The Scene of the Crime

by Steve Braunias

  The point and the appeal of the murder narrative was that the setting was unpeopled. But that wasn’t true. I was given an instruction in myth and geography by Paul Toohey, one of the greatest essayists and journalists in Australia. He attended the trial. He stood out: he was cool. I’d see him tooling around the streets of Darwin in his Chev Impala. He later wrote a brilliant book about the Falconio murder, The Killer Within: Inside the World of Bradley John Murdoch. The subtitle said it all. Toohey’s book was much less any kind of hard-boiled murder inquiry than an intimate and scary guide to the lawless society of the Top End. He said to me, ‘Murder is just murder. We like to romanticise death in the north, but we sometimes forget that it’s not a great death just because it happened in the north. It’s just another murder. But for some reason it interests people. The setting is vast, and it is empty, but it’s not necessarily lonely. It’s just that people are able to get away with things easier up here.’

  Murdoch ran drugs, hauling kilos of dope on long-distance drives between Broome and Adelaide. He took speed to keep himself awake. He took his dog, Jack, for company. He took a gun.

  Toohey wrote in his book, ‘Brad Murdoch is not just Brad Murdoch. He’s a breed, a type. There are Murdochs all across northern Australia and they run to kind. White or beige Toyota Land Cruiser HZJ75 utility. Six-pack foam esky for up front of the cab on long drives . . . Weapons of various types — revolvers, pistols, rifles.’

  I didn’t know anyone like that, and I didn’t know anything about that whole scene. I doubt I was alone in that among the press at the Supreme Court. There were a lot of Australian journalists, and also a squad sent out, with seemingly little pleasure going by their steady litany of complaints about Darwin life, from England. They kept apart. The twain did not meet between Australia and England. It was a strange, unspoken apartheid. Most of the English were sequestered in a room with CCTV of the court proceedings. They could have chosen to sit in court; there were usually spare seats on the press bench. I went to and fro, stateless, bewildered at the weird division in attitudes. I found it hard to regard the trial as any kind of whodunit, only a wheredunit — Falconio’s body has never been found. In general, Australian journalists were confident that Murdoch was guilty as charged. Almost unanimously, the English had it in for Joanne Lees. They suspected her of something. Either Falconio was dead, and she knew more than she let on; or he was alive, and she was complicit in that, too. They hated everything about her — her manner, her clothes. They talked of her as aloof and snooty, a hard-faced bitch. They remained in a state of scorn at her decision a few days after the murder to give a press conference wearing a T-shirt with the words CHEEKY MONKEY.

  The powerful dislike, the baseless suspicions . . . Darwin’s newspaper, Northern Territory News, marked a civic anniversary during the trial by running old photos of memorable moments in the Top End. There was one of the biggest crocodile ever captured and killed; kids played in its vast open jaws. There was also a fullpage photo of a couple walking up the front steps of the Darwin Supreme Court in 1975. The husband wore a white shirt and tie. The wife wore a thin sundress. The bright light of Darwin burned their black shadows onto the courthouse steps. I still have that photo of Michael and Lindy Chamberlain.

  2

  Until I got to Darwin, the biggest person I’d ever seen at close quarters was Jonah Lomu. It was over lunch at the All Blacks training headquarters in Palmerston North before the 1999 World Cup. He ate an omelette scrambled from approximately 4000 eggs, and drank milk straight from the cow, draining it in one gulp, and then he said: ‘More.’ Certainly he was very big. But he was as a will o’ the wisp compared to the giant accused of murder in the Darwin Supreme Court. Lees had said of Murdoch’s attack that night in 2001: ‘He just seemed to be all around me and over me.’

  I looked at him a lot in the dock. He was 47 years old and 6’ 5” with a large face, broad chest, and enormous hands. The skin was drawn tight over his bones. His mouth was a narrow, bitter slot. His spectacles gave him the plausible appearance of scholarship as he studied maps and underlined transcripts. He listened closely to evidence and filled out exercise books with a ballpoint pen that looked like a toothpick held in his great fist. When he stood, soaring above his two security guards, he picked up a briefcase and would leave the courtroom like a man rushing towards his next appointment.

