by Sue Williams
‘She was sort of saying, “Help me, look I’m tied up”,’ says Millar. ‘I was trying to sort of see, and she was showing me her hands.’ Then he saw the cable ties around her wrists, the duct tape on one of her legs, and the tape in her hair and around her neck. ‘Geez, hang on a minute, stay here!’ he told her before calling out to Adams in the cab: ‘I got some sheila out here all tied up! Come out and give us a hand!’
Adams climbed down from the cab to see Millar with a woman in handcuffs with duct tape hanging off her. ‘She was almost hysterical,’ he says. ‘She had ties around her wrist, and I sort of looked and thought: “There’s something wrong here”.’
Joanne was crying and talking at the same time, trying to explain what had happened, and telling them about someone called Peter Falconio. ‘My boyfriend’s gone, I can’t find my boyfriend,’ she kept saying, over and over, between sobs. ‘I can’t find my car.’
Millar tried to assess the situation. ‘You could see she was shocked and, I suppose, disturbed,’ he says. He yelled at Adams to get some cutters from the toolbox and removed the cable ties, keeping them to give to the police. He then pulled off the duct tape on her leg, and started on the tape in her hair. In the end, it was far too painful having two men pulling at her hair so she took that out herself. The pair put her into the cab, sitting in the middle between them on the engine which was the warmest place. It was now 12.45 a.m. ‘Don’t worry,’ Millar told her gently. ‘You’re safe now. Everything’s going to be all right.’
AT EXACTLY THE SAME MOMENT, a man stopped for fuel at the Shell Truckstop — the large service station Joanne and Peter had driven past on their way north from Alice Springs. He had dark straight hair, a droopy moustache and a baseball cap, and was driving a white ute with a green canopy. He parked beside a bowser, pumped 120 litres of diesel — about 26 gallons or twice the capacity of a standard family saloon car — and then strode to the door of the shop. Andrew Head, the consol operator, hadn’t noticed the man drive up. It was a quiet night, and he’d been busy restocking one of the fridges.
The man took his time, picking up two bags of ice, two large bottles of Mount Franklin mineral water and a carton of iced coffee. He paid the bill of $136.65 in cash, with three $50 notes. Head assumed the man had long-range diesel tanks fitted to his ute, to buy that amount of fuel. ‘I can’t recall whether he spoke or not,’ he says.
The entire transaction was captured on the closed circuit security cameras.
RODNEY ADAMS TENDED TO THE injuries on Joanne’s knees, elbow and arm, all the while discussing with Vince Millar what to do next. They considered taking her to the police station at Alice Springs, then wondered if there’d be police at the station at Ti Tree. They felt sure Barrow Creek would be closed at this time of night.
But Joanne kept insisting she wanted to find Peter, and Millar eventually relented and said they’d have a look around. He moved the truck to the side of the road, disconnected the trailers, and turned the cab back to drive slowly north, looking along the sides of the road. At one stage, they noticed a small pyramid of dirt, around 15 to 20 centimetres high, at the edge of the bitumen, but their cab headlights were too patchy to be of much help. Only later were they to discover it was a pool of blood over which gravel had been hurriedly kicked. They also saw fresh tyre marks in a dirt track leading off the Stuart Highway 80 metres further north, but after following them for a short way, they doubled back for fear of getting bogged.
Joanne had begun recounting what had happened. ‘We couldn’t work out who Peter was,’ says Adams. ‘She said, “my boyfriend”, but through the sobbing it was hard to decipher a complete sentence.’ When she got to the part, however, where the man pulled out his gun, Millar blanched. He and Adams exchanged looks over her head.
‘How do you know he had a gun?’ Millar asked Joanne.
‘Cos he held it against my head when he tied me up,’ she replied.
Millar looked at her aghast. ‘So what the bloody hell are we doing out here looking around in the bush for a bloke that’s got a gun?’ he said. ‘It’s too dark, we’re not going to see anything.’ He drove back to the trailers, hooked them up again and headed south, the same direction the man had driven, towards Barrow Creek.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
A BLOW-IN AT BARROW CREEK
AT 1.30 A.M. ON SUNDAY 15 JULY 2001, the roadhouse at Barrow Creek was in full swing. Publican Les Pilton had been holding his annual New Year’s Eve party — his Christmas party had been the weekend before — and there were around fifteen diehard friends, family members and tourists propping up the bar. Pilton was a popular bloke in the area. He’d visited Barrow Creek from Alice Springs and liked it so much, he stayed … for the next thirty-four years. In 1988, he’d taken over the roadhouse, combining fuel pumps, the bar and various basic forms of accommodation.
