by Sue Williams
Up against them was the Northern Territory Director of Public Prosecutions, Rex Wild QC, sixty, who had opted to take on the case himself. He was an old-fashioned kind of lawyer, softly spoken, gentlemanly, humble and with a real passion for justice. Born in Sydney to a professional soldier father, he’d been appointed a QC in Victoria in 1991 and come over to the Northern Territory to practise in 1992. Two of his three children are also lawyers.
‘I would like to think I’d be regarded as a fair man,’ he says. ‘It’s not a question of being an easy mark, it’s a case of being fair. It’s very difficult for a defence lawyer to criticise to a jury someone who’s patently fair. Being courteous and smiling is a big advantage.’ One disadvantage for him in the Murdoch case is that he already had a large workload to juggle. At the time of the committal, he had on his plate no fewer than nine murder cases at different stages. But, for him, the case wasn’t the biggest he’d been involved with. He spent four years with the Costigan Commission, a Royal Commission of inquiry set up as a result of disclosures on murder and mayhem within the Ship Painters and Dockers Union, which successfully exposed a ‘bottom of the harbour’ tax fraud, and he’d been an investigator into BHP and Elders IXL, and into Laurie Connell’s Rothwells. With the Falconio case, however, he realised the stakes were high. ‘There’ll be a lot of criticism if we lose this,’ he says. ‘The first question will be: “How much money have you spent on losing this case?” That’ll be difficult. We’re aware the world is watching us. There’ll be no other suspect, ever again, in this case. There he is; you’ve got one chance.’
THE COMMITTAL WAS HELD IN a courtroom in the Supreme Court building newly fitted out, at the cost of $1 million, with all the latest technology, including a screen on the wall to display evidence, and screens before all the witnesses, lawyers and journalists. It was billed as the country’s first paperless court, but there were still mountains of paperwork in evidence. With 550 witness statements, fifty witnesses being called and seventy journalists in attendance, it was set to be one of the biggest cases ever. And it was always going to be controversial. On the first day, an order was made to withdraw the board game ‘Trivial Pursuit’ from the Northern Territory after a new edition was found to have included a question about the case with the given answer yet to be proven.
But the first day started well, with Wild outlining the prosecution case. There was a murmur at the quality of the DNA evidence found on Joanne’s T-shirt — DNA 640 billion times more likely to be that of Murdoch than from any unrelated person selected at random from the Northern Territory. It had also been the first time the DNA on the gearstick and steering wheel had been revealed too.
Murdoch, now forty-five, sat between two prison guards with his silver hair closely cropped, wearing a pale blue shirt and fawn trousers. He’d taken the opportunity of prison to have his dentistry problems sorted out and no longer had the unsightly gap with missing front teeth. He listened to the proceedings frequently shaking his head. Sitting across from him were Nick and Paul Falconio, who had previously applied for permission to sit through the whole proceedings. When it was granted, the brothers, now thirty-six and thirty-four and both dressed in black, arrived late into the courtroom which made their entrance all the more dramatic, creating a ripple around the room. Magistrate Alasdair McGregor, one of the Territory’s most senior magistrates who’d been brought out of retirement to preside over the case, muttered later that he thought the Mafia had arrived. They took seats in the jury box 10 metres directly in front of Murdoch and, separated only by a sheet of glass, the pair stared fixedly into his face. Murdoch never met their gaze.
Paul Falconio later gave evidence that neither he nor his family had heard from Peter since July 2001. ‘We have tea together at least once a week and just generally keep in contact,’ he said, in an unfaltering voice to the court. They’d never seen him again after his departure for Australia.
Joanne, now thirty, was next to take the stand. Her appearance shocked onlookers. Whereas on her last visit to Australia she’d looked as young and as fresh-faced as she had before the attack, this time her pale skin was mottled with angry red acne that even heavy foundation couldn’t hide. ‘Stress,’ confided a friend, later. ‘She’d been dreading that day for so long now …’ But she’d obviously learnt well the lessons of the past as far as her clothing was concerned: she was dressed as conservatively and unremarkably as possible, in a white blouse and black knee-length skirt, with her black hair tied back in a neat ponytail.
