08 Jesse & Luke | Jury shown 3D reconstruction of crime scene

The jury has seen a 3D reconstruction of the shootings in Jesse Baird’s home, as a ballistics expert has told the court why he believes two of the three shots were fired at close range. In this episode, court reporter Jamie McKinnell also describes the forensic pathologist’s evidence, including the injuries Luke and Jesse suffered from the gunshots. We are taping a live episode of The Case Of in Melbourne on Wednesday 11th November. Details and ticket information here. https://events.humanitix.com/the-case-of-live If you have any questions you’d like Jamie and Stocky to answer in future episodes, please email [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Family and domestic violence support: If you need help, contact 1800 Respect https://1800respect.org.au/ national helpline on 1800 737 732. The Case Of is the follow-up to the hit podcast Mushroom Case Daily, and all episodes of that show will remain available in the back catalogue of The Case Of.

• 0:00Speaker 05

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  Tune in to The Dead Can't Sue to find out on ABC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts.

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  ABC Listen, podcasts, radio, news, music and more.

• 0:46Speaker 03

  Two gunshots in the kitchen, one straightforward, the other one almost straight down. One at the bedroom through the door. This is what jurors have seen as a reconstruction has been played to the court. I'm Stephen Stockwell. Just a heads up, there will be some descriptions of gun violence and injuries coming up. This is episode eight of the case of Jessie and Luke.

• 1:08Speaker 02

  He's accused of shooting Jessie Baird and Luke Davies with his service firearm.

• 1:13Speaker 06

  Police now allege Constable Beau Lamar Condon murdered the couple at a home in Paddington.

• 1:18Speaker 04

  This is just a terrible incident that's occurred here, the loss of these two young men.

• 1:25Speaker 01

  Now this is nighty-grah time and yet it's a community in mourning.

• 1:28Speaker 04

  The pain is ongoing. We don't have a lot of answers that we would love to have, just to help bring closure and to bring peace.

• 1:36Speaker 03

  At the start of our last episode, I said the photos of the injury that Jessie Baird sustained were one of the most graphic moments of the trial. And I got humbled pretty quickly by the court because following that, the court was shown further injuries and further discussion to Jessie Baird and Luke Davies. And also the details of the ballistics testing that was done around 60 Brown Street. There, through all of this evidence, has been ABC Legal Affairs reporter Jamie McKinnell. Welcome, Jamie. Hi, Stocky. It has been some kind of graphic evidence over the last few days, but it's evidence that's really kind of told a story.

• 2:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, it has. I think until now, the jurors have been hearing evidence that perhaps invited them to imagine what might have happened in 60 Brown Street and the different versions that they've heard. But now for the first time, they have been shown visually what the Crown says allegedly happened inside. And this 3D reconstruction the court heard had a very specific purpose and it came with a specific warning from the judge.

• 2:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, all things that I'm very keen to unpack in this episode. Jamie, do you think you can wrap up the last few days for us in a minute or so?

• 2:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure. So the jury has heard lots of questions and answers about this idea of stippling, which we've heard is a pattern created by the particles that are coming out of a gun when it's fired at close range. And the defence has been asking a lot of clarifying questions to explore the witnesses' opinions about how that applies in this case. We've seen CT scans of the injuries to Jessie and Luke. And we've heard a forensic pathologist's opinion about what those injuries would have meant for the two men at the time they were inflicted. The court has seen photos of the microscopic examination of bullet cartridges found at Bungonia and also in Paddington. And we heard that they were matched to the police gun of Beau Lamar Condon.

• 3:27Speaker 02

  And a ballistics expert has sat in the witness box with a deactivated pistol to demonstrate to the jury how that firearm works. The jury's also seen a video of a test shot that was fired through the bedroom door and heard what that testing then showed in relation to an existing hole that police belatedly found in July. And a 3D reconstruction of Jessie Baird's terrace has been presented to help jurors understand the possible angles of the gun and how those possible angles could have created impact damage in different parts of the house, including in the kitchen, on the wall and also on the floor.

• 4:09Speaker 03

  Thank you, Jamie. Much to discuss, not least the presence of a gun in the courtroom, which was a very surprising development earlier this week. But I want to start with this reconstruction of 60 Brown Street in Paddington in Sydney, where Jessie Baird and Luke Davies were shot, where the Crown alleges they were murdered by Beau Lamar Condon. This reconstruction was made using 3D scans of the house. Police had scanned it when they had been there. And as we moved through it, it looked kind of like a sort of badly rendered video game. That's what it reminded me of. Can you tell me what we saw?