Pilton, fifty-one, is a genial host. Two hundred thousand people a year drive up and down the Stuart Highway, he says, so if he meets only half of them, he’s got a pretty good social life. It wasn’t always so good, however. Five years after he and his wife of fifteen years moved to Barrow Creek, she went off with someone who’d also been passing through. Pilton tried to commit suicide, but failed. Since then, he feels he makes a contribution by chatting to everyone who comes through, even talking through their problems with them. ‘I think that’s part of the reason I’m here,’ he says. ‘I talk to people who have hard circumstances and understand how they feel. It’s a sort of ministry in a way. You help people.’ In 1999, Pilton had got together with an old friend the same age, Helen Jones, who’d also split up with her husband, and who’d returned to Alice Springs after a time away to nurse someone dying of cancer. She came up to live with him at Barrow Creek in early 2001.
The couple were proud of the place. Pilton serves cheerily behind the bar nearly every day, yarning with customers with unfailing good humour. ‘It’s a lifestyle kind of thing, I think,’ he says, of Barrow Creek, population eleven — all of whom work for him. ‘Some days are absolutely great here. And others are fucking fantastic!’
The dusty, stained walls of the bar are adorned with countless postcards and mementoes, including an old pair of panties, bra and various other items of underwear. Tattered army memorabilia takes up another space, as well as a decrepit Australian flag, crude jokes, and old cigarette packets beneath a shroud of spiders’ webs. There’s graffiti scrawled over the bar, and an old broken clock with the message that any time is ‘Beer O’Clock’. Behind the bar is a display of thousands of moth-eaten banknotes. Tradition has it that anyone passing through leaves one on the wall so, if they ever return, they’ll always have enough cash to buy another beer. Most Aboriginals still drink outside, buying their grog through a hatch in the wall. Some visitors see the roadhouse as an eccentric slice of old Australia; others as a filthy, decrepit hole in the middle of nowhere they only visit because there’s no alternative.
TRUCKIES VINCE MILLAR AND RODNEY ADAMS were sure the Barrow Creek Roadhouse would be shut, but all the lights were still blazing when they pulled up. Millar jumped out, but Joanne Lees refused to budge. ‘She wouldn’t move at that stage,’ says Adams. ‘She was terrified.’ The reason was obvious: she was petrified that the man might be inside. In the end, Millar said he’d go in alone to check the coast was clear. Adams stayed with Joanne. Inside, Millar found Les Pilton behind the bar and briefly explained what had happened.
‘Yeah, right mate!’ said Pilton, disbelievingly.
‘No mate,’ replied Millar. ‘It’s fair dinkum.’
Pilton looked at Millar’s eyes, and could see the adrenalin pumping. He nodded, and rang the nearest police station at Ti Tree, but only reached their answering machine. He then dialled Alice Springs, gave a precis of what he’d been told to the senior auxiliary on duty, Tony Stafford, and then passed the phone to Millar. Stafford told Millar he’d have to speak to someone higher up. ‘That fella doesn’t believe me,’ Millar told Pilton after their conversation had finished
, ‘but he says he’ll ring back.’ Pilton then went out to the truck with Millar to try help persuade Joanne to come in. She was sitting with her head on her knees. ‘I know you’ve had a hard time up the road,’ Pilton told her, ‘but this place is safe and we’ll look after you.’ Eventually Joanne agreed. She sat on a bar stool but refused offers of a stiff drink; instead, she agreed to a cup of tea.
Adams was pleased. ‘I thought: “cup of tea, half a teaspoon of sugar for shock, ideal”,’ he says.
For it was clear that she was still in shock. She was barely speaking, just nodding or shaking her head mutely. ‘She had calmed down from actually being out there,’ says Millar. ‘But she was just shocked. You could see there was some sort of shock there. She got upset … She was worrying about Peter all the time, that was her main concern. I think if Peter had been there with her, it wouldn’t have been so bad. But because Peter was gone …’
Pilton noticed the same thing. ‘When she was being asked about some of the events, she was welling up and started to have tears,’ he says. ‘Then she made herself not actually break down and fully cry.’
