And Then the Darkness

by Sue Williams

  The strangest aspect to the story of all was Joanne’s demeanour. She didn’t look at all like a woman who’d been through a terrifying ordeal, and she certainly didn’t behave like one either. No-one had seen her composure slip in public; she appeared stony-faced, impassive and bereft of emotion. It was a look a number of journalists in Alice Springs at the time remembered having seen once before. On the face of Lindy Chamberlain.

  One of the main reasons that Chamberlain had been convicted twenty-one years before of murdering her baby at Uluru, outside Alice Springs, was that she just didn’t match the popular image of a distraught mother who’d just lost her child in the most awful circumstances imaginable. She looked strange, and acted even more strangely, a view promulgated and shared from the media to the police investigators, from casual bystanders to the general Australian public. A Seventh Day Adventist, her pastor husband Michael had declared, in his first press interview, that Azaria being snatched by a dingo was ‘the will of God’. Lindy hadn’t cried on camera and had battled, as she thought she should, to contain her emotions in public.

  It had the opposite effect to the one she intended. It might have allowed her to preserve her own dignity but, in the eyes of the public, it branded her a cold-hearted, dry-eyed murderess.

  Now exactly the same thing was happening to Joanne Lees.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  AND THE DINGO DIDN’T DO IT …

  WAS JOANNE LEES HIDING SOMETHING? The speculation reached fever pitch, fed on itself, and grew more heated, and more concrete, by the day. It was only a matter of time before people started whispering about the chances of her being more complicitly involved. And as soon as you started from that premise, suddenly nothing appeared quite as it seemed.

  Southern Commander Bob Fields continued to defend Joanne and moved quickly to dispel the gossip-mongering. ‘The position of the police force is we have no problems, no cause to worry about the truthfulness and the accuracy of what Joanne Lees has told us,’ he said at a press conference. ‘We are proceeding full steam ahead on the basis that what Joanne Lees has told us is the truth and is an accurate and credible recollection of events that happened at Barrow Creek last Saturday night.’ Yet earlier he’d spoken about events that night ‘defying belief’ — was he trying to cover his own tracks? And why had Commander Max Pope suddenly emerged as the main spokesperson on the case? Was this an attempt to sideline Fields?

  Northern Territory Police Commissioner Brian Bates looked on with incredulity. ‘The media saw something sinister in that, but there was nothing sinister at all,’ he says. ‘I had appointed Max Pope to talk to the media as I wanted to ensure they got what they wanted. I wanted to give them a focus. Bob Fields couldn’t do that full-time. He was Commander in charge of the southern region, and his responsibilities went far beyond that particular investigation. He had other work he had to do. But the media thought I wasn’t happy with Bob Fields, and that’s why I put Max Pope there. That wasn’t true. They just didn’t understand our command structure.’

  Yet on other aspects of Joanne’s story, the message didn’t seem to be getting through sufficiently clearly about what had happened. Fields and Pope appeared intimidated by the phalanx of world media that faced them every day and said the absolute minimum, sticking tightly to the script and volunteering no extra information. As a result, there were still sections of the media who thought — wrongly — that Joanne’s legs were bound during her escape, and no-one from the police pointed out that Joanne had never even suggested the dog had left the ute. Even the reenactment was taken as a sign that the police hadn’t believed Joanne’s story and wanted her to act it out to check she wouldn’t slip up.

  In addition, the police hadn’t shown the cable ties with which Joanne’s hands had been cuffed, or described how they enabled her to hold her hands apart with the tie in the middle. If they had, everyone would have understood how easy it had been for Joanne to move her bound hands from her back to her front, by stepping over the tie in the middle. In the absence of that information, Britain’s Daily Mail reporter, Richard Shears appeared on TV saying he’d even spoken to a ballet dancer who confirmed that, despite all her intense training and agility, she wasn’t flexible enough to step through. She’d have to dislocate a shoulder, step through, then pop it back. Another journalist, this time desk-bound in London, wrote: ‘Here’s a little party trick for you. The attacker taped Joanne’s hands behind her but, she said, she managed to bring them to the front by putting her body through her arms. Can you equal this feat? And don’t come crying to me if the ambulance men think it funny.’