  He had nowhere to go. Only downstairs to the cells, munching on salad rolls for lunch, and then he was escorted to the nearby Berrimah Prison each night. In court, he peered over his spectacles at prosecutor Rex Wild QC, at his defence barrister Grant Althie, at the jury, and sometimes at the public gallery. In the front row, there were Falconio’s parents, Luciano and Joan, a small, forlorn couple who trudged the hot pavements of Darwin every afternoon back to their room at the Saville Hotel. Behind them sat Joanne Lees.

  She wore white blouses and long cream skirts to court. Her long black hair was bunched in a Lady Jayne band. She had an oval face and an angry mouth. She chewed gum, she crossed her very attractive legs, she sometimes took the opportunity to inspect the creature in the dock. During recess, she sat with Falconio’s mum and dad; one afternoon, Luciano patted her shoulder, and kept his hand there for a few seconds.

  Murdoch was immense. Lees was voluptuous. Peter Falconio was the man who wasn’t there. As the second witness at the trial, Luciano was asked for his son’s age. He said, ‘It was 28 when he died.’ Murdoch’s lawyer told the jury, ‘Sometimes people disappear.’ Crown prosecutor Rex Wild: ‘He was made to disappear.’

  A couple told the court they saw a man they thought was Falconio call into their shop about a week after the murder to buy a Coke and a Mars Bar. They couldn’t get their story straight. The man said he served her, the woman said she did; God knows how they were allowed to give evidence. Police received eight reports of Falconio after 14 July ‘all over Australia’. They also received reports of him on dates before he ever arrived in the country.

  ‘I’ve heard it said as the Peter Falconio mystery,’ Wild said to the jury. ‘There is no mystery.’ Lees said when Falconio got out of the Kombi to talk to the motorist whom she identified as Murdoch, she heard him say, ‘Cheers, mate.’ His last words. And then she heard a loud sound, like an engine backfiring, like a single gunshot. She screamed his name. ‘He didn’t come,’ said Wild. ‘He couldn’t have come.’

  Police searches at the crime scene unearthed bottle tops and the remains of a kangaroo. All that was left of Falconio was a pool of his blood beneath a little pyramid of dirt. He vanished along with his wallet containing $630 and his St Christopher’s necklace.

  Murdoch has always maintained the charges were a police stitch-up, that he was going about his illegal business some 600 kilometres away that night. He had the support in court of his girlfriend, Jan Pitman, a big woman who wore three rings on each hand. Sometimes she was joined by true-crime author Robin Bowles, who wore three rings on each finger. Bowles wrote a book about the murder. Slowly, I would expect; whenever she visited the press room, she jabbed at her keyboard with one very long fingernail.

  Her book raised the suggestion that Falconio may have been drug-running. Equally, he may have been abducted by aliens. The notion that Falconio was alive and well somewhere — outer space, anywhere — was taken up in two books by two hacks, Roger Maynard and Richard Shears. Maynard’s book was called Where’s Peter? It begged for a subtitle. Something along the lines of Oh For Christ’s Sake He’s Most Likely Fucking Dead is Where.

  3

  Lees and Falconio were on their way to New Zealand. They had done Nepal, Singapore, Cambodia, Thailand; the plan was to fly out of Brisbane and spend five weeks in the North and South Islands, where they would celebrate their birthdays, his on 20 September, hers five days later. But first, the drive north, through the Outback, towards Darwin.

  Murdoch left school at 15. He’d worked as a truck driver and a mechanic. He was a nasty piece of work with form (jailed for shooting at Aborigines after a fo
otball match, charged with the rape and abduction of a 12-year-old girl and her mother but found not guilty). He lived in a caravan behind a workshop in Broome. He was fastidious, very particular about things; he said he liked BP service stations: ‘They’ve got clean fuel.’ He drove long distances in bare feet, and stepped out wearing either thongs or moccasins. He stayed awake on the big drug runs by taking speed. ‘I always have it in a cup of tea.’

  On the morning of 14 July, Lees and Falconio called into a Red Rooster fast-food outlet. Murdoch camped overnight, and had Weet-Bix and tea for breakfast. He was on his way from Sedan to Broome with about 11 kilograms of dope hidden in the Toyota. Fussily, again, he’d been looking everywhere for a particular grey colour for a dash mat: ‘I was at the end of my tether.’ He was with his dog, Jack, a Dalmatian–Blue Heeler cross. He bought chicken at Red Rooster to share with the dog. ‘Jack was a bit of a liker on nuggets.’