STAFFORD ALSO TRIED TO CONTACT the Ti Tree police, but got the answering machine as well. He called the watch commander, Senior Sergeant Geoff Sullivan, who called Barrow Creek and spoke to Joanne personally. When she’d put the phone down, the others noticed she was shivering. Millar went back to the truck to fetch her a jumper, while Pilton lit a fire in the grate. Millar suggested she might like some female company, and went out to wake up one of the bar staff, Cathy Curley, who’d gone to bed in one of the sheds 50 metres away from the main building about an hour before.
Curley came in ten minutes later, and introduced herself to Joanne. Her eyes took in everything: the grazes on her knees, elbows and arm, and the marks around her wrists from the cable ties. ‘She seemed a bit shaken up, so I offered to take her down to wash her face,’ says Curley. ‘[Her face was] a bit like, scrubby, dirty.’ There wasn’t a towel in the bathroom, so Curley took Joanne to the laundry to find one. At the sound of her voice, her eight-month-old Blue Heeler cross puppy Tex ran in. Joanne asked her what breed of dog Tex was. ‘A Blue Heeler,’ replied Curley. Joanne nodded. ‘I recognised it as the same breed of dog as the one that the man had,’ she says. The colours, however, were different — the man’s dog was black and brown, whereas Tex was more blue.
When the women returned to the bar, Pilton thought Joanne might want a nap as it would be a couple of hours before the police arrived. He took her to one of the rooms just off the bar area to lie down but she agreed to go in only if he left the light on and the door open, but even then she lay down for no more than a few minutes. She was far too wound up to sleep and was anxious for the police to arrive so they could start searching for Peter.
BRADLEY MURDOCH WAS THOUGHT TO be in the area at around the time, driving north from Alice Springs and then taking a left to thunder, in his white four-wheel-drive Landcruiser, across the dirt Tanami Track to Broome.
THE POLICE ARRIVED AT ABOUT 4.20 a.m. and took a statement from Joanne. Detective Sergeant Ian Kesby photographed her standing next to the cool room, took pictures of her injuries and asked his colleague, a female officer from Tennant Creek, Senior Constable Erica Sims, to examine her clothing. Sims found a hair that looked as if it might be from a dog. Then Kesby took Joanne outside and showed her a ute with a green canvas canopy, asking if that was similar to the vehicle her attacker had driven. ‘She said the canvas on the other ute was a darker colour,’ says Kesby. ‘You could go from the front to the back of the ute she was in, and there was bedding in the back. She was obviously in shock. She was shivering from time to time and was very upset.’
In the meantime, Helen Jones, Les Pilton’s Dublin-born girlfriend, who moved from London to Australia at the age of twenty with her then husband, had been woken up by all the commotion, and had come into the front bar to see what was going on. Jones saw Joanne sitting huddled by the fire. ‘She was very distressed and yet, in a strange way, calm,’ she says. ‘She just kept asking if anyone knew where Peter was.’
The police were glad to see Jones there, and asked her to give Joanne some fresh clothes and help her to shower. They needed her clothes as evidence. Jones led her to the bathrooms, and chatted to her to try to put the frightened girl — the same age as her youngest son — at her ease. Hearing her accent, Joanne relaxed a little. At least that was something familiar in this strange place, where everything else felt so foreign.
‘I felt so desperately sorry for her,’ says Jones. ‘She kept saying how much she missed everyone at home. But she was frightened that if she went home she would somehow be abandoning Peter.’ Jones asked her if she’d like to call England from the roadhouse, to tell her mum and stepfather what had happened. Joanne shook her head mutely. She knew she wouldn’t be able to find the words.
Outside, the police asked Millar to draw a rough map of the area where he’d found Joanne and to accompany them back out to the spot. He found the dark pile of gravel on the roadside again without any difficulty, even though it had, by now, been run over many times by other vehicles. It was only later that he found out it was blood. Soon after, he gave up driving trucks. Friends say he had too many flashbacks of that terrible night, and lost his taste for it.
Millar at least thought he’d brought an end to Joanne’s nightmare. But neither he nor she were to know another one was just beginning.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
WHERE’S MY PETER?
