A court on Tuesday released footage showing the moment police discovered cleaners inside Jesse Baird’s home, two days after he disappeared.
Body-worn camera video captured Detective Senior Constable Alistair Wright and another officer knocking on Baird’s door at about 1.15pm on February 22, 2024. “Hello, it’s just the police,” they called out.
A female cleaner eventually opened the door and told officers the tenants were not home.
The officer asked her: “You’re the cleaner?”
“Yeah,” she replied.
The officer then asked: “Is anyone else home … is it all right if we come in and we have a chat to you?”
“It’s OK,” the cleaner answered.
One officer then asked: “Is there any blood here?”
The cleaner, whose first language was not English, replied: “We clean.”
Police then instructed both cleaners to stop work and move outside.
The terrace was subsequently declared a crime scene.
Senior Sergeant Bronwyn Lansley told the court that Baird’s blood had seeped through the floorboards and into the cavity beneath the house.
Investigators also detected traces of blood on the living-room rug, as well as on rugs in the hallway and the front bedroom. The court heard the front bedroom belonged to Baird.
Ms Lansley said Luke Davies’ blood was found predominantly inside Baird’s bedroom, suggesting the pair were together in the room at some point after their deaths.
Crime scene photographs showed substantial amounts of luminol in the kitchen, Baird’s bedroom and across the living room.
A groundskeeper later discovered bloodstained bedsheets and clothing in a skip bin, along with Luke Davies’ identification and Qantas card.
The jury was also read part of Craig Scott’s statement on Tuesday morning. It detailed how he found blood and black garbage bags inside a skip bin in Cronulla, in Sydney’s south.
Mr Scott said the bin had been filled with grass clippings when he left work on the afternoon of February 20, 2024—the day after Jesse Baird and Luke Davies were allegedly killed.
When he returned the next day, Mr Scott said it appeared someone had added rubbish to the bin. He asked a colleague to inspect it with him.
“There were AFL footy shorts still in plastic packaging,” he said.
‘I saw a bunch of white flags bunched together near the top and it had a lot of red.
‘When we moved them to the side, we saw several bin bags … I opened one of the bags and removed a piece of brown clothing, I only took a little from the bag and it had red stains on it.’
Mr Scott said he left it in the bag because he thought it was covered in blood.
His colleague opened another bag and found a bed sheet with similar stains.
They also found a silver watch and a leather pouch with credit cards in the name of Luke Davies, along with a Qantas card. Davies was a Qantas flight attendant.
Both men ‘decided something suspicious had gone on’ and decided to take the watch and the leather pouch to the police station.
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