And Then the Darkness

by Sue Williams

  Vincent called Jenny from the station. ‘It’s them,’ he told her. ‘Pete’s still missing, but Joanne is okay.’ He could hear his wife sobbing on the other end of the line and ached to go home to comfort her but knew he had another call to make first. He dialled the Falconios’ number and Peter’s father, Luciano, picked up. Vince was filled with dread but far better they hear the news from him than from the anonymous authorities over in Australia. As he told Luciano that his son had been shot and was presumed dead, he could hear Peter’s mum Joan in the background. The sound of her scream tore at his heart. He would never forget the raw desperation in her voice, and the utter misery.

  AS THE NEWS SPREAD AROUND the Northern Territory, there was a deep sense of shock, and shame, that something so terrible could happen to two young visitors. There was also panic. With the road north sealed off, knockabout, happy-go-lucky Alice Springs suddenly felt like a town under siege. At the Stuart Caravan Park where Peter and Joanne had spent their last night, owners Leonie and Rob Marshall didn’t know what to say. The police were going through their receipts book and taking down the numbers of the registration plates on every vehicle to check that the couple’s attacker hadn’t also been staying there, and had followed them out.

  ‘They wouldn’t let people leave,’ says Leonie. ‘It was our busiest time of year, and we were so crowded. But more and more people kept arriving because they didn’t want to be out on the road and, with no-one allowed to go, we couldn’t cope. We had people coming out of our ears. If everyone breathed at once, the fences would all have fallen over.’

  Tempers were beginning to fray. ‘The police advised everyone not to travel but people were getting a bit aggro and frustrated,’ says Rob. ‘They wanted to keep on with their travel plans. Elderly people were arranging to travel in convoys … I thought they were mad! I was telling them, “But this guy’s got a gun! What would you do if you met him?” They were all saying, “Oh, we’ll be right.” It was absolutely mad. I had to point out to them, what if they broke down on the road? No-one would stop to help them. They would have been there for days. And there were roadblocks everywhere. Even the shortest journey was taking hours.’

  FOR THOSE PEOPLE ALREADY OUT on the road, there were plenty of tales of narrow escapes. Joanne Harle from the Northern Territory Tourist Commission was driving alone from Alice Springs to Tennant Creek at exactly the same time as the attacker had struck. Towing her horse behind her, she was on her way to Katherine, 280 kilometres south on the Stuart Highway from Darwin, to compete in time trials. She was on heavy cold and flu medication and felt sick and fuddled. She didn’t turn the radio on to hear the news, and later couldn’t get any reception when she tried. On the way up, she pulled over a few times to let the horse out of its box for a walk, and to have a quick nap behind the wheel. It was only when she was stopped at one of the roadblocks that she heard what had happened, and realised how lucky she’d been. A phone call to a friend confirmed it. ‘Have you been out on that road on your own?’ he shouted at her. ‘You’re a bloody idiot! There’s a man with a gun out there!’

  Harle was shaken, but hadn’t thought twice about setting out on her own to make that long, lonely journey. ‘I lived for eight years on a station, and I’m used to those kind of places,’ she says. ‘Most people out here are really friendly and hospitable. Things like that just don’t happen here.’

  IN HUDDERSFIELD, HOWEVER, ANOTHER family was also panicking. Teacher Ron Phillips’ daughter Kate was out on the Stuart Highway with her boyfriend too, and her father hadn’t heard from them for days. When the phone call finally came to say they were fine, he felt thoroughly exhausted from the strain. ‘I was terrified for my daughter,’ he says. ‘She must have come within a hair’s breadth of meeting that man. She’d been over there eighteen months, living in Sydney and then travelling around Canberra, Melbourne, Adelaide and up through Alice Springs. She was also on her way to Darwin at the time.

  ‘She had to go through all the roadblocks with all the policemen with shotguns telling them not to stop for anything or anyone. They told her, “Just keep going, whatever you do! Don’t pull over in any circumstances! Even if you see someone with a broken leg, don’t stop!” She said it was like the Wild West. She says there were so many people manifestly psychotic up there, and everyone seemed to have guns.’

