ALLISON BADEN-CLAY:
sister tells: she didn’t die in vain
The last thing on earth Vanessa Fowler wants to do is recount the awful domestic abuse that her sister, Allison Baden-Clay, suffered in the final years of her marriage – the final years of her life. But if it will save other families from the grief that hers has suffered, Vanessa is prepared to go there.
Seven years since her sister was murdered, Vanessa says, in a powerful, exclusive interview with The Weekly, “we still grieve every day, but we understand what Allison was going through. We want to make sure other families get to see the signs and get to intervene.”
Vanessa has been working with Griffith University on a new program to educate Australians about the signs that might indicate a friend or loved one is in an abusive relationship.
The program references Allison’s experience and it has helped Vanessa, in retrospect, to see how the abuse in her sister’s marriage evolved.
In her last days, Allison knew her husband was having an affair and it was agony. It made her feel sick. She’d have given anything for him to love her again, and make love to her. For a “proper” hug. She was lonely and cried when he wouldn’t sleep in the same bed. When she’d tried to resume a sexual relationship, he laughed at her underwear and told her she smelled.
“Why so mean?” Allison asked in her journal. She felt as if she wasn’t good enough. She blamed herself for “just” being a mother and “forgetting” to be a wife. Two days before she died, she wrote: “really hurt, had so many opportunities to tell me – let me believe it was all my fault and therefore I was at your mercy.”
Allison had invested everything in her family. She’d given up a highflying job to stay home and raise three daughters; she’d parked her dream of being famous to marry real estate agent Gerard. She had a taste of fame when she was younger, touring the UK with the Australian Youth Ballet Company and being crowned Miss Brisbane in 1992. Now she had regrets but wanted to save the marriage. She couldn’t conceive of breaking up the family. She wanted stability for her children and most of all, she didn’t want to be alone. “I’m afraid of being alone and lonely, maybe because
I think I can’t handle it. I’m afraid of failing – failing in my marriage and what people think,” she wrote.
Only Gerard Baden-Clay knows what happened on the night of April 19, 2012. But it seems that, as far as he was concerned, Allison had become an inconvenient woman. He was drowning in debt, couldn’t afford a divorce and his girlfriend was increasingly demanding. “Leave it to me now,” he told his mistress Toni McHugh in an email. He is now serving a life sentence for Allison’s murder.
Allison did become famous, but for all the wrong reasons. The whole country followed the search when she was missing for 11 days, when her body was found under a bridge on the banks of the Kholo River west of Brisbane, and when her husband was charged with her murder.
Things like this didn’t happen to people like the Baden-Clays. Outwardly, they were the picture of middle-class respectability. Gerard was a pillar of the community, owner of a real-estate business, president of the Kenmore Chamber of Commerce, on the P&C of his daughter’s school. His pretty, former beauty-queen wife delivered a resilience program in schools and taught ballet – her passion – to children. She was a devoted mother. They lived in one of Brisbane’s most affluent suburbs, Brookfield, a place of vast houses and acreage, but behind the glossy façade, things were not as they seemed.
Gerard presented as “a charismatic man,” says Vanessa, but that was a mask. He was keeping a lot of secrets. While Allison was arranging marriage counselling sessions, he was being unfaithful to both his wife and mistress on adult dating sites, even while actively promoting his image as a doting family man.
The nation, and Allison’s family, would learn that domestic violence, the issues of power and control, do not discriminate between class, economic status and levels of education, and they are not always overt.
“It shocked the community,” says Vanessa. “I think people realised it could happen to anybody. We have this mindset it doesn’t happen in middle-class, upper-class suburbs, that it doesn’t happen to certain kinds of people, but it doesn’t discriminate. Allison touched a lot of lives when she was alive. They had a wonderful community of friends, she was well educated, kind, generous, very talented.”
Allison’s family, her parents Geoff and Priscilla Dickie, her sister and brother, ordinary people living ordinary lives, were thrust into the glare of the media spotlight at a time when they were devastated and grieving. “It was a shock,” Vanessa admits. But from the moment she’d gone missing, they’d known the news would be bad. “She would never have left her children,” said her father.
The close family had to endure an emotional roller-coaster when Gerard’s conviction was reduced to manslaughter and then reinstated to murder. More than 2000 people held
a rally in Brisbane when the charges were downgraded.
“It was a topsy-turvy time,” says Vanessa, “but the country really came together and supported us. They voiced their opinion and let the government know the court system needed to change. It needed to look at this case and set a precedent for future situations. We really felt empowered by the community getting behind us.”
In 2014, her family launched the Allison Baden-Clay Foundation, in honour of Allison and in the hope that through sharing her story, she would help others – that would be her legacy. Now they have partnered with
Griffith University’s MATE Bystander Program to educate people about family and domestic violence, and about how to help friends or loved ones in abusive relationships. The program, launching this month, will be implemented in workplaces throughout Australia.
The Weekly meets Vanessa on a sweltering summer day in inner-city Brisbane. Vanessa, a teacher, looks a lot like her sister did in photos, and talking to her we get a sense of what Allison might have been like – warm and outgoing.
There had only been 21 months between Allison and her older sister. “We were very close, we did dancing lessons together, there was always the two of us,” says Vanessa. And the sisters remained close throughout Allison’s life.
Even so, Vanessa only learned Allison had been in an abusive relationship when it came out in court and the media.
“She walked out every day, dressed, make-up, hair done,” says Vanessa. Until it happens to you, you can’t know the signs. But Allison had withdrawn, confiding only in her journal. When she was angry, she wrote, “I still go into my cave and don’t open my mouth to say what I want.”
