And Then the Darkness

by Sue Williams

  Another crime scene specialist, Senior Constable Tim Sandry, videoed the area, at the same time as helping with the search 40 to 60 metres north and south of the bloodstain. By that stage, the officers were down on their hands and knees, minutely examining every square centimetre of the ground. A request was put in for Aboriginal trackers to come and help but they were unable to get there until the following Friday.

  Later, that came to be regarded as a critical error.

  JOANNE WAS ESCORTED BACK TO the crime scene and was asked to check the Kombi to see if anything was missing. Looking pale and exhausted, she did exactly as she was told. She didn’t flinch at the sight of the vehicle. She would be one of the last people to see it in that spot. Soon after, Abbott returned with a tow-truck driver to take it back to Alice Springs.

  Later that afternoon, the police suggested to Joanne that she accompany them to Alice. She looked scared. Everyone she knew was out there at Barrow Creek. She turned to Helen Jones. ‘Please, please come with me!’ she begged. Jones nodded. With four children of her own, she felt it was the very least she could do for this young girl, all alone in a foreign land. To try to reassure her, she told Joanne she could stay with her at Les Pilton’s parents’ house in Alice.

  The pair was driven into town and Joanne’s interviews recommenced at 7.20 p.m., this time with Senior Sergeant Helen Braam, a detective and qualified negotiator from Darwin, and Detective Senior Constable Isobel Cummins, who was trying to put together a photo-fit image of the attacker. Braam asked Joanne about everything that had happened, and Cummins showed her pictures of various features — mouths, noses, facial shapes, moustaches and hairstyles — asking which, if any, resembled those of her attacker.

  ‘[Joanne] went through a whole range of emotions,’ says Braam. ‘She was tired, teary, angry. She was stressed.’ But after short breaks, she always managed to rally again, to provide them with the information and descriptions they needed.

  Braam used cognitive interviewing techniques, where she asked Joanne to go through the entire story from start to finish uninterrupted, then go back and focus on a particular area, and continue to the end, and then re-tell the story backwards. At the same time, Cummins was concentrating on a description of the attacker. Joanne claimed the man had a long or ovalish face, collar-length hair, sunken cheeks, deep-set eyes with dark circles underneath, black and grey streaky hair, a black-grey moustache down past his mouth, and a stocky build. He was at least forty-five years old. She added he had a ‘cowboy-style’ look, with a dark coloured T-shirt under an open-necked black and white check shirt, heavy trousers made of either denim or canvas and a black baseball cap with a shield motif, bordered with yellow. Gradually, they refined the photo-fit image of the man’s face, even though Joanne found looking at her attacker’s face over and over again so utterly harrowing, and she was dead tired and still extremely distressed. Outside, Abbott handed the orange Kombi over to forensics, and then went off duty. In the interview room, around midnight, Braam finally called it a day and said they’d pick up where they left off the following morning.

  But still Joanne had to work. On the way to Piltons’ parents’ house — the police had been unsuccessful in their attempts to persuade Joanne to stay at a hotel — Braam drove past a number of car dealerships and car rental agencies to see whether or not Joanne could spot a vehicle similar to the canvas-backed four-wheel-drive ute. This exercise yielded little, however. Joanne didn’t see anything she thought resembled the ute, and some places were so dark, neither of them could see anything at all.

  THAT EVENING, TWO POLICE OFFICERS, Jason Hastie and Jonathan Beer, called into the Shell Truckstop on the northern outskirts of Alice Springs. They showed the man behind the till, Andrew Head, one of the rough photo-fit images and told him they were hunting this man for the possible murder of a tourist and the attempted abduction of his girlfriend. Head recognised the man in the picture immediately. ‘When I was shown the picture, I recalled serving the guy,’ he says. He was unable to access the closed circuit security system, however, so the police called Val Prior, the Shell area manager. She was used to it; the police were often looking for stolen vehicles that stopped for refuelling. But this was late on a Sunday night. ‘Oh my God, what do you want this time of night?’ she aked jovially, but when told, didn’t make a fuss about coming in. She had a good relationship with the police and they often responded quickly when she called them about ‘runners’ driving away without paying. She unlocked the system and ran through the tape with the officers.

