In a Sydney courtroom, two pieces of physical evidence — a bullet hole in a bedroom door and DNA traces inside a gun barrel — have become the focal points of a trial asking one of the oldest questions the law must answer: where does self-defence end and murder begin. Beau Lamarre-Condon, a police officer, is accused of killing Jesse Baird and Luke Davies in a Paddington home on 19 February 2024, with the prosecution alleging premeditated execution and the defence constructing a counter-narrative of struggle and accident. As forensic experts disagree not on what the evidence is but on what it m
DNA and bullet hole evidence clash in Sydney double murder trial
Two men, Jesse Baird and Luke Davies, were fatally shot on 19 February 2024 in Paddington, Sydney.
I don't think that person is making any conscious movements.
Mark
So the defence is saying the DNA in the gun barrel proves Davies handled the gun, which supports their self-defence story. But the prosecution is saying that doesn't matter—the overall pattern of evidence still points to premeditated murder. How do you weigh those competing readings?
Mimi
The DNA is real, but it's also incomplete. It's a partial match, not a full profile. And the defence's argument about how biological material gets from a wound into a gun barrel—the crime scene officer just said he disagreed but didn't explain why or how. That's where the jury has to sit with uncertainty.
Luke
Right, and that's the thing: we don't actually know how DNA gets into a gun barrel in a shooting. It's not like there's a standard forensic textbook that says "this is impossible" or "this happens all the time." The defence is making a logical argument that sounds plausible, but Moon's rebuttal was just assertion.
Mark
What about the postmortem evidence? That seems more concrete. If Baird was shot in the temple, he couldn't have thrown the gun across the room.
Mimi
That's what Bailey testified. But Stratton pushed back on whether the entry and exit wounds were even clear. She admitted decomposition made it hard to determine trajectory with certainty. She said there were more features supporting back-to-front than front-to-back, but "more features" isn't the same as "certain."
Luke
And here's what we don't know: could Baird have been shot in a different order than the prosecution claims? Could the temple shot have come second, after he'd already been wounded and possibly moved? The postmortem can tell you what happened to the body, but it can't always tell you the sequence of events.
Mark
So the jury is really being asked to construct a timeline from fragments—DNA, bullet trajectories, wound patterns—none of which is dispositive on its own.
Mimi
Exactly. And the defence's self-defence narrative requires Davies to have picked up the gun and shot himself. That's a very specific claim. But the evidence doesn't clearly support or refute it.
Luke
The jury visit to the house might matter more than any expert testimony. Seeing the actual distances, the size of that bedroom door hole, the layout of the rooms—that could shift how jurors interpret everything they've heard.
El Pulso
- The defence is betting everything on a near-impossible biological journey — that DNA from a fatal wound could travel through a sub-centimetre bullet hole and lodge inside a gun barrel, a proposition the prosecution's own crime scene officer conceded was possible but could not explain.
- Medical testimony dealt a serious blow to the self-defence narrative: a man shot through the temple, with a bullet passing through his brain, cannot consciously fling a gun across a room — only involuntary movement remains.
- The crime scene itself has been compromised, having been extensively cleaned after the shootings, raising the spectre that critical evidence was erased before investigators could fully document it.
- CT scans of both victims' skulls were shown to the jury, making the violence viscerally concrete — bone fragments scattered in a line through Baird's skull, a bullet entry above Davies' left eyebrow.
- The jury will soon walk through the actual rooms where the killings occurred, tasked with mapping two competing stories onto a single physical space where every angle, stain, and hole is disputed.
In a Sydney courtroom, two pieces of physical evidence — a bullet hole in a bedroom door and DNA traces inside a gun barrel — have become the focal points of a trial asking one of the oldest questions the law must answer: where does self-defence end and murder begin. Beau Lamarre-Condon, a police officer, is accused of killing Jesse Baird and Luke Davies in a Paddington home on 19 February 2024, with the prosecution alleging premeditated execution and the defence constructing a counter-narrative of struggle and accident. As forensic experts disagree not on what the evidence is but on what it means, the jury is left to arbitrate between two irreconcilable accounts of the same afternoon.
A bullet hole in a bedroom door and DNA traces inside a gun barrel have become the twin axes of a double murder trial unfolding in the New South Wales Supreme Court. Beau Lamarre-Condon, a 31-year-old police officer, is accused of shooting Jesse Baird and Luke Davies with his service weapon on 19 February 2024 in a Paddington terrace house. He has pleaded not guilty to two counts of murder and one count of aggravated break and enter.
The prosecution alleges Lamarre-Condon disguised himself as a delivery driver, entered Baird's home, and killed both men deliberately — shooting Baird twice and firing through a closed bedroom door to kill Davies. The defence offers a starkly different account: two separate struggles, a gun knocked loose, and Davies ultimately shooting himself while grappling with the officer.