  Lees and Falconio watched a camel-racing event, and left Alice in the late afternoon. Lees drove; Falconio rested in the back, reading The Catcher in the Rye. They played The Stone Roses.

  By then, said Murdoch, he was nowhere near. He’d turned off Stuart Highway, and into the Tanami Desert, ‘rolling along like Tommy Tourist’.

  Darkness fell. At about 8pm that night a man in a 4WD indicated for Falconio to pull over, gesturing that there was something wrong with the Kombi’s exhaust. Falconio stopped the van. He took his cigarettes; ‘Cheers, mate’; and then on a night without a moon in it, an explosive sound, and a stranger coming around to the side of the Kombi and sticking a gun to Lees’ head. He ordered her out. He put his knee on her back, and strapped her wrists together with cable ties. He punched her in the head. He threw her in the back of his 4WD. Lees told the court she was more afraid of rape than death. He just seemed to be all around me and over me.

  Amazingly, she managed to escape. She jumped out of the back of the vehicle, ran into the scrub, and hid there for five hours in shock and fear until she flagged down a truck driver. He took her to the pub at Barrow Creek to call police. Saturday night in the Outback: there was more beer and cheer than usual, because they were having a delayed New Year’s Eve celebration. It’s too hot in summer to throw a party, so locals wait seven months for the desert to cool.

  4

  That was exactly the kind of thing I wanted to hear. Locals wait seven months for the desert to cool. I wanted the Outback served up as a land of simple contrasts — mysterious and beautiful, hopeless and savage. I’d seen it for myself. The precious year I rode the magnificent Ghan train from Adelaide to Darwin. It took three days and two nights to cross two time zones and three deserts — Great Victoria, Simpson and Tanami — where I rolled along like Tommy Tourist. It was a mesmerising journey. Hour after hour, day after day of the desert void. The train disappeared into it. All around was spinifex grass, cassia trees, mulga bush. Thin, sharp, scraggly things, clinging on for dear life out of all that red earth. Once it entered the subtropical Northern Territory as it neared Darwin, there were water buffalo, rosellas, galahs, even the spangled drongo. Most strikingly, and abundantly, there were also termite mounds, which went by the fabulous word ‘termitaria’.

  The only people I saw were the rabble onboard the train. I was among 25 other journalists on a junket; the party included two Australians who I raised hell with one night until about 1.30am, when I left them breaking in to the train’s bar. They spent the rest of the trip under a kind of house arrest, confined to quarters. They were the only people I liked, so I retired to my compartment and stared out the window at the termitaria, at the desert emptiness.

  This was the landscape — epic, unpeopled — where I imagined Falconio and Lees experienced terror. As a pampered passenger on The Ghan, I was cut off from the sight or knowledge of Brad Murdoch types tooling around in 4WDs with their eskies and their guns; all I saw were birds, lightning, termitaria. I willingly romanticised death in the north. The setting was so overpowering — the red, hard Outback, and the way it softened heading north, towards the subtropics. Darwin itself was a wonderland. The sky at night was lit by silent electrical storms over the Timor Sea. An illegal snake-dealer was caught with two black-headed pythons in a sack. Fishermen were urged to go up the Howard River where barramundi fed on prawns in the mangroves. There were hermit crab races — two heats of 10 on a sandy board — every night at the Fox ’n’ Fiddle. It was December, the wet season, 34 fructifying degrees, with fruit bats in the tops of the banyan trees. A 2-metre saltwater crocodile was found prowling the streets. A public meeting was held to discuss methods of waging war on cane toads.

  It was so exotic, so removed from prosaic New Zealand. But one day in court I heard a sound I recognised. It was the familiar vowels of a New Zealander. It came from the prosecution’s star witness, James Hepi, who led the police to Murdoch, and gave crucial evidence against him. The two men had a brief exchange in court. I felt proud to hear the Australian drawl countered by the musical voice of a Maori.

  Murdoch said, ‘You’re a fucken liar.’

  Hepi said, ‘Fuck you.’

  5

  Hepi was Murdoch’s partner-in-crime in the dope-smuggling business. The contraband was usually powerful skunk weed. It paid well. But Hepi got busted with about 4.5 kilograms of the stuff on him, and was looking at jail. ‘I had an ace up my sleeve called Brad Murdoch,’ he said to Paul Toohey, the Darwin journalist, ‘and I used it.’ Meaning, he suspected Murdoch was Falconio’s killer, and gave his name to the police in exchange for a suspended sentence.