  The police knew the press wanted more information but, at the same time, they needed to keep certain evidence to themselves so they could distinguish genuine suspects from the attention-seekers. The situation was made worse by the way the British press in particular didn’t seem to be able to convey adequately the size and remoteness of the area where Peter had disappeared, which made locating the body such a difficult task. Indeed, a man had once committed suicide in his car just 2 kilometres off the Stuart Highway near Tennant Creek and he wasn’t found for seven years. Readers in Britain, especially, also couldn’t understand how there could be so little traffic on a main highway, or how someone could apparently disappear off the face of the earth. There were still questions about the number of footprints and Pope didn’t help things when he was asked whether there was any physical evidence of an offender and he replied in his slow, careful, unembroidered way, ‘I’m not going to comment on that.’ And as for the reports of a row between the couple at a hostel in town, they were allowed to fester for far too long before it was revealed to have been a case of mistaken identity.

  Instead, the whispering campaign grew steadily in momentum. Burning in the memories of many British journalists was the story of former barmaid Tracie Andrews, twenty-eight, who received enormous media coverage back home in 1997 after she described how she and her twenty-five-year-old fiancé Lee Harvey were stopped by another motorist as they drove home along a little country lane in the British Midlands. After an altercation, Harvey was stabbed to death in a vicious road rage attack, and she was punched when she tried to intervene. The press went all out covering the story of the grieving, love-struck heroine who’d managed to escape with her life, especially when she tried to commit suicide later because she couldn’t face life without her man. Two years later, she was convicted of the murder and jailed for life. Making that wrong call in the early days in such a similar situation played on those journalists’ minds. By coincidence, in Australia just nine months before Peter’s disappearance, a Sydney man, Patrick Joiner, made an emotional appeal on television for his missing wife. The body of Mary Seretis was found two weeks later in the boot of his car.

  But with Joanne, it wasn’t long before the quiet deliberations finally broke out into the public arena. The first sign was a question at a press conference asking whether police really did believe Joanne’s story. The second was a query about whether Joanne had a history of mental illness. Pope unwittingly fanned the flames. He said she was ‘free to go’, but said he could not comment on the second matter. The rumour mill cranked up a notch.

  BEHIND THE SCENES, THE ATTEMPTS to persuade Joanne to face the press were assuming an edge of desperation. There was only one way to stop all this innuendo, and that would be if she fronted up to the media and gave them the pictures, film and quotes they craved. But Joanne was still not cooperating. Sitting drinking tea in a café in Alice Springs, she was tipped off by another customer that just behind the nearest pillar, ten men with cameras were waiting for her to come out. Another day, she was walking back to her hotel and a camera crew drove onto the pavement to trap her so they could take some film. ‘They then chased me down the street,’ she says. ‘It was all so intimidating.’ She’d started to feel as though the press was trying to hold her hostage all over again, and she rebelled. She knew they were printing lies about her, so why should she bow to their demands? The two sides grew
increasingly entrenched. There was a need for a circuit-breaker.

  It came in the form of Bates. He’d had plenty of experience with the international media over his forty-five-year police career, most recently in 1999 with the mass evacuation of East Timorese refugees to Darwin. When the UN compound where they’d been sheltering in Dili came under siege from armed militia after the vote for independence from Indonesia, Bates oversaw the rescue operation for the 1300 terrified people. Ten years before, with the Australian Federal Police, he’d run the long investigation into one of Australia’s most shocking crimes: the assassination of Assistant Commissioner Colin Winchester, after he helped uncover a complex tangle of a drug supply network and corrupt police.

  On July 24, Bates flew from Darwin to Alice Springs to meet with Joanne personally. ‘At that stage, no-one could convince her to do a press conference,’ he says. ‘So I thought I would go down and try.’

