Frances Crawford confronted her Royal Australian Air Force pilot husband about his repeated affairs and flights booked for other women days before she was allegedly killed, a court in Brisbane has heard.
Robert John Crawford, 49, denies murdering his wife in July 2024 and staging her death as a lawnmower accident at their 100-acre property in Upper Lockyer, south-east Queensland.
Prosecutors allege Crawford lived a double life and killed Frances to avoid losing millions of dollars in a divorce. Her body was found near a ride-on mower at the bottom of a retaining wall.
The prosecution alleges she died from strangulation or blunt force trauma to the head. Crawford has pleaded not guilty.
Affairs at the centre of the Robert Crawford trial
The Supreme Court heard that Crawford had several relationships during his marriage, including affairs with a pilot, two RAAF colleagues, a real estate agent and a woman he met on the dating website eHarmony.
Prosecutors said he misled his wife about his movements, claiming he was away on work trips or staying at the RAAF base at Amberley, south-west of Brisbane. He allegedly deleted messages and arranged interstate and overseas flights for other women.
The court heard that, after travelling to Italy for work, Crawford began a relationship with a colleague in his squadron. They became intimate during a work trip to the Solomon Islands, and he later visited the woman at her Brisbane home most weeks over two years.
In mid-2023, he allegedly began another relationship with a RAAF colleague and booked return flights for her to Queenstown, although the tickets were later cancelled.
After moving out of the family home, Crawford began a relationship with a buyer’s agent he met while moving into a rental property, prosecutors said. Around the same time, he started communicating with a woman in Western Australia through eHarmony.
The Western Australian woman travelled to visit him, while the buyer’s agent ended her relationship with Crawford soon afterwards. When the woman returned home and asked to be reimbursed, the court heard, Crawford did not respond and blocked her.
Prosecutors also told the court of other alleged encounters, including a sexual relationship during a training exercise in Japan, sex with a nurse in 2018 and sex with a friend. Crawford allegedly told Frances he had contracted a sexually transmitted disease from using a public toilet.
In messages shown to the jury, Frances accused her husband of lacking empathy and being unfaithful. “All those girls to stroke your ego,” she wrote during an argument on a weekend trip to Kingscliff in northern New South Wales.
She also told him: “You are a miserable excuse for a human being. A f—ing cheat!” The defence said the argument later resolved and that the couple’s messages provided the best account of their relationship at the time.
Defence says death was a tragic accident
Saul Holt, defending, said Crawford’s account had remained unchanged: he woke to find his wife was not in bed, searched the property and found her beneath the mower.
Mr Holt said the machine’s wheel was turned sharply to the right, its brake was off and it was in reverse when it was found. He told the jury mower rollovers were not uncommon and that Frances had been using the machine after repeatedly asking her husband to do the work.
The defence also argued that the police investigation had been influenced by an earlier domestic violence incident involving the couple. An officer allegedly told colleagues that Crawford had broken in with an axe, leaving Frances “cowering in her room”.
Mr Holt said the incident had “all the red flags for domestic violence” and had led officers to approach Frances’s death with a “close-minded” view. He said the scene could not be explained as staged.
He rejected the prosecution’s suggestion that money motivated the alleged killing, describing it as “a headline” rather than evidence. “The defence case is that this was not murder, not by Robert Crawford, and not by anyone else,” he said.
The trial before Justice Lincoln Crowley continues.
