by Sue Williams
As everyone’s frustration — and expenses — mounted, no-one could understand why Joanne wouldn’t simply face the press, and get it over and done with. ‘All we wanted was a picture and a few words,’ says Phil Cornford, from the Sydney Morning Herald. ‘It really wasn’t that hard.’ Barbie Dutter, the Sydney-based correspondent for the UK’s Daily Telegraph felt much the same. ‘Here we all were, sitting in Alice Springs, just waiting for her to come out of hiding. If she’d just speak to us, and allow a few photographs, it would have taken so much of the pressure off her.’
Rumours as to why Joanne was being so intractable intensified. A new one reared its head: maybe she’d actually been raped and that’s why she was refusing to talk.
Police again tried to persuade Joanne to appear at a press conference, but again she refused. In the end, she agreed to prepare a written statement. Police assumed she’d read that to the assembled media but … no. Would she read it on a police video camera? No. She also rejected the suggestion of giving the media the chance to take film and pictures, giving them instead a photograph of her and Peter taken in the Kombi. Media officer Denise Hurley tried to explain that that wouldn’t be sufficient to placate the media. ‘Well, that’ll have to do,’ Joanne replied stubbornly. She was close to tears, and Hurley left it. In the end, Paul Falconio, who, with his dark short hair and his soft brown eyes, looked eerily like Peter, agreed to read the statement for her. Joanne asked that Wilton not be allowed into the room.
The statement was only six brief paragraphs. ‘I don’t want to lessen the severity of what happened, but I believe there has been speculation I was sexually assaulted,’ it read. ‘But this did not occur. I consider myself very lucky to have escaped and be okay.’ Paul then did his best to make excuses for Joanne. ‘Joanne is still very distressed and she is withdrawn, which is to be expected,’ he said.
But her message was clear, particularly to those sections of the Australian and British media who had written her letters, through the police, to buy the rights to her story. ‘I am not prepared,’ she wrote in another statement that would come back to bite her later, ‘to sell my story to the media.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
A DESERT SHOOTOUT
THAT SAME DAY, FRIDAY JULY 20, Geoffrey Nicholls, the armed man who’d been using a cow as target practice as he drove towards Peter Falconio and Joanne Lees’ Kombi, was getting into yet another fight, this time 500 kilometres south of Alice Springs. He’d veered off the main road as he travelled south from Alice Springs to take the 200-kilometre dirt road to Oodnadatta, a tiny town in the heart of the Simpson Desert, northeast of Coober Pedy. The famous old track was used as a trade route by local Aboriginal people tens of thousands of years before Europeans arrived and built a railway through the town. Since the closure of that railway in 1981, however, Oodnadatta has become a quiet settlement — population just 120 people, mostly Aboriginal — with a general store, a museum and a hotel. Its most frequent visitors are long-distance trucks and four-wheel-drive off-roaders. Even the main road is a challenge to ordinary vehicles and it’s a big deal when the council’s road grader comes through a couple of times a year to keep it open.
Together with his Aboriginal girlfriend Judy Rose and her two children, Nicholls had been travelling rough in their white Ford stationwagon. They’d been stopped by police searches a few times, but on each occasion had been allowed to pass. They’d chosen to avoid the main road, calling into towns only when they needed petrol, and had been sleeping out in the open in the soft orange earth in parking bays. Nicholls, with his .22 Magnum rifle bolt action repeater by his side, and a tomahawk and a large kitchen knife in the car, had been drinking heavily all the way. At one point, they stopped for petrol at Barrow Creek.
The family arrived in Oodnadatta at about 4 p.m., intending to wash the windscreen, and went to the hotel, the Transcontinental, in the middle of the town, to buy something to eat. At the front bar, they were asked to leave and sit outside because the children, at eight and two, weren’t allowed on licensed premises. Nicholls asked for food, but was told they didn’t start serving meals until 6 p.m. He was outraged, and accused manager Alan Wilson of being racist — even though, with the hotel Aboriginal-owned, Wilson was actually employed by black proprietors. Eventually Nicholls stomped out of the hotel, told everyone to get back into the car, drove nearer to the hotel, and parked. Then he got his gun.