• 4:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, so this reconstruction, it starts from basically the front door. So you see the camera moving through the entrance and then the hallway. It looks into Jessie Baird's ground floor bedroom, moves through the hallway into the living area and then into the kitchen. And as it moves around the kitchen, we see integrated into that 3D animation, the actual crime scene photographs of the ricochet mark on the wall. And then it moves up to the kitchen cabinet and shows the crime scene photo of where that bullet cartridge was found. So it's using not only the scan, but also actual photographs that the jury has already seen as well. And the other thing it shows is a sort of red cone-like shape that originates from those

• 5:29Speaker 02

  points of impact, so on the kitchen wall and the hole in the floor. And the idea of that is this text on the screen that I saw come up said, angle of uncertainty. So what it's showing is that the police have established that the damage was in certain parts of the house or on the wall or on the floor. And that cone shape that comes from that backwards is showing here are the possible angles of the gun, according to the evidence from this ballistics expert. So what they've done is basically work backwards from the point of impact to where they say the gun may have been.

• 6:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, I found this really interesting to watch, Jamie, this kind of first red line sort of going almost straight from the kind of kitchen door towards one of the walls of this house and then another one kind of going almost straight down in the middle of that room. And just to clarify, we're not seeing any, you know, kind of models of people or anything in these either, are we?

• 6:30Speaker 02

  There was a sort of representation of a person at the start of the video about the kitchen and then the bedroom. But it was a sort of a coloured figure that was showing the trajectory of the injuries to Jessie Baird and Luke Davies. And it wasn't, it didn't then appear in the actual room. So it was really just a separate part of the video that showed here are the injuries and here are the, what we say are the trajectories of the injuries.

• 6:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, okay. And so we have the model of the kitchen, so kind of moving through the house into the kitchen and those two lines, the straight red one and then one going down. And then there's one for the bedroom as well. What did we see in that one?

• 7:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, so this was the same kind of idea. It had that same sort of red cone shape that came from the hole that they found in the bedroom door. So it was the same sort of idea depicting, you know, the hallway and the bedroom door and then the inside of the bedroom. But it was in combination with that hole in the door. And the ballistics expert that we heard from, Lucas Vanderwalt, is from New South Wales Police. And he was saying that with this bedroom door reconstruction and the evidence he's given about that, that they can be slightly more certain about that angle because they have a bullet hole, what he says is a bullet hole to work from. So in one respect, they know the vertical of that, the height of it.

• 7:52Speaker 02

  So he was saying that gives them a bit more certainty, but what they can't account for, what they don't know for sure, is that the door was on a hinge. So obviously it's moving at a certain angle. They don't know how open it was or whether it was fully closed. And so in this reconstruction video, the door was part of the equation of this, you know, angle of uncertainty that we're not sure about where exactly that was positioned.

• 8:16Speaker 03

  Yeah. The thing I found kind of really interesting about this evidence, you know, the fact that they've used 3D scans and they've kind of made this rendering in itself is really interesting. But also the, the kind of, I guess, direction almost that Her Honour Natalie Adams gave the jury before this was played. Can you tell me what she said?

• 8:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, this was a very specific direction from Justice Adams. She said, this reconstruction is based on the evidence of this witness, as in Mr Vanderwalt. And she said, it does not reflect all of the evidence that's been deduced or what might be deduced on behalf of the accused. She also said that the Crown case is that Jessie Baird was shot at close range as he was on the floor and the defence is disputing that. So the question of things like the position of the two men, the angle of the gun and the distance between the gun and one man or the other man are all live issues in this trial. And the judge also warned them that in the kitchen scan, the kitchen is not to scale.

• 9:18Speaker 02

  And she said, this video is not being relied on to show the distance from Mr Baird, but just the range of possible angles, according to the Crown's case.

• 9:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, which I guess is the reason for that, you know, the kind of cone of uncertainty, I guess you were talking about before, Jamie. It was really interesting to hear how this had been kind of put together. We had the ballistics expert who gave evidence around this. And also when it came to the injuries that Jessie Baird and Luke Davies had sustained, we heard from a forensic pathologist as well. And this was at times quite confronting. And I will give you a warning to just be mindful that some of these descriptions can be kind of quite visceral. So if that's something you're, you know, not comfortable with listening to, maybe skip ahead a little bit at the moment. But Jamie, can you tell me what this pathologist was able to find?

