by Sue Williams
For life has changed irrevocably for the couple since that dark night two years before. Now, visitors often mention the case, and they still get calls about it from overseas. Yet the place has lost a little of its heart, somehow. Pilton had always adored Barrow Creek. ‘I’ve got the biggest backyard and front yard in the world!’ he’d declare. ‘When you see the setting sun behind the windmill across the road, and the cloud reflects the light, the whole canopy is absolutely beautiful. Yes! That’s why I love it here. Sometimes, the stars are so bright you can even see their light at the bottom of the fireplace coming down through the chimney. There’s nothing like the stars around here.’ Now, however, there’s a sadness that tinges his words. He’s even thinking of moving on. On Boxing Day 2001, he took part in the annual Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race and enjoyed it so much he’s planning to buy a 40–50-foot yacht and go to the Whitsundays and beyond.
‘I want to experience more of the rest of Australia,’ he says. ‘Eventually, I want to sail around the world.’ If Jones wanted to come, she could, but it was all the same with him if she didn’t. ‘It’s up to her,’ he says. ‘Who knows? If it’s to be, it will be. It’s a case of “Do it my way, or hit the highway”. It sounds callous, but I’ll never allow myself to be hurt like I was with my wife again.’ Pilton and Jones split up soon afterwards.
Pilton, however, is left with nothing but fond memories of Joanne. ‘I always liked Jo,’ he says. ‘I’ve got good instincts for people. I always felt she was telling the truth. I only hope one day she can find peace.’
THE NIGHT OF THE PARTY, Aboriginal tracker Teddy Egan is out too, trudging around the area where Joanne hid beneath the mulga bushes. ‘She has good spirit here,’ he says, thumping his chest. ‘She strong.’
Nearby, he lights a fire, and stares into it long and hard, as if somewhere in the flames he can find an answer.
FOUR KILOMETRES UP THE ROAD, former PR consultant turned writer and private detective Robin Bowles is with a few friends. She has her hands tied behind her, and is crashing through the bush.
Egan smiles in delight. ‘She is in wrong place,’ he chuckles. ‘Strange lady.’
Obviously in her private reenactment of the chilling crime, she’s clearly taken the police at their word when they told journalists where the crime scene was; they didn’t want the spot turned into a circus. Three months later, Bowles announced she was travelling around the desert with a shovel and a psychic to find Peter Falconio’s body. That hunt was abandoned soon after.
But even if Bowles was traipsing around a different patch of bush, Teddy Egan knew exactly where it was: ‘She run from here … then here she fall down, get up run one bush, two bush, three bush and lie down under this one.’ And just when you’re wondering if this man who seems as old as the hills and cast from the same clay is simply spinning a good yarn, there it is, under the bush, a metal spike with police tape tied round it. It’s a unnerving moment — this is exactly where death came looking for Joanne Lees but couldn’t find her.
BACK TOWARDS ALICE SPRINGS, at the Shell Truckstop, manager Val Prior still can’t stop watching the video that was taken that night of the mystery man buying diesel. ‘I don’t know how many times I’ve watched that video,’ she says, gloomily. ‘I downloaded it on to my PC and watch it over and over, trying to see something.’
The man who operated the till and also appeared on the video that night, Andrew Head, no longer works there. Prior had to change his shifts around because he was constantly being approached by journalists. He would get anxious about the safety risks of having electronic cameras around the fuel bowsers and worried about somebody getting knocked down by a car. Prior would call into the station, twice a week during the nightshift to check he was all right, and spend an hour with him. She offered him counselling too, but he refused.
‘He just had trouble handling it,’ says Prior. ‘He was just an ordinary bloke. Police kept asking him questions that he couldn’t answer. He felt like he was letting someone down because he couldn’t recall anything out of the ordinary.’ He now works in a shop in SA.
Two regular customers don’t call by any more, either. Vince Millar gave up driving trucks soon after that fateful night, spooked completely by what had happened and Rodney Adams left the company and went to stay in Adelaide.
OVER IN THE WEST OF the country, in a pretty seaside town south of Perth, Bradley Murdoch’s parents are also in mourning. They don’t stray far from the dark, cramped brick-built bungalow on the subdivision where they live, and they rarely open the door to strangers. Colin, Murdoch’s father, used to be a big man, but now he’s shrunk with age, and hunched with worry. He’s walking with a stick after he fractured his toe when he stubbed it against a wall. His passionate belief in his son, however, remains undimmed.
