ON the morning of April 30, as the search entered its 11th day, canoeist Daryl Joyce spotted a body in the mud as he made his way along Kholo Creek.
She was 13km from home, lying in the shade of the Mt Crosby Rd overpass.
Allison Baden-Clay, mother to three girls, was partly face-down, partly on her right side. Her hands were tangled in her jumper, her jumper was tangled around her neck.
She wore her exercise clothes – a singlet, three-quarter length pants and sneakers.
Her left leg was forward, her right leg angled behind. She lay exposed on a mucky slope.
He paddled away in a frenzy, drove home and called police. She wasn’t alone after that. The police came. So did firefighters and forensic teams.
Two police officers were winched down. They took photographs before rolling her gently onto a tarp. She was then slid onto a stretcher, which was winched onto the bridge. They did it carefully. Slow, small movements in an attempt to keep her body in a similar position.
She arrived at Queensland’s John Tonge Centre in a sealed body bag. A blue-tarp-wrapped female. Age 43 years.
Dr Nathan Milne broke the seal and unwrapped Allison from the tarp. Leaves were collected from her hair and body.
The pathologist made a note of the clothing she was wearing. Her fingernails were painted with a pink polish, chipped and worn.
They removed her wedding ring. G & A, 23/8/97.
She was in a terrible state. Badly decomposed. Any injuries she might have had were no longer discernible.
Some areas were more decomposed than others. Part of her face. Her forearms and left shin. Dr Milne considered whether this meant she had had injuries, soft tissue damage, when she died. But there was no way of knowing.
She had no broken bones. This made it unlikely she had fallen or been dropped the 14m from the bridge onto the banks of the creek.
Her hyoid bone was intact. Her larynx was uninjured. Damage to either would have pointed strongly to strangulation.
Dr Milne could give several possibilities. Blunt force trauma from an assault. Smothering or strangulation. Death from drug toxicity. But they were theories only. None could be proved.
He finished his autopsy report with four words. Cause of death undetermined.
Gerard wasted no time. The woman found in the mud had not been formally identified when he put in a claim on his wife’s life insurance - worth nearly $1 million.
But there could be no payout without a death certificate. A second call was made. To the State Coroner’s office. He needed a death certificate. And put a rush on it.
But the coroner couldn’t issue a death certificate when Allison had not officially been found. The widower would have to wait.
IT was a tapered coffin of rosewood.
Allison lay on satin under an arrangement of coloured flowers.
Next to her was a police listening device.
They were using her to help try to catch her own killer. Detectives were hoping her husband would take some time before Allison’s funeral to farewell his wife in private and incriminate himself.
Perhaps he would tell her he was sorry. Perhaps he would give them something they could use.
But Gerard arrived late with his daughters and was never alone with her casket.
The detectives investigating Allison’s death found a motive and plenty of compelling circumstantial evidence pointing to Gerard. But to secure a conviction, they’d need to be meticulous and innovative.
They’d need to leave no stone unturned, no piece of the jigsaw missing.
Police had towed away the couple’s Holden Captiva, a new car they’d had for just eight weeks.
They found Allison’s blood in the boot, dripping down a side plastic trim where a third row of seats could be folded down. A blonde hair was found in the dried blood. They called in expert after expert to look at the scratches on Gerard’s face and torso.
Photos of the injuries were sent to the UK’s Serious Organised Crime Agency for advice.
The large gouge marks on Gerard’s face did not look like shaving cuts. They looked like they’d been made by someone’s fingernails.
They could see smaller scratch marks, made later, over the top of the gouges, that looked as though they had been made with a razor. As though Gerard had jabbed at the fingernail scratches with his razor to try to back up his story.
A caterpillar expert was called for opinion on whether a caterpillar bite could really have caused Gerard’s chest and neck injuries.
They analysed Gerard’s phone and computers.
He’d told them he’d gone to bed at 10pm and slept soundly til 6am the following morning.
The analyst scouring his iPhone was able to determine someone had plugged it in to charge at 1.48am.
When they dug deeper, they found lurid messages to the women he'd been having sex with.
The investigation was not without missteps. Investigators were given initial information from their tech experts that Gerard had attempted to make a Face Time call from his iPhone to his father at 12.30am.
This was significant. Why would he be calling his father in the middle of the night — the night he was supposed to be sound asleep, the night his wife disappeared?
Armed with that information, detectives arrived at Nigel and Elaine’s Kenmore home with warrant in hand. They were to hand over all “Apple products".
Elaine would later brag she gave them her fruit bowl and a smirk. Nigel didn't own an iPhone. Gerard's was an older model not capable of making FaceTime calls.
Their tech expert ran the software again. There had been a mistake.
They searched his phone to see what he’d been looking up on the internet. On April 18, he’d searched "Taking the Fifth". The search led him to a Wikipedia page on "self-incrimination". It seemed like a breakthrough. Had the whole thing been planned?
On April 20, five minutes before calling Triple-0 to report his wife missing, Gerard had again looked up "self-incrimination".
It seemed like a great piece of circumstantial evidence. But it wasn’t.
Gerard’s lawyers would later explain he’d been watching US legal drama The Good Wife. The phrase had come up and he hadn’t known what it meant. He’d googled it on his phone.
Detectives checked the episode. He was right.
