by Sue Williams
But Joanne had her mind on a completely different liaison. While she was being chaperoned around town, she called into an internet office to check her emails. Her police minder, under orders to keep a close watch for anything out of the ordinary, noticed that she was writing from a second email account. And she was emailing, and receiving emails from, a girlfriend called Steph.
She thought it was odd that Joanne should be operating another email address and she mentioned it back at the station. Just to be sure, an officer confronted her. Joanne was was eventually forced to admit that Steph was a pseudonym for Nick Reilly, the man she’d seen back in Sydney. She’d emailed him, suggesting they meet up one day in Berlin. The report went straight to Kerr: this must be the information the linguistics experts had detected Joanne being so frantically determined to hide. For Joanne, no doubt, it had been a desperate cry in the dark for companionship, from someone who felt she’d lost everyone, and everything, but she was devastated to realise that her secret was now in the open. She dreaded the press finding out. Bad enough that she’d betrayed Pete the first time; it would be horrendous if the wider world, and the Falconio family, discovered her deception.
That night, she wept as she often did. But this time, as well as the sobs of grief and of anger, there were also tears of shame.
JOHN DAULBY ALSO MADE ANOTHER major decision: he finally released the Shell Truckstop video, the snatch of film and series of pictures that showed a man, thought to be the Barrow Creek attacker, buying diesel, coffee and ice a few hours after Peter and Joanne had been ambushed. The disk had been sent over to police in Queensland to be transferred onto video and cleaned up. Police were hoping the process might allow them to work out the registration plates on the white ute pictured. But when the image came back, it was still not good enough.
The police had been in possession of the tape for more than three weeks, sometimes denying its existence or protesting it wasn’t important, and its release after so long provoked a fresh wave of anger. If it had been released at the very beginning, critics argued, people would have been looking out for the attacker and his vehicle so much earlier, and there wouldn’t have been such doubt about Joanne’s account. Also, it instantly explained why there were so few footprints at the scene: the man was wearing thongs which would have made no impression on the hard, stony ground.
‘The problem was that it got lost in the mechanisms of the investigation,’ Daulby says. ‘It’s true we had that tape early. We treated it appropriately. We sent it to Darwin in the first week. Then they came back to us and said there was nothing they could do with it and it would have to go interstate. So it went interstate. To be frank with you, it should have been dealt with earlier. It should have been out there earlier. We received a barrage of criticism over that. I stuck to my line that there’s a process that has to be gone through. There’s nothing wrong with sticking to that process but if it goes wrong … we suffered. Another problem was that they had earlier discounted the person they thought was on the video, and so did not worry about it.
‘It’s difficult to explain, but once you’ve taken a line on something, that’s it; you’ve got to justify your position. I had no problem with the time period of the investigation. It’s just that it made things very difficult. You’ve got to face it: it was a stuff-up. That was one of the low lights of the investigation.’
But it also provided another of the darkest days. Daulby didn’t say so at the time but two days before, Joanne had been shown a collection of ten photographs, one of which was a still taken from the security tapes at the Truckstop, by Senior Constable Anthony Henrys. He asked her if she could identify her attacker but her reaction disappointed everyone. When she saw the man in the Truckstop still, she said, ‘No, that man is too old.’ She didn’t actually discount him, but she didn’t immediately leap on him either.
Joanne’s mum, Jenny James, explained that Joanne couldn’t definitely say it was the man, but thought the likeness to him was very good. Over the coming weeks, the police kept asking, if the man on the video wasn’t the attacker, why didn’t the innocent customer filmed simply come forward to identify himself?
THE PUBLICITY OVER THE RELEASE of the Truckstop tape attracted even more calls from people with information. Toyota Australia had identified the vehicle as a 75 Series cabin chassis Landcruiser, a model nearly always supplied in white that had only been imported since 1985.
Joanne agreed to take part in another press conference, to appeal for anyone recognising the man in the tape, or his ute, to come forward. This turned out not to be so bad as the first, but still not much better. Joanne appeared, but refused to speak, leaving Paul Falconio to answer all the questions. She turned up in a tight pink sleeveless T-shirt that emphasised her large bust, with the words ‘Cheeky Monkey’ emblazoned across the front. Some of the press were aghast; media officer Denise Hurley admitted she had asked Joanne to wear a jacket over the top, but she’d refused. Even worse, she’d bought the T-shirt with police money.