“Having the journal was probably her way of dealing with it,” Vanessa realises now. “She was very hesitant to talk about it around us. That was probably pride.” And possibly shame. Gerard had always been “aloof” at family events, but how could they have known there was a killer in their midst? Her mother had been told to “butt out” when she raised concerns with Gerard but they’d been worried he would take it out on Allison and the girls if they interfered. “He was a born controller,” Allison’s mother has said.
“We felt Allison was strong enough to handle what went on behind closed doors,” Vanessa says. “She was very strong and very determined – very determined to raise her three children in the way that she wanted. We never dreamed that he would have it in him to actually murder her.”
Now they know differently. The family were aware she was becoming increasingly isolated from them but couldn’t have guessed at the danger she was in. “Withdrawing is a red flag in itself. If we had known what the signs were, we may have been more determined to intervene, rather than letting her tell us that everything was okay. There are lots of ‘should have, could have, would have’ scenarios that go around in our heads.”
Being isolated is the first sign that you are in a controlling relationship, but with Allison it happened gradually, almost imperceptibly. When she married Gerard, Allison had been a confident woman, with an Arts degree with a major in psychology, speaking several languages, accomplished, a catch. Gerard, whom she had met when they were both working at Flight Centre, had “whisked her off her feet with lovely gifts and lots of adoring sentiment. Who could resist that?”
Vanessa now believes what happened over the 15 years of the marriage was “the whittling away of her self-esteem. We now understand it wasn’t just an act that happened on that night as a result of an affair or ‘I have got no money’, it was something that had increased in its frequency and severity over many years. He was chipping away and chipping away.”
Months before she was murdered, Allison had written in her journal: “I hate it when my husband treats me like shit”.
As they came to terms with the violent death of their sister and daughter, the family realised “this issue was something that needed to be addressed. We were shocked at the prevalence of it and the fact that it was something people were not talking about.”
“Looking back,” says Vanessa, “we were looking for the physical signs. We had no idea domestic violence manifests itself in so many different ways. We now realise there were signs: the isolation in particular; the blocking of our phone numbers; not allowing Allison to call us or us to call her. He was cutting her off from her friends. She was not going to those coffee catch-ups and things like that. There was also financial control, we later found out. And technology control. He was monitoring her phone and her texts. ”
For his book The Murder of Allison Baden-Clay, journalist David Murray spoke to Phillip Broom, a partner in Gerard’s business. Phillip said he had noticed how controlling Gerard was with his family, how he kept them in their place, and Allison wrote that he became angry about the way she parented their daughters.
She also wrote that she wished they could go back to a time before the wedding, when Gerard had courted her, treated her like a princess, when they were in love and free and travelled, before the children came.
These are the ties that bind, that keep women in controlling relationships long after the reality has shifted, says Anoushka Dowling, Assistant Director of the Bystander Program.
“There’s still a lot of love in most cases, and glimpses of that love and
“We had no idea domestic violence manifests itself in so many ways.”
respect. That’s what keeps it all going – the promise of getting back to the good times. That’s the insidious nature of domestic violence and sometimes we can’t recognise what is happening. You can’t recognise all your social and psychological resources are being shortened. It’s about power and control. Gerard knew how he could control Allison.”
“Domestic violence is very measured and controlled,” says Shaan RossSmith, the program’s Director. “People say ‘they just need anger management’ or ‘they just snap’. Absolutely not. There is a pattern of behaviour. He knew exactly what he was doing. He was very measured in the way that he did it.”
When Gerard confessed to his affair, seven months before he killed Allison, she collapsed onto the footpath weeping. A mother at her children’s school had told her and she had driven to meet her husband outside McDonald’s. She fell apart. He promised to end it, and did for three months, before sneaking around with Toni McHugh again. Allison grew stronger and more determined. Her youngest child was in school, so she went to work in Gerard’s office part-time, no longer an ignored, dependent stay-at-home mum. But, says Shaan, “empowering herself was a threat to him and his doing things his way – having all the control.” It would cost Allison her life.
The Allison Baden-Clay Foundation and the Bystander Program are reaching out to all Australians. If you know someone who might be in a controlling or abusive relationship, don’t stand by and don’t give up on them. Even if they cancel and make repeated excuses, keep in contact.
“People don’t know how to respond, so they don’t,” says Anoushka. “People get compassion fatigue and withdraw. They think, ‘I never see her, she never comes, I’m sick of asking.’ Open the dialogue in a non-confrontational, respectful way. It’s about understanding signs and then understanding what you can do. It’s about offering support, and being able to converse with that person about what you’re seeing and what your concerns are, and putting them in touch with services.” And above all, she insists, “keep showing up”.
Shaan agrees: “Closing the isolation gap is really important for people going through that violence – letting them know they’re not alone and there are people who can help them.”
Emotional abuse can be immobilising, says Anoushka, as it was for Allison. “Things like ‘you used to really look after yourself but now you don’t’; ‘you’ve put on a bit of weight’; or ‘you’ve got mental health issues – you need to go and see a shrink’. If it’s said once, it doesn’t make much impact, but if they’re continual, then you start to believe them, they become your internal dialogue. The more you feel like that, the more isolated you feel.”
Vanessa hopes the conversation the foundation is encouraging will make people more aware. “We hope we’re going to allay their fear and shame about what’s going on in their own minds,” she says, and empower “them, their friends and family to seek help.”
For more on the Griffith University program and the foundation, visit allisonbadenclayfoundation.org.au