by Sue Williams
Murdoch would work for a while for one or other of the companies around town, then disappear for weeks at a time. He rarely explained where he’d been or what he’d done during those long absences, and no-one wanted to ask. ‘He didn’t work on a continuous basis,’ says Edward Egerton-Warburton, who worked alongside Murdoch as a mechanic for his brother-in-law, Duthie. ‘Several times he left to go away or work elsewhere and then would come back and work for a little while.’ Even his girlfriends were unsure where he went. ‘At times I knew he’d be going away on a trip because he told me,’ says Beverley Allan, at the time thirty-eight, who worked at Broome Diesel and Hydraulics Service where Murdoch was an occasional customer. The pair had started going out in October 2000. ‘He’d be gone sometimes for a week at a time, sometimes up to three weeks. I [only] knew where he was going a few of the times.’
When Murdoch did stay in Broome and work, however, he was constantly fiddling with his own vehicles. He changed the configuration and the style of them often, but never seemed to be satisfied with any of them. ‘He always seemed to be working on his own vehicles,’ says Egerton-Warburton. ‘He was always tinkering. That would be his hobby: maintaining and working on his vehicles.’ For his personal use, he favoured Toyota Landcruisers as they were rugged enough for every kind of terrain, powerful enough to be driven long distances at speed, and spacious enough to carry all manner of goods and equipment. You could even live in them if you ever needed to. Murdoch enjoyed adding extra features, taking away others and adapting his vehicles to every kind of job. At one stage, he installed oversized fuel tanks capable of carrying an extra 200 litres of diesel, which would enable him to drive more than 1800 kilometres without refuelling. And at another, he’d change the open back tray, or mix and match his vehicles, buying old cars and newer secondhand vehicles, and cannibalising parts and sections. He’d tell anyone who asked that it was just an interest, but the police would say later it was for a far more sinister purpose. For those long, unexplained absences, he’d designed a series of vehicles that were perfect for transporting large quantities of drugs around the country, they would claim, and he changed the look of the vehicles frequently so people wouldn’t start recognising one single car, and becoming suspicious.
LIFE WAS GOING WELL, BUT Murdoch decided the caravan wasn’t the ideal base for his activities, and he rented a unit near the corner of Forrest Street and Guy Street, 2 kilometres from the heart of town. It was nice and private, in a little double-rowed complex protected by thickets of brilliant bougainvillea and gum trees. It was convenient too. Close by was Fong’s Store, a mini-mart that sold almost everything, and Murdoch quickly befriended the owners.
‘He used to come here for a yack,’ says Graham Fong. ‘He was a nice bloke.’ His wife Meg agrees. ‘He was moody at first, then when you got to know him, he was all right. We don’t live in each other’s pockets here, you know? People don’t like to know each other’s business. We all keep separate. But I make everyone talk to me. No-one gets away.’
Two blocks away through the soft orange dust was Murdoch’s favourite drinking hole, the Beer and Satay Hut at the Palms Resort on Hopton Street. Just by the little swimming pool along from the blocks of low-priced rooms is the outdoor bar beneath a novelty thatched roof, covered with corrugated iron to protect it from the storms, with stools or white plastic tables and chairs for the more discerning drinkers. Beyond is a pool table with the pool competition results chalked up on a board, and the small barbecue hut that gives the place its name, serving hearty steaks, pumpkin, peas and chips. Marge, who’s been cooking there for years, says Murdoch was a regular.
‘He used to come and sit at the bar,’ she says. ‘I used to say hello as he was there so often. But he never used to talk. It was mostly locals drinking there, especially in the off season. It’s the people who live nearby who like it most, so they can stagger home afterwards. A lot of them come at 5 p.m. for Happy Hour, go home for a shower, then come back again for the rest of the evening. For a lot of them, it’s every night, too.’