• 10:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the court heard from Dr Kendall Bailey. We heard that she has been a forensic pathologist for 19 years. And she did the autopsies of both Jessie Baird and Luke Davies. And she went into quite a bit of detail about what she found in her post-mortem examination. She said that Jessie Baird had two injuries. One was from around the area of the back right shoulder blade and it appeared to have an exit through the mouth. And the other injury appeared to her to be coming from the right temple, passing through his head and then with an exit out behind the left ear. She told the court that in relation to Luke Davies, she found that he had one injury

• 10:48Speaker 02

  that appeared to have an entrance near his left eye, slightly above his left eye, and with an exit out the back of his head.

• 10:58Speaker 03

  Did Dr Bailey say what impact, you know, injuries like that would have on a person?

• 11:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, in her examination in chief, she was asked directly by the Crown, what would this mean, these kinds of injuries for a person who suffered them? And she said that in relation to Jessie Baird's first injury that passed through his shoulder blade and exited through his mouth, she said that would be a very serious injury. She called it a nasty injury, but she said it was not necessarily incapacitating, but she said that a person who had that injury may pass out because it's a very painful injury. She said bony injuries are painful. And she said that it was survivable if it was treated appropriately at the time. But when she was asked whether someone with that injury could talk, she said that she

• 11:48Speaker 02

  didn't think anyone in that position would be able to make any meaningful vocalisation. She said they may be able to make sounds, but no meaningful vocalisation. The gunshot through the head, she said, would have been incapacitating, but not necessarily instantaneously fatal. And this was interesting, Stocky. She was then asked by the Crown whether a person with that injury could, for example, fling a gun into another room. And she said that person would not be making any conscious movements. She said there is a possibility of involuntary movements, but they wouldn't be consciously doing anything like that. In relation to Luke Davies' injury, when she was asked what that would mean for a

• 12:31Speaker 02

  person, she said that it would have been instantly incapacitating and rapidly fatal. So it was a quite confronting explanation of what these injuries would mean for people who were in that position.

• 12:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, very, very confronting. Luke Davies also had some stab wounds on his leg as well, I believe. What was the story there?

• 12:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, so Dr Bailey gave evidence about these two wounds that looked like stab wounds on his right thigh, in the sort of mid-thigh area. We saw a diagram, so not photos, but a diagram of where this would have appeared, according to her. And she said that they were consistent with a single-bladed weapon, but she also told the court that in relation to the timing, that this, in her opinion, may have happened around the time of death or possibly after death. And the reason why she said that was when you get a sharp force injury, if you have blood pressure, then a wound like that will bleed. And on this particular wound or wounds with Luke Davies, she didn't notice any discoloration

• 13:39Speaker 02

  around the wound, which gave her the impression that it must have happened around the time of death or after death.

• 13:46Speaker 03

  And Jamie, were there kind of marks on the surfboard bag or anything that Luke's body was found in around that space?

• 13:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, we also heard evidence that there were some sort of sharp defect or damage to the bag in around a similar area, which may have correlated with the location of those wounds on Luke's thigh.

• 14:06Speaker 03

  Thank you, Jamie. The use of the word defect is something I've kind of noticed in the last couple of days to describe things that are out of place, not just in things like the surfboard bags, but also when, I noticed when Dr Bailey was describing the injuries to Jessie Baird and Luke Davies, the word she was using for things like an entrance wound or where somebody would come out would be a defect. It's something that's not in the way it should be in the body, which I found interesting. And just kind of way, I suppose, of sort of distancing the jury from the realistic language of that. If we were to use something more descriptive, it may be more confronting. So I found that quite, quite interesting. The other part of this kind of reconstruction, I mean, the evidence of Dr Bailey and what

• 14:50Speaker 03

  she learnt, obviously would have helped investigators work out, you know, kind of potential bullet paths and things like that through Jessie Baird and Luke Davies. But the ballistics expert is the guy who's kind of working out where bullets may be moving throughout a home. So much detail in what he was talking about. How did he piece together what he thinks happened in the kitchen?

