Did a textual content drive policeman to shoot lifeless TV presenter and his companion?

The snapshots on Jesse Baird’s Instagram account are an image of younger, carefree love. In one, posted this month, Jesse, 26, and his boyfriend Luke Davies, 29, are at a live performance, beaming on the digicam, ready for pop star Pink to reach on stage.

Another picture reveals Luke gazing adoringly at his companion, whereas in a 3rd Jesse is dancing within the rain, grinning regardless of the downpour.

Neither may have envisaged that, inside days of those completely satisfied photos being taken, they might each be lifeless — their our bodies found in surfboard baggage dumped on distant farmland in a makeshift grave two hours’ drive from Sydney, the Australian metropolis that each had just lately made house.

It was a ugly finish to 2 younger lives that has shocked the nation, not least as a result of the alleged killer is a former celeb blogger and native police officer, accused of utilizing his Glock service pistol as a weapon.

An intriguing character with a Walter Mitty facet to his character, Beau Lamarre-Condon — typically identified by the surname Lamarre — baffled colleagues who struggled to reconcile his jet-set, designer life-style along with his AUS$80,000 (£40,000) wage as a police constable.

Now he stands accused of violent homicide, allegedly fuelled by that age-old motive: thwarted want.

For whereas the precise nature of their relationship was unclear, investigating officer Detective Superintendent Danny Doherty revealed this week there had been ‘some type of relationship’ between Lamarre and Baird that ‘did not end well’.

Against this intriguing backdrop, it’s maybe little marvel that the grisly case has despatched shockwaves past Australia.

This week, pals and strangers alike arrived on the house that Baird rented within the trendy Sydney district of Paddington to depart flowers. ‘RIP’ learn one card. ‘I still grieve for your loss.’

While much less is understood about Luke Davies, who flashed his prepared smile whereas working as cabin crew for Australian airline Qantas, Jesse Baird was a minor celeb.

The drama and media graduate left his native Melbourne in 2017 to pursue a tv profession earlier than finally discovering his solution to Sydney, the place he turned a roving reporter for the favored community TV station Channel 10.

A cheerful presence on-screen and off, he was additionally a revered ‘Aussie Rules’ soccer umpire, scheduled to referee a pre-season apply match on February 20.

Baird didn’t present up, nonetheless, as a result of by then his life had been brutally lower brief the day before today, allegedly by the hands of Lamarre.

So did issues go terribly unsuitable between Baird and Lamarre?

Things had gone bitter, pals steered this week, following a ‘brief encounter’ between the 2 that Baird had not wished to take additional.

‘(Lamarre) was not his ex-boyfriend,’ one among Baird’s pals, TV producer Isaac Muller, insisted to an Australian tv present. ‘They were never going out.’

That sentiment was echoed by Corey-Dean Thorpe, a former boyfriend of Baird, who revealed this week to the Mail how his ex-lover was finally pressured to finish his friendship with Lamarre after the latter posted movies on Instagram falsely suggesting they have been a pair.

Thorpe revealed he had assisted Baird in drafting a textual content message to Lamarre telling him he had overstepped the boundaries of their friendship and informing him they need to not keep in touch. ‘I would appreciate it if you could refrain from contacting me,’ learn the textual content.

So how did the bloody occasions of final week finally come about?

Lamarre had joined the police at 20, two years after he reportedly got here out as homosexual in 2014 by throwing a letter onstage at a Lady Gaga live performance, which the star learn out to the group.

He clearly relished the nice life. Among the photographs posted on his now-deleted Instagram account have been ones displaying him sipping champagne in non-public planes and driving a horse shirtless alongside a tropical seaside. He drove a Mercedes and earlier this month was noticed behind the wheel of a Tesla.

‘He was always quite secretive about where the money came from,’ one acquaintance mentioned this week. ‘There were rumours he must have had a rich boyfriend.’

One former feminine police officer who had additionally acquired to know Lamarre mentioned he had instructed her he was an ‘influencer or blogger’ and the money, journey and lavish life-style ‘came with the job’.

The former was definitely true: after beginning a celebrity-focused weblog round 2017, Lamarre had been photographed alongside scores of A-listers together with pop stars Taylor Swift, Miley Cyrus and Lady Gaga in addition to actor Ben Stiller.

‘Outdoor bars and blurry nights’ he captioned an image of himself alongside the singer Dua Lipa.