Even when relaxing, Murdoch didn’t like leaving his guns behind — by this stage, a Magnum 357 handgun and a .22 revolver. At home, he’d hide them under the bed in the spare room or tape them with heavy masking tape to the underside of the kitchen table. When he was driving, he’d stash them in a hidden compartment of the side panel on the driver’s side door, or tuck them down beside the seat. But generally he much preferred to keep one on him at all times, tucked into a leather shoulder holster that he could wear beneath his shirt, so the gun sat hidden under the left armpit. At times, he exuded an air of quiet menace; at others he looked comparatively harmless among some of the other characters who frequented the bar. It wasn’t long before he started talking to one of them, a gruff, dark-skinned, broad-shouldered Maori called James Hepi.
Nine years younger than Murdoch, Hepi was a muscular labourer who’d drifted into Broome in 1998 to work as a pearl diver. The work was extremely hard, however, and Hepi had quickly moved on to other things. He drove taxis for a few years and took on grass-cutting contracts. He’d also bought a cheap property in South Australia, a rundown house on an isolated 75-acre back block of the Riverland, deep in the mallee country at Sedan. He was a well-known figure around Broome, a casual knockabout kind of guy, thickset with unruly black hair and a deep, husky growl, who’d do pretty much any little job for cash. The pair got on well and, after a while, Hepi moved into Murdoch’s unit to share the place with him. They also took a trip to SA to view Hepi’s property. The mallee attracts few visitors, with its long stretches of uninhabited country, broken up with fields of barley, durum wheat and lucern. The only real plant to thrive there these days is the spindly, squat tree-like eucalyptus shrub that gives the area its name. In earlier times, the soil was rich and dark, and vast tracts of fertile farmland were owned by single families, passing them down proudly through the generations. But with the fall in produce prices and successive harsh droughts, many of the older families abandoned the area and subdivided their plots. As a result, nowadays it attracts a different sort of settler. Land is cheap and housing even cheaper, with 80-acre blocks of land sold for as little as $16,000, two-bedroom stone-built homes on sizeable acreages for a bargain $73,000, and nothing much to do but shoot animals, camp, fish and hide out. ‘Too many ferals these days,’ publican David Pearce remarks as he stands behind the bar of the Sedan Hotel. ‘They’ve moved in because the places are dirt cheap. The blocks are all remote and hidden away, and the police don’t bother with them, so they grow drugs. You never know what goes on around here. Often, you don’t want to know.’
Hepi had bought his secluded property in 1998 for $34,000, and divided his time between Sedan and Broome. In Sedan, he’d established a business sourcing cannabis and amphetamines, parcelling them up with the help of an older male friend, and then driving them to Broome to sell. In around 1999, when Hepi returned to New Zealand to see family, he invited Murdoch to join him. He also introduced him to his friend who, together with his wife and young daughter, seemed to warm instantly to Murdoch. On one visit, the wife even gave him a puppy to replace his late, beloved Boxer. It was a Dalmatian cross, which he named Jack.
From that time on, Murdoch and Hepi took turns to make the 4300-kilometre run from Sedan to Broome. They’d get organised in Hepi’s shed, load crates for their cargo and a spare fuel tank into Murdoch’s ute, then lay plywood sheets, carpet and a mattress over the top. While that made the back sit slightly higher than the tray sides, it was level so it was fine if either of them needed to unfurl a swag. Murdoch would stock up with food and drink, usually beer and iced coffee which was kind to a gnawing hiatus hernia, and fill his extra tanks with diesel. They’d use one of several mobile phones they had to coordinate their activities, and then usually throw it away to avoid being traced. Then they’d head north past the vast inhospitable Simpson Desert, and take a left across the Tanami Track, the long, mostly dirt road that’s a monotonous 1050-kilometre short-cut t
hrough the Tanami Desert to Halls Creek in the far northwest. The advantage of this route was that there were never any troublesome inspections aimed at stopping the dangerous pest, the fruit fly, from being spread. They’d then continue through the northern rim of the Great Sandy Desert, and back again. Turnaround time for the 8600-kilometre return trip would be about a week. It was a lucrative business: half a kilogram (a pound) of good cannabis could be bought from local hydroponic growers in SA for around $2700 and on-sold in WA for between $15,000 and $20,000.