• 15:09Speaker 02

  Well, we heard him talking about the bullet ricochet mark on the kitchen wall, for example, or the hole in the floor, and that he had basically worked backwards from there and looked at it in a way that sort of reconstructed what would fit with that result. He also looked at the location of the cartridge above the kitchen cabinet. And so we heard he actually did some tests where he was seeing where a cartridge would end up if it was ejected from a certain point. Would it reach a certain height? Would it be flung high enough to reach the kitchen cabinet height, for example?

• 15:49Speaker 02

  So he told the court that he thought the, one of the shots that ended up damaging the kitchen wall was fired from somewhere around the kitchen door area, he said, in a sort of straightforward way. He said there was a confidence that there was a horizontal trajectory, and he gave the height as approximately from 1.3 metres. He said that he believes the gun was held in a conventional manner and demonstrated that in court with his, with his hand in the witness box. And he said in relation to the hole in the floor, that he thought initially that the bullet might have entered on a slight angle, but then when they looked under the floorboards, he said they realised that there was a joist that was under the floorboards that the bullet

• 16:33Speaker 02

  had not damaged. And so after he saw that, he realised that it must have been approximately a vertical angle, so closer to straight down.

• 16:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, okay. And I think the thing that was kind of interesting with his evidence as he was talking through kind of how a gun works as well, so explaining all the different parts of a gun, how a cartridge is ejected from a gun. I learnt a lot about how a Glock works over the last few days, and I'm sure the jury has as well. And Jamie, you mentioned he was doing this with a real gun in the court.

• 17:05Speaker 02

  It was a deactivated Glock pistol, so it was the same, same type as Bolemar Condons. But he was using this to demonstrate with, I think, what were replica rounds. So he had a collection of different replica bullets that were, he was loading into the magazine and explaining as he went that this is how a magazine is loaded, and then how the magazine then goes onto the gun, and then the reverse process, so how you take the cartridges out of the magazine. But there were points in his evidence where he was sitting in the witness box with this very realistic looking gun. The jury was reassured before that it had long been deactivated and was not capable

• 17:46Speaker 02

  of firing, but he was, in his evidence, at certain points, holding it somewhat casually, I think, in the witness box. And at one point, he even apologised for pointing the gun in awkward or weird directions,

• 18:01Speaker 03

  I think. Yeah, it's been interesting to hear how he's kind of gone around and explained all this to the jury. They obviously need to have a clear understanding of how these firearms work, and that's what his role has been, giving evidence. You know, talked about the evidence that he had from the kitchen and what he talked about, the trajectories in that. I mean, he was at the house for the initial investigations, but didn't notice the hole in the bedroom door at that point. We know the police went back and found that much later, they removed it. He was shown a photo of this door, basically as it was removed, and, you know, he kind of said that there was stippling almost immediately, you know, before any paint had been removed, before they'd done anything like that. He said, look, on that picture, I believe that stippling around that. Can you, can you talk us through what he was saying there, Jamie?

• 18:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, so these photos that showed the door as it was found, as he said, before any paint or putty was stripped away. There were circles around the particular area, and there were sort of indentations or tiny little holes that were still showing up, even though there was a layer of paint over them. And they were sort of embedded in the wood. And he, he used the comparison, Mr VanderWold, of imagining grains of sand travelling at a very high speed, so that at the speed of a bullet when it's fired from a gun. And he said that those particles would impact something like the surface of wood and leave those kind of indentations.

• 19:23Speaker 02

  So he said these little divots showed stippling, and then we saw scraping back the paint. There was a photograph after part of that process, and then he pointed out areas where he said you can see more parts of the door around the hole that were affected by these little dots or what he called stippling. And we also heard that they did this test shot through another similar area of the door. We saw a video of that happening, Stocky, where at a police firing range, they had a pistol that was fired at very close range to the door with a gel block behind it. And then we saw a comparison photo of, you know, the damage to the door from the test shot compared to the hole that they originally found.

• 20:08Speaker 02

  And Lucas VanderWold said they were very similar in characteristics in terms of the hole, the size of the hole, but also the stippling pattern that was left behind. So he was using that as a way to confirm that that was, you know, his opinion, that that was the sort of range that the gun may have been fired through the door from.

• 20:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I mean, when we're talking about the, the exact kind of distance from the door that, that said, that gave us the, the pattern that, you know, this witness said was the same as the existing one on the door, exactly how far away were we? It was, you know, kind of a handful of centimetres, right?