‘He knows he’s innocent, he didn’t do anything,’ he says, the pale blue eyes under the mop of white hair hot and fierce. ‘The trouble is, he’s just too good-hearted. He tries to help people, and they take advantage. He had to really battle his way through school. He got into a lot of fights, but he was a good fighter. He was really good at sports, too.’ A cloud passes over his face, and his wife Nancy hobbles over to him. In one of those terrible blows of fate, at about the same time as Colin’s accident, she had a fall soon after a hip operation, and is still recovering. She’s walking with a frame.
‘This whole business has cost him $75,000 so far,’ says Colin. ‘He could get out of prison if he wanted to, but he doesn’t want to yet because then he can get more money in compensation. It’s terrible what people are saying about him. He would never do anything like that. He’s a good boy. It’s just that people pick on him. He didn’t do it. He told us. He’s too kind-hearted. This is a set-up, and they’ll prove it soon.’
The couple live in the town of Falcon — a name so close to that of a young man from the other side of the world that it will forevermore haunt them.
FURTHER NORTH, WHERE THE intense blue of the Indian Ocean meets the vivid red cliffs of Broome, Bradley Murdoch’s friends also wait to see what his fate will be. Some are convinced he’ll beat the charges in SA, and then go on to defeat his accusers in Darwin. Others are not quite so sure. His current girlfriend, Jan Pittman, who works in the town’s bakery, is a big blonde with her hair caught up in a perky ponytail. She looks weathered, anxious and exhausted. She hands over a blurred photograph of Murdoch holding a fishing rod, standing in the shallow surf on Cable Beach with his dog, Jack, gambolling by his side. She echoes the same affectionate tones of an earlier girlfriend. ‘He’s a gentle giant; brusque on the exterior, but underneath, he’s really good. If a woman is in trouble in a bar, he would help. A lot of people don’t get past the brusqueness, but I did. We’re very close.’
She says he used to spend his time off fishing, and in other such harmless pursuits. She was introduced to him by mutual friends at his old favourite drinking hole, the Beer and Satay Hut. ‘Far from being a loner, he was very sociable,’ she says. ‘He worked hard. He used to cook for me, and we’d go out for dinners together. And he loved his animals, his dog and his cat. We were living together and sleeping together. If something’s a bit odd about a man, you find out then. But with him, there’s never been anything.’
Down at that bar, the air is filled with the scent of frangipani, and talk of ‘Big Brad’. ‘He was a good bloke,’ says Jeff, one of the regulars. ‘He never did it. He never had it in him. I knew him for two years, we drank together every night. He’d come for a drink, go home to feed his dog and cat, then come back for the night. He’d tell you if he didn’t agree with you, but he never caused any trouble.’
Greg, a silver-haired Aboriginal man, says he was a steady drinking buddy too. ‘He was always fine,’ he says. ‘Sure, he was a drug dealer, but he never pushed to kids. He got angry if a dealer pushed to kids. The ones who did sell to kids were shit scared of him. He was a big bloke. He wouldn’t ask too many questions; he’d just go and do his business. But you could have a
joke with him. He wasn’t racist. He only shot at those Aboriginals down at Fitzroy Crossing because they wouldn’t get out of his way.’
Over in the sports bar in the Roebuck, John is another mate who doesn’t have a bad word to say about Murdoch. He too thinks he’s been framed. ‘Peter Falconio — I don’t believe he’s dead,’ he says. ‘Nah, I bet he’s in Malta or the Mediterranean or something. There’s no dead body, otherwise the Aboriginal trackers would have found him. They’re really good. They can find anything. They look for food every day. Only some of them go to supermarkets.’ His friend Albie, however, has a different take on the case. ‘That girl did it,’ he says. ‘I know someone who knows she did. And, tell me this, how comes she married again last year?’ When it’s pointed out to him that she certainly didn’t, he’s insistent. ‘What would you know?’ he says. ‘It was in the newspapers, I read it, everyone knows about that. She’s the same as Lindy Chamberlain who killed that baby. She reckoned a dingo cut the matinee jacket with a pair of scissors. Come off it. They’re both the same them two.’
