Shae Davison testified she sent fabricated Instagram note at Lamarre-Condon’s request
Beau Lamarre-Condon, 31, has pleaded not guilty to two counts of murder and one charge of aggravated break and enter in the NSW Supreme Court. Prosecutors allege he fatally shot Baird, 26, and Davies, 29, with a police service weapon at Baird’s Paddington home on 19 February 2024.
Shae Davison, a close friend of the accused, told the court on Friday that Lamarre-Condon became “infatuated” with Baird during a brief relationship. Baird ended the relationship in November 2023 after Lamarre-Condon went through his phone and deleted messages from other men, which Davison said made the police officer “really upset.”
Lamarre-Condon then asked to stay at her house because he did not want to be alone, Davison said. He arrived at her home with a backpack the next day and asked to send a message from her Instagram account to Baird as “one last try to win Jesse back,” she told the court.
Davison said she initially refused but testified that “he put a lot of pressure on me, he said he never asked anything of me, he’s so upset, can I help.”
“He wore me down,” Davison said. “It felt like guilt-tripping to me and using my friendship to get what he wanted.”
She agreed on the condition Lamarre-Condon read the message aloud while omitting medical details. When he read out the message, she asked him to delete parts that weren’t true, and it looked like he was typing and actioning her edits, she told the court. He then sent the note in a series of messages and told her she was allowed to read it after 4 December 2023, when he told her he was set to undergo surgery. He left her home about an hour after he arrived.
The 1,600-word Instagram note claimed Davison had gone with Lamarre-Condon to Westmead Hospital, where he was told he had “a cancerous tumour growing in his left shoulder joint/ligament area” that could result in “possibly having his arm amputated.”
The text stated that the medications prescribed “throw off your hormones massively, which throws off how a person can act in their day to day life” — an apparent attempt to explain Lamarre-Condon’s behavior of going through Baird’s phone. Davison told the court she had not attended the hospital with Lamarre-Condon and had not cleared that part of the text.
The messages tried to justify the officer going through Baird’s phone and stated “this is very out of character for him.” The note purportedly from Davison also stated: “There is real love there, trust can be built back on that. Even if you guys never hang out again, I know Beau wants to make things right.”
Davison said she was unsure if Baird read the messages but said it was possible he had seen them through Instagram’s preview function. Lamarre-Condon later asked her to unsend the messages. She obliged and tried to ask him about the content, but she testified that “he was quite annoyed, I could tell in his voice he was frustrated that I had [read them].”
The defense has claimed Lamarre-Condon acted in self-defense after disguising himself as an Uber Eats driver and entering Baird’s home on the day of the shootings. The trial before Justice Natalie Adams continues.