• 20:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, so he said it was between five and six centimetres, but due to the similar pattern left after that test shot, he was, he seemed to be suggesting his evidence that the distance was similar to the test shot compared to when the gun was allegedly fired through the door. And also, the other thing he pointed out was the other side of the door, where there was splintering, where the wood had come away as the bullet exited that, that wood. He said that was a similar impact to what they saw on the original hole in the door as well. So there were multiple points of comparison that he was using. And he also said that this was confirmed through chemical testing.

• 21:23Speaker 02

  So they did testing for nitrates and nitrates, and he said that that was present on the hallway side of the door. So that was another way, he said, that he was confident that that is what happened through the bedroom door.

• 21:39Speaker 03

  Okay, thank you, Jamie. So yeah, this evidence, this witness's evidence, I should say, basically that the, the gun, his opinion was fired, you know, quite close to that bedroom door. We also heard him, Jamie, talking about stippling that he saw in photos of Jessie Baird's injury to, to the head. Is he saying that he, his opinion is that that was of a similar distance to the shot to the door?

• 22:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, so he was shown the photograph taken by Greg Moon, that quite graphic photograph that we've mentioned, that the jurors were handed in a yellow envelope. And he was asked about that and he said that does appear to be from a sort of close range, according to what he could see in the picture of the same stippling pattern on the skin surface.

• 22:25Speaker 03

  And I mean, Jamie, we're going to talk a bit more about this a little later in the episode because he was asked a lot of questions in cross-examination around stippling, so we'll get there in a moment. Before we get there, though, I do want to talk about the different types of bullets that we've heard about from this witness and mentioned in the trial. I was kind of struggling to get my head around them, and so I'd love a bit of an explanation. So we had one found at Brown Street, which was a full metal jacket bullet. And then there were the operational bullets that New South Wales Police use, hollow point bullets. Can you explain the difference?

• 22:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the court has heard that these full metal jacket type bullets are solid lead encased in copper and they travel through objects. And for that reason, they're mostly used for training and particularly for, you know, shooting targets because they move cleanly through an object compared to hollow point, which have a sort of hole at the front. And the idea is that they sort of spread out when they enter an object and they transfer the kinetic energy from the bullet to an object or a target. So Mr. Vanderwold, in his evidence, used this description of being like a mushroom effect

• 23:35Speaker 02

  when that sort of spreading out happens, this design to sort of expand as they make contact. And these are the operational bullets used by New South Wales Police. And he also demonstrated in that use of the replica or deactivated pistol, Stocky, that these two types of bullets can go in the same magazine of a gun.

• 23:57Speaker 03

  Okay. And, you know, we should clarify as well, a full metal jacket bullet was the bullet that was recovered from Brown Street, under the floorboards in that house. Only one bullet recovered after the three shots that we've heard were fired in that house. Jamie, we have heard about these bullets previously. You know, there was a firearms expert from New South Wales Police who does the training, talked about the full metal jackets and how they use them in training. Heard that Bola Markandon did that training. Also heard in previous evidence that he had spoken to a friend or a friend said he had asked her whether or not a junior constable, he says he saw taking bullets from training when he was doing it, would be caught or anything like that. Has any of that come back up again?

• 24:39Speaker 02

  No, that hasn't been raised again since we heard that evidence from their friend previously.

• 24:43Speaker 03

  Right. Thank you, Jamie. Yeah, I feel like I'm learning a lot from all of this. The other evidence from this ballistics expert that I found really interesting was around the someone's momentum, the impact that a bullet has on somebody's momentum. He explained that this is not like what happens in the movies.

• 25:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, so he said that if someone, for example, is moving towards you when they're shot, they won't fly backwards. He said the bullet will move through them and their momentum will continue in the same direction wherever they were going. So he specifically mentioned that this impact doesn't push people backwards. And he said it's not like you see in Hollywood.

• 25:24Speaker 03

  The cross-examination of this witness was one of the more substantial that we've seen. Can you kind of explain what Bola Markandon's barrister was asking this witness about?

• 25:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we probably should just remind people of the defence case here for Stocky. So that's that Luke Davies was involved in a second struggle involving the police pistol. And during that, he pulled the trigger and fatally shot himself, according to Bola Markandon's lawyers. And that's in contrast to the Crown's case, which is that he was on the other side of the door and shot through the door when he was allegedly murdered. Now, this witness was asked by Defence Counsel John Stratton S E whether stippling could occur from a distance of up to a metre away. And he said that is possible, but there are a lot of variables and factors with a different kind of gunpowder or a different kind of ammunition, for example, that may be possible.

