And Then the Darkness

by Sue Williams

  Bizarrely, the interview wasn’t aired in Australia by the Seven Network, which has all rights to Granada TV material, until 4 September 2003, some eighteen months later. ‘We didn’t think people would be interested,’ said a spokesperson.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  NEW SUSPECTS … AND TWO MORE KILLINGS

  WITH A FLASH OF STEEL and a spurt of blood, the Barrow Creek investigation sprung back into life. An unemployed drifter called Michael Sorrell had lunged at two brothers with a large hunting knife as they left a Sydney electrical store on 3 June 2002. One, Michael Furlong, lay dead. The other, Glen, had only just managed to escape. Police in NSW had arrested the killer as he slept in his vehicle, early the next morning, with his victim’s wallet. They’d then alerted the police in the Northern Territory. This man roamed widely around Australia. He seemed to have no motive at all for his sudden violence. He was obviously extremely dangerous. Could he possibly be the Barrow Creek gunman? It was a lead in a case that seemed to have gone cold, and police immediately requested a sample of his DNA and samples from his vehicle to compare to that which had been found on Joanne Lees’ top.

  Aged twenty-nine, Sorrell had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia from at least 1994, and experienced delusional beliefs that made him unable to tell reality from fantasy. While serving time in prison in WA, he’d been transferred to Greylands Hospital for psychiatric help. He believed that he was under surveillance, had been drugged by a secret government unit using technology that enabled them to read his thoughts via vibrations in his larynx, and he was the victim of a complex plot involving the CIA, the FBI, the West Australian justice department and medical staff. He was prescribed anti-psychotic medication.

  Later, during a period in the UK, he was admitted to the notorious Broadmoor Hospital for the criminally insane in Berkshire — the same institution as Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe — until being deported back to Australia. More recently, he’d been in Townsville Hospital in Queensland after a suicide attempt, and was again treated with anti-psychotic drugs while in custody in NSW. Only when he took that medication, was his behaviour ‘normal’. Without it, it could be, according to one of the psychiatrists who examined him, ‘very alarming’. The killing of Furlong, forty-five, at Smithfield proved it. Could he possibly be the man being hunted for the disappearance of Peter Falconio?

  Politicians in NSW, where there were tighter restrictions on the use of DNA, hurriedly passed legislation to allow Sorrell’s DNA to be sent to Darwin for comparison, and the country waited with bated breath for an answer. It came just a day later. Michael Sorrell wasn’t the gunman. Later, in February 2003, he was declared not guilty of murder by reason of mental illness, and was ordered to be detained in the psychiatric ward of Long Bay Jail.

  SHORTLY BEFORE MICHAEL SORRELL, another possible suspect had come to light. English backpacker Caroline Stuttle, in Queensland on holiday, was pushed off a bridge during a violent robbery and plunged 10 metres to her death. The British press immediately linked her killing, in Bundaberg on 9 April 2002, to the Falconio case. It wasn’t long, however, until her attacker was arrested: another drifter, this time drug-addicted and looking for cash to feed his habit. Ian Previte, thirty-two, was jailed for life in October 2004.

  Assistant Commissioner John Daulby, despite the lack of leads, remained determinedly optimistic. ‘We will catch this man,’ he said. ‘We won’t be giving up at all. We are 100 per cent behind Joanne. We are going to resolve this case.’

  Every week without fail, occasionally twice or three times depending on what was going on, he called the Falconio family to let them know of any developments. Sometimes, the phone conversations went smoothly. The week after the current affairs show 60 Minutes ran a piece on the case on 26 May 2002, there were hundreds more calls from the public with promising information. But sometimes Daulby had so little to tell them, he dreaded the aimless chit-chat. But that had been his agreement with them, and he stuck doggedly by it. Joanne had been less keen to keep in touch, saying she only wanted to be contacted if there was anything positive to report. At times, Daulby was relieved at not having to call her too.

