Three shots, a shopping trip and 14,000 hours of CCTV: The case against Beau Lamarre-Condon

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.