GERARD dialled Triple-0. "I don’t want to be alarmist," he told the operator. Calm. Polite. "My, my wife isn't home. Um, I don't know where she is."
It was 7.15am on April 20, and Gerard, prominent real estate agent, president of his local chamber of commerce and self-appointed man-of-importance, was calling authorities.
His wife should be on her way to a real estate conference, he explained. But she hadn’t returned from her morning walk.
Or so he assumed. He’d left her watching The Footy Show when he’d gone to bed the night before. His alarm had shrilled its morning wakeup call at 6am and he’d risen to find her gone.
This was the story he’d tell again and again. But police would never find any evidence Allison had gone for a walk at all.
In Australia, about 35,000 people — or one every 15 minutes — go missing every year. Most are found within a week. Many missing persons cases take hours, days, or even weeks before an urgent investigation is launched.
In the extraordinary case of Allison Baden-Clay, it took minutes.
Constables Kieron Ash and Leah Hammond arrived at the Baden-Clay home at 8am, took one look at Gerard and feared foul play.
He was dressed for work when he emerged from the house and greeted the officers. Const. Ash noticed the tie and cufflinks. But mostly he noticed the gouges down Gerard’s face. Jagged red lines. They dragged their angry way down Gerard’s right cheek, all the way to the bottom of his jaw.
Those weeping scratches told a story. He’d told them he’d cut himself shaving. They looked at this pillar of the community and saw a liar.
They called for backup.
Perhaps it was a case of a depressed suburban mum needing time away. Or maybe they’d find her injured on a walking track, clutching a twisted ankle.
But they didn’t think so.
Neither did three teary girls when their aunt arrived to drive them to school because their mummy was missing.
“Is everything OK between you and Allison?’’ Constable Ash asked the man with scratches down his face.
He’d been having an affair, Gerard confessed. Allison had found out and things had been pretty rocky.
Const. Ash took a look around the house. He checked the bathrooms for bloodied tissues or towels, some evidence to back up Gerard’s shaving cut story. He found nothing.
Outside, he took out his phone and dialled the boss, Senior Sergeant Narelle Curtis. He told her he wasn’t happy with Gerard’s story. She told him she was on her way.
She arrived soon after with a colleague, Sergeant Andrew Jackson.
“My name’s Sgt Jackson and this is Sen Sgt Narelle Curtis. I’m the Indooroopilly ...’’ the sergeant began.
“Cut myself shaving,’’ Gerard interrupted.
They hadn’t even had a chance to ask.
HE'D been frantic with worry, he told the officers when they first arrived.
He’d sent her the first text at 6.20am.
“Good morning! Hope you slept well? Where are you? None of the girls are up yet! Love G.’’
It was a cutesy message from a man who rarely shared a bed with his wife.
He waited 20 minutes before trying the "Find my Friends" application they'd installed on their phones. Allison wanted to be able to find her wandering husband.
“Al, getting concerned. Where are you? The app doesn’t say either. (Two of the girls) now up. I’m dressed and about to make lunches. Please just text me back or call! Love G."
This was the message he’d sent at 6.41am. He’d called his father, who’d told his sister Olivia. They arrived soon after. Olivia scoured the neighbourhood. She’d stopped and spoken with mums at the school. A council worker. A groundsman. Neither of them had seen Allison. She’d gotten out of her car and walked down to a creek.
With his father looking after the children, Gerard took Allison’s car and drove her usual walking routes. He drove around Brookfield searching for his missing wife. Then he went home to meet the police.
He’d answered their questions. Told them his finances were in trouble. His relationship with Allison was “very good’’. The affair was in the past. He accused them of making him repeat himself. He’d “answer all the questions in the world" – but he just wanted to get out, look for his wife.
Then, as suddenly as he’d offered, he decided he wasn’t going to answer their questions after all.
