Day two of Lamarre-Condon’s evidence
Good morning and welcome to our live coverage of Beau Lamarre-Condon’s criminal trial in the NSW Supreme Court in Sydney.
Lamarre-Condon, 31, has pleaded not guilty to two counts of murder over the deaths of Jesse Baird, 26, a former TV presenter, and Luke Davies, 29, a Qantas flight attendant, in Paddington on February 19, 2024. His case is that he acted in self-defence, the 15-person jury has been told.
The former NSW police officer has also pleaded not guilty to an aggravated charge of breaking into Baird’s home six months earlier on August 17, 2023, and stealing his mobile phone and wallet.
Lamarre-Condon started giving evidence on Thursday and returns to the witness box today. He denied breaking into Baird’s home and said he used a key the TV presenter left for him in the letterbox, but admitted he put a bobby pin in the front door lock.
He said he wanted to take Baird’s phone outside while he was sleeping to check if he was in a relationship with another man, and “if he was to wake up and come outside, he would see the bobby pin [and] not be under the impression that it was me going through his phone”.
He has yet to give evidence about the day Baird and Davies died of gunshot wounds from his police-issued Glock pistol.
The Crown alleges Lamarre-Condon developed an obsessive and jealous infatuation with Baird that escalated when Baird ended their casual romantic relationship in November 2023.
The defence case is that the accused went to Baird’s home disguised as an Uber Eats delivery rider to collect some of his belongings and that his gun went off twice during a struggle with Baird, wounding him fatally, and that Davies shot himself during a second struggle.
There is no dispute that he cleaned Baird’s share house and disposed of the men’s bodies.
Support is available from the National Sexual Assault, Domestic Family Violence Counselling Service at 1800RESPECT (1800 737 732) or the Men’s Referral Service on 1300 766 491.
Accused hands himself in to police
Lamarre-Condon says he handed himself in to police in the morning on February 23, 2024.
“I just knew I had to trust in God and do the right thing,” he says. “I just had to trust and hope for the best.”
He says he “maintained my legal right to silence”.
‘I need to do the right thing’
He says that Kennedy called him later, and he told her that he was going to go to police.
“I need to do the right thing,” he says he told her. He says she asked him not to involve her and to say she waited at the fence line of the property.
Lamarre-Condon says he called Bondi police station on February 22, 2024, and said he was “definitely coming in the following morning to speak to them”.
The rural property and the dam
Lamarre-Condon says Kennedy did not stay on the fence line of a rural property in Bungonia, near Goulburn, as she said during her evidence.
He says the men’s bodies were in a surfboard bag with a longboard bag on top.
He and Kennedy started mixing concrete, he says, and she helped him lift the bags containing Davies’ body partly onto a dinghy to take it into a dam at the property.
“I obviously tried to push the bag into the water,” he says. “It only went down halfway. As it wouldn’t sink all the way down we were thinking maybe it was because there was air in the bags.”
He says Kennedy slashed the bag containing Davies’ body with a knife, which resulted in stab marks on his thigh that the court has heard were observed during forensic examination of his body.
They left the property without the bodies, he says, and he returned to Bungonia later.
The alleged trip in the van
Warning: Graphic content
A former friend of the accused, dubbed Elizabeth Kennedy in the proceedings, has told the court that Lamarre-Condon took her on a drive to Goulburn in a van on February 21, 2014, two days after the alleged murders, but she was unaware the men’s bodies were in the back.
He gives evidence that Kennedy told him in advance to buy “coveralls” and he bought them in two sizes because she is shorter than him.
He says when he arrived at her house he “lifted the blue tarp” in the back of the van and “she could see Jesse’s head”.
“Then I started crying and having a panic attack,” he says. He says he suggested he should just go to the police, but she stopped him and said: “What if they don’t believe you. You’re a police officer, you could go to jail and get killed.”
He says Kennedy told him that “this is like Taylor Swift’s song, No Body, No Crime”, a claim she has rejected.
Accused says police did not find all belongings
Lamarre-Condon says that police did not find some of the larger items from Baird’s home, such as his mattress, and that he had dumped them at South Village shopping centre near Sylvania.
‘I’ve never said ‘pew, pew’ in my life’
Lamarre-Condon says the friend he spoke to shortly after the men’s deaths “had full knowledge that it was Jesse” who had died.
“I told him I had shot Jesse twice,” he says. He says he also discussed with the man how to get rid of bodies, and his friend suggested buying concrete and sinking the bodies in a dam.
The friend has given evidence that Lamarre-Condon made a gun gesture with his finger and thumb and said, “pew, pew” when describing the deaths of both men.
“I’ve never said ‘pew, pew’ in my life,” Lamarre-Condon says. “That’s something that a kid would say.”
The bullet hole in the door
Warning: Graphic content
Lamarre-Condon says that he removed a bullet from Baird’s bedroom door after the men’s deaths.
“I got it and I took it,” he says. “I don’t even know what I did with it.”
The Crown case is that Lamarre-Condon shot Davies through the bedroom door, while the accused gave evidence this morning that Davies shot himself by accident in front of the door and the bullet went through his head and into the door.
Accused admits sending texts from Baird’s phone
Lamarre-Condon admits that he sent messages from Baird’s phone after his death and originally planned to send the phone to a friend in Perth.
He says that he changed his mind about sending the phone interstate: “I didn’t want to involve her. It wasn’t right. Couldn’t do it.”
The text messages were shown to the jury earlier in the trial and are reproduced below, using court-ordered pseudonyms for Baird’s housemates.
A suitcase or a sleeping bag
Lamarre-Condon says that he originally planned to buy a suitcase or a sleeping bag after the men’s deaths but later decided to buy a second surfboard cover because he had bought one two days earlier on February 17, 2024.
“I didn’t want the housemates to see it and then be traumatised for the rest of their life,” he says of the bodies.
“Why didn’t you contact police?” his barrister, John Stratton, SC, asks.
“It honestly didn’t feel real,” he says. He says that he was later “genuinely of the belief that I would be killed” in prison “because of the uniform that I wear”.
He was confronted with a “moral dilemma”, he says.
‘I’ve killed somebody’
Lamarre-Condon says that “things just didn’t feel real” and he called a friend and told him “something’s gone horribly wrong”.
He drove to the man’s work and said he was “not in a normal state.” He says he told the friend: “‘I’ve killed somebody’, referring to a singular person.
“I never said anything about shooting Luke.”
He says he told his friend about “two gunshots going off” relating to “Jesse Baird, and Jesse Baird only”.
“I then said I didn’t shoot the second person,” he says. He says he told his friend he wanted to call police back but couldn’t have them make out that it was a “domestic” or that he shot a witness.
He says he asked where to get a door, and his friend was “the one that said to go to Bunnings”. He says he asked his friend to take some time off work to help him figure out “if this is real or not”.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: www.smh.com.au