  When he first approached Joanne in the corner of a little town centre café, she came straight up to him, avoided all eye contact, and declared, ‘If you’ve got no news of Pete, there’s no use talking to me.’ Bates was taken aback but persisted. He had his own reasons. ‘My background of many years in policing has taught me that it’s important to keep the momentum of a case going,’ he says. ‘As much the media needs us, we need the media. I knew if I could get Joanne in front of the cameras and talking, it would keep things happening. The problem was that the days were flying by and there was no sign our suspect. The longer things go on, the more difficult they are.’

  He sat down with Joanne and Superintendent Kate Vanderlaan, to try to explain how vital it was that she appear before the media. He was sympathetic to her reluctance, but felt it was vital. ‘It was impossible to get close to her, to warm to her, to establish a rapport,’ he says. ‘But that wasn’t important. It’s no denigration of her, but I could see she was her own person, with her own personality, and she couldn’t cope with what was happening. She’d got herself offside with the media, they’d taken an instant dislike to her, and she’d reacted in a particular way.’

  Eventually, Joanne agreed, and everyone heaved a sigh of relief. But it wasn’t to be straightforward. At first, she asked Denise Hurley to find out what questions the media would like to ask, because she’d decided she was only going to take certain questions, then she said she wanted only one journalist in the room, and the TV camera operators, no-one else. And, further, she wanted to ban all British media. ‘We encouraged her to forget that, it would be a disaster,’ says Hurley. ‘But we got all the questions from the media, and then she started knocking some of the questions out. She said she’d answered some of those questions before, and that others were ridiculous.’

  The press conference, on Wednesday July 25, was an unmitigated disaster. Only one ABC radio reporter was allowed into the conference room at the Alice Springs police station with the photographers and camera operators and, of the fourteen questions the assembled press had prepared for her, she’d whittled the list down to three. Those three questions gave the media little material to work with. ‘If I could say one thing to the man who did this, I would ask him to let police know where Pete is,’ she said, reading her written answer, with Paul Falconio on her right and Pope on her left. ‘I am confident Pete will be found.’ The reenactment was ‘unpleasant’ but ‘necessary’. ‘I have asked police to tell me only positive news and remain hopeful of finding Pete.’ As for her plans for the future, she said she hadn’t decided how long she would remain in Alice Springs. ‘At the moment I don’t think further ahead than what I will do tomorrow,’ she said.

  She concluded by saying, ‘Anyone who has spoken to me or had any contact with me, no-one doubts me. Only the media have asked questions about my story. I find it all so overwhelming and intimidating. I’ve got a problem with all press. They distort the truth and doubt my story. They misquote me, making up stories and accusations.’ It was a hesitant, stumbling performance and she was breathing heavily, clearly nervous, but her answers made her look uptight and paranoid. She came away from the press conference feeling she’d done her duty; she’d given the press what they’d wanted. The press came away feeling more hostile and belligerent than ever.

  One journalist talked of being phoned by an assistant editor on his newspaper, furious that they didn’t have a decent story for the day, and outraged that Joanne had turned down all approaches for an interview. ‘Right!’ she’s alleged to have barked down the phone. ‘Let’s get the bitch!’

  Bates shook his head sadly. ‘There was nothing I could do when she said she was only going to answer three questions,’ he says. ‘The media had expected her to open up to them, and she hadn’t at all. At least I’d achieved the aim of getting her in front of the cameras, but it made things worse.’

  Hurley couldn’t understand Joanne’s rationale. ‘It was almost as if someone had planted the thought in her mind that the press were never to be trusted,’ she says. Vanderlaan says Joanne never actually said she hated the press. ‘I think she just didn’t like talking about what had happened. She was overwhelmed, and didn’t know how to react. I certainly felt for her.’

  Bates, despite his disappointment, felt similarly. He was pleased she’d appeared — the police switchboard was flooded with more than 300 calls after her appeal, the biggest single response they’d had to date. And he was, to a point, sympathetic. ‘She may not have got it quite right because of the trauma,’ he says. ‘But how would any of us react in the situation she’d been in?’

