Officer allegedly described murder plan months before killing couple, court hears

Beau Lamarre-Condon sat across a dinner table from a close friend in May 2023 and described, with apparent casualness, exactly how he would dispose of a body if he ever killed someone. He would take their belongings and throw them in a dumpster. He would carry the corpse into bushland where no one would find it. Nine months later, on 19 February 2024, the 31-year-old Sydney police officer allegedly shot Jesse Baird and Luke Davies inside Baird's Paddington home using his service weapon. The bodies were discovered on the fence line of a Greek Orthodox monastery in remote bushland near Bungonia, roughly 160 kilometres from where they died. Baird's bloodied belongings and furniture had been dumped into a skip bin in Cronulla. The specificity of what Lamarre-Condon had described to his friend Georgia Cook—the dumpster, the bushland, the disposal method—appeared to match, with chilling precision, what prosecutors say he then executed.

At his double murder trial before Justice Natalie Adams, Cook testified about that May 2023 dinner. The conversation had begun when Lamarre-Condon, whose brief romantic relationship with Baird had recently ended, asked Cook a hypothetical question: what would she do if he told her he had killed someone? He pressed further, asking what she would do if she herself had committed a murder and needed to dispose of a body. When Cook said she had no idea, Lamarre-Condon laid out his plan with apparent precision. Cook told the jury the moment felt surreal. She could not decide whether to believe what she was hearing. "Hearing a person of power in the police force say that," she said, "it felt like I didn't have anywhere to go and I was really scared by what I had heard."

The defence team challenged Cook's account, suggesting Lamarre-Condon had never made such a statement. They also noted that Cook's formal statement to police came months after news reports had already described how Baird and Davies' bodies had been found and disposed of—raising the possibility, the defence implied, that her memory had been shaped by what she had read. Cook was firm in her response: "I could never forget these words being said to me."

Prosecutors have built their case around the theory that Lamarre-Condon developed an obsession with Baird and began planning his murder in early 2024, after learning that Baird had begun a relationship with Davies. A work colleague, Andrew Callus, testified that Lamarre-Condon had grown visibly annoyed and unhappy when he discovered the relationship. Callus told the court that Lamarre-Condon had said to him: "You know what I'm like. I can't let things go. I hate losing." Callus described the officer as angry at the relationship itself and at being rejected by Baird.

On the morning of the shootings, a friend of Davies attempted to reach him by message. When those messages went undelivered, the friend sent a message to Baird's Instagram account asking, with dark irony, "Hello is your wife alive?"—a reference to Davies. The response came from Baird's account: Davies had smashed his phone screen that day. Two days later, on 21 February, the friend sent another message to Baird's account, this one urgent: police had found Luke's wallet, his mother had been called, no one could reach him, everyone was panicking. Did Baird know where he was? There was no response. Prosecutors say Lamarre-Condon, having killed both men, was sending messages from Baird's phone to create the false impression that Baird was still alive.

The defence has offered a starkly different narrative. Lamarre-Condon's lawyers argue he acted in self-defence. According to their account, he disguised himself as an UberEats rider to gain entry to Baird's home. Once inside, both men were fatally shot during physical struggles with the officer. Panicked, Lamarre-Condon then cleaned up the scene. He has pleaded not guilty to two counts of murder and one charge of aggravated break and enter. The trial continues before Justice Adams, with the prosecution's theory of premeditated murder—supported by Cook's testimony about a conversation nine months prior—now central to the case the crown must prove beyond reasonable doubt.