ALICE SPRINGS CID SENIOR Constable Trent Abbott was on a rostered day off on Sunday July 15, so he was startled to hear his phone ringing at 3.30 a.m. He lifted the receiver blearily. Senior Sergeant Geoff Sullivan filled him in, and directed him to drive straight to Barrow Creek with two other officers to set up a cordon around the roadhouse. He set out immediately, and arrived at about 6.30 a.m. After cordoning off the area, he drove north with a group of officers and truck driver Vince Millar to the spot where he’d been told the attack had taken place. They stopped further up the road from the crime scene, 10.7 kilometres north of the roadhouse, positioned themselves on both sides of the road and walked slowly south, looking for anything suspicious. In the daylight, they could see exactly how rough the scrub was. With dull orange rocky dirt, and different tones of green from olive to sun-bleached grey-green, the area looked grim and inhospitable. Mulgas, the long-life variety of acacias in the area, were stunted by the lack of moisture, but still spread out prickly branches as far as they could reach. Tufts of tough, sharp spinifex, the local porcupine grass, broke up the ground with their hardy roots. And there were burnt patches of land everywhere, probably from the wild bushfires that struck in November 1999.
It wasn’t long before Abbott spotted the orange Kombi van in the bush. The men spread out and slowly approached the vehicle, stopping around 50 metres away. ‘Is there anyone there?’ called Sullivan. ‘Come out!’ He repeated it a few times, with no result, so Abbott walked up to the van and peered through the windscreen. There was no sign of life. The officers sealed off the area for the forensics team. Abbott went back to the spot where Sullivan had by now found the stain. He was told to set up roadblocks 100 metres away in both directions. No traffic at all was going to be allowed through, just in case Peter Falconio was somewhere there, lying injured, waiting for help. In the circumstances, that felt the very best they could hope for.
SERGEANT GLEN MCPHEE, A MEMBER of the police support unit, the Territory Response Group (TRG), had arrived at 5.15 a.m. ‘Our primary concern was locating a missing person who might be alive at that stage,’ he explains. ‘So I was urgently looking through the area close to the incident site.’
On the eastern side of the Stuart Highway a fence ran parallel to the road, some 20 metres away. On the western side, a fence ran at an angle at distances varying from 100 metres to 400 metres from the road. The team walked 2 kilometres in both directions. TRG Senior Constable Kevin Paice, who’d flown down to Ti Tree from Darwin, was part
of the search lines, and as he walked he poked long sticks into all the drain gulleys. They swept the area, over and over again. McPhee was in charge of keeping a running sheet of everything of significance; sadly, there was little to report. They found footprints, later confirmed to be Joanne Lees’; they found a boot, but it was old and had been abandoned a number of years before; and they spotted a large flock of birds circling, and raced there only to discover it was merely the site of the local tip. Their sole real finds were some black duct tape and a small white plastic cap from a stick of lip balm, buried under leaves found in a depression where Joanne could have been lying.
TRG Sergeant Bruce Grant was part of another nine-strong team who were combing the spinifex with metal detectors over an area 300 metres north, 500 metres south and 300 metres west of the crime scene. For six days they searched for clues: a murder weapon, bullets, car keys or personal items that may have been dropped. All they found were screws, parts of trucks and old horseshoes. An alert had gone out for a white four-wheel-drive ute, but in a place like the Northern Territory, that description fitted just about every second vehicle. The highway was closed in both directions and people in Alice Springs were warned about travelling north. In spite of the measures taken, in all likelihood, the attacker would have been long gone.
One of the key officers involved was Senior Constable Ian Spilsbury, the crime scene examiner from Alice Springs. He went straight to the Barrow Creek Roadhouse and photographed and videoed Joanne and her injuries, and took DNA swabs and fingerprints. He then went on to the crime scene, where he examined and bagged items including a cigarette butt, two pieces of tape and the lid off Joanne’s lip balm. He supervised the measurements of distances and areas, including the bloodstained section of gravel with its 58-centimetre diameter, and the taking of 300-plus photographs. He had a turn at operating a metal detector too, but only came up with old bottle tops and ringpulls. Spilsbury’s priority was finding a spent firearm cartridge, but he knew it was a big ask. If the weapon was a revolver, there wouldn’t be a cartridge at all and, depending on the calibre and projectile, the bullet may not even have exited the body.
