by David Murray
Gerard quickly regained his composure when discussing his real estate business. He preferred to hire people new to the industry because it ‘had a fairly poor reputation for some of its practices’, a reputation he considered to be well founded in some instances. He didn’t want people who had been ‘tainted’.
The couple had their third daughter in September 2006 and Allison was in ‘shock’ because she had her heart set on a boy, according to Gerard. Again, he couldn’t resist damning with faint praise, saying: ‘Allison fell in love with her soon, too, which was great.’
Back at work, he was executing his ‘big vision’ to build an empire across the western suburbs, taking on partners Phill Broom and Jocelyn Frost. Allison wasn’t coping, so he was still helping with the morning and evening routines with their daughters. Again, he said, his wife hid her problems in public but would collapse on the couch at home. Allison ‘just had no interest in any physical intimacy at all’.
In this environment, he started the affair with Toni McHugh: ‘It started one night in the office when we were both working back … and then on a couple of occasions we actually met up and had a tryst, I suppose, is the best way to describe it, in my car, which was the Prado, Snowy.’
They’d steeled themselves to sit though all manner of gruesome evidence from scientific experts, but Gerard’s testimony proved too much for some members of Allison’s family. Geoff Dickie and Allison’s uncle Don Moore left the main court and went to sit in the overflow court upstairs. They didn’t trust themselves to stay silent.
Gerard told the court he had ‘tried to break off with Toni on numerous occasions’ but they always ended up back together. Not that he cared for her. Now Gerard belittled his mistress. He was only interested in the sex. Toni left her partner and ‘wanted me to divorce Allison’. Gerard’s loyalty was to his wife, but it was all very awkward, he said, because McHugh worked for him. He continued to sleep with her because he didn’t want to lose a good saleswoman, and because she was volatile and he didn’t want her to cause any dramas. He was flattered by the attention, ‘but really it was purely for the physical intimacy’. Along the way he had another affair, with Jackie Crane, at a real estate conference in Sydney, but this too was just about sex.
And at work, his business went from strength to strength and award to award, and ‘ultimately we were the number 1 office in Queensland’. His business partners were living the high life, buying ‘flashy things’. He got caught up in it too, he confessed, buying a new Lexus on a whim in 2009 when Phill Broom bought one. It was the same year Gerard had complained to Allison’s psychiatrist that she had wasted money on a treadmill.
Putting the boot into his former partners, he told the court they simply ‘stopped selling’ before the big move to the new office at Taringa. There was a long, detailed discussion about the business and the Brisbane floods before Gerard came to Allison’s discovery of the affair.
His wife reacted with ‘just disbelief’. And McHugh ‘just couldn’t believe it’ when he unceremoniously dumped her the same day.
Gerard had duped the two people closest to him – his wife and his mistress. Would the jury accept he wasn’t lying now? It was an uphill battle.
Allison imposed a new regime, banning him from working nights. He said she ‘needed complete control and access to my phone, so every day whenever I came home I would basically hand my phone to her’. Allison would return the phone in the morning before he went to work.
Gerard tried to spin a positive out of resuming his affair with McHugh. He was worried. He’d ‘heard that she was really struggling’.
Trying to downplay his financial struggles, Gerard admitted he cried on the phone to Dr Bruce Flegg’s friend Sue Heath when he asked for a loan in March 2012, but they weren’t tears of desperation.
‘She did ask me, “Are you okay?” and I remember actually breaking into tears at that point, because nobody ever asked me if I was okay,’ he volunteered.
Toni McHugh had previously told the court she and Gerard tried to talk every day. Gerard had a different story: ‘I was doing my best to distance myself from Toni. So wasn’t seeing her at all. Was not calling her. I was responding only to emails that she sent and answering the phone when she called.’
McHugh was ‘fixated’. He was trying to get rid of her, to make her ‘preferably, go away’.
As to the emails Gerard sent to McHugh telling her he loved her and would leave his wife by 1 July, in the witness box, Gerard insisted that he was merely telling McHugh ‘whatever she wanted to hear’.