  THE WAY LUCIANO AND PAUL FALCONIO were conducting themselves — politely, cooperatively and patiently, despite their grief — threw Joanne’s behaviour even more sharply into contrast. Bates had decided he wanted to meet them as well as Joanne, to express his sympathy for their terrible predicament and reassure them that everything possible was being done. He saw them for lunch the same day as he’d met up with Joanne. Luciano was courteous and gracious while Paul was quieter but eager to do anything that might help. ‘They were such lovely people,’ says Bates. ‘I felt so, so sorry for them. I said, “We’re doing all we can”, but I knew that really wouldn’t be much comfort. It was important for them to know where we were at. That’s part of the approach I’d always felt was so important.’

  LUCIANO AND PAUL WERE HAPPY to speak to the press whenever they were asked to and it began to look as if Joanne was being deliberately obstructive. They’d covered all the obvious angles by now, followed every new lead and become endlessly inventive. One British journalist wrote breathlessly of Australia’s ‘Death Triangle’ — a massive triangle drawn over most of Australia and the size of several European countries within which, in the past, a number of tourists had met their deaths.

  Now it was time for a fresh angle. And that same journalist, Richard Shears, had no compunction about writing it. Under the provocative headline, ‘Is the Outback Heroine telling the truth?’ he wrote: ‘Now in Australia they are beginning to talk about the “Lindyfication” of Joanne Lees, whose limited public accounts of the incident at Barrow Creek have given rise to rumour and speculation similar to that which grew up around Lindy in the early days of the Azaria mystery … “Where are their prints?” the doubters ask. The Aboriginal trackers would find a dog’s prints with their eyes shut. And why did the stranger tie up Ms Lees in such a way that she could escape? How could a woman stumbling away to hide in a clump of roadside bushes conceal herself so well from a man with a torch and a dog? … It is disturbing questions such as these that dominate the dinner tables and bars of Alice Springs.’

  Shears had reported doubts as coming from Australians and, in return, the Australian media reported the doubts as coming from the British. Both sides had effectively given voice to their speculative stories by quoting the other. It was a game of Chinese whispers, and the only real loser was Joanne.

  Today, Shears remains defiant about his stand. ‘I was suspicious about Joanne’s story from day one,’ he says. ‘There were too many gaps in her story.
It doesn’t add up. Unless you shake a tree, nothing falls out. I felt I was justified in asking those questions. I got a lot of criticism for it; some of my colleagues said, “We’ve got to stick to the police line”. To be honest, I don’t know what happened, but I still don’t believe her story. Why won’t she talk to the press? What’s she so afraid of?’ Shears had once had similar doubts about Lindy Chamberlain and the death of her baby Azaria. It made for controversial, headline-grabbing copy. ‘And I still don’t believe the dingo did it,’ he says.

  Shears’ story, with its raising of the spectre of Joanne somehow being involved in Peter’s disappearance, created a sensation in the UK and other newspaper editors clamoured for similar reports from their correspondents. Some bluntly refused to file them. Sydney-based stringer for a host of British tabloids, Frank Thorne, was one. ‘A few papers called me saying the editors wanted a story saying Joanne did it,’ he says. ‘I said I’m not going to write that. I don’t believe she did it. There’s no evidence at all to suggest she’s involved. Then later, I got a call from a more senior person on one newspaper asking, “What’s all this about?” I told him all the facts pointed to her not being involved at all. He was totally taken aback. I explained to him all the evidence and he said, okay, write that story. But it never ran. They just weren’t interested. They were so carried away by the fact they’d all been conned by Tracie Andrews and here was another good-looking woman, so she must be a killer too. Everyone finds female killers fascinating, and it was much more interesting than the truth.’

  THE DAY AFTER THE PRESS conference, the police launched a stunning new initiative by posting a record $250,000 reward. They said they were looking for ‘someone who has knowledge of the gunman but who has so far been reluctant, or afraid, to come forward’. It was the biggest sum of money offered since the 1870s when an 8000-pound bounty was put on the capture — dead or alive — of outlaw bushranger Ned Kelly.