  MEANWHILE, POLICE IN BROOME were talking to James Hepi about his assertion that they should be hunting his former partner in crime, Bradley Murdoch. They were wary as they’d lost count of the number of villains facing charges who’d tried to finger others to save their own skin, and it was Murdoch, after all, who dobbed in Hepi. In addition, there was that small matter of the $250,000 reward for information about the Barrow Creek killer up for grabs.

  But as Hepi talked about his business partner, the police became more and more interested. He’d even had a friend visit his Sedan property collecting Murdoch’s cigarette butts to post to him in Broome so the police could check his DNA against the blood on Joanne’s T-shirt. The West Australian cops decided it was time to call Darwin.

  BACK IN THE UK, JOANNE was living in Brighton but was finding life a struggle. The press continued to hound her, keeping watch on her old workplaces and hanging around outside her home for hours, waiting for the chance of a photograph, with one news crew even digging a satellite dish into the front lawn outside her apartment. Going back to her old travel agency job would have been impossible, and she had to move house every time they discovered her new address, which was often. Instead, she decided on a complete change. She moved to Hove, just out of the centre of Brighton, where a neighbour described her as ‘very quiet. She seemed like a lost soul’, and she changed careers, moving into social services. At first, she was an advisor for people with housing problems and later worked with people with intellectual disabilities. If she was going to take anything positive at all out of the experience in Australia, this would be it. ‘I just want to give something back to people and help people who are struggling and need a direction,’ she says. ‘I can empathise with them and I think I would have appreciated someone like me to help me.’ She also considered doing a course at university. For never far from her mind was Peter, and what he’d think of what she was doing. ‘He’d want me to do this,’ she says. ‘He’d want me to go to university. I want to make him proud of me, like I was proud of him.’

  She thought about going overseas again to escape the attention, but her mother Jenny James was getting sicker. Joanne travelled more and more regularly up to Huddersfield to see her, until Jenny grew so weak she knew there wouldn’t be much time left. On 28 June 2002, her mother died, aged fifty-four. It was yet another blow for Joanne, and she wondered how much more tragedy she could take. But one of the cruellest twists was to come the day after her mother’s funeral.

  THE HEADLINE IN BRITAIN’S Daily Mail newspaper on 6 July 2002 made Joanne gasp. ‘Did Outback Peter Fake His Own Death?’ She read the story in a state of mild shock. The article said police in Australia were investigating a startling new possibility — that in order to collect an insurance payout, her boyfriend might have staged his own death and still be alive. The author, once again, was Joanne’s tabloid nemesis, Richard Shears.

  In fact, as part of their routine inquiries at the beginning of the case, the Northern Territory police had checked whether Peter had any life insurance. He hadn’t. He’d merely had a small run-of-the-mill travel insurance policy. Police media officer Denise Hurley says Shears had been told this, but still he felt the story was valid. ‘It was all speculation,’ says Shears today. ‘But I’d spoken to a particular fellow, I can’t mention his name, who works for a company who works with people who fake their own deaths … I don’t believe Joanne’s story. It doesn’t add up. We phoned her for a comment but she’s never given us one. She’s just ducked and dodged.’

  Even while Shears admits it was pure speculation, that still didn’t stop the story from gathering momentum as it was picked up by other newspapers, TV and radio bulletins, and was reported all over the world. While it hit Joanne hard, it shocked and appalled the Falconio family even more. ‘It’s absolutely disgusting,’ said Peter’s teary mum, Joa
n. ‘My son is not here to defend himself. No-one has ever had a bad word to say about him.’ Peter’s oldest brother Nick was also horrified by the claims. ‘It’s completely untrue, hurtful and insensitive,’ he said. ‘Peter would never have done that to our family. It’s a fairytale, a load of rubbish.’