  It was an awkward process. The cameras didn’t tape direct to video, but onto a computer hard drive, which only enabled Prior to obtain still images and print them out individually, or to save them to a floppy disk instead, which would then need to be sent to a specialist to be transferred onto video. The police officers took away the stills prints and said they’d return for the disk.

  THAT NIGHT, HELEN JONES MADE up the spare room for Joanne. But Joanne’s face crumpled when she saw it. ‘Please don’t leave me alone,’ she pleaded. ‘I couldn’t bear it.’ Jones agreed to sleep in the same bed with her, and listened as Joanne recounted what had happened. She talked about how wonderful Peter was, and how they’d always done everything together. She talked about that last sunset, and their plans, one day, to marry. When, exhausted, she finally fell asleep, she dozed only fitfully, and Jones heard her weeping. She would wake up confused then, realising she hadn’t simply had a nightmare, would break down again. ‘She kept asking me over and over, “Where’s Peter? Where’s my Peter?”’ says Jones. ‘We both felt in our hearts he must be lying dead somewhere, but I just kept reassuring her he’d be all right. What else could I say?’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  HOPING FOR THE BEST, FEARING THE WORST

  BY EARLY NEXT MORNING, Monday July 16, the area was swarming with police, police auxiliaries and members of the TRG in their distinctive pale khaki uniforms. Roadblocks had been set up on all highways leading into SA, WA and Queensland, where heavily armed police were pulling over vehicles, checking the occupants and warning them about stopping for strangers. The 1.5 million square kilometres of the Northern Territory was virtually closed off to the outside world. Even the air space above had been closed to all aircraft other than eight planes, some of them privately-owned and lent by neighbouring cattle stations, sweeping the skies looking for any telltale clues.

  With only one bitumen road travelling north to south, but hundreds of rough tracks and hidden trails that you could travel for days without seeing another soul, people get lost, disappear and die in that part of Australia. It’s one of the most remote areas of the world and the size of the American mid-west … only without the people.

  Everyone was hoping for the best, but feared the worst. ‘As the days went, by the distance that could have been covered by any person involved turned into thousands of kilometres in a radius around the site,’ says Sergeant Glen McPhee. ‘Given our limited resources, we had to use what we had to best circumstances.’

  AT 4 A.M. THAT DAY, Bradley Murdoch’s drug-running partner James Hepi was in bed at the flat in Broome. His phone rang. Murdoch had just arrived back in town after the long drive from Sedan and was at the workshop of West Kimberley Diesel in the outer suburbs. Could Hepi pick him up?

  Hepi was surprised: Murdoch usually rang from a roadhouse which had mobile reception about 30 kilometres out of town. Hepi would then know to open the gates, so Murdoch could drive straight in to unload his cargo. It was odd that he’d go directly to the workshop. But when Hepi saw him, he was even more taken aback. Murdoch had left a few days before with collar-length hair and a long handlebar moustache. Now, he was cleanshaven and had razored his hair to a smooth number one. Hepi didn’t ask why. ‘I wasn’t really interested,’ he said later. After all, men running drugs aren’t the type either to ask, or answer, personal questions. In addition, Murdoch appeared ‘scattered’, says Hepi. He’d been on amphetamines for the past four or five days in order
to stay awake on the long drug runs, and was wired.

  During that day, news came through of the attack on two young backpackers just north of Barrow Creek. ‘It wasn’t me!’ Murdoch immediately exclaimed. Hepi looked at him quizzically. He hadn’t even asked. He did ask, though, why Murdoch had gone straight to the workshop instead of coming home first. ‘The vehicle needed work,’ Murdoch told him. It was something to do with the gearbox. Hepi saw the white four-wheel-drive Landcruiser was covered in red desert dirt.

  The work seemed to take a long, long time and was bloody expensive too. ‘Not sure quite how much, but quite a lot of money,’ says Hepi. ‘A whole aluminium canopy made, turbo, exhaust, $1000 alone for the exhaust.’ What irked was the fact that Hepi was helping foot the bill. It was paid for from their drug proceeds, ‘just from the money we’d been making’. By the time the work had been completed, the vehicle had been heavily modified and looked completely different to before. ‘[It’d had the] tray removed, the canopy removed, a complete new one made,’ says Hepi. ‘So the appearance of the vehicle changed dramatically.’