When the pair sat down, they gave a much more definite response to the notion that the Truckstop man was actually the gunman. Paul said they both believed he was the one, and made an emotional plea to his brother. ‘Just hang in there, if you can hear us, just wait,’ he said. ‘We will see you soon … Anybody in Australia, or anywhere, if you see anything, or you know of any information, if you could come forward. This is from myself, Joanne and both our families.’
Joanne again looked nervous, and held Paul’s hand tight, seizing it with her other hand when she turned around from her chair to leave the room. It was as if, having lost one Falconio boy, she was determined not to let this other one slip away.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
THAT’S YOU!
BRADLEY MURDOCH WAS SITTING IN his flat in Broome when his girlfriend Beverley Allan called round to tell him about a phone call they’d had that day at the office of the Broome Diesel and Hydraulics Service about the missing man, Peter Falconio. With a start, she saw him gazing at the front page of the West Australian newspaper of Tuesday August 7, with its picture of the man in the Shell Truckstop video. ‘That’s you on the front page,’ she declared, ‘and that’s your vehicle.’ Murdoch shook his head. Allan, however, was convinced. ‘I just remember the way that he walked,’ she said later. ‘The way he held himself, his body posture.’
Murdoch had also had a call from his father that day, who’d seen the same photograph. ‘He told his father it wasn’t him,’ says Allan. ‘He sat me down and continued to point out all the differences between the vehicles. There were some differences on the tray, the canopy — which I can’t remember precisely — and also he said he was towing a camper trailer, that it couldn’t have been him.’ Allan had never known he had a camper trailer, but later she actually saw one in the yard. Since he’d returned to Broome from Sedan, Allan says he’d overhauled his vehicle: the tyres were off, the back stripped and the canopy had been rebuilt with a new wire cage.
James Hepi was also surprised when he saw the photograph in the newspaper. He asked Murdoch, ‘That’s a picture of you, isn’t it?’ to which he claims Murdoch replied, ‘Yes. But I had nothing to do with it.’ When asked what ‘it’ was, Hepi explains bluntly, ‘The murder.’ Hepi says Murdoch would often wear glasses as part of a disguise, although his friend Brian Johnston says he needs them these days to read maps. Hepi is adamant, ‘That’s Brad Murdoch going through the door of the service station.’ He was familiar with the place too, he used it regularly himself.
At first, Murdoch insisted the vehicle in the photo wasn’t his. He pointed to the roof of the Landcruiser, which looked as if it had poles jutting from it. ‘Brad said that can’t be my car; it has the roof supports on it,’ says Hepi. But Hepi subsequently saw another picture of the car, and realised those poles from the roof were actually part of the fuel bowsers, and weren’t a part of the vehicle at all.
Broome mechanic Robin Knox had agreed to install a new, bigger exhaust system on Murdoch’s To
yota Landcruiser. He knew Murdoch had been driving long distances across the red dirt roads of the area, so he was startled when he got a close-up view of the vehicle.
‘It was in extremely good condition,’ he says. ‘It had been rebuilt or cleaned right up. It was quite unusual for a Broome car. You get a lot of red dirt and dust up here. The car was spotless. There was no dirt on the brakes or wheels or chassis, anything like that. We worked underneath the car and everything seemed very clean, like it had been rebuilt and tidied up.’
Later, Murdoch started a discussion about bodies with Hepi. It was fairly wide-ranging: ‘How to get rid of them,’ explains Hepi, ‘to put them in a spoon drain on the side of the road, cover them with dirt, and soft diggings. [They’re] on the side of the road, run-off so the roads don’t flood.’ Hepi was apparently unimpressed by the conversation. He replied, ‘I didn’t think I needed to kill anyone to carry on what I was doing.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
ALL QUIET ON THE NORTHERN FRONT
TOWARDS THE MIDDLE OF AUGUST 2001, the investigation was scaled down from 100 police to seventy, and then down to fourteen core people. Aware that it might be only too easy to lose impetus, the group decided they needed an inspiring name. They settled on Taskforce Regulus, after the brightest star in the Leo constellation. ‘Lionheart,’ they agreed enthusiastically. It felt apt. They knew they’d need all the spirit they could muster to keep wading through the oceans of information, with no firm lifelines or leads. With more than $1 million already spent, and 1700 cars and 200 potential suspects already excluded from inquiries, tip-offs from 6000 calls from the public were being carefully studied, filed and followed up. To maximise efficiency, the Taskforce was divided into three cells: intelligence; persons of interest; and vehicles of interest. They were still optimistic they’d find the perpetrator, but they realised it could take a long, long time.
