Sydney police said they have found the bodies of a couple allegedly shot dead a week ago by a police officer who used his service pistol in the killing.
After days of searching inland waterways and farmland south of Sydney Jesse Baird, a former television reporter, 26, and Luke Davies, his partner, 29, who was a Qantas flight attendant, were found sealed in surfboard bags on a remote farm.
Police allege Beau Lamarre-Condon, 28, a senior New South Wales police force constable, shot Baird and Davies dead in the house the couple shared in Paddington, Sydney, on Monday last week. Lamarre-Condon had been in a brief relationship with Baird that ended acrimoniously late last year.
Before he joined the police force five years ago, Lamarre-Condon was a celebrity blogger who interviewed Hollywood A-listers, including at the Golden Globes. He has been photographed with celebrities such as Selena Gomez, Katy Perry and Miley Cyrus.
The killings have caused deep anguish in Sydney’s large gay community before this week’s annual gay Mardi Gras parade, one of the world’s largest celebrations of LGBT culture. They came days after New South Wales Police issued a formal apology for decades of failure to properly investigate gay hate crimes in Sydney.
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Mardi Gras organisers on Monday “disinvited” police officers, who have in recent years joined the parade in uniform, from the event to be held on Saturday — prompting intervention from Anthony Albanese, the prime minister.
Organisers said police participation would add to the distress already being felt in the “devastated” community.
Albanese said on Tuesday it was “very good” that police now joined the parade, and that relations had come a long way since 1978 and the first Mardi Gras parade, when members of the LGBT community were arrested. But he also said he understood “the queer community in Sydney in particular … are grieving what is an enormous tragedy”.
Police leaders are hoping to reach an agreement with the parade organisers for officers to march in Saturday’s parade without uniforms after a turbulent day on which questions were raised about the leadership of Karen Webb, the police commissioner.
Webb was criticised for describing the killings as a “crime of passion” and attempting to dismiss her critics with a Taylor Swift reference: “There will always be haters, haters like to hate — isn’t that what Taylor says?” she told morning television on Tuesday. She later apologised.
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The police leadership has also been criticised for allowing off-duty officers to access their guns on days off when they are contracted to do private security jobs.
It was under this provision that Lamarre-Condon was carrying his police-issue Glock pistol on the day he is alleged to have killed Baird and Davies after entering their house.
Lamarre-Condon was charged on Friday with the murders of both men. He has not entered a plea or applied for release on bail.
Police first suspected a homicide on Wednesday last week when the couple’s bloodstained possessions, including a phone, wallet, credit cards and a set of keys, were found in a rubbish container 19 miles from the crime scene.
Police initially suspected that Baird had killed Davies after messages from Baird’s phone were left for his housemates telling them he was moving across the country to the west coast city of Perth and asking them to put his belongings in storage.
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Police now believe Lamarre-Condon sent the messages from Baird’s phone to divert suspicion from himself after he had murdered both men.
They suspect he took the bodies in a rented van to a farm in Bungonia, near Goulburn, a town about 125 miles southwest of Sydney on Wednesday last week — two days after he allegedly killed the couple.
They believe he returned to the farm on Thursday after buying weights from a department store that detectives suspect were intended — but ultimately not used — to sink the bodies in a waterway.
A bullet case found in Baird and Davies’ home matched the pistol Lamarre-Condon signed out of a police gun safe on Thursday, February 15 and returned on Tuesday, February 20.
After reportedly refusing for days to tell investigators where the bodies were, Lamarre-Condon who turned himself in last week, relented on Tuesday morning.
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Detective superintendent Danny Doherty, chief of the homicide unit, said the bodies were discovered in two surfboard bags, covered in debris, on a farm fence line.
An attempt had been made to conceal the surfboard bags with rocks and branches, police said.