She’d previously been driven into the court building at speed, with an unprecedented posse of police, security guards and TRG officers shielding her from the press. She elected not to be hidden from Murdoch with a screen, and looked at him only briefly when she began giving evidence. He glanced at her when she took the stand, but then averted his eyes. Joanne then looked resolutely straight ahead, but coughed nervously, sipped at a cup of water, and looked close to tears on a number of occasions. She gave a chilling account of the night her life changed forever but when she mentioned the marijuana joint she and Peter had shared watching the sunset before the darkness, there was another murmur around the courtroom. No-one had known. Outside the courtroom, it set off another flurry of speculation from the conspiracy theorists that perhaps Peter and Joanne were somehow involved with drug dealers or had perhaps known their attacker via a drug deal gone wrong, or had previously met Murdoch or Hepi through drug connections. And much to Joanne’s horror, after everything she’d been through, it was that one small detail of the lone joint that earned the biggest headlines in all the newspapers.
Murdoch only looked back at Joanne towards the end of her evidence.
AS IN ADELAIDE, THE CASE quickly ran into difficulties with the various suppression orders over issues such as the photoboard, the Shell Truckstop video and photo-fit imagery and the DNA evidence that were placed on the press reporting the proceedings so as not in influence a future potential jury. Murdoch’s role as a drug-runner was also never mentioned for fear that too might prejudice the jury — except for one slip by a witness. The Nine Network appealed against one of the orders, which went to three judges of the Supreme Court, leading to concerns that the court might end up closed to the media, or might even derail the whole process. As the case was delayed, and delayed again, Paul and Nick Falconio looked on in increasing bewilderment. ‘But why can’t they just get on and try him?’ asked Paul one day, outside the court, in despair. Everyone just smiled sympathetically, and moved away. Joanne wasn’t able to resume giving her evidence for another week, after the appeal was eventually dismissed.
Murdoch wasn’t happy either. Fed up with being ferried to court each day and having to wait in the cells downstairs when the case was halted, rather than in the comfort of his Berrimah Jail cell, he leapt to his feet to deliver a catalogue of complaints about his treatment. ‘I’m back and forth all the time,’ he said gruffly at the glass partition around the dock. ‘It’s half past seven, quarter to eight by the time you get back to your cell … I’m in travel [sic] all the time. No-one knows where I am.’ He also protested that his lawyers were forced to speak to him at a cell below the courts when he was in the precinct, rather than in jail, and that the court paperwork wasn’t coming through quickly enough. It was a fitting end to another farcical day of legal manoeuvrings.
In the meantime, the press was still desperate for a photograph of Joanne, trying to snap her as she sped in and out of the court car park below the building, and, when court was out, cruising the small town looking for her. ‘If only she’d just walk from a car into the court like a normal person, that would give us all a picture and we could stop this ridiculous circus,’ said one photographer. ‘But she’s not a celebrity or a politician whose position waives the right to privacy; she’s simply the victim of an alleged crime,’ responded a court official.
Joanne wasn’t in a conciliatory mood, anyhow. ‘You know, I went through all that, and all the media could talk about was the dope!’ she
’d exclaimed to a friend. ‘They’ve never done me any favours. Why should I do them one?’
Eventually, fears that someone might end up getting hurt led to Joanne making an offer to the press, saying she would pose for a photo for a donation to charity, the victims support program, from the media groups. It foundered, however, after some organisations that had strict policies against chequebook journalism said that was tantamount to paying for a picture, and a blow to the freedom of the press. One person suggested making a donation instead to put up a reward in the local newspaper for anyone who could tell them where Joanne was staying. Another person phoned police officers, offering them cash for information.