  THAT MORNING, JOANNE LEES WAS picked up by Senior Sergeant Helen Braam, and the interview resumed. It continued for eight more hours and over two days, twelve one-hour tapes were recorded. Joanne also continued to help Cummins refine the photo-fit image of her attacker. By draft number nine, Joanne declared that was as good as it was going to get. A mouth swab was taken for DNA testing as well as her fingerprints and, at one stage, another officer came in to show her a selection of firearms in the hope she might recognise the features of the one she’d been threatened with. ‘Nothing mirrored what she thought she’d seen,’ says Braam. Braam also made a number of sketches of various things, and recorded a description of Joanne’s injuries.

  Senior Sergeant Jeanette Kerr, who’d come down from Darwin to coordinate the intelligence gathering, was pleased with progress. She felt, however, that Joanne needed to be allocated a female chaperone. ‘Because Ms Lees was alone in Australia, we felt she was extremely vulnerable, frightened and traumatised,’ says Kerr. ‘She needed a support person with her at all times.’ By the end of the day, it was felt Braam and Joanne had been through so much together, Braam would make the ideal candidate.

  THE INCIDENT HAD HAPPENED IN possibly the worst place on perhaps the worst day. Barrow Creek was isolated, communication was difficult, and those long drives there and back all the time were proving exhausting for the police. It didn’t help either when a few of them billeted at the roadhouse refused to stay there for more than a night. The rooms in the main block were oppressively dingy, with sweaty walls, sticky carpet and torn rags at the windows, and you could hear all the noise from the bar — or from the occupants of the other rooms — through the gaps between the walls and the ceiling. The toilets were outside, through a courtyard. The officers said they’d much prefer to stay in tents, outside, which meant a whole new camp had to be set up.

  The timing was terrible, too. The Northern Territory Police’s Assistant Commissioner John Daulby, the man who’d normally take charge of any big investigation, was in New Zealand visiting his kids who lived there with his ex; his relief officer, Superintendent Kate Vanderlaan, was in Perth for an operation on her shoulder; Southern Region Commander Bob Fields, in charge of the Alice Springs region, was in Darwin for a farewell; and the police’s Darwin-based head of media, Denise Hurley, who’d only been in the job six months, was in Brisbane at a conference. In addition, her one staff member operating out of the Alice Springs office, 1490 kilometres away from HQ in Darwin, had just left. Hurley flew to Darwin in time to greet her parents who were visiting her, and then headed straight back out to Alice Springs.

  Complicating matters even further, Prime Minister John Howard was in Alice Springs attending a ceremony to turn the first clod of earth for the start of work extending the Adelaide-to-Alice Ghan railway line to Darwin with a horde of local and overseas journalists. The media circus was already in town when the news broke.

  LATER ON MONDAY JULY 16, BRADLEY MURDOCH dropped by to visit his girlfriend Beverley Allan when she’d got home from work. She couldn’t help noticing his changed appearance. When she’d last seen him, just over a week before, he’d had a bushy moustache going down the sides of his mouth, and his hair was quite long. Now he looked entirely different. ‘He was cleanshaven with no moustache, and he’d shaved his head,’ she says. ‘It was really, really short, a number one, close-shaved.’ His demeanour was also strange. He looked ‘fairly wrung out’. Allan asked him how his trip had been. ‘He told me it hadn’t been a good trip,’ she says. ‘There’d been a few dramas.’ She looked concerned. ‘What sort of dramas?’ she asked. His reply didn’t leave her any the wiser. ‘He believed someone was following him, and that he’d had to find out who was following him, and he’d had to deal with it.’

  Murdoch said that he’d come through Fitzroy Crossing on his way back, where he’d called in to see his friend Peter Jamieson. Jamieson later said he remembered him dropping by. Murdoch had arrived at his service station at around sunset, just after he’d locked the bowsers for the day. He’d unlocked one for his mate, sold him around 50 litres of diesel that he’d paid for in cash, and then sat down and chatted to him about fishing while he ate a steak sandwich and drank a mug of coffee.

