Beau Lamarre-Condon asked celebrity chaser friend if he could post phone to her in WA to throw in water, court told

A court sketch of Beau Lamarre-Condon during his NSW supreme court trial. He has pleaded not guilty to two charges of murder. Photograph: Rocco Fazzari/AAPView image in fullscreenA court sketch of Beau Lamarre-Condon during his NSW supreme court trial. He has pleaded not guilty to two charges of murder. Photograph: Rocco Fazzari/AAPBeau Lamarre-Condon asked celebrity chaser friend if he could post phone to her in WA to throw in water, court toldWoman contacted following alleged murders, years after meeting Lamarre-Condon in Sydney and bonding over scepticism of Covid vaccines

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Beau Lamarre-Condon asked a friend in Western Australia if he could post her a phone to be thrown into a body of water, and told her he’d been “set up” over the disappearance of two men, a court has heard.

Lamarre-Condon, 31, has been accused of fatally shooting Sydney couple Jesse Baird and Luke Davies with his police service weapon in Baird’s Paddington home on 19 February 2024.

He has pleaded not guilty to two counts of murder and one charge of aggravated break and enter.

Read moreA friend of Lamarre-Condon who lived in WA told the NSW supreme court on Thursday that she first met the police officer in 2010.

The two were celebrity hunting for American rapper Pitbull in 2010 outside the Channel 7 studios while Sunrise was being filmed.

They exchanged numbers to try and double their chances of encountering the celebrity and continued to speak and meet whenever she travelled to Sydney in the following years.

Asked if they had any shared interests beyond celebrity-chasing, she said they would speak about the Covid pandemic.

She told the jury she “didn’t agree with the injections and whatnot” and explained she would go to protests.

Knowing Lamarre-Condon was a police officer, she would ask how he could “stand there and push back against people fighting for freedom”.

“He just told me it was devil’s work,” she told the court.

Lamarre-Condon on 12 February 2024 asked if they could switch to messaging on the encrypted messaging app Signal, the court heard.

On 20 February 2024, a day after the alleged murders, he called her and asked if she could do him a favour.

“He told me that he’d stolen some police files from the commissioner to do with Covid and he’d wanted me to get rid of a phone,” she told the court.

“He wanted me to turn the phone on, turn it off and throw it into some body of water. I was going to do it not knowing what it was.”

Lamarre-Condon specifically asked her to turn it on for about 10 minutes so it could “ping” and then turn it back off before disposing of it 30 to 40km from her home, the friend told the court.

Two days later, he called her again and said police had been searching for him.

“He’s said that the detectives had been at his mum’s place,” she said on Thursday.

“[He said] he had been set up for two guys missing in Sydney and he used to know one of them. He asked me again what I had to do with the phone so I told him what I was going to do.”

Unlike the earlier call, where the officer seemed “very easy to talk to”, she said his tone in the later discussion felt like “he wanted to hear from me that I knew what I had to do”.

Soon after, a different friend sent her a news article that said Baird and Davies had disappeared and Lamarre-Condon was wanted for questioning.

“I started reading through the article and it said that Jesse’s phone had sent messages to his friends saying he was going on a road trip to Perth,” she told the court. The friend never received a package from Lamarre-Condon.

The defence team has claimed Baird and Davies were accidentally shot in two separate struggles with the accused while he acted in “self-defence”.

The trial before Justice Natalie Adams continues.