a cop is on trial for shooting his ex and his ex's new boyfriend. the case already got the police thrown out of mardi gras.

via ABC News, the Star Observer and PinkNews, with the 2024 parade decision from the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras board.

Not guilty, to all of it.

That was Beau Lamarre-Condon on Monday morning in the New South Wales Supreme Court, 31 years old, a former police officer, answering two counts of domestic violence murder and one count of aggravated break and enter. Fifteen jurors were picked. The Crown said it would call witnesses by the dozen, among them Baird's family and friends and people who knew Davies. Justice Natalie Adams adjourned late Monday afternoon with the Crown's opening unfinished; it resumes Tuesday, and she will be hearing this for about three months.

The two men he is accused of killing were Jesse Baird, 26, a presenter for Channel Ten, and Luke Davies, 29, a Qantas flight attendant. Baird was his ex. Davies was the man Baird was seeing.

what the crown says happened

Crown prosecutor Brett Hatfield SC opened with a phrase that is going to follow this case: Lamarre-Condon, he said, had developed an "obsessive and jealous infatuation" with Baird after the two were involved in late 2022 and part of 2023. Contact stopped in November 2023.

The prosecution case is that on February 19, 2024, he went to a share house on Brown Street in Paddington and shot both men with his police service pistol, which he was carrying despite being off duty, and then drove their bodies to a rural property at Bungonia. Hatfield told the court Lamarre-Condon had stalked Baird around Sydney's eastern suburbs, that the jury would hear he admitted following him, that he allegedly obtained CCTV from a pub, and that he turned up that day dressed as an Uber Eats delivery driver. Of the second shot, the Crown's position is blunt: "The Crown case is this second shot was an execution-style shot."

what took two years

The Star Observer reports he offered to plead guilty to a single count of manslaughter and that the prosecution refused it. He was raising that offer as far back as a hearing in October 2025, where OUTinPerth reported the judge then handling the matter noted such negotiations would be on the court file.

All of which is to say: none of this has been quick, and the families have been waiting two and a half years to hear a jury told what the state thinks happened in that house.

the part that changed mardi gras

This case did something to Sydney that no wire story about the trial will mention.

Within days of the killings in February 2024, the board of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras asked the New South Wales Police not to march in that year's parade. Their statement is worth reading in the original, because it is not written as a punishment: having the police march, the board said, "could add to the distress within our communities, already deeply affected by recent events," and "their participation at this year's event could intensify the current feelings of sorrow and distress." The decision, they wrote, "allows space for the community to heal this year."

Then everybody argued about it, and the argument was not the one you would expect. It was not gay people against straight people. It was gay people against each other, because the accused officer was himself gay, which knocked the usual shape out of the thing entirely. Some called the request the bare minimum. Some called it collective punishment for one man. Two days later the board reversed itself and let officers march in plain clothes rather than uniform, alongside a commitment to an external LGBTQIA+ advisory panel, and Commissioner Karen Webb said she was "delighted that our LGBTQIA+ officers, as well as other police who are allies and supporters, will be allowed to march this year."

Plain clothes. A compromise where the uniform was the entire disagreement, resolved by asking people to take it off.

We have written before about what it looks like when a police force has to tell a queer community what happened outside one of its bars, and about how long Australian courts can take to settle a question about our lives. This is the harder version of both. A jury in Sydney now has to decide what one man did in a terrace house in Paddington, and the only thing already settled is that two people who should be alive are not.

Baird and Davies were remembered at that parade. The Star Observer reports friends raised more than $76,000 toward their funerals. That is the part of this story that was never in dispute.