And Then the Darkness

by Sue Williams

  He rang Jones every couple of hours on the Monday, and again on the Tuesday. Jones said Joanne was still upset but that she was getting keener to speak. ‘Helen said Joanne was monitoring the media to death, reading everything that had been written about her,’ says Wilton. ‘She wasn’t happy with a lot of the stuff that had been written. Someone had written that Peter had been dragged out of the Kombi kicking and screaming, and all that sort of shit which wasn’t true.’ Doubtless Joanne had also read about her own fantastical commando derring-do.

  At 3 p.m., Wilton finally received the call he’d been waiting for. ‘Mark,’ came Jones’s voice down the line, ‘can you come over now to have a chat?’ Wilton put down the phone with a triumphant flourish. ‘I’ve fucking got her!’ he told the office. ‘I’m going now!’ It was the interview the world had been waiting for, but it was only by chance it didn’t have to wait another three days. As Wilton was leaving the office, someone asked, ‘Do you think it’ll hold until Friday’s edition?’ They were immediately overruled.

  There was only one condition placed on the interview: no photos. ‘I didn’t push it,’ says Wilton. ‘In some respects that was a shame. I probably could’ve made some money out of that.’

  When he arrived at the house, Joanne was sitting in an armchair with her feet tucked up in front of her, and holding her hands tightly together. ‘It wasn’t quite a fully foetal position, but it wasn’t far off,’ says Wilton. ‘Then she took a couple of deep breaths and let it all out. She was definitely still in shock.’

  The interview wasn’t easy. Wilton asked Joanne the same questions twice, three times, sometimes four times, in an effort to prise decent answers from her. After forty minutes or so, he switched off the tape recorder, and it was only then that she started to open up. ‘I honestly do not believe this man would have let me go,’ she said. ‘He really needs to be captured. I do not think he would hesitate to do it again.’ She found it hard to describe what she went through as the man hunted her in the outback. ‘Everyone can use their own imagination about what it was like for me that night. But I was determined to escape and I feel very lucky to be alive.’ She said she was convinced the man would have stopped her and Pete even if they had not pulled over. ‘He would have shot our tyres or done something anyway.’

  Wilton also provided a sympathetic ear to Joanne’s feeling that the police were pushing her hard. One day, Helen Jones pointed out helpfully, Joanne had been picked up at 8.30 a.m. and she was still at the police station twelve hours later. He noted she wasn’t going to be given access to a counsellor until the next day. By the time he left the house, he knew what he had in his notebook and on his tape was pure gold, but he still had a long day ahead of him before he could write it up. As chief of staff, he was also chief sub-editor and had to lay out pages, as well as make up the paper’s biggest earner, the real estate section. While all around the world newspaper editors were biting their nails waiting for his copy and offering him five figure sums to leak material, Wilton diligently sorted out descriptions of three-bedroom houses.

  He finished writing up the story just before 8 p.m. that evening. As part of the worldwide News Ltd group, his copy was then sent on elsewhere. Because the Advocate’s email system was rudimentary, the story was eventually faxed down to Sydney via the Northern Territory News, and then syndicated around the world. Those newspapers that didn’t get the story legitimately, plundered the printed text for snippets they could use. One way or another, Wilton’s interview found its way on to the pages of every newspaper in Australia, Britain and beyond.

  Not surprisingly, Joanne was horrified. She had no idea how the global media machine worked, and had chosen the tiny local paper as a means of delivering a slap in the face to the big British papers who’d been offering her what she considered ‘blood money’, and the aggressive Australian journalists who’d been hounding her. She’d assumed that, by giving her story to the tiny Advocate, she would be denying everyone else. And besides, Jones had told her Wilton was a good mate, and was honourable. Joanne would never have agreed to the interview if she’d known what was going to happen. She considered she’d been tricked into speaking.