Joanne Lees and Paul Falconio decided to leave Alice Springs and flew to Sydney on August 15, where Joanne went back to work at her old job, at the Dymocks bookshop, and stayed with her friend Amanda Wealleans at her flat in Manly. She said she was determined to remain in Australia while the investigation continued, while there was a chance of finding out something about Peter’s fate. ‘She said she thought that while she was here, she might as well be doing something,’ says her boss Gary Sullivan. ‘Initially, there was a lot of press hanging around, cameramen trying to shoot into the store, and people lurking in the shop. It was getting on Joanne’s nerves. But all the staff were very protective of her.’
She used the pseudonym Anna for all phone calls, worked mostly in the storeroom away from the public and tried to avoid the weird guy who’d regularly come in to tell her he loved her. When a customer would approach her and casually ask her for an autograph, she would flee, astonished, upset, and angry.
‘She was struggling to cope with everything,’ says Sullivan. ‘Peter’s brother Paul started picking her up from work so she wouldn’t get hassled. She was a really nice soft girl. She told me she didn’t know how to cope without Peter. He did so much for her. The side others saw of her in Alice Springs, of wanting to be in control, none of us had seen. None of us knew that part of her. Here, she was just back to being an innocent young girl.’
EVERYONE WANTED A SAY IN the case. A British newspaper flew out John Stalker, one of the UK’s most famous former police officers, and the man who unleashed enormous controversy by revealing an alleged Royal Ulster Constabulary ‘shoot-to-kill’ policy in Northern Ireland. Now the director of a large national security company and a crime specialist on TV, he visited the crime scene, and said it was no wonder there were so few footprints on such hard stony ground. He also revealed that he had never experienced such black nights before, and declared that the police were doing a fine job. ‘For my own part, having spent two hours in [Assistant Commissioner John] Daulby’s office, I can honestly say he is not the sort of cop I’d want on my trail if I were the gunman.’ And his verdict on the villain of the piece? ‘My belief is that the attacker is in his early middle-age,’ he says. ‘He is a loner and completely self-reliant — the kind of man who can take off into nowhere with his van and his dog and live off the land. He is a survivalist, the American Vietnam Veteran type. There are plenty of them in Australia too.’
A water-diviner from Queensland swore Peter’s body was buried at Renner Springs, 150 kilometres north of Tennant Creek. The farmer who owned the land delivered a piece of dirt to the police for forensic testing. A psychic provided a fresh description of the Barrow Creek assailant. Even loathed backpacker murderer Ivan Milat put in his tuppence worth. He said the description of the Barrow Creek gunman was the same as the description of the backpacker killer by the one man who got away, Paul Onions. The gunman, therefore, was most probably the same person as the one who stalked, raped and killed the overseas tourists. For Milat, of course, never did it.
IN THE MIDDLE OF SEPTEMBER 2001, Paul Falconio decided to return to the UK. There seemed to be little point in hanging around Sydney, with nothing he could do to help the police. There was another reason too. ‘I think he thought Joanne was getting too dependent on him,’ says Gary Sullivan. ‘He felt it would be better if Joanne tried to cope on her own.’
IN OCTOBER, IT WAS DECIDED TO send a group of police officers from Taskforce Regulus to examine the crime scene. No-one at that point from the group had actually been there, so they took along Senior Constable Ian Spilsbury who’d been in charge of the area at the start to help them orientate themselves.
