The eldest daughter of murdered Allison Baden-Clay has celebrated her university graduation – 10 years after the mother’s death at the hands of her husband.
Pictures posted to social media showed Hannah Baden-Clay completing a course in dance performance at the Queensland University of Technology.
The 20-year-old posed in her graduation cap and gown with her sisters, Sarah, 18 and Ella, 15, who were left without a mother when their father Gerard Baden-Clay killed her in April 2012.
Gerard was sentenced to life in prison after a Supreme Court jury found him guilty of Allison’s murder, following a six-week trial in 2014.
From the time Allison’s body was found, Gerard has maintained he had no involvement in his wife’s death, however, on appeal, his defence team conceded there was sufficient evidence to point to the fact he killed her.
What there was not sufficient evidence of, they argued, was that he did so intentionally.
It was a controversial change of tactic that was met with widespread outrage, particularly when the Court of Appeal in 2015 ruled there was not sufficient evidence to prove murder, setting aside the conviction and substituting it with manslaughter.
In a High Court challenge to the ruling a year later, the murder conviction was reinstated.
An overwhelming body of evidence pointed to the fact it was he who took her life — the scratches she left on his face, the foliage from their garden found in her hair and the drops of her blood discovered in the family car he used to drive her 14km to a creek bed, where he dumped her body.
Allison’s body was found by a kayaker on the banks of the Kholo Creek, 10 days after Gerard reported her missing.
He didn’t join in the search and told police that red marks on his face were “shaving cuts”.
Gerard was having an affair with Toni McHugh, who later testified that he had told her he hwas no longer in love with Allison and that they were living in a sexless marriage.
It took a further six weeks for detectives investigating the mother-of-three’s death to charge him with her murder, a charge he has denied ever since.