  It spelled the end of her relationship with Jones, whom she now saw as having been party to what she interpreted as a ‘deception’. Their bond had already been weakened when Jones told the media how Joanne had confided that she felt guilty at not insisting Peter ignore the man and drive on when he tried to stop them. That snippet had been picked up and flashed around the world. Joanne interpreted that as a betrayal, and later accused Jones of making mileage for the Barrow Creek Roadhouse out of what had happened, and of enjoying basking in the press attention. Others like Denise Hurley felt it was plain wrong that Jones had gone out on a limb to set up a press interview with someone who was clearly traumatised, without any help or support. In any case, Joanne severed their relationship completely from that day on. Today, Jones refuses to comment on the matter.

  Rumours flew around that Mark Wilton had been part of an elaborate ruse and had been introduced to Joanne by Jones as a lawyer who was going to help her. That too was reported to police, and they demanded that he hand over the tapes, which served only to strain even further relations between the media and the police. ‘I was accused of perverting the course of justice,’ says Wilton. ‘So I turned round to them and said you can do anything you fucking want, but you can only have it if I deem you should have it. It got very nasty.’ Indeed, the transcripts of his interview show he’s telling the truth. Although Joanne said she wanted legal advice, at no time during the interview did Wilton claim to be a lawyer.

  Joanne’s old Dymocks bookstore boss, Gary Sullivan, watching from Sydney, felt sure he knew what had happened. ‘I think she thought that this guy was from a local Alice Springs paper, and she didn’t expect that the story would go all through the country, and over to England,’ he says. ‘She was probably a bit naïve.’ In Joanne’s determined attempt to outwit the press, she just hadn’t realised that the friend of her trusted comforter and minder worked for News Ltd, the most powerful media empire on earth.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  GUM LEAVES TO REMEMBER

  THE BRIGHTLY-COLOURED POSTCARD LAY ON the mat inside the front door for a while before Joanne Lees’ mum Jenny James could bring herself to pick it up. She turned it over to see her daughter’s neat writing on the other side and, with her heart in her mouth, read the words slowly. Joanne and Peter were having a great time in Alice Springs, it said. Next, they were travelling north. In a few days, they planned to be in Darwin.

  ‘All I could think of when I read the card was that I hoped Peter’s mother had not had one too,’ said Jenny tearfully. ‘I don’t know how she’s coping, but we’re praying for a miracle.’ She’d watched the drama unfold on the other side of the world with despair. She was not well enough for a trip over to Australia, so she and Vincent agreed that he should go. Like her daughter, she too read everything she could about the case, and spoke to Joanne on the phone daily, but it still wasn’t enough.

  ‘At times she seems to be okay and handling it, at others she just breaks up,’ she said. ‘She just wants to help Peter and helping the police is the only way she can help him. I think she’s still holding a glimmer of hope that he may still be alive.’

  IN SYDNEY, GARY SULLIVAN WAS also trying to work out how he could help. When he’d first heard about an attack on two backpackers, it hadn’t occurred to him it might be Peter and Joanne. ‘You never expect those sort of things to happen to people you know,’ he says. When he learned the next day that the couple had been driving a Kombi van, however, it didn’t take long for his worst fears to be confirmed. The police phoned the shop to speak to him. ‘Then everyone here knew about it and we were all upset,’ he says. ‘So we tried to see if there was something we could do to help. I think the thing that goes through your mind is that if that was one of your kids overseas and they were on their own and something happened to them, you would want
to think someone might look after them.

  ‘There was no point in me going up there. I thought it’d be much better if someone closer to her went. So I talked to her closest friend at the store, and asked her if she’d want to go.’ Amanda Wealleans was keen to help Joanne and Sullivan was happy to pay her fare. She arrived in Alice Springs on the Wednesday July 18, the same day as another friend, Lisa.

  Joanne was overjoyed to see them, and moved out of Helen Jones’s place to stay at a safe house, as the police had urged originally. In the company of old friends, she felt confident enough to do so.

  Sullivan kept in touch with Joanne via Wealleans. ‘The whole thing had obviously had a severe effect on Joanne,’ he says. ‘She wasn’t sleeping, and she was in a bit of a mess. She was on Valium or something too, so she was pretty much a zombie.’ That also explained why, later, when she finally came face to face with the press, they all remarked on her lack of emotion and her blank composure.

