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A former NSW police officer accused of murdering Sydney couple Jesse Baird and Luke Davies told a friend at a dinner how he would dispose of the body if he killed someone, a court has heard.
Beau Lamarre-Condon, 31, is standing trial in the NSW Supreme Court on two counts of murder over the shooting deaths of Baird, 26, his former casual romantic partner, and Davies, 29, in Paddington on February 19, 2024. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
Georgia Cook, a former friend of Lamarre-Condon, told the court on Monday she distanced herself from the then-police officer after he asked her over a dinner in Kirribilli 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.”
Cook said he asked her later in the dinner, “So, if you did kill someone what would you do with their bodies?”
Lamarre-Condon said he would “take their stuff, I would put it in a dumpster, and I would take their bodies to bushland where no one would ever find them”, Cook told the court.
“It felt very surreal,” she said. “I didn’t know whether to believe anything I’d heard. I really couldn’t continue a friendship after hearing these things.”
She said she had told Lamarre-Condon before the dinner about a confidential medical diagnosis, and he had said at the restaurant that “what I’m about to tell you, if you tell anyone else, I know about you”.
He was using the information “to hold over me, so I wouldn’t go and tell … what he had told me”, Cook said.
She said she was “really scared” after the dinner, and distanced herself from him permanently in December 2023.
Cook gave a statement to police in June 2024, four months after Lamarre-Condon was arrested in February.
She rejected a suggestion by one of the accused’s barristers, James Lang, that Lamarre-Condon did not have this conversation with her, and that she had repeated details about the alleged location of the bodies and other items from media reports.
“When someone says something that scary or shocking, it’s not something that leaves your mind,” Cook said. “I can remember it like it was yesterday. It was jarring. I could never forget these words being said to me.”
Asked about the delay in coming forward to police, Cook said she was “absolutely terrified”.
“After the news had come out, I was scared,” she said. “I didn’t know what to do with what I knew. I didn’t know if I wanted to be involved.
“If he wasn’t put away, what would happen to me? That puts me in a scary position.”
Cook testified on Friday that Lamarre-Condon had told her during the same dinner 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 court has heard that Baird broke up with Lamarre-Condon for the first time in April 2023. 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 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.
The prosecution alleges Lamarre-Condon murdered Baird, a former Network Ten producer and presenter, after developing an “obsessive and jealous infatuation” with him. Davies, Baird’s new boyfriend, was killed to eliminate a witness to the crime, the Crown alleges.
There is no dispute that Lamarre-Condon was at Baird’s Paddington share house when Baird and Davies died, that they died of gunshot wounds from his police-issued pistol, and that he was disguised as a delivery rider.
However, the defence case is that Lamarre-Condon was there to pick up some of his belongings and did not expect anybody to be home. A struggle ensued in which his gun accidentally went off twice, killing Baird, and Davies accidentally shot himself in a second struggle after grabbing the gun, the defence says.
The trial continues.
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