Paperback: All marriages have their secrets.
It began with a phone call to Brisbane police on 20 April 2012. Allison, wife of real estate agent Gerard Baden-Clay, was missing.
When investigating officers arrived at the family home, in one of the city's wealthiest suburbs, a neatly dressed Gerard was about to send the couple's three daughters off to school.
Weeping welts on the side of his face were simply shaving cuts, he told them. Police were not convinced and opened one of Australia's most high-profile investigations.
Within days everything private would become public. Behind the façade of happiness their life together was riven with debt, infidelity, unfulfilled dreams, and bitter jealousy.
Ten days after Gerard reported Allison's disappearance, the body of the former beauty queen was discovered on a creek bank 14 kilometres from home.
The Baden-Clays had been married 14 years. They had three young daughters and were prominent figures within their well-heeled community. Gerard was the great grandson of Scouting founder Robert Baden-Powell, successful businessman, community leader, role model and happy family man. His wife, Allison, was a one-time beauty queen - Miss Brisbane 1993 - who spoke six languages and was global human resources manager for a travel firm when she gave it all away to marry the man of her dreams. Together they made their home in Brookfield, an idyllic semi-rural suburb, but Gerard had just become the focus of police suspicion. How had he ended up here?
The Murder of Allison Baden-Clay (2014) is written by the investigative journalist who covered the case from the start. It weaves together exclusive interviews and police and court records to explain how an upstanding family man with no criminal history received a life sentence for a haunting murder.
It is a story of love, lust, image, ambition and marriage.
It is also a story about everyday choices and their consequences.
Update: After a high-society spectacle that held the nation in its thrall, Gerard Baden-Clay is serving a life sentence for murder, with a mandatory non-parole period of 15 years. Public outrage was perhaps unsurprising, then, when Queensland’s Court of Appeal - led by the state’s new Chief Justice Catherine Holmes, fresh from her appointment by the Palaszczuk government - downgraded Baden-Clay’s conviction to manslaughter. In a unanimous decision, the court agreed with Baden-Clay’s lawyers, who argued he might have — hypothetically — unintentionally killed his wife, panicked, dumped her body, then lied about it. The ruling hinged on intent; while prosecutors had proved he killed Allison, they had failed to prove beyond reasonable doubt that he had intended to do it. The scrapping of Baden-Clay’s murder conviction sparked intense condemnation in the court of public opinion, peaking with a protest rally attended by thousands in Brisbane’s King George Square and capping a year of justifiable widespread concern about domestic violence. (The Australian, 2 January 2016)
About the author: David Murray lives in Brisbane with his partner and their two sons. He has been a journalist since 1997, has won awards for news and investigative reporting and is a former Europe correspondent for News Corp. He is currently Crime and Courts Editor for The Courier-Mail and Sunday Mail.
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