‘I don’t honestly know where that came from,’ he said. ‘I anticipated that that time would come and go and Toni would be frustrated by that. I really wanted for her to be able to make the decision to leave me, if that makes sense.’ He lacked courage, he said.
Prompted by Michael Byrne, his defence lawyer, Gerard told the court that two days before Allison disappeared – Wednesday 18 April – he and his wife drove to Mt Coot-tha for the 15-minute session mandated by their counsellor. He said they calmly worked through the questions in Allison’s diary. She had asked about Gerard going to the movies with McHugh, and he told her it was only a couple of times. He told her he was ‘terrified’ of being seen with his mistress, and they ‘never showed any physical affection in public’. There were ‘a couple of intimate meetings in Snowy’ with the seats down, after they had driven to a secluded spot. He drew a map of McHugh’s unit in Allison’s journal, with it balanced on his knee in the car.
Explaining the toys found in the Holden Captiva, Gerard said the previous week the family had gathered up clothes and toys the girls didn’t use any more to give to charity. Allison had loaded them into the Captiva the day before he reported her missing. He had no idea ‘whatsoever’ how Allison’s blood ended up in the car.
The day before Allison vanished was like any other, Gerard said. He’d gone to a chamber of commerce breakfast then to the school cross-country event. He was standing next to the oval when ‘all of a sudden something bit me, stung me’. It felt like it went down his shirt too. Previously, Gerard told police a caterpillar had fallen on him. At trial he thought it was a caterpillar but it might have been a spider.
After the cross-country he went to his friend Rob Cheesman’s house, which was about to be put on the market. That afternoon he had a parent–teacher interview, which Allison couldn’t make because she had work and a hair appointment. That night, he and Allison talked. She was in her pyjamas and they went through some questions from her journal, then discussed more mundane topics.
‘I reiterated how I appreciated her strength and forgiveness. It was perfectly normal. Certainly civilised,’ said Gerard.
Allison had his phone overnight, as usual, he continued. He didn’t put it on the charger at 1.48 am. In the morning Allison was gone.
Next Gerard picked up a highlighter pen for a pivotal piece of evidence. Using it like a razor he attempted to demonstrate how he had cut himself shaving. He talked the jury through it.
‘Because it was blunt and I – I was pushing down quite firmly on my skin like that, and I pulled down and then flicked up like that, and that’s when I cut myself. I always shave on my right side first, and that’s when I cut myself the first time, closer to my mouth. The reason I think that it happened the second time was because I was – and that hurt a lot. When I was coming down again for the second time, I released before the previous cut to be sure that I didn’t cut myself there – you know, get involved in that first cut. I then continued to shave and had a bit of an issue shaving around those cuts, obviously, and cut myself again.’
It was a key moment for Gerard. The Crown case turned on the injuries to his face. He needed to convince the jury it was possible they were shaving cuts. Had he done that?
The trial adjourned for the day with Gerard still in the witness box. The next day was Allison’s birthday. It was the second anniversary of the date Gerard had chosen as the deadline to leave his wife. It was also the day
prosecutor Todd Fuller would get his chance to grill Gerard.
Tuesday 1 July 2014
Before Gerard faced cross-examination, Michael Byrne took Gerard through some final details, trying to tie up some loose ends in his testimony. To begin with, he targeted Gerard’s phone calls with McHugh about the conference clash. Gerard had ‘no real concern’ about the two women in his life meeting at the real estate conference, he said. McHugh had wanted him to tell Allison she would be there, but he never did.
Byrne had Gerard explain why he had called insurers on the day of Allison’s autopsy: it was because his father said he was obliged to inform them. On the subject of his finances, he said he had not paid credit card bills between January and May because it wasn’t a priority. It was ‘not correct’ that he was under pressure financially and personally at the time.