• 26:19Speaker 02

  But in relation to this case, he thought that the gun being half a metre away would be more likely the maximum distance to have caused that effect. Mr. Vanderwold confirms that he has also expressed the opinion that due to decomposition, that it's not possible to determine a precise distance when police and investigators looked at Jessie Baird's wound on his temple. And he also got a few questions about where the bullet or the cartridge in the bedroom might have gone. We've heard that there was no cartridge or bullet found in the bedroom. There was no ricochet or impact damage on the wall anywhere in there. Now, he had expressed in his evidence some hypothetical reasons why that might be the case.

• 27:04Speaker 02

  He said it's possible that there was a lot of cleaning done in the house, for example, and the bullet may have been picked up or recovered through that. He also observed in the bedroom that there may have been objects in there that have since been moved, and that might have been an object that the bullet hit, and that's the reason why there's no impact damage. But he was asked under cross-examination whether it was possible for a bullet to pass through a body and then get stuck in the door. And he said, no, that's impossible because what the defence barrister had done in that hypothetical was introduce a target. And that would mean, he said, that the stippling would be on the target and not on the door where he says it was found.

• 27:48Speaker 03

  Yeah. Thank you, Jamie. Plenty of ground cover in that cross-examination as well. This is a conversation and questions about stippling really have been a feature of defence questions to witnesses. Jamie, I do want to jump back to a question we had from Casey in our last episode. Thank you for emailing [email protected]. Casey was wondering about the connection between Bola Markandon and a farm in Bungonia. Now, we've heard, Jamie, that police alleged that Bola Markandon tried to dispose of the bodies of Jessie Baird and Luke Davies at a farm in Bungonia before leaving them outside of a Greek monastery nearby. Now, when Casey asked about that connection between Bola Markandon and that farm, we didn't have a very satisfying answer for him at the time, but we do now.

• 28:33Speaker 03

  Can you fill us in?

• 28:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the court has heard a witness statement from a man whose family owned the farm. And he's from Sydney, but they have a hobby farm in the Bungonia area. So this witness wasn't in court, but the Crown, one of the Crown solicitors read out this witness statement. And we heard that this witness met Bola Markandon after they matched on the dating app Hinge. They followed each other on Instagram. And then later that year, around September 2023, they went on a handful of dates. For example, they went to the Taylor Swift movie, he remembered. He said Bola Markandon then invited him to go on a trip to a sort of off-grid cabin. And this man thought that that was too expensive.

• 29:16Speaker 02

  So instead, he invited Bola Markandon to the hobby farm. And this happened in November 2023. They went there for an overnight stay. And he said Bola Markandon recorded some videos when he was there, when they were sort of driving around or looking at animals or doing things like that. And he remembers Bola Markandon uploading that video of some of their activities there to his Instagram not long afterwards. And he said it was set to the Taylor Swift song, You Belong With Me. This witness also saw posts of Mr. Markandon with Jessie Baird, and he asked him about Jessie Baird. And he said that the defendant told him that he was just friends with Jessie Baird.

• 29:59Speaker 02

  He also mentioned in his statement that there were never any red flags with Mr. Markandon in terms of mental health, although he does remember that when they were out together, Bola Markandon would always wear a cap and sort of, it was almost like, he said, he was trying to hide his face, but he just thought that was a cop thing. The contact we heard slowed between these two men towards the end of 2023. But then he remembers in the end of, at the end of January 2024, he got some missed calls from a no ID sort of number on his phone, and he ignored them. And then he said he got some signal messages from a user that he didn't recognise or didn't know. He said that the name just came up as Bob.

• 30:44Speaker 02

  And these messages were saying, hey, call me back. And he just thought this was maybe a scam because sometimes scammers know your name. But the next thing in his statement he remembers is then being contacted by detectives after the alleged murders, who were asking him whether he knew Mr. Markandon. And when he told them that the defendant had been to the farm, the police then told him that they had reason to believe that the bodies of Jessie Baird and Luke Davies may be located on the farm.

