Friend reveals killer dad Rowan Baxter plotted to kill other family members
The man who killed his estranged wife and their three children in a car fire planned on murdering other people, his wife’s friend said.
Rowan Baxter ambushed Hannah Clarke and their children Aaliyah, 6, Laianah, 4 and Trey, 3, on their school run before dousing the four in petrol and setting them alight in a car in Brisbane’s suburb of Camp Hill last week.
Baxter later died from self-inflicted wounds.
Speaking to The Australian, Clarke’s friend Nikki Brooks said Baxter had told Clarke how he had planned to kill his ex-partner and their son Isaiah years earlier.
“Hannah had told me that he had a rope and something in his car,” Brooks said.
“He’d driven to do it. He’d prepared what he needed to kill Isaiah and [Isaiah’s mother] and then didn’t do it. Isaiah would have been maybe seven or eight. It was the first time she was going to leave him as well.”
Brooks said Baxter told Clarke he had almost killed another person in a separate incident, resulting in a conviction for grievous bodily harm.
“Hannah just knew there was a road rage incident – he lost his mind and nearly beat someone to death,” she said.
“He would make it out to be someone else’s fault, of course – someone did something and he acted the way he did because he had a baby in the car.”
Brooks gave a statement to Queensland police a week before Clarke’s death.
“I was giving an affidavit to the police to support Hannah’s claim that he’d breached a Domestic Violence Order,” she told A Current Affair.
Brooks said when Clarke “knew she’d made the right decision” when she left Baxter late last year.
“The day she came back she stayed with me and we felt safe. He didn’t know where I lived,” Brooks said.
“It was the happiest afternoon and night of our lives … She just looked relieved and she just seemed really happy. She knew she’d made the right decision.”
The Brisbane Lord Mayor’s Charitable Trust is now assisting Clarke’s family to set up a charity named ‘Small Steps 4 Hannah’, which aims to raise awareness of domestic violence and help save lives.