Rose was alarmed. ‘Don’t be silly, Geoff,’ she pleaded. ‘Put the gun away.’
Nicholls looked at her strangely. ‘Don’t worry,’ he replied. ‘The welfare will look after you.’
He then walked to the front of the hotel. Wilson’s wife Beverley Kemble spotted him and ran in through the back door. ‘He’s got a gun!’ she shouted to Wilson. Together, they raced around the pub locking all the doors, and called the police. With Joanne and Peter’s attacker on the loose, they weren’t going to take any chances, and the two men on duty, Senior Constable Mark Sutton and Senior Community Constable John Coombes, grabbed a 12-gauge shotgun and a box of ammunition before rushing to the hotel.
FROM THE CAR, JUDY ROSE heard a gunshot and scrambled out and ran to the back of the hotel. She saw Nicholls standing on the corner, aiming the gun at someone. She screamed at him to stop. But standing right in his sights 30 metres away was Sutton who’d arrived and was shouting to Nicholls to put his gun down. Nicholls ignored him and, as Sutton walked towards him, he heard the crack of gunfire.
‘I moved diagonally towards the hotel to get some cover,’ says Sutton. ‘I was still yelling but my shotgun didn’t have the range of his rifle. I had capsicum spray too but I wasn’t close enough.’ The only bullet-proof vests back at the station had been too small to wear.
Nicholls seemed hellbent on shooting someone. ‘I’ve got a rifle and you’ve got a shotgun,’ Nicholls yelled to Sutton. ‘I can shoot you, you can’t shoot me.’ He was right. He then fired another shot, and darted behind the fence. Sutton was torn; he needed cover, but he also wanted to be close enough to talk to him. By this point, Nicholls was 5 to 7 metres away. Sutton was intensely aware of all the people around too. At one stage, elderly local Nelly Stuart walked between the two men; at another, a tourist pulling a trailer drove through. There were drinkers standing on the verandah of the hotel, there were children in the nearby playground and there were fifteen or so people milling around the store 50 to 60 metres away. ‘Police!’ Sutton was shouting as loudly as he could. ‘Put the gun down! Police! Put the gun down!’
Finally, Sutton came out from behind his cover, only for Nicholls to level the dark grey barrel of his rifle right at him. Sutton pulled his trigger first. Nothing happened. He hadn’t disengaged the safety catch. He then flicked the safety off, aimed again and shot three times in rapid succession. Nicholls crumpled to the ground.
GEOFFREY NICHOLLS WAS PRONOUNCED dead by an ambulance officer on the scene at 4.45 p.m. on Friday 20 July 2001. A DNA sample request was filled in by the South Australian Police ‘to be compared re possible sample from Barrow Creek shooting in NT’. Police investigating the Barrow Creek case also requested an image of Nicholls to check it against Joanne Lees’ descriptions. ‘It was a matter of waiting for that photo to come through,’ says Superintendent Kate Vanderlaan, now back from Perth and in charge of the Peter Falconio case. That picture was emailed to Detective Sergeant Chalker from the NT police on July 23. ‘We then realised it wasn’t him,’ says Vanderlaan. Nicholls was simply a bloke with a gun who was severely depressed, had been drinking heavily and hadn’t been taking his medication. Police also discovered that he died on the actual day of the second anniversary of his son Troy’s death.
A Commissioner of Police’s inquiry concluded that Nicholls was suffering from a mental condition, and that the use of a firearm by police was justified. Nicholls’ actions, they said, indicated that he had every intention of killing or seriously injuring someone. The coroner recommended that the police buy new bullet-proof vests.
But Ge
offrey Nicholls’ brother Shane was left in no doubt that Peter Falconio’s murderer had now claimed his next victim. He feels today that Nicholls was only shot because, with the real killer still at large, police acted too quickly to resolve the situation. ‘Police overreacted because of Falconio,’ he says. ‘They were hysterical. Geoff had drunk too much to do anything, and his hand had been injured by the first bullet — how would he have carried on firing?’