In one other, understood to have been taken shortly earlier than the alleged murders, he posted an image of himself in entrance of Kourtney Kardashian as she arrived in Sydney. ‘Sneaky on-set selfies,’ he wrote.

Yet inside a number of days of that submit — and Baird and Davies’s personal completely satisfied journey to Pink’s live performance — gunshots have been heard at Baird’s house at 9.50am on Monday, February 19.

No one reported the noises to police however, piecing a timeline collectively, detectives found a name had been made to emergency companies from Baird’s telephone 4 minutes later which was disconnected earlier than anybody answered.

Two days later, after his no-show as umpire, Baird and Davies’s blood-stained belongings, amongst them a £4,000 watch, telephones, bank cards, a set of keys and clothes, have been present in a skip by a workman 19 miles from his house.

After figuring out the objects, police rushed to Baird’s tackle, the place they discovered clear proof {that a} crime had taken place.

Furniture had been upended and the partitions have been smeared with blood. A bullet was discovered embedded within the wall, whereas ballistics assessments established {that a} casing discovered on the scene had been fired from a police Glock pistol matching a gun Lamarre had ‘signed out’ of a police protected on Thursday, February 15, then returned the day after the murders.

At first, police suspected Baird had killed his boyfriend Davies, after discovering messages on Baird’s telephone suggesting their relationship was in bother.

But detectives then appear to have determined that the messages had been written by the killer or killers to divert suspicion.

Then, after studying of the alleged breakdown within the relationship between Baird and Constable Lamarre, officers refocused their consideration, establishing that on the night the pictures had been heard, Lamarre had employed a white Toyota HiAce van from Sydney airport.

Police believed that this van was used to move the our bodies of Baird and Davies. But the place?

As the lacking males’s households waited in anguish for information, police travelled a whole bunch of miles taking a look at potential dumping grounds, amongst them a suburb within the Australian metropolis of Newcastle in addition to forests, farms and waterways.

For days, their efforts proved fruitless. Then, at lunchtime on Friday, Lamarre dramatically handed himself in to police at Sydney’s Bondi station.

Three hours after he arrived, he was charged with two counts of homicide — regardless of the very fact no our bodies had but been discovered.

As police continued to seek for the lacking males, there was one other weird growth.

At the weekend, officers have been contacted by a feminine buddy of Lamarre’s who instructed them she had travelled with him in his employed white Toyota to Southern Tablelands, a fairly, rural space about 140 miles from Sydney.

She instructed detectives Lamarre had requested her to attend at an remoted roadside whereas he used an angle-grinder to chop a padlock on a farm gate. He then drove the van again to the ready lady, changing the gate padlock with one other he had bought. While police haven’t revealed extra particulars of this curious journey — saying solely she was an ‘innocent agent’ who’s ‘not involved’ in any crime — it was sufficient info to spark an enormous however finally fruitless search of the realm.

Police now imagine that whereas Lamarre might have initially dumped the our bodies there, he then returned to the farm a second time — alone — to retrieve them, maybe suspicious that his buddy had spoken to the police.

Data from the van reveals he then drove to Newcastle, 98 miles from Sydney, the place he went to the house of a buddy (and former police officer) and requested for a ‘hose to clean his van’.

The Toyota was discovered deserted close to a nationwide park near Sydney on the day that Lamarre handed himself in to police.

On Tuesday this week, Lamarre lastly revealed to detectives the place he had left the our bodies. Police rushed to an remoted space two hours’ drive from Sydney — Bungonia within the Southern Tablelands — and uncovered two surf baggage close to a fence.

Inside have been the boys’s decomposing corpses.

Revealing that detectives believed the our bodies had been dumped as much as 72 hours after the murders, Detective Superintendent Doherty mentioned yesterday: ‘An attempt had been made to conceal the surfboard bags with rocks and branches.’

New South Wales Police Commissioner Karen Webb subsequently instructed assembled reporters: ‘We are very confident we have located Luke and Jesse.’

She added that, devastating although the invention had confirmed for the victims’ households, it had additionally introduced them closure.

‘Each day, each hour, was an agonising wait for them,’ she mentioned. ‘They wanted to know where their children are.’

As the devastated households made a pilgrimage to the victims’ burial web site, Australia’s prime minister Anthony Albanese spoke out to say he understood the grief of the victims’ households.

Yet nonetheless, many unanswered questions stay about this extraordinary case that has transfixed Australia — chief amongst them, why (assuming he’s responsible) did Lamarre act with such savagery in opposition to two harmless younger males?