It was mid-morning. Allison had been missing a matter of hours when police asked Gerard to accompany them to the station to provide a formal statement. He’d hesitated, but eventually agreed.
The drive from Brookfield to Indooroopilly police station takes about 10 minutes. Gerard spent that time changing his mind. When they arrived at the station, he asked to speak to his lawyer.
Police were furious. They called his lawyer and told him it was not a good look.
Gerard spoke to Toni too. She’d been at the real estate conference, expecting a confrontation with her lover’s wife. But she hadn’t seen Allison all day.
A shaken Gerard told her Allison was missing. Toni was stunned. She asked him what had triggered it. Had there been a fight? No, there’d been nothing, he’d told her.
“I won’t be made to feel guilty for this," Toni told him.
He suggested they shouldn’t talk for a while. They should lay low. This upset Toni. “See you later," she said. “For all it’s worth, I love you."
POLICE swarmed through Brookfield. They knocked on doors, walked the streets. They found out Allison’s walking routes and traipsed them, looking for any sign of her, any sign of something out of place.
They called every hospital in Brisbane. Had anyone matching Allison’s description been admitted? They called her family and friends. Had anybody heard from her? Nobody knew where she was.
Gerard waited hours before calling Allison’s parents and friends. When Geoff and Priscilla Dickie finally arrived at their daughter’s home they went inside with Gerard so they could talk in the bedroom. Her best friend, Kerry-Anne Walker, was there too. Gerard told them police were suspicious of him. He’d hired a lawyer. They were stunned. Their fears were growing by the minute.
Priscilla thought Gerard was “calm as a cucumber". Totally relaxed. She couldn’t believe he was dressed for work. The house seemed unusually ordered. The bed was made. Gerard was ready to serve them tea in a cup and saucer. They always drank from mugs at her daughter’s house. Allison didn’t even like The Footy Show.
Detectives milled about the house. They were questioning him again when one of the officers took a call.
They’d triangulated Allison’s phone. It was somewhere out the back.
The officer’s voice was high, excited. Did Allison know the neighbours? Could she be visiting the people who lived behind them? Gerard didn’t react. He didn’t dash outside to see whether his wife was nearby.
“OK," he said. They didn’t find her that day. And they never found her phone.
GERARD didn’t join Allison’s family at the police command post when the search resumed on that second morning.
He’d dropped by in the morning with his sister. Spoke to an officer, answered the same questions again.
But he had other things to do that day. He needed an appointment with a doctor. Urgently.
Kenmore Clinics Medical Practice gave him the first appointment of the day.
At 8.30am he was ushered into the office of Dr Candice Beaven. He asked her to take a look at the marks on his face. He’d cut himself shaving the previous morning, he explained. An old razor. He’d been in a hurry.
He seemed anxious. He kept repeating himself. Three times he told her the marks were from shaving.
She took a look. Told him the scratches were superficial. There was no specific treatment she would recommend.
There were three gouges on his face. He told her he’d done them in one motion.
She was sceptical. She explained their size and the distance between them made it seem unlikely they’d been caused by the one action.
“I was in a rush,’’ he said.
"It could have been a few.’"
But the real reason he was there, he told her, was to document his injuries for a police investigation. He told her police had told him to. It was a lie.
“I don’t know if you know but my wife is missing at the moment,’’ he said.
He seemed insistent that the doctor make notes to the effect the scratches were shaving cuts. She wouldn’t.
Gerard’s manner stayed friendly and jovial as the doctor made her notes. He asked where she lived and how long she’d worked at the Kenmore clinic.
She told him she lived too far from work. She wanted to move closer.
“I might be able to help you with that,’’ Gerard, the salesman, said.
The man whose wife was missing, who was at an appointment with big, jagged marks on his face that looked suspiciously like fingernail scratches, took a business card from his wallet and put it on Dr Beaven’s desk with a smile.
Gerard was back at Indooroopilly police station later that day. His lawyer stood by his side while they swabbed him for DNA.