• 31:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, right. It was, yeah, pretty confronting to hear evidence like that, but also really interesting to kind of understand the connection between this witness and Bola Markandon as well. Thank you for emailing the case of Casey. I'm glad we could answer that question for you. If you have any questions yourself, get in touch, [email protected] is where you can reach us. We are getting plenty of questions coming through, Jamie, at the moment, so I want to try and run through a few of them kind of quickly now, if we could. One from Nick from Melbourne. He's wondering whether or not this is the first time that Bola Markandon is seeing the evidence being presented as it's presented in court, or would he have been, you know, kind of questioned about it several times previously?

• 31:55Speaker 02

  He will broadly have an awareness of what's coming and that's because the the brief of evidence will have been handed to his lawyers as they're preparing for this trial. So he will have a general awareness about the brief of evidence, but there still could be new things that emerge when witnesses are called and then they are asked questions and cross-examined. New things might come out that were perhaps not in witness statements or material, or at least not in there in as much detail as we hear in court.

• 32:25Speaker 03

  Thank you, Jamie. Thank you, Nick from Melbourne for getting in touch with that one. Jamie, a question here from Nicole. We had a juror sick earlier this week and Nicole is wondering with a juror out sick, are there spares?

• 32:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, there are spares. We've got 15 jurors that have been impaneled, but it turns out that juror who was not feeling great has returned. So really, the only day the court lost was Monday this week when they were away. But there are 15 jurors. So if they do end up having to lose a juror or more than one juror, it will not affect the trial as a whole.

• 33:02Speaker 03

  We can lose up to three jurors. Not that any of them are disposable. All jurors are as valuable as the next juror, I'd like to clarify. But, you know, basically Nicole, there are spares. Great question. Thank you for getting in touch with the case of at abc.net.au. And Jamie, one here from Caitlin. Where is Bo Lomar Condon? Is he in the courtroom?

• 33:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, he is in the courtroom. He's sitting in the dock. Usually he's wearing a suit and he's, as we've, I think we've talked about Stocky, he's usually just sitting there quietly and observing. He's passing notes to his lawyers every now and then, but he is, he is in court every day, watching as this is unfolding.

• 33:40Speaker 03

  Yep. Thank you, Jamie. Great question, Caitlin. Thank you for writing into the case of at abc.net.au. I really appreciate hearing from you, from everyone who gets in touch, all the questions, feedback, reflections, statements, all very valuable, all read. So please get in touch if there's something you are wondering about. Jamie, where are we off to next?

• 34:00Speaker 02

  Well, we haven't got a sort of advance warning or heads up about the witnesses to come, but I think it would be fair to say that we seem to have returned to forensic evidence to do with the Brown Street Terrace. So I think it's a fair bet to say that that theme will continue and we might hear more about, you know, what police found in the home and different testing and results and things like that.

• 34:25Speaker 03

  Thank you, Jamie. I appreciate you joining us for this episode, taking us through everything that's unfolded in court over the last few days. And I really appreciate all of you getting in touch as well. If you have questions about the house, I feel as though we're going to be talking more about that in our next episode as well. And I want to make room for a lot of the questions that we have been getting about the Brown Street Terrace. So the layout of the house, who was in what room, all of that, we will explain in our next episode. So if there's things you're wondering about, please send us an email, [email protected] is where you can reach us. We back in your feed on Tuesday, but before then, I have a little bit of homework for you, some very exciting news. We are doing a live show, The Case of Live, on the 11th of November, that is a Wednesday. We'll be taking over a TV studio here at the ABC at South Bank and would love you to

• 35:10Speaker 03

  be there. I've got some very special guests who'll be joining me. Someone who was a witness in the trial of Aaron Patterson, which is quite exciting to be able to talk to them about their evidence and also, you know, their understanding of what's unfolded there. And also we'll have an entirely new case to unpack on stage as well. So much to dive into. Would love to have you there. We'll have all the details for the tickets and the like in our episode descriptions. So tell your friends, tell your family, start clearing your calendars for the 11th of November. I look forward to seeing you at the ABC in Melbourne.

• 35:42Speaker 03

  The Case of Jessie and Luke is produced by ABC Audio Studios and ABC News. This episode was reported by Jamie McKinnell and presented by me, Stephen Stockwell. Our supervising producer is Greg Muller and our executive producer is Claire Rawson. A huge thank you to our video producer, Dylan Bean, for getting these episodes up on ABC Listen and YouTube. To senior lawyer Jasmine Sims, our legal queen for her legal advice to the New South Wales newsroom, and also to Audio Studios manager, Eric George. This episode was produced on the land of the Gadigal and we're on tree people.