Nicholls’ barrister Ralph Bleechmore was also critical of police. ‘They shot at the centre of his body, so they were shooting to kill,’ he says. ‘From army experience, it’s possible to disable someone instead.’
Others were adamant: Geoffrey Nicholls had been depressed and suicidal and his death was more a case of ‘self-precipitated suicide’, or ‘suicide by police’. But however heartbreaking was his death, as was his life, Peter’s killer was still at large. And no-one was safe.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
THE LINDYFICATION OF JOANNE LEES
ON THE SATURDAY EVENING A week after the attack, Joanne Lees was sitting with her chaperone, Senior Sergeant Helen Braam, in their Alice Springs hotel room, but kept getting up, pacing the room, and glancing at the clock.
‘What’s wrong?’ asked Braam.
Joanne shook her head. ‘It was about this time,’ she replied quietly, ‘that it happened.’
Seven days had passed since Peter Falconio’s disappearance, and it seemed to her that little real progress had been made. But she didn’t need to remind the police of that. They too were acutely aware of not having come up with any conclusive leads. They’d searched 800,000 square kilometres from the air — almost half the Northern Territory — vehicles had trawled 4800 square kilometres around Barrow Creek, and police and trackers on foot had covered 10 square kilometres around the scene. There’d been more than 500 calls from members of the public, but every one had drawn a blank. Dozens of potential suspects had been apprehended, questioned and set free. Pictures of the ute had been circulated and, despite police hoping such a distinctively customised vehicle might be easy to spot, nothing so far had been. They started to believe family or friends might be harbouring the gunman and appealed to them to come forward.
That same day, Senior Sergeant Jeanette Kerr had decided to begin an audit of the whole investigation. She also came to the conclusion that she needed to try to get more information out of Joanne.
In the meantime, the police had conducted a new search of the area and found another footprint, but it could still possibly only be but a tiny piece in the gaping puzzle. Then they played one of their trump cards. Top Aboriginal tracker Teddy Egan had finally been located in the outback and was brought to the scene.
From the harsh, sun-blistered deserts of Australia to the snow-blanketed forests of Europe, Teddy Egan Tjangala had plied his almost mystical trade as one of the last great traditional trackers of the Australian subcontinent. Aged around seventy-five — he’s thought to be the only person in Australia who doesn’t have his year of birth marked in his passport, merely a question mark — he’s one of the most respected Aboriginal elders and one of the most in-demand black trackers in Australia. It had been a hard journey, however. At the age of three, Teddy, his mother and their relatives were cornered by police officers during the brutal Coniston massacre near Barrow Creek. His mother hid him in a cave and Teddy emerged as one of just two survivng Aboriginal people from his clan who ducked the white men’s guns to live to tell the tale. Now his tracking skills are sought after throughout the world, including in Germany where he once helped police find three dangerous murderers who’d managed to escape from jail, tracking them through the snow, even though he’d never seen snow before. These days, he also plays a critical role in Walpiri ceremonies, with his talents as a traditional dancer much admired among his tribe. And he is a revered artist, painting not only on canvas, but in the old way, in the sands of the desert. Today Teddy lives as traditional a life as he’s able. When he’s not roaming the traditional lands of the Walpiri people in the Central Australian outback, he sleeps out in Alice Springs. He still speaks in the traditional Walpiri language and, with his halting English, prefers to converse in his native tongue.
At Barrow Creek, Teddy peered at the ground and complained about the vast number of police officers and searchers who’d left their own prints. ‘If you got me more early, I find the man,’ he said. He then walked straight to the mulga bush where Joanne had sheltered that night. ‘She running, here, there,’ he said, pointing to indiscernible signs. ‘Here she fall down. She run away into night. And here she lay down,’ he pronounced, pointing to the space under the bush. ‘Many hours. She shelter here. She very afraid.’ He bent lower into the space beneath the spidery branches of acacia. ‘See, she keep very still. Five witchetty grub trees here in a row.’
Teddy was in little doubt as to the attacker’s movements, he said he was a good hunter and that he knew the country well. He pointed out the places where he’d been, both in the scrub and where he’d walked along the side of the highway. ‘Big man tracks. Size eight–nine boots.’ And then he said something which startled the police. ‘And here, he had a flat tyre. His car not good. He have to change.’