  Even other journalists felt the story shouldn’t have been printed. ‘The police had investigated that already, and discovered Peter hadn’t had any life insurance,’ says Frank Thorne, the stringer for many of the British tabloid newspapers. ‘We all knew that. And then that came out, and caused so much heartache and distress. I thought that was unforgiveable.’ Onlookers also cringed to think of the Falconios’ torment at such a story. ‘The hurt that must be being felt by the Falconios would be really devastating,’ says Les Pilton. ‘There’s no way their son would do that to cause such grief to his family.’ At the end of the day, Thorne believes it was simply part of the game of ‘getting Joanne’. ‘The lack of information and the police’s half-arsed answers made Joanne look guilty, and then the way she behaved aroused suspicions,’ he says. ‘Some people couldn’t help adding two and two and coming up with five.

  ‘Once the dogs of conspiracy are let loose, they’re difficult to stop. If some people had their way, Joanne Lees would have been in a prison cell by now, like another woman once was.’

  THAT OTHER WOMAN HAD INDEED been following Joanne’s ordeal closely. Lindy Chamberlain, whose life was irrevocably altered by her ordeal out in the same desert, longed to help the younger woman. ‘If she had given her consent, I would have liked to have helped,’ she says. ‘Can you imagine anything worse than being accused of murdering someone you love?’ Chamberlain couldn’t help but be affected as she watched Joanne suffering from her own ‘Lindyfication’. ‘People who love her and care for her are going to take her for what she is,’ she told New Idea magazine on 29 June 2002. ‘The ones that don’t, that’s their problem, and you can’t do much about it. The sad thing is that even if they do find the murderer, the suspicion won’t end. Some people have already made up their minds. They will still say she did it. “No smoke without fire” or “some funny business there”. Yes, there was funny business but it was not you — but you have to wear it.’

  Chamberlain also felt it was looking increasingly likely that Joanne would suffer the same fate as her, the longer the case went on. ‘When you look at the huge areas of the outback … it’s no wonder a body hasn’t turned up,’ says Chamberlain. ‘There are miles and miles of just nothing. I’d hate to be looking for a body out there.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  POLICING THE POLICE

  TWELVE MONTHS ON FROM THE Barrow Creek attack, the largest police operation in the history of the Northern Territory had resulted in nearly 23,000 case note entries, with attachments, and DNA swabs from some 300 people. In addition, more than 2500 persons of interest and 2000 vehicles had been eliminated from their inquiries, and the computer system wasn’t coping at all with the enormous workload. Yet in spite of the massive investigation, it seemed the police were no nearer to finding the killer.

  Detectives had flown to Ireland to obtain DNA from the parents of one suspect and questioned another, only to find he was wanted for two cases of rape in Queensland. It was a win of sorts, but not in the main game: the Falconio case remained tormentingly open. There’d been massive publicity around the world, and Interpol and other countries’ intelligence agencies had all been double-checked just to make absolutely sure Peter Falconio wasn’t some kind of double-agent. The investigation had been forced, however reluctantly, to rely on other state police forces also doing their bit as they couldn’t possibly afford to pay for their officers to fly off around the country to follow up every one of the 3000 interstate leads. And there’d been a virtual trial by media of the only witness, but there remained no body, no weapon, no motive, no clear suspect and no real sense that an end was in sight. It was the perfect time for an investigation into the investigation.

  Just prior to his retirement at Christmas 2001, Commissioner Brian Bates had set the wheels in motion. The Colin Winchester case he’d headed had been the subject of a review and he felt a similar exercise could prove just as useful now. The new Commissioner taking his place, the former South Australian Assistant Commissioner Paul White, fifty-one, agreed. Two men were appointed to head the six-week project — White’s old fellow South Australian Assistant Commissioner Jim Litster, now retired, and Northern Territory Superintendent George Owen.

  Within the force, there was nervousness about the review; indeed, there was a lot riding on it. As well as the reputation of the Northern Territory force, with so much still to prove after the disastrous Lindy Chamberlain affair, there was also the pride of Australian policing at stake in the spotlight of a critical media both at home and away.