  To Beverley Allan now, though, Murdoch mumbled something about using Jamieson as a back-up. ‘He’d also had to come the long way home or had run into a roadblock,’ says Allan. The roadblock was one of the police roadblocks aimed at finding the man who’d attacked Peter Falconio and Joanne Lees.

  A FEW HOURS ON, ONE of the most experienced forensic scientists in the Northern Territory, Carmen Eckhoff, arrived in Alice Springs from Darwin. Fingerprint expert Sergeant Neil Hayes had just finished examining the Kombi van, so immediately Eckhoff set to work, donning a gown and gloves before searching the interior for documents, keys, passports, diaries, fuel receipts, email addresses, photographs … anything at all that could prove significant. Everything that was taken out, including a camera, atlas, CD, plastic bag with a sewing kit inside, even cigarette butts from the ashtray, was carefully photographed. Eckhoff took Peter Falconio’s Ventolin inhaler from the shelf under the dashboard to use for a sample of his DNA. A set of three keys were also swabbed for DNA. Then she sprayed Orthotolodine and Luminol, liquids that illuminate on the presence of blood, inside and outside the vehicle. The only blood she found was on the Kombi bumper. It belonged to a kangaroo.

  By this stage it was getting late but Eckhoff, a woman with a reputation for being extremely strong-minded who doesn’t take orders easily, wanted to visit the crime scene. She drove out and arrived around 11.30 p.m. Again, she sprayed Luminol and Orthotolodine on, and around, the stain on the road. It lit up straight away. When she moved a few stones and dirt, it lit up even more. The dark substance was definitely blood and, what’s more, it was clear that someone had tried to hide it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  YOU NEVER KNOW WHO’S OUT THERE

  WHEN THE NORTHERN TERRITORY POLICE finally broke the news to the outside world of what had befallen two British backpackers on a lonely road north of Alice Springs, they didn’t pull any punches: Peter Falconio was missing and Joanne Lees was lucky to be alive. ‘I don’t entertain any doubt whose blood it is,’ Southern Region Commander Bob Fields told the assembled media on Monday July 16. ‘We’re thinking the worst.’ On the subject of Joanne, he came as close to sentimentality as any hardened copper on what must be one of the world’s toughest, loneliest beats ever could. ‘I just thank God that she didn’t get taken away from the crime scene,’ he said. ‘How she survived is as close to a miracle as anything I know about.’

  The greatest fear was the chance of the attacker striking again; the greatest worry was that they might not find him in time. ‘We’re looking for a needle in a haystack and you don’t get a haystack much bigger than the Northern Territory,’ said Fields, peering out at the world’s press through his large, ol
d-fashioned aviator-style glasses. ‘One break and we will zero in on him. We’re jumping on cars out of helicopters. It is going to be a battle of wits and survival. But let me say this. We will never give up the hunt.’

  The story had everything: two young backpackers on the trip of a lifetime to one of the globe’s top holiday destinations, and an unknown and armed predator out to kill and, presumably, rape, still at large somewhere in the vast, mysterious outback, the stuff of so many dreams and just as many nightmares.

  BACK IN ENGLAND, JENNY AND Vincent James were having a normal Sunday morning in their village just outside Huddersfield when they happened to turn the TV on to a Teletext channel. Jenny was in the kitchen washing up, and shouted out to Vincent to take a look. A young British man had been shot in the Australian outback, and a woman had only survived by escaping into the bush. It had happened on the road running north of Alice — the road Joanne had phoned them the previous day to tell them they’d be taking.

  The couple stared at the screen with their hearts in their mouths, reading, and re-reading. No, it couldn’t be. But what if it were?

  Vincent was the first to break the silence. ‘I’ll go to Huddersfield police station and see if they know anything,’ he said. The officer at the front desk said he had no information, but that he’d phone the Foreign Office. With every minute passing, Vincent’s optimism slowly dribbled away. When the officer returned from the back office, his face was grim. Vincent felt like he’d been slugged in the stomach. ‘I’m sorry,’ the man said. ‘They’ve confirmed it is Joanne and Peter.’