his success in business. ‘We were successful professionally. Personally, it was quite challenging,’ Gerard said. His return to work put a strain on Allison. Fortunately, he was able to pick up the slack. The jury learnt it was called ‘happy hour’ when Gerard came home from work at 5 pm every day. Most of the time he fed and bathed the girls and put them
to bed, he said. Allison ‘would actually go to bed pretty much as soon as I walked in the door’ on many occasions.
Byrne moved Gerard back and forth between his home and work. Gerard revelled in talking shop: ‘Very quickly, we did win listings, we got sales, and we became quite successful very quickly,’ he said. ‘And in fact that very first year, 2005, we won the Quest Business Achiever’s Award for the best real estate agency in the western suburbs.’
He was doing all this while looking after his troubled wife. Allison would call him during the day and he’d drop everything and go home. Usually, he did the morning routine with the children as well. Allison put on a façade when she went out, which only drained her further at home – again, an explanation for Allison appearing normal to others.
Meanwhile, her medication was having side effects: ‘Allison did certainly suffer a loss of libido. Our sex life basically became non-existent. And she did put on weight.’
He jumped from talking about his sexless marriage to Allison’s desperation for a third child – preferably a son: ‘She wanted to be able to continue the Baden-Clay name.’ Gerard told the court he wasn’t keen. The financial pressure of surviving on one income, and Allison’s personal difficulties, were already too much.
Byrne asked if he was faithful to Allison at the time, and Gerard began sobbing. He admitted to a month-long affair with former Raine & Horne colleague Michelle Hammond, who until then had not been named.
‘I just wanted sex,’ Gerard cried, ‘and Allison and I hadn’t had any sort of physical intimacy for years. It’s not an excuse but that’s why.’