  AS BACKPACKERS VISITING THE Northern Territory checked out of campsites and into hostels, and abandoned plans to hitchhike, buying bus, train and plane tickets instead, even the hardiest of locals, well accustomed to the vicissitudes of life in the Australian outback, were shaken by the news. They prided themselves on being friendly, trusting and hospitable, and everyone depended on neighbours for help at times, and on people passing through. Strangers represented not unknown dangers, but the chance of a good yarn with someone new, and lending a hand whenever you could was one of the unofficial rules of the outback.

  But, suddenly, everything had changed. The Northern Territory was being portrayed as a strange, dangerous place, home to deranged souls on the run from the rest of civilisation, and as a vast, desolate stretch of nothingness where people came to hide out, and were rarely found. And, in some ways, that’s true. The name the ‘Never-Never’, coined in 1902, still held fast. For together with that down-home hospitality comes a real tolerance for difference, and an acceptance of free spirits. On all the massive cattle stations in the area, drifters often turn up looking for casual farmwork and usually get it, no questions asked. They may be colourful characters with indistinct pasts but, in the outback, a talent for telling a good story goes a long, long way.

  The outback holds a firm place in the Australian psyche. For most indigenous Australians, it’s somewhere familiar, often quite unchanged with time, a place of sacred sites and ancient spirits. For most white Australians, it’s immense, anonymous, untameable; a frontier of white imagination, a land that turns us all into vulnerable babes in the woods.

  IN HUDDERSFIELD, PETER FALCONIO’S family was struggling to come to terms with the news that he’d been shot and was now missing. Luciano and Peter’s second-eldest brother Paul had gone to the police station together because they couldn’t quite believe what Vincent James had told them. It was the beginning of a long, uncertain nightmare. ‘The family are going through hell,’ said Paul. ‘We are just waiting for the phone to ring and are just sitting tight and praying. We spoke to Pete on Friday and he said he was having the time of his life.’

  Luciano and Paul were making urgent plans to fly to Australia, but Joan still couldn’t seem to digest the news. ‘Peter is a very outgoing man, who lives life to the full,’ she told journalists. ‘He’s the kindest boy in the world.’ No-one at that stage had told them the full story, and the Falconios were under the impression Peter had stopped to help a fellow motorist in trouble. ‘He was just stopping to help,’ Joan said. ‘We thought that was just typical of him.’

  THE NEXT MORNING, TUESDAY JULY 17, forensic scientist Carmen Eckhoff did more luminescence testing for blood on the Kombi van. More samples were sent up to the laboratory in Darwin; she’d collected some 380 items in all. Then she took some swabs to check for DNA on the steering wheel. She’d earlier noticed a police officer touching the wheel with an ungloved hand, so only took swabs from the part she was sure remained uncontaminated. Then she took samples from the gearstick and the seats.

  Joanne’s clothes were carefully tested too. There was blood on her shorts and T-shirt, which turned out to be hers, but a tiny bloodstain near the back left sleeve contained a different DNA. Eckhoff tested it against Joanne’s, against Peter’s, against Millar’s and Adams’. But it was none of theirs, and it was male.

  And then came the icing. The steering wheel and gearstick swabs also contained samples of another man’s DNA. Eckhoff smiled to herself. This was their first big breakthrough.

  PART THREE

  THE SEARCH FOR THE TRUTH

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  STRAINED RELATIONS

  IT HA
D BEEN TWO DAYS since the attack in the desert, but the only people who had seen Joanne Lees were the police. More than 120 newspaper, radio, television and wire journalists had congregated in Alice Springs, and they were all waiting anxiously for the same thing: the appearance of a tearful young English woman, lost and alone in the Australian outback, pleading heartrendingly for any information that might lead to the rescue of her boyfriend.

  But they waited. And they waited. And they waited.

  In newsrooms across the globe, editors were screaming for a picture of Joanne, for a few words, for the definitive firsthand description of what had happened. Here was a real-life heroine, and a slip of a girl at that, who’d managed to evade a ruthless, cold-blooded killer. It was a powerful story. The only trouble was, no-one was getting it.