On April 20, when he opened his internet browser to search a non-emergency number for police, the page from two days earlier had loaded again. They dropped it.
Then, an expert botanist provided a key breakthrough.
Dr Gordon Guymer, director of the Queensland Herbarium, analysed plant material collected from Allison’s hair and arms.
There were leaves and twigs from six different species of plants clinging to Allison’s body. Two of those plants were found to be growing near Kholo Creek, where her body was found.
All six were growing in the garden of the Baden-Clay house, many along the rear patio and carport area where the Captiva had been parked.
To investigators, that told a story. At some point, Allison had been on the ground gathering leaves in her hair.
Probably by the carport, next to the Holden Captiva. The Holden Captiva where they’d found her blood.
But they didn’t stop there. Police even sent cuttings from the Baden-Clay residence to South Australia to try to retrieve DNA to match it with leaves found in Allison’s hair.
Experts in Western Australia were consulted to eliminate death by drowning, and insects from the body were sent to Wollongong to determine their age.
Officers who reviewed CCTV at a Kenmore roundabout, between the Baden-Clay home and where her body was found, discovered a car similar to Allison’s driving through that night.
But they couldn't make out the number plates or be absolutely certain it was precisely the exact model.
They went there in the middle of the night and drove a range of vehicles similar to Allison’s Captiva through the roundabout to see if any matched the car in the footage.
They stopped motorists driving through on a Thursday night, hoping one was a regular who might remember seeing a silver Holden Captiva or a white Toyota Prado at the same time Gerard had claimed to be asleep.
Gerard was strangely curious about the roundabout. A couple of weeks after Allison disappeared, he called his politician mate, former government minister Bruce Flegg.
Gerard had seen news reports about police pulling cars over at the roundabout. Could Dr Flegg find out for him if there was a CCTV camera there? Flegg said he didn’t know and could ask, but did not follow it through.
By now, surveillance teams were monitoring Gerard’s every move. Phone taps recorded his conversations with his mistress.
But they soon discovered Gerard was using a new phone. It belonged to Bruce Flegg. Dr Flegg’s close friend Sue Heath had passed it on.
Some detectives were furious. But Flegg was just helping his friend, whose phone had been seized by police.
A couple of days after handing over the phone, Sue received a text message from Nigel Baden-Clay.
What help could the government give Gerard, Nigel wanted to know. Gerard’s house was a crime scene and stood vacant.
A forensic accountant went to work on Gerard’s financial position. They worked out he owed around $1 million.
He had borrowed $275,000 from three friends in “gentlemen’s agreements’’, $75,000 from Century 21 Australia CEO Charles Tarbey and owed $45,000 on credit cards.
He owed his business partners a total of $290,000 — debts set to be called in in June. He and Allison were guarantors on a $335,000 mortgage on a property at Paradise Point.
Police spoke to everyone who was owed and took statements from each confirming the amounts. Or almost everyone.
The financial analysis showed Gerard’s parents had loaned him $58,000. They wouldn’t admit to any loan when police came calling and refused to provide a statement.
The considerable financial troubles would be wiped out by his wife’s insurance and superannuation policies. Together they would bring him a $975,240 windfall.
Detectives also investigated whether Gerard had an accomplice. Several reported sightings around Kholo Creek suggested more than one person was involved. But investigators were never able substantiate the leads. There were too many inconsistencies.
There were other odd things about Gerard's behaviour.
Allison’s father Geoff was discussing funeral arrangements with his son-in-law one day.
Gerard pulled out his phone and said he wanted to record their conversation.
Police also spoke to a woman who had looked after Gerard and Allison’s daughters on April 26 — a week after their mum disappeared.
The woman had mentioned the girls’ missing mum.
“I’m sorry," one of the girls said. “I know I am not allowed to say anything until the debrief at night."
Detectives discovered Gerard had told a lot of lies that first morning
Detectives discovered some of the lies Gerard had told. He told police his wife often walked in the mornings. Some of Allison’s friends and family disputed that.
He told one of Allison’s closest friends she’d gone walking at 10pm. That that was her regular walking time.
He sent police off to search two different routes he claimed were her normal walking tracks. He told her parents he had no idea where she normally walked.
He’d told police about the affair but insisted he’d ended it.
Toni — and Gerard’s "Bruce Overland" email account — told them a different story.
They’d taken three statements from Toni in the week after Allison disappeared. On April 28 she confessed to having deleted communication between her and Gerard from her iPhone and email accounts. For privacy reasons, she told them.
Her statements had been short and succinct. Later she decided she had more to tell.
By then, police had discovered Toni wasn’t Gerard’s only extramarital interest. He had two others that they’d found.
They went to her with that information. She’d had no idea. She thought they’d been planning their life together.
He rang her not long after that. It was a Sunday night in May when she answered a call from a private number.
“I know what you’ve been doing," she told him.
“How could you do that to me?"
He didn’t deny it. He told her he wanted to speak to her about it in person. But it was going to be difficult to get away.
“Why should I give you any time to explain?" she demanded.
By then Gerard knew he was in trouble.
Things were not looking good for him, he said.
She'd best find someone else to fall in love with.
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Here’s what you can expect with tomorrow’s Parramatta weather
As summer moves towards autumn what can locals expect tomorrow? We have the latest word from the Weather Bureau.