For those long drives, Murdoch even had a special cushion made for his new pup, Jack, who by now was accompanying him everywhere. Often he also took a cat he’d adopted in Broome too. ‘The dog was a bit loopy as pups are till they’re two, but he was faithful,’ says a close mate of 15 years, Peter Jamieson. ‘It just liked to run.’ Which meant Murdoch sometimes couldn’t let the dog out of the cab unless he knew he’d be able to catch him again, something that would occasionally prove a real problem.
CHAPTER NINE
THE CITY OF CORPSES
TO LOCALS, ADELAIDE IS KNOWN as the City of Churches. Others know the genteel capital of SA by a more sinister title: the City of Corpses. For while Adelaide did indeed once have more churches per capita than any other Australian city, it also lays claim to the grisly record of having been home to far more bizarre mass murders than any other. Author Salman Rushdie once visited Adelaide in the 1980s and described it as a perfect setting for a Stephen King novel or horror movie. Hearing of the gruesome toll of serial killings, bodies found horrifically mutilated and the mysterious disappearance of young children, he said ominously, ‘Sleepy conservative towns are where those things happen.’
Adelaide’s macabre subtext is not, however, immediately apparent to casual visitors. Arriving in Adelaide after the long drive from Canberra and Melbourne, both Peter Falconio and Joanne Lees felt their spirits soar as they rattled over the green Mount Lofty Ranges to the east of the city, and then through the leafy parklands that ring it. The day was sunny and warm, and Adelaide sparkled as Joanne pored over the map. After the chaotic sprawl of Sydney, and the complex tangle of motorways on the approach to Melbourne, Adelaide came as a pleasant surprise. The town centre is a compact, well-planned grid, criss-crossed by a series of wide, tree-lined boulevards which makes it easy to navigate and very beautiful. In stark contrast to the bigger cities, it also has a mellow, laidback pace, coupled with an easygoing liberalism residents claim dates back to the days when it was the only Australian city to be founded by free settlers. South Australia, after all, was the first to give women the vote and the first to decriminalise homosexuality under the flamboyant, pink-shorted Premier Don Dunstan in 1975.
Locals are proud of its cosmopolitan air, and are astounded that the city of just over a million people isn’t able to attract as many visitors as it so obviously deserves. It has countless attractions: excellent restaurants of every ethnicity; the sprawling undercover food market on Rundle Street; and even free buses around the city centre. Close by are the pine-fringed beachfront at Glenelg, and the picturesque wineries of the Barossa Valley, responsible for a quarter of Australia’s total wine production, as well as the Adelaide Hills. In addition, SA is known as ‘The Festival State’, and Adelaide prides itself on the 500-odd festivals it holds every year, ranging from international arts and theatrical festivals to small regional events.
Outsiders, however, are under no illusion why visitors, particularly from overseas, so frequently ignore Adelaide. For a start, it feels in the middle of nowhere, jutting up against the sea to its west and with its northern outer suburbs petering out into the great featureless central deserts. Then there’s the climate: filthy hot and buzzing with flies and mosquitoes in summer, and temperatures that dip towards freezing in winter. And, finally, all those chilling crimes …
THE JURY’S OUT ON JUST why Adelaide has been the scene of so many gruesome events. South Australian police chiefs claim it’s mere coincidence, and allegations that their state is the murder capital of Australia and according to one notable later British documentary, of the world, are way off the mark. But by the same token, it’s true that the sheer scale of some of those crimes in Adelaide monster those of elsewhere. Backpacker visitors, in particular, love to dwell on the city’s morbid history. ‘We like to frighten each other with scary stories about life — and death — here,’ says Bridie O’Loughlin, an Irish backpacker working casual shifts in one of the city’s hostels. ‘It makes us all feel braver. It’s part of the experience of crossing Australia. It’s a rite of passage.’ Peter and Joanne were no exception. Like many tourists, they weren’t spending long in Adelaide, just time enough for a quick sprint around the main sights. Staying a night in the Windsor Gardens Caravan Park on the eastern outskirts of the city, they also picked up another six months worth of registration for the Kombi, with new South Australian plates, W01 597. The long road north was their focus, their first venture into the vast sunburnt outback they’d heard so much about. To two young Britons, raised in small green villages outside Huddersfield, the outback was a new experience, a taste of the real Australia, a glimpse of the unfathomable vastness of the continent, and an adventure in the truest sense of the word.