  Hepi claimed Murdoch had told him that the best place to bury a body was in a spoon drain. He claimed he saw Murdoch making cable-tie handcuffs. Hepi claimed he could definitely identify Murdoch as the man on CCTV at a Shell service station on the night of 14 July, placing him at a time and location near the alleged murder: ‘I know exactly who it is. I spent a lot of time around that man. I know how he stands. I know how he walks.’

  There was such a New Zealandness to Hepi’s heavy, truculent sarcasm at the trial. Yes, he said to Murdoch’s lawyer, Grant Althie, he was definitely interested in collecting the police reward of $250,000 that led to the arrest. ‘Who do I see about it — you?’

  He was also cross-examined on his attempts to collect the Winfield Gold cigarette butts that Murdoch smoked, with the intent of collecting DNA. ‘If it matched the Northern Territory murder, good job.’

  Althie: ‘What did you do about it?’

  Hepi: ‘It’s not as if I’ve got a DNA lab in my back pocket, mate.’

  Hepi said he threw away the butts. There was other circumstantial evidence, independent of Hepi, that pinned Murdoch to the murder. His DNA was matched to the cable ties, and the Kombi’s gearstick. Althie said the cops put it there.

  A spot of Murdoch’s blood was identified on Lees’ T-shirt. Rex Wild told the jury: ‘It’s the most single significant piece of evidence in this case. It ties this man to this woman on this day.’ Althie said the cops put it there.

  There were discrepancies. Lees told the court that she had tried to release her hand bindings by rubbing them with lip-balm; police found the lid in a search the next day, but only located the tube three months later. You can guess what Althie said about that, but here is the exact quote: ‘Maybe a kangaroo took it away and put it back. Perhaps it was a dingo, or a zephyr of wind. Another possibility is that somebody, one of the police officers, put it there.’

  Lees said Murdoch punched her in the head. Murdoch said if he punched her in the head then she wouldn’t have got up. Lees said the man had a gun with a silver barrel. Murdoch owned two guns — a .357 Magnum, and a Beretta — and neither had a silver barrel. Lees said the man threw her from the front seat of his car into the back tray. Murdoch’s Toyota didn’t have front to rear access. In ‘the agony of the moment’, argued Wild, she ought to be allowed the benefit of the doubt.

  Althie argued that his client ought to be allowed the benefit of the doubt, too. The national manhunt to find the culpr
it took over two years; police were desperate to make an arrest; was Murdoch simply convenient? Nearly a whole volume of the six-volume set of court transcripts from the trial was devoted to the murky CCTV image of Murdoch or whoever it was at the Shell station on the night of the murder. ‘That man could have come from anywhere,’ Althie said. ‘It’s just a guy at a truckstop with a moustache.’ He also denied that the 4WD caught on CCTV was Murdoch’s vehicle; one of his most compelling arguments was that it didn’t match the bullbar Murdoch bought from someone with the fabulous name of Woggie Minshull.

  The jury deliberated for eight hours. I remember strolling around and looking at the artwork in the court building. One showed a former chief justice smoking a pipe in the foreground and a nude peeling her top off in the background. Another was a canvas with white lettering on black paint. It read Thou shalt not kill.

  Murdoch was given a life sentence with non-parole of 28 years. In 2014, his lawyers withdrew an appeal against his conviction. He’d wanted a retrial, claiming ‘a miscarriage of justice’. His appeal was based on the notion that the prosecution had groomed Joanne Lees ‘secretly, deliberately and improperly’, because they feared the jury would find her resolutely unlikeable.

  Well, possibly. Murdoch still has believers, people on his side. It’s just that they seemed deranged. Someone called Keith Allan Noble is the author of a 2011 book with a curiously placed exclamation mark in the title. Find! Falconio is described as an ‘exposition of Australia’s strangest disappearance (murder or missing?) and of the associated misinvestigations, cover-ups, and incompetence. Reveals the show trial in which the jury was lied to. Encourages readers to get involved in finding the British visitor (and drug courier?) Peter Falconio — dead or alive.’ Noble is also the author of a book which argues the innocence of Port Arthur mass murderer Martin Bryant.