  At the hurriedly re-equipped police media office in Alice Springs, Denise Hurley was fielding a call a minute. She’d had to install more phones and whiteboards in the tiny one-person office, and squeeze in another staff member from Darwin so there’d be three of them to manage the avalanche of interest. But even then, they couldn’t cope with the demands for information from all over Australia, Britain, Singapore … everywhere around the world. When Hurley slipped away to her hotel room one night for a couple of hours’ sleep, she woke to find her mobile phone message bank full with another forty messages, all demanding she call back immediately. Nothing like this had happened in the Northern Territory since Lindy Chamberlain’s baby had gone missing. And even that wasn’t on anything like this scale. ‘It was difficult from every angle,’ says Hurley. ‘Another problem was that the mobile phone range wasn’t that good there so often people became very frustrated that they couldn’t get through. We were working twenty-four hours a day trying to keep up, and people were just falling apart.’

  Media organisations were offering large sums of money for an interview with Joanne — one British tabloid was rumoured to be prepared to pay half a million Australian dollars — and everyone was trying to work out where she was staying. Journalists had travelled great distances, and were having to justify large expenses bills getting there and staying, only to sit around their hotel rooms, in the police station or in the town’s many bars, with not a single glimpse of their quarry. It was a media feeding frenzy and, with no Joanne to feed on, they set their sights elsewhere.

  THE POLICE HAD BEEN TOTALLY unprepared for the level of interest. The Northern Territory force was comparatively small with just 770 officers, 120 auxiliaries and fifty Aboriginal community officers spread over an area five times the size of the UK and twice that of Texas. Much of the area was remote and many of its communities isolated, with 25 per cent of the 200,000-strong population identifying as Aboriginal. In addition, in the four years from 1990, and again in 1997, there’d been a freeze on police recruitment because of budget cuts across the public sector. This had left the force rundown and depleted in experience at the critical sergeant and senior sergeant level.

  Resources were already over-stretched by the extent of the searches with officers drawn from all over the Territory to travel to Alice Springs. In addition, normal community policing work had to continue; no-one who’d just been burgled would forgive the police for saying they couldn’t investigate as they were too busy elsewhere with a couple of tourists. As well as the business of crime and managing the force, there were also the anti-violence programs and pioneering Aboriginal recruitment projects. ‘We think we know our country, but you really don’t know what it’s all about until you go into a place like the Northern Territory,’ says Brian Bates, who was the Northern Territory Commissioner of Police for seven-and-a-half years until Christmas 2001. ‘You have to experience the size and remoteness and some of the horrendous problems before you can understand.’ No-one had too much time left over to pander to the seemingly insatiable demands of a media who were growing positively obstructive.

  As the search continued, furnishing little of interest, there was less and less to give the media. The release of a photo-fit image of a man with shoulder-length hair and a droopy moustache distracted them for a while, but ended up creating even more work when the police had to deal with a fresh torrent of calls from a public eager to help. The trouble was, while Joanne thought the man looked distinctive, some of the local press muttered that the man looked like half the male population up there. Any real breakthroughs, like the discovery of the DNA, had yet to be released. The police wanted to flush the attacker out, and they reasoned that those kind of revelations might scare him underground for good. Even some of the smaller titbits, however, appeared, by either accident or design, to be kept jealously under guard. No-one had, at that point, quite realised the significance of the Shell Truckstop video, amongst all the video tapes collected from a dozen sources around Alice, so news of that wasn’t passed on. Worse, Hurley was frequently kept in the dark about developments that might have kept the media happy — if only she’d known them. ‘One of the major difficulties for us was that we were not being kept fully informed ourselves in the media unit,’ she says. ‘Everyone was quite secretive. Our police spokesman was Commander Max Pope but sometimes I even questioned whether or not he was being told everything too.’