But the horror stories nagged. Dropping into the seaside suburb of Glenelg for a stroll along the sandy beach, for instance, it was hard to dismiss thoughts of the mystery that has plagued Australia since 1966, the abduction of the three Beaumont children, Jane, nine, Arnna, seven, and four-year-old Grant. They failed to return from a lone Australia Day outing with Jane in charge, and the biggest search ever mounted in Australia found nothing. Five years later, just south of Adelaide, a man went berserk and shot dead ten of his relatives, including his wife, their new baby and seven of their other children. The Bartholomew murders were, at the time, SA’s worst. Two years on, another two children, Joanne Ratcliffe, eleven, and Kirsty Gordon, four, disappeared from the Adelaide Oval while watching a football match and, in a case that brought painful memories flooding back of the Beaumont siblings, they were never seen again.
But there was worse to come. In the Truro area, which Peter and Joanne drove through for a flying visit to Adelaide’s stunningly beautiful wine-producing district of the Barossa Valley, Australia’s deadliest pair of serial killers were once active. The bodies of seven young women, aged between fifteen and twenty-six, were variously found shot and stabbed to death over seven weeks from December 1976. James Miller was later sentenced to life imprisonment while his accomplice and lover, Christopher Worrell, was killed in a car accident two days after the pair’s last victim disappeared. Even as that case was winding up, however, another series of murders was alarming the authorities. In what were to become known as ‘The Family Murders’ in the four years from 1979, five males, one aged just fourteen, were abducted, held prisoner, drugged, sexually assaulted, horrifically mutilated and murdered. Their bodies were all found, one diced in garbage bags, on the outskirts of Adelaide. Local accountant Bevan Spencer von Einem was convicted of the murder of one fifteen-year-old and charged with the murders of two other teenagers, but the charges were dropped by the Director of Public Prosecutions when vital evidence was ruled inadmissible. He was jailed for thirty-six years.
PETER AND JOANNE HAD BEEN looking forward to their trip to the wine-producing Barossa Valley and they set out early the next day. It was the beginning of July 2001 and the middle of winter, and the mornings were chill with a light frost snapping on the grass as they walked over the verge to their Kombi which was parked by the main road. Joanne pulled her fleece tighter around her. As soon as the sun came up, she knew it would be warmer, but she was still keenly anticipating heading north into the stronger sunshine. This would be the pair’s last sightseeing side trip before taking the long highway to the Northern Territory and, although they were impatient to begin their epic journey, they knew it could be many years before they returned to Australia and they were determined not to miss a thing.
The B1
0 road northeast towards the Barossa drilled a straight line through flat, featureless suburbs of single-storey homes with pretty wooden verandahs, charcoal chicken outlets and churches imploring their congregations on giant billboards to ‘Come To God!’ Just to the north was Elizabeth, a 1950s township built primarily for the ‘ten-pound Poms’, the Britons offered cheap fares to migrate to Australia. Plagued with social problems, just like many of Britain’s New Towns, Elizabeth is nevertheless notable for producing members of three of Australia’s most famous bands — AC/DC, Men At Work and Cold Chisel.
As the housing estates petered out, the Torrens Valley slowly unfolded, the rolling hills a brilliant emerald green, dotted with grey ghost gums, creeks snaking through their folds and the odd lone farm building glowing in honeyed sandstone. The Kombi rattled through villages selling antiques, and past front gardens fiercely pruned, stripped of all native vegetation and planted with roses and peonies in order to look like English country gardens. An elderly man cutting back his hedge with shears stopped to wave, and the pair laughed at the signs advertising ‘Pony Poo $2 a kilo’, and the sight of llamas amid the cows and sheep on the hillsides. At the picturesque Barossa town of Angaston, its avenues lined with huge fig trees, there is a crossroads, and Peter and Joanne debated briefly which way to turn. To their left, lay the main road north towards Alice Springs and Darwin; to their right, the more irregular, lumbering hills and rougher stony outcrops of the desolate mallee country off towards Sedan and Swan Reach.
