It was a seemingly unremarkable scene. Shortly after 9am on Monday, February 19, 2024, a man dressed as an Uber Eats rider, motorcycle helmet on and paper bag in hand, appears on a street in Paddington in Sydney’s eastern suburbs.
Within an hour, three gunshots will ring out in a terrace house nearby. The apparent delivery rider, captured in CCTV footage of the street, was the then-NSW police officer Beau Lamarre-Condon, a Supreme Court jury has heard. He was also the alleged gunman.
The Crown alleges that Lamarre-Condon stood in his disguise on the street for about 20 minutes, “steeling himself for what he was about to do”.
Shortly before 10am, it alleged, he used his police-issued Glock pistol to kill Sydney couple Jesse Baird, 26, and Luke Davies, 29, in Baird’s share house, before cleaning the scene and disposing of their bodies in surfboard bags.
Lamarre-Condon, 31, a former senior constable, has pleaded not guilty to two counts of murder. His criminal trial started in Sydney on Monday and is expected to run for up to 12 weeks.
The prosecution case is that Lamarre-Condon murdered Baird, a former Network Ten producer and presenter, after developing an “obsessive and jealous infatuation” with him that escalated when Baird ended their casual relationship in November 2023.
Davies, a Qantas flight attendant, was Baird’s new boyfriend. The court heard the two men were “smitten”. “It was the real deal,” a friend told the court.
The murder of Baird was premeditated, according to the opening address by Crown prosecutor Brett Hatfield, SC. The accused’s preparatory steps allegedly included buying a surfboard bag two days before the killing to store his body.
The prosecution alleged that the murder of Davies was not planned but that Lamarre-Condon shot him to eliminate a witness to his crime.
At 9.49am and 33 seconds, the prosecution said, the first gunshot was heard in CCTV footage from a neighbouring property, followed by another 4 seconds later.
At 9.50am and 28 seconds, the third shot was heard.
The defence does not dispute that the then-police officer was wearing the Uber Eats disguise, or that he was at the home when the men died from gunshot wounds.
The defence case is that he went to Baird’s home to collect some of his belongings after the break-up, but he expected nobody would be home.
He “disguised himself … so he could masquerade as a delivery person if anybody unexpectedly opened the door”, his barrister, John Stratton, SC, said in an opening address to the jury.
The Crown alleges that Lamarre-Condon shot Baird twice in the kitchen of the home, including an execution-style shot through the temple, and shot Davies through the door of the bedroom after he called Triple Zero.
The defence case is that the then-police officer, still in disguise, was surprised by Baird once he entered the home after nobody answered his knock.
The two men struggled, the defence says, and the accused’s gun went off twice, fatally wounding Baird. The gun was flung into the loungeroom.
Lamarre-Condon picked up a mobile phone and started calling Triple Zero, the defence says. Davies was holding a knife and also grabbed the gun, according to the defence, and shot himself accidentally in a second struggle.
The Crown case is that Lamarre-Condon engaged in a series of obsessive behaviours in the months before killing Baird, including using his position as a police officer to obtain footage of Baird on a date with another man in May 2023.
The court has heard that Baird broke up with Lamarre-Condon for the first time in April 2023, and the accused was disappointed that he did not want a serious relationship. The two men resumed seeing each other briefly in late 2023 before Baird ended it permanently in November.
Lamarre-Condon is charged with breaking into Baird’s home in August 2023, after the first break-up, and stealing Baird’s wallet and phone.
He has pleaded not guilty to aggravated break and enter. The defence case is that he used a key Baird had given him to enter the home.
Baird reported the alleged break-in at the time and said he had woken shortly before midnight to a man standing over his bed. Investigating police took a photo of a bobby pin in the lock of Baird’s home, tendered in evidence in the trial.
During the first week of evidence, the court heard from a series of witnesses about Lamarre-Condon’s posts on social media about Baird.
One professional acquaintance testified that Lamarre-Condon told her he would post photos on Instagram that were not visible to Baird but could be seen by a select audience of potential romantic rivals.
The images gave the impression that he was in a relationship with Baird.
The posts were designed to send the message that he and Baird were “together and to back off, basically”, the witness said.
She said Lamarre-Condon had posted a photo of a bouquet of flowers with a caption designed to suggest Baird had sent them to him while he was in Melbourne.
“I said: ‘That’s crazy,’” she told the court. “He said: ‘It works.’”
Text messages tendered in court show Lamarre-Condon claimed the photos were a gift for his mother from his stepfather when Baird asked him for an explanation.
Another witness gave evidence on Friday that Lamarre-Condon admitted to her that he had “staged the photo” of the flowers. She said he also used her phone to pose as her to send Baird a message on Instagram after their break-up that claimed, falsely, that he had cancer.
Baird broke up with Lamarre-Condon permanently after the Instagram post about the flowers, the court heard. “I would appreciate it if you could refrain from contacting me,” he said in a text message tendered in court.
On Friday, a close friend of Lamarre-Condon said he had asked her over for dinner in May 2023: “What would you do if I told you I killed somebody? Would you help me hide the body?”
She said she froze and replied: “No, because I don’t want their ghost to haunt me.”
She said Lamarre-Condon “kind of laughed it off” and said, “Don’t worry, I didn’t do that, but I did do something crazy”.
Furthermore, she testified that Lamarre-Condon told her that he had been watching Baird from outside his house, using his mother’s car and wearing a black hoodie.
“In that time he’d seen Jesse have sex with other men,” she said he told her.
She said the accused also claimed that he saw Baird over the back fence taking photos with friends with a Polaroid camera he had given him.
Lamarre-Condon told her he kept watching until Baird left the home and saw where he left his key.
“He [said he] went and got the key and unlocked the door, broke into the house, he stole the Polaroid camera, he ate Jesse’s Easter egg, and he said that there was something else that he did, but he wouldn’t tell me what it was, which concerned me,” she said.
The Crown has played the jury a series of compilations of 14,000 hours of CCTV footage from 200 locations, including from a sports store in Westfield Miranda where the accused bought a large surfboard cover with a friend on February 17, 2024, two days before the alleged murders.
The Crown has foreshadowed that the court will hear evidence that Lamarre-Condon asked whether his friend would fit inside the surfboard bag.
The friend allegedly replied “probably not”, according to the prosecution’s opening address to the jury, and the accused said: “I’ll grab this one instead, it should be big enough.” His friend is not accused of wrongdoing.
The Crown alleges that Lamarre-Condon bought a second surfboard bag on February 19 after the alleged murders, for Davies’ body, and two more on February 21 when he discovered the first two bags were too small.
The defence case is that Lamarre-Condon panicked and dumped the men’s bodies in the bags in Bungonia, near Goulburn.
“He was a police officer, and he knew this looked bad,” his barrister, Stratton, said in his opening address.
Stratton submitted that the accused’s actions after the men died – leaving the bodies near a Greek monastery, after a failed attempt to sink them in a dam – were “not the actions of a man who believed that he was guilty of murder”.
Rather, they were the actions of a man who had “panicked considerably, who knew the gravity of the situation that he was in and how it might be perceived and was overawed by it”.
The trial continues.
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