Albie is obviously one of those people who listens to too much late-night talkback radio and believes way too much of what he hears. But he’s indefatigable. ‘The police in the Northern Territory, they’re terrible. They take all the misfits, and never check them out. They took on one police officer once and didn’t realise he was on their wanted posters all around their stations. They only noticed after he’d left.’ But John agrees. ‘Yeah, they don’t know anything,’ he says. ‘They just wanted someone to pin that Falconio murder on.’
JAMES HEPI HAD MANAGED TO wipe his slate almost clean. After his fateful arrest by West Australian police, the police in South Australia had searched his property in the Riverlands and found seven cannabis plants, charging him with producing a prohibited substance. In February 2003, he appeared in the South Australian court, before a magistrate at Berri. He pleaded guilty and was fined $439 and his plants and equipment were seized by the Crown. He then went back into hiding, waiting nervously for Murdoch’s committal hearing. After all, none of the kind of people he usually associated with much likes a dobber.
AT THE ALICE SPRINGS police station, working late again, Superintendent Colleen Gwynne sits sifting through the day’s reports from Taskforce Regulus. ‘I think we did well, despite the criticisms,’ she says. ‘We’ve been through so many people and so many vehicles … We’ve been working hard crossing all the ‘t’s and dotting the ‘i’s ready for the trial. We don’t want anything to go wrong. And, you know, I still feel confident that one day we’ll find Peter. It might take us a while yet, but it’ll happen. It’ll happen.’
In Darwin, Assistant Commissioner John Daulby is still phoning the Falconio family every week but plans to stop that when the trial gets underway. After nearly thirty years in the police service, he’s also considering leaving. ‘It’s made me bitter about certain things,’ he says, sadly. ‘I think I’m very professional, but I do take things personally. If I’m responsible for a mistake, I say so and take responsibility. And things do go wrong. But with this Falconio case, if it all happened again today, I would do and say all the same things. My difficulty was coming in so late. If I’d have been there at the beginning, I would have tried much harder to persuade Joanne to talk to the media. She would then have been treated differently. We chaperoned her around Alice Springs for quite a considerable time because we weren’t sure of the stalker element. But after a while, she should have been left alone.
‘I really want to see this case through to the end. I would really like to find Peter. There will always be people who want to say you weren’t successful, to say you were wrong all along, and that the investigation was a stuff-up. But it hasn’t been. It’s worked. For the trial, who knows? We have a good case, but there’s always an element of never knowing what a jury is going to do at a trial.’
IN ENGLAND, JOANNE LEES battles to rebuild a normal life. There were rumours of a new boyfriend, but they turned out to be about simply a good platonic friend of her’s and Peter’s from far happier days. In the Brighton electoral register, there’s a Joanne Lees living with a David Murdoch in Park Street which could, given the right circumstances, spark yet more rumours about Joanne being part of a plot to do away with her boyfriend to set up home with the beloved brother of his alleged assassin. When I call round, however, they have no idea what I’m talking about.
Relations between Joanne and her stepdad Vincent James are said not to be as close as they once were. A friend says he’s spoken once too often to the press for her liking. James, however, insists they’re still good mates. He smokes roll-up after roll-up as he looks through photos of happier family days, when his wife and Joanne’s mother was still alive, and no harm had come to his stepdaughter, safe at home. ‘I’m angry that the police aren’t in touch with me more,’ he says. ‘I don’t talk to Joanne so much. She has email.’ He says she’s thinking of writing a book, one day.
At the Falconios’ house a short drive away, Peter’s mum Joan is home alone. She looks weary, and her face is lined with care. ‘The pain never goes away,’ she says, softly. ‘It’s pain all over your body. It never stops. It’s there all the time. We have friends who do their best, and family, but no-one can stop the pain. I tried counselling at first, but it didn’t do any good. I went to a support group, but everyone else just wants to talk about their problems and their sorrow. You don’t want to hear it. You just want to be on your own, with yours.’ She says she keeps forgetting what she’s doing. She can’t find anything. She can’t even read a book, as she can’t concentrate. ‘I’m not right in the head. I’m not right in the body. I’m ill. I can’t imagine ever getting over this. It will never end.’