  At the same time, however, police were intensely aware that, whichever way the review went, it was unlikely to be the end to the controversy over their handling of the case. If the review was disparaging, they’d have to take that criticism on board. If it was favourable, the police could stand accused of pulling off a whitewash. The man in charge of the investigation, Assistant Commissioner John Daulby, was in favour of a review, but wasn’t keen on having Litster in charge. ‘However professional the review was going to be, and however suited Litster was going to be to the task, having a friend of the Commissioner’s, and someone user-friendly to the Commissioner, on board made it look like a farce,’ he says. ‘Outsiders might look at that and say he might just as well have conducted an internal review. If there was going to be criticism, I was more than ready to accept that but I wanted to have complete confidence in the process.’ It didn’t help that he received a call on his phone from a journalist for Litster, even before his participation had been publicly announced.

  When it got underway, things got worse. It seemed to some within Taskforce Regulus that the terms of reference of the review were being blatantly flouted. Instead of sticking to the police’s initial response, including its witness statements, its exhibits and searches, and reviewing the lines of inquiry and the resource requirements, it appeared the team was more interested, at times, in investigating the crime itself. ‘We hadn’t been able to solve it, but I think they thought they could,’ said one insider. ‘It was a very high profile case, and there was some jostling for position going on.’

  Messages were constantly being sent over to the Regulus unit: We think you should be looking at this; Has it occurred to anyone to look at that; We’ve a new theory that should be checked out. The review was meant to be verifying the police had done their job, not giving them even more work on top of their own continuing lines of investigation. Daulby grew more and more annoyed as the lines of reporting between himself and the review team dissolved and the review team increasingly reported direct to the Commissioner. He was also taken aback that the review team failed to seek responses or feedback from members directly involved in the management of the investigation.

  When the review’s thirty-two-page report was finally completed, only the main findings were released. That created suspicion among the media that there had been a stuff-up, followed now by a cover-up. But, in fact, the final report was not overly critical of the investigation and the way it was conducted and found that, although the existing computer systems had encountered difficulties in processing the vast amount of information collected by Taskforce Regulus, a few police officers guarding the crime scene had not submitted statements and there was a lack of uniformity in record-keeping by police managing the roadblocks, generally the investigation had been as good as it possibly could have been. Yes, the crime scene had been trodden over by a number of police, but the review judged this ‘justifiable and necessary in an attempt to locate Peter Falconio in the immediate vicinity’. Yes, the roadblocks had been ‘set up in a timely fashion, taking into consideration the initial report of the crime’, and the fact that it happened in such a remote area. And yes, the searches had been carried
out ‘in a logical and orderly fashion’.

  In addition, the review delivered an interesting perspective on Joanne’s recollection of events. ‘Further, the team concluded it is perfectly reasonable to expect there will be inaccuracies in Joanne Lees’s statement considering the undergoing trauma,’ it wrote. ‘For instance the review team undertook a reenactment of the event utilising a female police officer. It was found that even under these staged conditions the female officer could not recall all events.’

  ANOTHER CRITICISM OF THE investigation had come a short time before from Chris Tangey, a freelance cameraman and country music video-director, who’d been asked to video a much later examination of the Kombi by forensic officers. He was the only person known in the area who owned a camera that could film in the kind of low light that would pick up the glow radiated in the darkness by blood-sensitive Luminol, and was asked if he’d mind doing it for free to lend police a hand. ‘I had no idea what they were talking about, so I looked it up on the internet,’ he says. ‘They said they wanted to run a test, to see if in the future it could be useful to film a forensic examination for court use later.’ When he turned up, he was introduced to Joy Kuhl, the head of biology in the forensic science branch in Darwin, and the woman who’d become notorious during the Chamberlain case as the person who’d wrongly identified sound deadener in the family’s Holden sedan as foetal blood which had proved critical evidence in Lindy’s conviction. Six years later, at a Royal Commission, she’d admitted she’d been mistaken. She’s always protested that the kind of testing she’d carried out at the time was somewhat in its infancy, and she is still mystified at how it had so misled her.