  JOANNE’S STEPFATHER VINCENT ARRIVED the same day. When she saw him, she ran straight into his arms. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he told her. ‘We loved Peter too.’ He was one of the first people around her to talk of Peter in the past tense.

  THE POLICE WERE CROSS-CHECKING their criminal records for anyone fitting the man’s description, as well as following up the 300-plus leads phoned in by the public. A charter plane carrying Tanami Mine staff reported spotting a white ute with a green canopy driving through the Tanami Desert. Heavily-armed police swooped, but were disappointed to find the driver was seventy-one. There was an itinerant near Katherine who fitted the description and who’d told a couple of fishermen he’d had to shave off his moustache and cut his hair as he was sick of being stopped by police. The men described him as behaving oddly but, when police tracked him down, they were again able to discount him. A man someone knew in Queensland a few years before with a reputation for violence was also found, but subsequently given the all clear.

  Helicopters had joined the planes in conducting aerial searches, but with little success. Motorbike hunts of the area, 50 kilometres north and 50 kilometres south of the crime scene, had found only a kangaroo caught in a fence and a dead dog. There were no more footprints discovered on either the hard, stony surfaces or in the soft, loose sand. One of the sergeants covertly tossed a tiny five-cent coin into the scrub to test how effectively everyone was looking. It was found only an hour later.

  By the late afternoon of Wednesday July 18, police decided to call off the search of the 10 square kilometres around the bloodstain and the 4800 square kilometres around that. If a body was there, it would have been found. They had to face facts: the body must have been taken a distance away. The hours between the incident and the time Joanne alerted the police would have enabled the attacker to travel many hundreds of kilometres, especially if he were familiar with the outback roads.

  A note of desperation was beginning to creep into the words of police. ‘This whole thing is really so bizarre, it almost defies belief,’ Commander Bob Fields said. ‘If we are dealing with someone who has some local knowledge of the Northern Territory, its back blocks and back roads, it’s certainly not beyond the realms of possibility that he could have got out that way.’ The words ‘defies belief’ would later come back to haunt him, however, in a situation where the media was still scrabbling for material to file. One UK newspaper wrote about ‘Horror Trips Down Under’, recounting the disasters that had befallen backpackers travelling in Australia, while other journalists were speculating, in the absence of any known leads, that maybe even the police were beginning to doubt Joanne’s story. The words ‘defies belief’ came up in the discussion, again and again.

  ON WEDNESDAY EVENING, POLICE asked Joanne to take part in a reenactment back at the crime scene in the hope it might help her remember more details. She sat in a car beside a police officer playing Peter, as a white four-wheel-drive ute pulled up beside them, and another officer leaned over calling to them to stop. She then watched as the two officers moved behind the vehicle. They stopped short, however, of tying her up. Instead, a female officer took her place. Before darkness fell, Joanne walked around the scrub where she’d hidden that night. ‘We realised just how traumatic it would be for Joanne,’ said Commander Max Pope. But they were desperate for any clues, however small.

  To the assembled press, herded behind police roadblocks 1.8 kilometres either side of the scene, it seemed a perfect opportunity for photos, film and questions. Instead, they were kept for several hours so far away from Joanne and the officers that they could only just make them out. From that distance, no-one saw the moment, just after the fake attacker had pushed his gun into Joanne’s face as she sat in the van, that she ducked down beneath the dashboard. She’d broken down in long, anguished sobs, and the play-acting had to be suspended for a few minutes to allow her to recover. The mock gunman patted her arm reassuringly.

  One photographer alone managed to get a picture of Joanne as her police car sped through the barrier on its way back to Alice Springs. The rest froze in the cold and wind, watching police lighting their own bonfire to keep warm well into their side of the orange cones.