A scenes of crime officer stood nearby, camera in hand, as Gerard removed his shirt. They knew about the scratches on his face. They didn’t know there would be more.
There were scratches on his neck. A caterpillar had landed on him. He’d scratched it away.
There were scratches by his right armpit. A large red graze was on the left hand side of his chest and a cut was on the palm of his right hand.
He told them they were self-inflicted. He asked the officers whether they could tell he’d scratched himself.
The cut on his hand, Gerard explained, was from changing a light fitting. No, nobody had seen him do it.
At 4pm he went to see another doctor — this time at a different local clinic.
Dr Renu Kumar leaned forward in her office at Taringa Medical Centre and looked at the scratches on Gerard’s face. Then he lifted up his shirt and showed her the marks on his chest.
“I scratched myself,’’ he told her, moving his hand in a repetitive motion to show her what he’d done. He’d been itchy.
The next day, police wanted him back. Detective Senior Constable Cameron McLeod had organised a forensic procedure order and told him to come in for a complete examination.
Police had both of Gerard’s cars, so he borrowed a blue 4WD off an old friend and headed back to the station.
He got as far as Indooroopilly shopping centre, where he drove the car into a pylon at the bus terminal.
An ambulance was called. Police wondered whether he had been trying to cover up the old injuries with new ones.
His parents got a visit from detectives too. Elaine invited them in and pulled out a photo of her husband, Nigel, as a child, bouncing on his grandfather Lord Baden-Powell’s knee. She wouldn’t always be so welcoming. She’d shout at them more than once. Her golden boy was an adulterer.
The search spread to three suburbs. They searched the hills and roads on motorbikes. On horseback. From the air.
Firefighters were winched into abandoned mine shafts, some 40m deep. Orange-clad State Emergency Services volunteers dotted Brookfield’s rolling greenery.
Allison’s family and friends kept a daily vigil at the local showgrounds. They never saw Gerard.
He never assisted in the search, he never offered to search.
"He never value-added to what we were doing," Det Supt Mark Ainsworth said. Considering it was his wife and considering he had good local knowledge, his contribution was non-existent."
As the search for Allison continued, members of the Baden-Clay family made calls to police asking for the return of seized property.
Police told them they'd have to wait. They barely asked after Allison.
They also demanded the return of her jewellery from inside the house, cordoned off with crime scene tape, because they did not trust police with it.
It wasn’t Gerard who fronted media crews at a prearranged press conference on April 23. Allison’s parents were the ones who stood in front of the cameras to plead for her return.
“Our lives will never be the same. We must find her," a tearful Priscilla Dickie told journalists.
One of Allison's family members had to go to the Gold Coast to find photos of Allison for police to release to the media after the Baden-Clays failed to hand them over.
Gerard spoke publicly about his wife only once. A television crew nabbed him outside his house early one morning.
“We just hope that she will come home soon," he said
“I’ve tried to help the police as much as I can.’’
Even as reality began to dawn that their daughter was not coming home, the Dickies did everything they could to help the investigators.
“Allison’s parents were there day in, day out for the whole duration," Supt Ainsworth said.
“Not once did we see him (Gerard) down there with Allison’s parents, being a bit of support towards them or anything, as if he just had no interest in the search at all."
With Allison’s disappearance dominating the news, a colleague rang Toni to see how she was faring. Badly.
She broke down, sobbing into the phone, stumbling over words.
“This is a mess,’’ she said. “I’m responsible for her running off."
They’d called her in, she told him. The police. They’d questioned her for six hours. She might have said something that incriminated Gerard.
“But I don’t give a shit," she said. “I’m not hiding a thing."
Detectives had also been back to the Baden-Clay home at Brookfield.
They left with two computers, financial documents and eight shirts.
They went to his parents’ Kenmore home. More seized items. More evidence bags.
A third warrant was executed at Gerard’s Century 21 office.
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