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March 12th, 2013 
David Schulberg the 3rd 
An artist’s sketch of Gerard Baden-Clay during day one of the committal hearing in Brisbane.
Source: The Courier-Mail
DAY two of the six-day hearing to determine whether Gerard Baden-Clay will face trial for the murder of his wife Allison has begun.
11.45am: Another officer from Indooroopilly, Constable Liam Braunberger, told the court he had a conversation with Baden-Clay at the police station.
“I just asked a few questions, normal sort of questions relating to a missing person,” he said.
Constable Braunberger said he asked about Allison’s bank account and whether she had any money.
“Our missing persons unit would look into that to see whether there’d been any financial transactions,” he said.
“From that conversation I had with him, I put some of that stuff onto the database.”
The court heard a few days later, he used information from the police database to write a statement about his conversation with Baden-Clay.
The court heard Baden-Clay told the officer his wife had suffered from post natal depression for seven years and had been taking a medication called Zoloft.
11.02am: Constable Ash said Baden-Clay had told him his wife had been angry because he had been having an affair and that she no longer trusted him.
Baden-Clay told the officer they had had many arguments about it.
Former Housing Minister Bruce Flegg was a witness at the committal hearing of Gerard Baden-Clay over the death of his wife Allison.
10.59am: Constable Ash said he asked Baden-Clay how he got the scratches on his face.
“I cut myself shaving this morning,” the officer said Baden-Clay told him.
Mr Davis asked why his statement included the added detail that Baden-Clay had said he was in a rush getting the girls ready for school – information not in his notes at the time.
“From my recollections,” Constable Ash said.
The court heard the officer went for a walk through the house to look for any evidence that Baden-Clay had cut himself shaving.
“I was looking for any signs of blood that would be matching the shaving cut that Gerard Baden-Clay told me about,” he said.
He said he found no blood and no tissues containing blood.
“You went into the house, by the time you walked in, you’d seen the cuts on the cheek,” Mr Davis said.
“You had a missing person.
File picture: Allison Baden-Clay (left) with friend Kerry-Anne Walker, who gave evidence at the committal hearing of Gerard Baden-Clay.
“It crossed your mind that something untoward might have happened to her.”
Constable Ash agreed.
“And that something untoward might have involved a husband,” Mr Davis said.
Constable Ash agreed.
“You were looking for evidence of what might have happened to Mrs Baden-Clay.”
Mr Davis said it was not a difficult concept to imagine something flushing tissues down the toilet.
“There was no blood anywhere,” Constable Ash said.
10.45am: Constable Kieron Ash, from Indooroopilly police station, and his partner were the first police officers to arrive at the Baden-Clay home in Brookfield after Allison was reported missing.
He said when he arrived, he found Baden-Clay, his father Nigel and sister Olivia at the home.
Allison Baden Clay, nee Dickie, with her siblings on her wedding day to Gerard Baden-Clay
“He (Baden-Clay) said that he last saw the missing person at 10pm on the night prior sitting on the couch watching the Footy Show,” Constable Ash said.
Constable Ash said Baden-Clay told him Allison went for a walk at 6am each morning for 2km because she was trying to lose weight.
Baden-Clay told the officer she should have been back in time to get ready for a real estate conference she had that day.
Mr Davis said there was information in the officer’s statement that was not in the notes he made in his notebook at the time.
He asked the officer how he could recall such detail, including Baden-Clay’s comment that sometimes his wife would sleep on the couch, a month later while writing his statement.
Constable Ash said some detail in his statement was from his own recollections.
10.26am: Witness Elise Nielsen said she rang Baden-Clay on April 20, after hearing Allison was missing.
“I said ‘what’s happened, where would she be?’,” she said.
“He said ‘she went for her normal 10 o’clock walk … and hasn’t come back’.
“My reaction was ’10 o’clock, does she always walk at 10 o’clock?’.
“And he said ‘yes’.”
Mr Davis said Baden-Clay told police he had last seen her at 10pm when he went to bed and assumed she had gone for a walk in the morning.
He asked Ms Nielsen whether she could have gotten that confused.
“I thought he had said she went for her normal 10 o’clock walk and didn’t come back,” she said.
“It’s a possibility.”
The court heard she then asked if Allison had been taking her medication.
“You were thinking she had done something to herself,” Mr Davis said.
“It crossed my mind,” she replied.
10.17am: Ms Nielsen said she had a discussion with Allison in 2008 about post natal depression.
“She told me that she had it and I didn’t realise she had,” Ms Nielsen said.
“(She said) that she had had it with her children.”
Ms Nielsen said she had a total of three conversations with Allison about her depression.
“She talked to me about that later in 2011 when we had a more in-depth discussion about her depression,” she said.
Ms Nielsen said Allison told her Baden-Clay had convinced her to “go and get help” for her anxiety problems.
“Just that Gerard was the one who had tried to get her to go and get help. She did,” Ms Nielsen said.
“She was just telling me that she had been to a psychiatrist.
“We’d had a very stressful morning … and we decided to go have a coffee.
“She just told me she was overwhelmed.
“That her anxiety was coming back and she wasn’t coping.”
Ms Nielsen said Allison was tearful and explaining that she needed to go back on her medication but didn’t want to.
She said she tried to convince Allison to go back on her medication and get a cleaner to help with the house.
“I was surprised because she always looked like she was coping,” she said.
“I used to have to lean on her.
“I was a bit shocked because she was fairly adamant that she wasn’t coping.”
In another conversation that same year, Allison told Ms Nielsen she was worried Baden-Clay would leave her because of her issues with depression.
10.01am: Elise Nielsen, who had known Allison for many years, is the second witness to appear today.