When Joanne did eventually take the stand again, there was another sensation in store: the revelation, under cross-examination, of her affair with Nick Reilly. She handled it badly, at first denying she knew a man called ‘Steph’, and then denying it was an affair. She probably felt she was being honest — there was no man called Steph, and it was less of an affair, more a casual fling. But her pedantry only succeeded in making her look evasive and shifty. As the press seized on this new titbit with gusto, and British journalists offered rewards for anyone who could lead them to Reilly, onlookers remarked that the prosecution hadn’t done her any favours by not bringing the issue up in the first place and trying to control her responses. ‘They protect her with everything they’ve got outside but in here, they’ve thrown her to the dogs,’ remarked one journalist bitterly.
SUPERINTENDENT COLLEEN GWYNNE looked on anxiously. She felt protective of Joanne, but could never tell her so. ‘She doesn’t understand why the press won’t go away,’ she said. ‘I wanted to hug her, but I couldn’t — we’re both involved in this case, and we’re both witnesses. If I saw her, I had to talk about the weather. It felt bizarre and was obviously confusing for her, but I had to do it.’
Gwynne lost her cool just one day, on the court steps. Walking past the press contingent, she lashed out verbally at them for having nothing better to do than to hang around trying to take photos of Joanne every day. She was worried that what she saw as the excessive media attention might derail the case. ‘I ticked them off,’ she says. ‘I realised then that I needed a holiday.’ Instead, she went to yoga class that night. One of the press contingent was taken aback by her spray. ‘We’re standing there, and this bird comes up and blasts us,’ he says. ‘Who was she?’ They had no idea.
WHEN JOANNE FINISHED GIVING evidence on Thursday 27 May 2004, she was told she was free to go. There was a flurry of photographers chasing her, for the last time, out to her car. This time, they continued on. She was taken to the Darwin RAAF base and from there whisked in an unmarked police car across the tarmac, so she wouldn’t have to check in, to a waiting plane. Some journalists bought tickets on the same flight, but Joanne was given a special flight attendant’s seat behind a curtain. She then sat on board for twenty minutes while everyone else, including the attendants, disembarked, and was taken to a connecting flight. The media was dumbfounded at the measures taken to ensure they wouldn’t, once again, be able to take a decent photograph of her.
THE NEXT DAY IN COURT, there was an eerie silence as a video of the crime scene was run. Peter’s eldest brother Nick had returned to England because he couldn’t get any more time off work, but Paul watched silently as the camera showed the abandoned Kombi and then zoomed in on the pool of his brother’s blood.
That evening, he approached Twiggs as the lawyer sat by the pool at the hotel they were both, by unfortunate coincidence, staying. Twiggs lifted his head from his papers as the young man drew level. But Paul didn’t smile. ‘I don’t know,’ he said softly, ‘how you can sleep at night.’
OVER THE FOLLOWING WEEKS, with the committal split into two blocks divided by six weeks because the magistrate had a prior engagement to attend a conference elsewhere in the middle, the police witnesses talked in minutiae about the search for Peter and the hunt for his attacker. Forensic scientist Carmen Eckhoff discussed the DNA evidence. While the DNA on Joanne’s T-shirt had such overwhelming odds of being Murdoch’s, the DNA samples on the steering wheel and gearstick were less conclusive. Eckhoff said she was still doing statistical calculations on elements of the first sample which was 378 to one times more likely to be from Murdoch than any other unrelated person in the Northern Territory, while those in the second were also consistent with him.
Many of the rest of the witnesses trailed tirelessly through the endless detail about Murdoch’s changes of ute, and all the modifications he’d carried out on them. They were tough men looking out of place in T-shirts and jeans, or uneasy in shirt collars, with oil-stained hands who could remember the smallest details about the colour of the spokes on the wheels but genuinely could not remember what Murdoch looked like. Friends and enemies of Murdoch came and went, with varying degrees of reluctance. One, old mate Darryl ‘Dags’ Cragan refused to answer any more questions until he was threatened with being in contempt of court. Another, the former bikies club barmaid who’d travelled behind him just before the Barrow Creek killing, was desperate to keep her identity a secret as she’d changed her life since. Ex-girlfriend Beverley Allan tried to hide from Murdoch behind a mane of hair, while saying the last time she’d seen him was when she was running down the driveway of the house, ‘because, yeah, we’d had a bit of an argument and I had to get out of there’. It was as colourful a gallery of characters as you’d find in any outback town, and often just as rough.