The group included Superintendent Kate Vanderlaan, Senior Sergeant Jeanette Kerr, Detective Tony Henrys and Detective Megan Rowe, and they arrived on October 15 to view the site. Spilsbury pointed out the mulga bush Joanne had hidden beneath and they walked over for a closer look. As Kerr casually bent down, she spotted something on the ground. It was three pieces of black tape, most probably the parts Joanne had described biting off the manacles. Spilsbury immediately photographed them and took them. But worse was to follow. As he moved a leaf aside, he found the lipbalm sitting there, just as Joanne had said. Everyone fell silent. It was hard to believe the intensive searches of the area had overlooked them.
THE INVESTIGATION HAD HIT A wall. Even though the public was still phoning in with sightings of the attacker and his vehicle, ABC TV’s Australian Story had run a mini-documentary about the case, ‘The Vanishing’, and police were still churning through the mountains of information they’d amassed, there seemed to be little light at the end of the long tunnel. It was all painstaking work — checking people’s vehicles, gathering bank statements, examining the receipts of suspects who’d been in the area at the time of the attack to rule them in or out — but there seemed, from the outside, not to be much to show for it. In Sydney, Joanne grew increasingly despondent. For her birthday on September 25, her workmates urged her to go out for a meal with them. She turned them down, instead sharing a takeaway with a friend at the flat in Manly. The days all merged into each other with the same routine: the ferry or bus to work, the bookshop, avoiding curious customers and then home again. Every day she hoped for a call from the police saying they’d found Pete or they’d caught their attacker. Every day she was disappointed.
On November 15, when the first anniversary of her and Peter’s departure from England came, and went, without a phone call, she finally came to a decision. ‘I don’t want to leave Australia without Pete,’ she said, but she knew she had to face facts. Peter must be dead, and it could take years, if ever, for the police to catch his killer. It felt a betrayal, somehow, to be leaving her boyfriend behind in Australia but, really, she felt she had little choice.
On 19 November 2001, she finally went home to England.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
HONOUR AMONG VILLAINS
THE DAY IN NOVEMBER 2001 that the police called round to Bradley Murdoch’s flat in Broome to question him about the Barrow Creek murder, he appeared unflustered. The officers were polite, but firm. Murdoch was kno
wn to drive a white ute similar to the vehicle that had been described by Joanne Lees, and to that captured by the security cameras at the Shell Truckstop. After seeing the footage and images, a few people had called the police in Darwin reporting that Murdoch resembled the wanted man. Darwin had checked him out, and their suspicions had been aroused. There was a register of owners of the comparatively uncommon 75 Series Toyota Landcruiser imported from overseas, and he was on it.
But the day the Broome police visited Murdoch, they noted he had very short hair, and no moustache. His ute also at the time didn’t have a canopy. And he appeared to have an alibi, putting him in Broome at the time of the offence.
‘Thanks, Mr Murdoch,’ they said as they left. ‘That all seems to be in order.’
BUT ALL WAS NOT IN order with Murdoch. The work he’d been having done on his ute seemed to be taking longer and longer, and James Hepi was growing impatient. With his car not fixed up, he wasn’t able to do his regular trips from Broome to Sedan and back again. And Hepi was becoming irritated.
For years, Murdoch had enjoyed messing around with his cars, but now the work seemed to be assuming a life of its own. In March 2001, he’d bought a 1993 white Toyota Landcruiser from a courier company which had purchased it originally from Telstra, at a government auction. In late July, he’d had welder Michael Somerville repair and extend the tray and order him some parts ready for building a new aluminium canopy over it. Somerville noticed Murdoch had shaved off his moustache.
He’d also called into Minshull’s Mechanical Repairs, where he’d bought a new steel bull bar. Owner William Minshull saw there was nothing wrong with the original bull bar — in fact the one he was selling him was a lot older — but thought Murdoch perhaps wanted one that was more heavy duty. ‘His was a bit more trendier,’ he says. Powder-coater Wayne Holmes was then called on to treat the wheels, and then the bull bar. He was surprised at the condition of Murdoch’s vehicle. ‘[It was] excellent,’ he says. ‘The leather had been resprayed, fully detailed, chassis freshly painted black, looked like a new car really.’ A bloke Murdoch met in a pub, Robin Knox, then fitted a bigger exhaust system to the vehicle.
