Greenkeeper describes finding stained clothing and personal items in skip at Beau Lamarre-Condon trial

A statement read at Beau Lamarre-Condon’s double murder trial on Tuesday described how a greenkeeper found bags containing stained clothing and personal belongings in a skip at a Sydney bowling club. The evidence concerns items the prosecution says were discarded after Jesse Baird and Luke Davies were fatally shot in February 2024. Lamarre-Condon has pleaded not guilty, and his lawyers say the deaths followed struggles over a gun.

What the greenkeeper described

Craig Scott, a greenkeeper at Cronulla Bowls Club, said he and a co-worker arrived at work on 21 February 2024 to find the skip bin’s lid propped open with rubbish, according to a statement read to the New South Wales supreme court jury. He noticed several black plastic bags inside. Scott said he was certain the bags had not been there the previous day.

Scott said he opened one of the bags and took out a piece of brown clothing marked by red stains. The marks looked like dried blood to him, he said. That was his description of what he saw; the reporting of his statement does not establish a forensic identification of the stains. Scott said he and his colleague thought something suspicious had happened.

The court was told that the two workers also found a silver watch, a leather pouch and a Qantas ID card. Other items reported in the skip included wooden drawers, shoes, clothing and AFL shorts still in their plastic packaging. Scott’s account gives the jury a description of where the belongings were found and how the workers came across them, two days after the date of the alleged shootings.

Why the skip matters to the case

ABC News, in its account of the trial’s first week, separately reported the Crown’s contention that bloodied belongings and personal possessions were put in a Cronulla skip and found by a groundskeeper. The Tuesday statement adds Scott’s own reported description of the bags, the stains he saw and the objects he and his co-worker found. Neither report establishes from the material available here what forensic tests were carried out on those objects or what any such tests showed.

The defence account

Lamarre-Condon, a former Sydney police officer, has pleaded not guilty to two counts of murder and one charge of aggravated break and enter. His lawyer, John Stratton SC, told jurors in his opening that the fatal shootings occurred during struggles involving the officer’s service weapon. The defence says Lamarre-Condon acted in self-defence and began cleaning up afterward because he panicked.

ABC reported that the defence describes two separate struggles with the gun. Its account of the first week said Stratton urged jurors to wait until they had heard all the evidence before reaching conclusions. The prosecution and defence accounts therefore give different explanations for both the deaths and what happened afterward; Scott’s account of the skip is one part of the evidence the jury is hearing.

What happens next

The trial before Justice Natalie Adams was continuing when The Guardian reported Scott’s statement on 29 September. ABC had reported that the proceedings were expected to last up to three months. The jury has yet to resolve the competing accounts, and the available reporting of Scott’s statement leaves open what further evidence may establish about the items found in the skip.