  BUT IF RELATIONS BETWEEN THE police and media were chilly, between Joanne and the media they’d reached 10 degrees Celsius below. She put a message out to her friends in the UK not to speak to any media if approached, and asked the staff back at Dymocks in Sydney to refuse any interviews too. She’d lost so much, the only thing she felt she had left was her private grief. But, as it would transpire, that was the one thing she couldn’t afford.

  INSTEAD SHE LEFT IT TO Peter’s brother Paul Falconio and their father Luciano to front the press as soon as they flew into the airport in Alice Springs. Grief was etched deeply on their faces, but they were calm, composed and dignified as they spoke haltingly of a beloved son and brother who was kind, clever and good. It couldn’t have been a more stark contrast with the way Joanne had behaved towards the press.

  ‘My feeling is that he is still alive,’ Luciano said. ‘Otherwise, I would not be here. I’m looking forward to seeing Joanne, but I’m looking forward to seeing my son even more.’

  After the reenactment, Joanne was driven back to Alice Springs to meet them. She’d told Senior Sergeant Helen Braam she didn’t want to see them, but realised she’d have to. She knew how difficult the meeting would be, especially as Luciano was so eager to hold on to the belief that his son was still alive.

  THE NEXT MORNING, THURSDAY JULY 19, father and son provided blood and DNA samples to help identify the blood found at the scene. Then they visited the actual site, while the press, again, was kept at a distance. The two men were plainly distressed as they walked up and down the road for some forty minutes, obviously trying to understand Peter’s last moments and commit to memory the place with which he’d be forever associated. Then they wandered over to the scrub and leant down. Everyone craned heads to work out what they were doing. They were picking a few gum leaves as mementoes.

  BEHIND THE SCENES, JOANNE WAS still working hard with the police. Art teacher David Stagg from the Charles Darwin University Secondary School in Alice Springs was rung to ask if he’d help with the investigation. He arrived the next day, Friday July 20, and was startled to find himself face-to-face with the woman the whole world seemed to be looking for: Joanne. The police wanted some drawings of the white four-wheel-drive ute, he was told, as well as the gun, and Stagg spent a total of six-and-a-half hours with her. Joanne described the vehicle she’d been pushed into once more, and went over every single detail she remembered. Stagg drew sketch after sketch, she pointing out where he hadn’t quite captured an aspect, or rethinking her words to make them more accurately explain what she recalled. It wasn’t easy. ‘Ms Lees gave clear and precise explanations [and] she was composed the whole time,’ says Stagg. ‘[But] at one stage we asked her if she wanted a break because we thought it was a bit too much for her. She rolled back in her chair and covered her face with her hands and came back forward and offered
more information. She said she wanted to, that there might be something she’d missed that might be important.’

  Joanne tried to remember everything she’d seen. She told Stagg she had a glimpse of a red fire extinguisher on the left-hand side behind the passenger seat, she described the passenger’s seat as a bucket seat, and she said the headlights were square in shape. But when it came to describing the man’s dog, Joanne hesitated. Stagg showed her a book of dog pictures and showed her a Blue Heeler. Joanne shook her head. ‘It wasn’t a Blue Heeler or typical bush dog or Territory dog,’ she said. ‘But I can’t say what breed it was. Just a dog sitting in that seat, the driver’s side.’

  Stagg ended up with more than a dozen sketches of both the inside and outside of the vehicle. The pair followed the same process for a picture of the gun, with the main focus on the barrel and the engraved scrolling on the side. All the time, other officers were popping in to ask Joanne questions. But the one question Stagg kept asking her, over and over, was: ‘Are you sure you saw that?’ Because only the details Joanne said she remembered with absolute clarity were allowed to end up in the final pictures.

  BY THIS STAGE, THE CLAMOUR for Joanne to appear at a press conference had reached a crescendo. Australian newspaper, radio, TV and wires journalists were jostling for position with the British media, including correspondents from the BBC, The Times, News of the World, Daily Telegraph, Guardian, Independent, and The Observer. ‘It was an absolute feeding frenzy,’ says The Centralian Advocate’s Mark Wilton. ‘It was wall-to-wall journos everywhere.’