Beau Lamarre-Condon previously visited a farm where he later tried to sink the bodies of Jesse Baird and Luke Davies, the prosecution has told a Sydney court.
The rural property belonged to the family of a man the police officer had met on a dating app and the two visited the farm together months before the alleged murders.
Lamarre-Condon, 31, has been accused of shooting dead Baird and Davies with his police service weapon in Baird’s Paddington home on 19 February 2024.
He has pleaded not guilty to two counts of murder and one charge of aggravated break and enter.
The prosecution on Wednesday read out a statement from Michael Cella who was 20 years old when he spoke with police in 2024. Cella said he matched with Lamarre-Condon on the dating app Hinge in March 2023.
They began seeing each other, with the pair going to Bondi Junction to watch Hunger Games and the Taylor Swift movie in late 2023. They also ate sushi together.
In November 2023, Lamarre-Condon invited the younger man on a weekend trip to a cabin.
But because the proposed trip was too expensive, Cella invited the officer to go to his family’s hobby farm in Bungonia.
The property had four dams, animals, a fence and a front gate with chains and a padlock, the court heard on Wednesday.
On 6 November, they drove around the area, looked at the animals and stayed overnight, with Lamarre-Condon recording the farm and posting it to his Instagram story with the Taylor Swift song You Belong With Me.
Cella later learned about Baird when he saw Lamarre-Condon’s Instagram posts with him.
“Beau told me they were friends. I sensed there was something more and Beau was not telling me everything,” Cella said in his 2024 statement read to the jury.
Communication between Lamarre-Condon and Cella slowed significantly about mid-November 2023 and the latter soon lost interest.
He received some messages from Lamarre-Condon in January 2024 but ignored them, blocked his contact number and deleted their text message conversation, the court heard.
Days later, he received a call from a number with no called ID and did not answer, followed by a message on the encrypted messaging app Signal from a contact with the name Bob. Cella did not respond.
After the deaths of Baird and Davies, Lamarre-Condon allegedly made an unsuccessful attempt to sink their bodies at the bottom of a dam at Cella Farms, the prosecution has said.
They were later found at the fenceline of a monastery about 20km from the property.
The defence has not disputed the officer attempted to clean up the scene or dispose of the bodies, claiming he “panicked considerably” after acting in self-defence.
But the events inside Baird’s home are contested.
The defence has argued the couple were accidentally shot in two separate struggles.
The prosecution has told the court that Lamarre-Condon shot Baird twice in the kitchen before shooting Davies through a bedroom door.
A computer-generated video outlining the crown’s version of events was played to the New South Wales supreme court jury earlier on Wednesday.
The 3D recreation of the Paddington terrace on the morning of the shootings allowed the jury to see the alleged path Lamarre-Condon took through the home. The reconstruction included photos of bullet holes and marks.
The potential trajectory of the bullets was also highlighted.
Before the video was shown, justice Natalie Adams said it was the crown case that Baird was shot at close range but the defence argued he was shot from further away.
The judge warned the kitchen was not shown to scale and that not all the evidence relevant to the angle or distance of the shot to Baird’s head had been adduced.
The NSW police firearms examiner Lucas Van Der Walt said he was more certain of the trajectory of the bullet through the bedroom door because it had passed 35mm thick wood.
Van Der Walt told the court that “stippling” had been found on the door around a bullet hole that the prosecution alleged was covered with putty and a plastic hook.
Stippling is the pattern made by gun shot propellant particles. The closer a target is to a barrel, the smaller the spread pattern would be, Van Der Walt said on Wednesday.
“[It] is going to pepper itself into that softer surface – in this case a painted door,” he told the jury.
The court was shown a video of police taking the door from Baird’s bedroom and shooting it with the same gun and ammunition that was allegedly used by Lamarre-Condon.
The pictures of both the original and test bullet hole were compared and shown to the jury. Van Der Walt said there was a “very similar spread pattern of the propellant particles impacting with the paint and the wood in the door”.
He suggested the muzzle of the firearm was 10 to 20cm away from Davies when it was discharged.
On the side of the door the bullet would have exited, he noted the splintering looked more opaque in the original hole, but he said that was because wood putty had been used to fill the hole.
Defence lawyer John Stratton SC suggested the bullet hole could have been created if there was a body in front of the door, but Van Der Walt said the “clear stippling” would prevent that scenario.
Asked why there was no other bullet marks or bullets found in the room, the expert said it could have hit a hypothetical pillow, jacket or similar item.
“If that bullet continued and penetrated any of these surfaces and that object was removed and discarded, we’ll never find that bullet,” he told the court.
Bullets shot in this way fell to the ground, he said, and given the scene had been cleaned extensively, a casing could have been picked up by cleaners, Van Der Walt told the jury.
The trial before justice Adams continues.