Todd Fuller’s cross-examination of Gerard began at 11.34 am. In the days leading up to it, there had been much speculation about the approach he would take. Some observers felt the prosecution had been lacking in force and depth in the opening days. Now that Gerard had taken the stand, the gloves would be off. It was Fuller’s to win or lose. If surprised by Gerard’s decision to testify, he and co-prosecutor Danny Boyle had consequently enjoyed the benefit of a three-day weekend break to prepare, and they obviously hadn’t wasted a minute.
Fuller went straight for Gerard’s Achilles heel – his credibility. He highlighted his years of deceit. Gerard had lied to his wife, and lied to his mistress. He was a practised liar – the type of person who could lie to police, and lie to a jury, to save himself.
The prosecutor’s sarcasm was barely concealed as he noted Gerard resumed having sex with McHugh after she left the business: ‘So, you’re not having sex with her for the sake of the business, are you?’
Before raking over Gerard’s emails to McHugh, Fuller put them on the screens in court. One, sent in the days before Allison’s death, had Gerard telling McHugh three times he loved her. The questions were coming thick and fast. And every question was met with a short, sharp response. The tears of previous days had vanished too. Gerard was calm and composed for his interrogation.
‘You went on to give her a date when you would be together, the 1st of July; correct?’ Fuller asked.
‘That is correct,’ Gerard replied.
‘Which just happened to be your wife’s birthday?’
‘Which just happens to be today,’ Gerard batted back. He added that even McHugh didn’t believe he would meet the commitment – she had sat ‘in this very chair’ and said she didn’t believe it. He was ready for a stoush.
Fuller kept returning to Gerard’s lies: ‘You deceived your family and friends for that four-year period as well, didn’t you?’
‘Yes, I did.’
The prosecutor went back to Gerard’s start in real estate, when he got a job at Raine & Horne then opened up next door: ‘So, you took their business and then had an affair with one of their employees [Michelle Hammond]?’
‘Correct,’ Gerard replied.
Moving quickly along, the prosecutor turned to Gerard’s image; he’d barely started his cross-examination and he was getting to the heart of what made Gerard tick. Gerard had carefully built the reputation of a respectable community member over many years. A clash between his lover and his mistress could bring it all undone. That was what set Allison’s final night apart from all the others.
The prosecutor highlighted to jurors Gerard’s subterfuge: deleting phone calls from McHugh, avoiding text messages and using the secret Bruce Overland email account.
Fuller went back to Gerard’s testimony about the early years of marriage – the international travel, the Scouts, his role as acting director while Allison worked in the shops, his well-paying London job while Allison was earning peanuts. It was all about Gerard. He had done little to help his wife at the onset of her depression – he didn’t even believe in depression. Before their first daughter was born, Gerard had started working from home because he had been made redundant – it wasn’t a sacrifice he made out of concern for Allison, Fuller pointed out.
The prosecutor went through Gerard’s financial pressures and his loss of personal freedom after Allison discovered the affair. He had managed to keep his work and home lives separate, until Allison started coming to work to watch over him.
Everyone in the court that day was now watching a verbal sparring match – short, sharp questions met by short, sharp answers. Fuller was jumping backwards and forwards in time, making Gerard work hard to keep the strands of his story from unravelling or snapping off altogether. He brought up his promise to come to McHugh ‘unconditionally’.
‘It was a bit of a joke,’ Gerard explained, ‘in relation to a real estate contract being unconditional.’
No one seemed particularly amused.
Fuller asked why Gerard resumed having sex with McHugh after they had broken up in 2011. Gerard had previously said there were only two occasions of intimacy – now he offered that one occasion wasn’t strictly sex. Pressed, he appealed to the judge.
‘How much sordid detail am I expected to give, your Honour?’ Gerard appealed.
‘I didn’t ask about the sordid detail, Mr Baden-Clay. I asked why you had sex with her,’ Fuller said icily.
‘Well, it wasn’t sex as in intercourse,’ Gerard responded. The pair had met at a Coffee Club and then retired to McHugh’s car, where an encounter that ‘wasn’t sex’ took place. What exactly the pair got up to in a parked car in the middle of the day was left to the imagination of all in court.