Joan says her sons are coping, they have each other, but she doesn’t believe she ever will. ‘It’s different for a mother,’ she says. ‘And because they haven’t found the body, you can’t ever give up properly. You never know. I can’t even think about Peter without thinking of the horrible things that might have happened to him. I can’t think of him. It’s too horrible.’
The killer has even robbed her of those, her memories of her son.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
BRADLEY MURDOCH’S FIRST TRIAL
THE MURDER OF PETER FALCONIO, the attempted abduction of Joanne Lees and now the rape and false imprisonment of a twelve-year-old girl and an assault on her mother — but far from being simple, the charges against Bradley Murdoch were a morass of contradictions and interstate legal complexities, and issues critical to the fundamental principles of providing a fair hearing to anyone accused of a crime … or several. The biggest hurdle was that Murdoch was now facing charges in two different legal jurisdictions: the Northern Territory and SA. Naturally enough, they both wanted the chance to try him first. The Northern Territory felt they’d been hunting Murdoch for a long time, and were keen to see their suspect tried in such a high profile case. But SA argued that their alleged victim was now thirteen and if the matter was delayed for much longer, with a trial in Darwin on the Falconio matter and then possible appeals, it could feel like an eternity for a young girl longing to get on with her life. Some legal experts believed if Murdoch were convicted of the South Australian charges, his trial in the Northern Territory would have to be put off until he’d served his sentence. Only then could he be extradited to Darwin. On the other hand, if the Northern Territory trial went first and he were convicted of murder, he could end up in jail for life, which would make it highly unlikely he’d ever be allowed out of prison to face charges in Adelaide.
To break the deadlock, South Australian Director of Public Prosecutions Paul Rofe decided to talk to the mother and daughter, to ask them how they felt. They were anxious for their case to be finalised and so a date was set first for the trial on allegations of rape, false imprisonment and indecent assault in the South Australian District Court in Adelaide.
WHEN ADELAIDE SOLICITOR MARK TWIGGS received a call from the mother of a man he’d successfull
y defended against rape allegations, asking if he’d represent a friend of hers, Bradley Murdoch, he wasn’t keen. He was still embroiled in the gruesome long-running Snowtown ‘bodies in barrels’ case, and was representing one of the accused, Robert Wagner, later to be labelled one of Australia’s worst serial killers. Manchester-born, but having migrated with his family to Australia at the age of eight, Twiggs had been working in law for twenty-five years in total, and practising as a lawyer for ten. The Murdoch case didn’t particularly interest him until the woman phoned back the next day to tell him Murdoch was also going to be questioned about the Barrow Creek murder. Twiggs, forty-six, was then a great deal more interested. He had Murdoch brought to Adelaide, agreed to be his lawyer and approached local barrister Grant Algie to represent him in court. ‘It’s a case that excites me,’ says Twiggs. ‘It’s intriguing. It’s the kind of case any good defence lawyer would like.’
WHEN ALGIE ENTERED THE DISTRICT court in Adelaide on Monday 13 October 2003, a ripple went around the courtroom. If central casting had come up with a barrister, they couldn’t have done any better. Algie walked on to his stage as if he owned it, back as straight as a rod, head held high and chin raised haughtily. With blond hair rippling over his collar, an impeccably neat goatee and silver rimmed glasses on the tip of his nose, enabling him to look down, if he cared to, on everyone he passed, he swept in with a stately flurry of black gown, his furled black umbrella leading the charge. Immediately, there were frictions with the assembled press. Algie had laid his gown out carefully on one of the press benches, together with his brolly and extra bag of papers, taking up two or three seats in the limited space over which the media contingent were already fighting. When one reporter asked him if he’d be so kind to move his possessions forward to the legal benches, he ignored him completely. An usher was asked to approach him instead. With a pained sigh, he finally transferred his belongings to a vacant chair. He didn’t deign even to glance at the press after that. As he took his expensive fountain pen out of his neat black briefcase and dipped it fastidiously into a bottle of ink on the bench before him, Twiggs sat beside him, short, stout and with the outline of his vest showing through his shirt. They looked for all the world like a modern day Pancho Villa and Don Quixote, ready to take a tilt at another windmill. But looks can be deceiving.