THE POLICE PURSUED THIS NEW lead vigorously. They also checked out the route of a gas pipe line in the area. Denise Hurley saw Teddy as the ideal person for the press to meet but, unfortunately for her, a new footprint in a burnt out campsite a distance from the crime scene was discovered, and police returned to whisk Teddy away again, leaving the media even more disgruntled.
‘I predicted, right at the start, that as soon as the press had got over the first stage of the investigation, and all the excitement of that, they’d run out of things to write about, and they’d turn on us,’ says Hurley. ‘We actually sat down and strategised what to do for when that happened. One of our strategies was to give them Teddy Egan. But then something came up so we had to take him away, and cut all the media interviews. That didn’t go down well.’
BY NOW, THE ASSEMBLED PRESS was running out of patience. They were restless and irritated that they weren’t getting access to the big story — Joanne Lees — and they felt sure the police were hiding vital information from them. A low point was the reenactment. In response to questions from journalists, police had denied they were planning such a thing; it was going to be a simple walk-through with just two police cars present. A press conference was scheduled in Alice Springs at about the same time, which many of the reporters therefore opted to go to instead. Then it was delayed when the keys to the pressroom were misplaced. Two journalists were stunned, standing out there waiting on the street, to see an orange and white Kombi driving past, en route to Barrow Creek.
They thought the police had deliberately misled them to keep them away and they later learned it had been a full reenactment, complete with Joanne having a gun pushed in her face. ‘We’d asked them if they were going to stage a reenactment before they actually did, and they’d said no,’ says the Sydney Morning Herald’s Phil Cornford. ‘They’d lied about that, what else were they lying about?’
The press had also been tipped off about the Truckstop closed-circuit security video and kept badgering Hurley for details, convinced she was being deliberately obstructive. Mark Wilton asked a direct question about the existence of the footage, and was told no-one had knowledge of any such film. Afterwards, the journalists were furious to find out that the police viewed the footage the day after it was taken. But, at the time, the police he’d asked were telling the truth. They knew nothing about it. ‘We kept getting told there was nothing, basically,’ says Hurley. ‘The media were really cranky about it but we couldn’t get any information either. We were just passing on what we were being told.’
The journalists were leaked various bits of unofficial information from the police operation, sometimes from officers who were annoyed at not being a part of all the excitement, and sometimes from officers annoyed that they were, often far from home and operating in uncomf
ortable circumstances on an operation most had assumed would be wrapped up within a couple of days. There were also some officers who didn’t like Joanne and had started to doubt her story. They passed their misgivings on to a media hungry for any scrap of information, whether real or speculative.
Some sections of the press picked up on it immediately. They’d been hanging around, day after day, chewing the fat and dissecting, scrutinising and re-assembling the story from every possible angle. Predictably, sooner or later, the spotlight would fall back on to Joanne, and this time as a suspect.
At a time when the world had become used to instant gratification over news events, when victims were usually grateful to enlist the media to help and when the media themselves were present, willing and able, it seemed bizarre behaviour at the very best and, at worst, downright suspicious. In addition, there were parts of her story that didn’t seem to make sense to the press, especially when, of course, they hadn’t been told the full story. With her feet bound, they asked, quite wrongly, how could she have crawled 30-odd metres into the bushes? Why weren’t her injuries worse, and why hadn’t she suffered more from the cold while she was waiting out there for her attacker to leave? And if he was searching for her with a dog, how could it possibly have failed to have sniffed her out? And what of this idea that she moved her handcuffed hands under her body from behind her to in front, surely that would be impossible? Then there was the fact that police had found no footprints from the man at the scene …
There was that one crucial aspect of the white ute that didn’t make sense either. No-one had ever heard of a ute which had access from the front cab straight into the back. What’s more, there’d been a report of Peter and Joanne having a row at the Melanka Backpackers’ hostel. Maybe they weren’t getting on and had fought on the road too. And as for Peter’s body, why hadn’t the searches found anything?