She told the court she knew Allison when they were girls and reconnected after they both had children.
She said they would see each other when taking their children to ballet.
“We used to stay and chat sometimes while they were in their class for 45 minutes,” she said.
By 2011, after their daughters got into the same ballet company, they were seeing each other frequently.
She said she would often see Baden-Clay while collecting children for rehearsals and they would chat about ballet costumes and performances.
But defence barrister Peter Davis SC said she “didn’t really know Gerard at all”, having never had discussions with him about anything but the children.
9.51am: Dr Flegg said Baden-Clay called during the state election campaign to ask again about the loan but Dr Flegg had his friend Sue Heath call him back.
“She indicated to me that he was very, very distressed and that he may have been tearful,” he said.
“I would have felt bad about being too busy to take his calls.”
Dr Flegg said he spoke to Baden-Clay again in March 2012 and found him “quite calm”.
“He didn’t pursue the matter with me.”
After Allison disappeared, Dr Flegg said he went to visit Baden-Clay at his parents’ house to make sure he was alright.
He said they did not discuss the circumstances of her disappearance.
9.44am: Dr Flegg said his second statement to police related to a conversation where Baden-Clay had asked him for a loan of $400,000.
“It was a pretty highly unusual request,” he said.
“Gerard was very to the point.
“There was no beating around the bush.”
Dr Flegg said while there was “nothing out of line with him making the request”, it still came as a shock.
He said when he asked for more information on the nature of the loan, Baden-Clay was evasive.
“I said, well, you’re buying out business partners, who are they?” Dr Flegg said.
“And he wouldn’t tell me.
“I think it would be fair to say that I closed the door on the discussion.”
He said Baden-Clay later accused him of sharing the details of that discussion with one of the real estate business partners.
Dr Flegg said he did not even know who Baden-Clay’s business partners were.
9.35am: Dr Flegg said he had gone to wake up his staffer, Graeme Hallett, who had been staying with him, when he heard a second scream.
“It was pretty dark, I obviously had no idea where it had come from,” he said.
“I then went to wake Graeme Hallett up, who sleeps like a railway sleeper.
“I was unsuccessful in waking him up.
“(That’s when I) heard the second scream.
“It was identical.
“It had a significant effect on me.
“It wasn’t something you’d just roll over and go to sleep after.”
Dr Flegg said he didn’t call the police because “I had no reason to think it was anything of concern to the police”.
9.30am: Dr Flegg, who lives in Brookfield, a suburb in Brisbane’s west where the Baden-Clays resided at the time of Allison’s death, has given three statements to police, the first on April 23, 2012.
The court heard in his first statement, Dr Flegg recounted hearing a “blood curdling scream” on April 19 while “sitting up in bed”.
Dr Flegg said he was on the phone to a friend when he heard a woman scream.
“Absolutely I do (remember discussing the scream with the person on the phone) because it was blood curdling,” he said.
“It was clearly a female scream.
“(It was) blood curdling.”
He told the court he leapt out of bed and went out the front door to investigate.
“I have no idea where it came from,” Dr Flegg said.
“I conducted a search outside.”
Dr Flegg said he asked the friend he had been speaking to on the phone whether she had heard it – but she hadn’t.
“I said to her, surely you heard that, because it was loud,” he told the court.
Dr Flegg said he believed the scream had come from the direction of the show grounds.
“You wouldn’t hear anything from any other direction,” he said.
9.17am: FORMER housing minister Dr Bruce Flegg has been called to the stand to give evidence as day two of the Baden-Clay committal begins.
Gerard Baden-Clay, a 42-year-old real estate agent is charged with murdering his wife Allison and interfering with her corpse.
The mother-of-three was reported missing on April 19. Her body was discovered on the banks of the Kholo Creek 10 days later.
Prosecutor Danny Boyle said Dr Flegg got to know Baden-Clay through the Kenmore Chamber of Commerce.
- Refresh this page for rolling updates of the hearing
Some of those scratches were still there when, two months later, a forensic officer was asked to shave off part of Baden-Clay’s beard to examine his injuries.
The court was told Baden-Clay phoned police on the morning of April 20, 2012, telling them he woke to find his wife Allison missing.
Prosecutor Danny Boyle, while briefly outlining the Crown case, said Baden-Clay had two reasons for wanting his wife dead.
The first was his affair with his former staff member, Toni McHugh, who had been promised in an email that he would leave his wife by July 1.
The second was his financial position. The court heard Baden-Clay was in debt to the tune of $975,000 and stood to gain from his wife’s life insurance policies and superannuation fund.
Allison’s best friend, travel agent Kerry-Anne Walker, told the court she noticed two scratch marks on Baden-Clay’s face, near his jaw line, on the day Allison went missing.
“They were red and angry,” she said.
“They were fresh scratches. In my view they looked like they were weeping.”
Police also couldn’t miss the scratch marks and on April 22 – two days after he reported his wife missing – Baden-Clay was examined by medical forensic officer Dr Leslie Griffiths.
Dr Griffiths found two deep scratches on the 42-year-old’s face, several lighter scratches on his neck, scratch marks near his shoulder and a large area of scratches and bruising on his upper chest area.
He said the scratches and bruising on Baden-Clay’s upper chest would most likely have been from “pressure” or “rubbing”.
A yellowing mark on another part of his chest was a bruise that was at least 18 hours old, he told the court.
Dr Griffiths said he believed the scratches on Baden-Clay’s face and neck were made by someone’s fingernails based on their shape and other forensic indicators.
But defence barrister Peter Davis SC said Dr Griffiths’ opinions on the origin of the scratches were “purely speculation”.
The hearing continues.
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