Defence lawyer John Stratton SC focused the jury's attention on a DNA swab from inside the gun barrel that partially matched Davies, and on the absence of blood on the bedroom door. His argument was pointed — biological material from a fatal wound passing through a hole less than a centimetre wide to end up inside a barrel approaches impossibility. The crime scene officer disagreed, but offered no mechanism to explain how it could occur.
The postmortem evidence proved more difficult for the defence. Forensic pathologist Dr Kendall Bailey testified that Baird's first wound — entering at the base of the neck and exiting below the lip — would have rendered him incapable of coherent speech. The second shot, through the right temple and into the brain, would have incapacitated him instantly. When asked whether such a person could consciously throw a gun across a room, Bailey was unequivocal: conscious movement would not be possible.
CT scans of both skulls were shown to the jury, with bone fragments visible in a line across Baird's skull interior and a clear entry wound above Davies' left eyebrow. A bullet recovered from the subfloor was found to have been fired at nearly a vertical angle. The crime scene had also been cleaned after the deaths, leaving open the question of what evidence may have been lost.
The jury is scheduled to visit the home in the coming days — walking through rooms where the prosecution and defence have built two versions of the same event from the same physical traces, each piece of evidence a contested fragment of an afternoon that ended with two men dead.
A bedroom door with a bullet hole through it. A gun barrel with DNA traces inside. These two pieces of evidence have become the hinge on which a double murder trial now turns, each side reading them as proof of their opposing stories about what happened in a Paddington terrace house on a February afternoon in 2024.
Beau Lamarre-Condon, a 31-year-old police officer, stands accused of shooting Jesse Baird and Luke Davies with his service weapon on 19 February 2024. The prosecution says he disguised himself as an UberEats delivery driver, entered Baird's home, and methodically killed both men—shooting Baird twice, once at the base of the neck and once at the temple, then firing through a bedroom door to kill Davies. Lamarre-Condon has pleaded not guilty to two counts of murder and one count of aggravated break and enter. The defence presents a radically different sequence: the men were killed in separate incidents during struggles, with Lamarre-Condon acting in self-defence. During a tussle with Baird, the gun was knocked across the room, picked up by Davies, and Davies then shot himself while struggling with the officer.
In the New South Wales Supreme Court this week, the defence lawyer John Stratton SC pressed the prosecution's forensic case with surgical precision. He drew attention to a swab taken from inside the gun barrel that returned a DNA profile partially matching Davies. He then noted that the bedroom door—the one the prosecution says Davies was shot through—tested negative for blood. Stratton posed the central challenge to the jury: biological material from a fatal wound would have to travel through a hole less than a centimetre wide and somehow end up inside a gun barrel. "The possibility or likelihood of that approaches zero," he suggested. But the crime scene officer Greg Moon disagreed. "I believe it can still happen," he told the court, offering no elaboration on the mechanism.
The postmortem evidence presented by Dr Kendall Bailey, who examined both bodies, sketched a different kind of problem for the defence theory. The bullet that entered Baird at the base of his neck exited just below his lip, fracturing his jaw and passing through the base of his tongue. Bailey testified the wound did not sever major blood vessels or the windpipe, but it was catastrophic nonetheless. Asked whether someone with such an injury could speak, she was clear: "I don't think anyone with that injury would be making any meaningful vocalisations. They could make a noise but that would be nothing that would be coherent." The second shot, entering Baird's right temple, would have passed through his brain and incapacitated him immediately. When Stratton asked whether a person with a temple wound could then fling a gun across a room, Bailey was equally direct: the body might make involuntary movements, but "I don't think that person is making any conscious movements."
CT scans of both men's skulls were shown to the jury on Thursday. Forensic radiologist Dr James Raleigh pointed out the hole in the right side of Baird's head at the temple, with bone fragments scattered in a line across the interior of the skull. Davies' wound was located in his face just above the left eyebrow, consistent with a bullet entry. Two wounds on Davies' thigh were consistent with a blade, Bailey said, though she agreed they likely occurred at or after death.
The physical layout of the crime scene added another layer of complexity. NSW police firearms examiner Lucas Van Der Walt determined that a bullet hole found in the floor had been fired at nearly a vertical angle, and he located the bullet in the subfloor. He explained to the jury that forensics teams do not always recover bullets—they are small objects travelling at 350 metres per second, and unless they lodge somewhere visible, they disappear. The crime scene had also been extensively cleaned after the shootings, creating the possibility that evidence had been removed or destroyed.
The trial continues before Justice Natalie Adams. The jury is scheduled to visit Baird's home in the coming days, walking through the rooms where the prosecution and defence have constructed two irreconcilable versions of how two men died. Every piece of physical evidence—the DNA, the bullet hole, the blood patterns, the trajectory angles—has become contested ground, with experts disagreeing not on what they found but on what it means.
Citas Notables
I believe it can still happen— Crime scene officer Greg Moon, on whether biological material could travel from a wound through a door hole into a gun barrel
I don't think anyone with that injury would be making any meaningful vocalisations— Dr Kendall Bailey, pathologist, on whether someone with a jaw and tongue wound could speak
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