  When black trackers were brought in, Denise Hurley was relieved, but much to the media’s chagrin, they were sent home immediately after they’d finished their work. In addition, access to senior officers was initially limited and, with the paucity of sanctioned information, conjecture and rumour flourished. On Tuesday July 17 British newspaper the Daily Mail printed a spine-tingling description of Joanne Lees’ ordeal, saying she’d been bound hand and foot, yet had managed to push enough tape away from her legs to stumble into the bush. Under the byline of its Australia-based correspondent Richard Shears, it said she then fell over and started wriggling across the rocks and sand ‘like a commando on her elbows’. Despite the fact that Joanne had adamantly refused to speak to all press up to that point, and had never said her legs were tied, the paper even purported to have a direct quote from her, confirming this. ‘It was the only way I could get away,’ it reported her saying, ‘wriggling along on my stomach because my hands and feet were still tied.’

  JOANNE HAD HAD LITTLE EXPERIENCE of the media in her tiny Yorkshire village, and couldn’t understand why they were so keen for her story. She’d lost the love of her life in horrific circumstances, probably made even more terrible by the guilt of her recent affair with Nick Reilly. She herself had been threatened at gunpoint, tied up and bundled into a stranger’s car. She was in shock, on medication and drowning in grief and fear. She longed to be left alone to get on with helping the police find Pete. She didn’t see any point in re-telling her story over and over again and viewed the media as an aggressive mob determined to make capital from her distress. They wanted her image and her words simply to sell more newspapers, attract more viewers, entertain more people. They were vultures feeding on her misery, and the more they pushed, the more she dug in. Joanne had used the opportunity of a fresh start in Australia to come out of her shell, to relax more, to be more vivacious. But she was only able to express that confidence around people her own age, her type, with similar interests. Out of that small circle, like many young women with sheltered upbringings and little experience of life beyond, she was completely lost. She didn’t have the good communication skills that would allow her to easily cross barriers with people quite different to herself. She had little small talk, and she wasn’t comfortable when forced to think on her feet, and talk off the cuff. In the situation in which she now found herself, she didn’t have a clue how to behave. She responded by becoming withdrawn and defensive. ‘She was a fish out of water,’ says Bates. ‘Take her outside the environment of her own young crowd and she was lost. In her own circles, she was fine. But with others …’

  Hurley and Vanderlaan were trying to persuade Joanne to appear at a press conference. Joanne resisted. They asked if she’d do a couple of interviews. She refused. ‘I think she was actually quite traum
atised by the whole thing,’ says Hurley. ‘Not giving in to what other people wanted at that stage was her attempt to retain her own sanity and stature. She was never the kind of person who’d let herself break down in front of the world.’ With her hardening attitude that the press was her enemy, she felt giving a press conference would be seen as a sign of real weakness, and she was determined not to appear any more vulnerable than she already felt. She was the victim here, and didn’t deserve to be victimised any further. Ironically, her behaviour elicited the opposite effect to the one she imagined. ‘It only served,’ says Hurley, ‘to create even more of a media frenzy.’

  AS THE WORLD’S PRESS CLAMOURED for an interview, and the police put more pressure on her to talk, Joanne seemed to start taking grim satisfaction in outfoxing the media. While out eating in Alice Springs with Helen Jones at her old favourite Bojangles restaurant one night, a bunch of journalists came in and sat at a nearby table, not realising they were within a few metres of her. By the time they’d realised who she was, she was long gone. Then came one of the most bizarre episodes of the case. Joanne decided, albeit with a little encouragement from Jones, to give a single interview. And it was with the tiny Alice Springs newspaper, the Centralian Advocate, a local bi-weekly with a circulation of just 8000.

  It happened partly by chance. The paper’s chief of staff Mark Wilton knew Helen Jones from the time she’d worked for the newspaper, booking advertising space, and had a knack of being in the right place at the right time. A Tasmanian-born fitter and turner by trade who’d got into newspapers on the island state by dint of writing about his great love, cricket, he took the first call about the Port Arthur massacre. Similarly, when he found out from publican Les Pilton where Joanne was staying, he made the first call to Jones. He asked if Joanne might consider talking to him and was told maybe, but not yet. Wilton persisted, calling a few times a day and once even speaking to Joanne herself on the phone for a few minutes. She said she still wasn’t ready to speak, out of respect for Peter’s family. He could have written up the phone conversation, but decided not to use what he’d gleaned from her in the hope of building a relationship that could yield results later. It was a smart choice.