The day James Hepi gave evidence, however, was the one everyone had been waiting for. When the big man ambled into court, he didn’t look happy to be there, but he knew he had his side of the bargain to keep. As Murdoch glowered at him, he held his gaze steadily once, then concentrated on the proceedings, talking about their drug-runs, his suspicions about Murdoch being on the Truckstop video, the day he saw him making handcuffs out of cable ties and the way he’d changed his appearance, and car, straight after the events of 14 July 2001. Under cross-examination, Hepi, thirty-seven, admitted he’d done a deal with police, but denied it was an agreement to set Murdoch up, with the lure, not only of the suspended prison sentence, but of the $250,000 reward for information leading to the conviction of a suspect.
‘If your evidence assists in securing a conviction of Mr Murdoch, you’d be proposing to make inquiries about the quarter of a million dollars?’ he was asked by Algie.
‘I reckon I would,’ Hepi replied.
‘You would say, I suppose, that you wouldn’t be involved in setting up Mr Murdoch,’ said Algie. Hepi flatly denied it but admitted that agreeing to give evidence had its recompense.
‘I would say,’ replied Hepi, ‘getting my skin off the line.’
As he left court, he nodded to Paul Falconio, as if to say he’d done his bit. Paul smiled back at him.
THE PRISON OFFICERS GUARDING THE defendants who appeared in court were interested in Murdoch. They’d never seen so many press there before, and wondered what kind of man would excite such interest. One female officer asked for the chance to escort him to and from the dock, and sit there with him. ‘I never want to do that again,’ she said, at the end of her shift. ‘He really interfered with my headspace. He played games. I couldn’t handle it.’
THE WILD CARDS IN THE pack of witnesses turned out to be a young couple who used to work in a petrol station in Bourke, way into the NSW outback. Robert Brown and his girlfriend Melissa Kendall, both twenty-six, said they’d served Peter Falconio a week after he’d allegedly been killed. They said they recognised him from a photo in a newspaper, and that he’d bought a drink and a chocolate bar. ‘I could tell he had a bit of an accent,’ said Brown. ‘The only English accent I know is on the telly.’ Kendall said the man was ‘identical’ to Peter. Their only gripe was that they were giving evidence from Bourke over a video link with the courthouse in Darwin, rather than having been asked to make a personal appearance. ‘You could’ve flown me up,’ grumbled Brown, cheerily. ‘I could be sitting next to you and
I would have had a holiday.’
Predictably, the couple’s claims made headlines around the world but few who’d been present in court that day took them seriously. Part of the hearing process was to expose and discredit witnesses who might prove distractions in the trial proper. Brown was asked also about sightings of Elvis.
IT WAS LEFT TO THE last witness of the hearing, Senior Sergeant Megan Rowe, who’d been with Taskforce Regulus from day one, to clear up any remaining misunderstandings. She promptly demolished two of the main pillars of the defence’s arguments. Rowe said the team had found revolver-type guns with the kind of scrolling pattern Joanne had described, and there had also been similar vehicles to her attacker’s discovered, with front to rear access.
MANY NIGHTS, ALGIE AND TWIGGS had gone out drinking with journalists. Algie was now a great deal more relaxed, laughing at descriptions of him having the best mullet hairstyle in the country. Wild, in contrast, rarely spoke to journalists outside the courtroom. Much of the press discussion centred on how smart Algie could be, and wondering if Wild was simply too gentlemanly — not ‘mongrel’ enough — for the fight ahead.
On 18 August 2004, Bradley John Murdoch was committed to stand trial on all charges by magistrate Alasdair McGregor. The date would later be set for May the next year.