Fuller then turned to a new piece of information. In the previous few days, Allison’s friends had retrieved an old post from Gerard’s Real Estate Expert blog, written after Allison turned 40. Allison had spent a week away at a health spa. His blog relayed his failed struggle to run the household while she was gone. It starkly contradicted his claims he was the one doing everything at home.
‘Mr Mum! The past week I have been trying to do my best impersonation of my dear wife – and struggling,’ Gerard wrote. ‘Whilst she has been enjoying the rest and quietude, I have been trying to manage the house and transport my three girls to all of their activities – and I am knackered. It’s a bit of a cliché that most men have no idea how hard it is to run a household, and I thought that I was pretty in-tune with the day to day routine, but I can honestly say that this week has given me a real insight into the challenges of managing a family … I’ll certainly be more understanding in the future when I come home from work and find out that dinner isn’t on the table with my foot spa pre-warmed.’
But when Fuller tried to introduce the blog, the defence objected and the jury left the room. Behind closed doors, Fuller argued he was entitled to raise it because Gerard had claimed that morning that Allison’s depression and episodes on the couch continued until her death. Justice Byrne ruled it should have been presented as part of the Crown case if it was going to be used. The jury would not see it.
With the jury back, Fuller put the blog aside and turned to Allison’s journal, asking Gerard to explain her question: ‘afterwards, why so mean?’
Gerard said they had resumed a sexual relationship in February 2012, and Allison thought he laughed at her underwear, ‘And that’s not true.’ He didn’t tell Allison she smelled, as she had written, it was just that ‘neither of us had had a shower’ and he’d suggested they should.
Fuller didn’t accept Gerard’s claim that Allison had asked the crossed-out questions in her diary on the 18th of April. He suggested to Gerard it was the 19th, the night she vanished.
Gerard replied: ‘You can suggest it. It’s completely untrue.’
Growing in confidence, Gerard started correcting Fuller. In one instance, he told the prosecutor the ‘subtle difference that perhaps you’re not quite seeing’ was that he had borrowed money from longstanding friends, not investors.
‘The subtlety hadn’t escaped me, Mr Baden-Clay,’ Fuller shot back.
Arguing
he was not under financial strain, Gerard said he could have wound up his business and emerged ‘relatively unscathed’.
Fuller pointed out he was only thinking of himself. Was he not concerned for his three best friends, who would have been left $270,000 out of pocket?
‘They are all highly qualified people,’ Gerard replied, ‘and they went into it with their eyes wide open, with the understanding that there was a risk that they might lose everything.’
The court adjourned. Gerard would have to return for a fourth day, when Fuller would launch a final assault.
Wednesday 2 July 2014
Justice Byrne kept the jury out to deal with an unusual development – the accused had tried to pass him a note. Justice Byrne didn’t know what was in the correspondence. Gerard had handed it to a bailiff, but it had been returned unread. Apparently, Gerard had been told he could not communicate with his barrister while under cross-examination so he had tried to pass a message to the judge. Michael Byrne admitted he had no idea what the note contained, and solicitor Peter Shields was given permission to investigate. Shields and Gerard had a brief private chat before Byrne told the court without further explanation that the matter had been resolved.
Gerard looked drained as he started his fourth day on the stand, but his cockiness hadn’t abated. When he tried to claim he had answered ‘every and any question’ police asked, Fuller immediately pulled him up:
‘So you answered every question that was asked of you?’
‘I did.’
‘They asked you to make a formal statement?’
‘Yes.’
‘You did not?’ continued Fuller.
‘Oh, I answered them: “No, I will not be making a formal statement.” That was my answer.’
The response was a sign Gerard was intent on sparring with Fuller and had forgotten the real battle was to convince a jury he was not the sort of man who could kill his wife, dispose of her body, then lie to friends and family. Gerard was playing into the prosecution’s hands by putting his hubris and guile on full display. He was having a battle of wits, but to the jury he may have just looked arrogant.