by Sue Williams
IN HIS CELL, MURDOCH WAS livid about the new ‘evidence’ that was now going to be put before the court, and angry that the case was being postponed yet again. In England, Joanne, despite her reluctance to step back into the spotlight, was distraught to get the last minute call to cancel her flight.
She had no idea that, in the small town of Wetherby, just 40 kilometres away from her hometown of Huddersfield, one of the last big battles over the truth about her ordeal and Peter’s mysterious outback disappearance was finally being played out.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
THE FINAL RECKONING
WHEN JOANNE LEES FLEW BACK into Australia on Friday 14 October 2005, no-one could quite believe their eyes. She was a different person.
For a start she looked stunning: she’d slimmed down markedly, losing at least 10 kilograms of weight, so her round, babyish face was now sharply defined with striking cheekbones, and she’d grown her dark hair long and straight, a fashionable fringe skimming her blue eyes. In place of the old T-shirts, comfy shorts and baggy jeans, she was stylishly elegant in a beige sleeveless wrap-around top, designer denims and gold sandals. Her attitude had changed too. In the past, she’d snuck into the airport at Darwin, doing her best to dodge the waiting press. This time, Joanne, now thirty-two, had let it be known she’d be prepared to have her dawn arrival filmed, photographed and reported on by a handful of journalists on condition that they would release their words and images to all the media, to avoid the kind of frenzied scrums that had greeted her in the past. Travelling with a family liaison officer from Sussex Police and childhood friend Martin Najan, she still refused to speak to, or even smile at, the little huddle awaiting her in the international airport arrivals hall, but at least she lingered long enough for them all to take photos and report on her demeanour.
The real surprise, however, was yet to be sprung. That came on the first day of the trial, on Monday October 17, at the Darwin Supreme Court. Whereas previously in the witness box during the committal, Joanne had been anxious, coy and evasive, this time she sat up straight, and answered questions directly in a much clearer, more confident voice. Dressed in a briskly businesslike white shirt and black skirt with her hair tied back in a neat ponytail, she was obviously still nervous, coughing constantly to clear her throat and sipping frequently from a glass of water beside her. But, for the first time in the four years and two months that had passed since that fateful event in the Northern Territory outback, she appeared in control, and determined to see out the whole thing to its end — whatever that might be.
‘Don’t forget, she’s older now, and she’s matured a lot,’ said Police Superintendent Colleen Gwynne, who’d been in charge of the investigation into Peter Falconio’s disappearance, and who, as a result, had got to know her well in the intervening years. ‘People do change, and she’s had a lot of time to think about this.’ Doubtless her new appearance gave her more confidence, as well as the new relationship she’d started with thirty-one-year-old osteopath Miad Najafi who also happened to be a martial arts expert. Friends said he’d been teaching her self-defence.
A FEW METRES AWAY FROM HER, in the dock and flanked by two armed prison guards, sat Bradley Murdoch, who’d turned forty-seven just over a week before.
Dressed in his trademark pale blue shirt and stone-coloured trousers, with his glasses perched low on his nose, he stared at Joanne, then broke away to peer at the heavy folders and notepad he had balanced on his knees in front of him. With the police brief available to him in his cell, as well as access to a computer, he’d been working hard on his defence. He too looked nervous, but friends said he was quietly confident of an acquittal. ‘He was depressed when the trial was adjourned before, because he just wants to get it over,’ says one. ‘He thinks he’ll be fine.’
Occasionally, he glanced over at his girlfriend, Jan Pittman, sitting in the public gallery. Just as Joanne seemed to have slimmed down, she appeared to have bulked up, a heavy, tough-looking woman, her face set in a grim line of irritation that her boyfriend was having to go through all this iniquitous indignity. Her hair had recently returned from blonde to brunette and was cut into the nape of her neck, and she’d dressed conspiciously in a bright yellow top and white baggy knee-length shorts. She was heavily made up, with dark-varnished nails and diamond rings flashing on many of her fingers. Over her right arm, she carried a handbag bearing the photograph of a Dalmatian — a little signal of defiance for those in the know about her man and his ‘mystery’ dog.
ON THE OPPOSITE SIDE OF the public gallery the Falconio family sat in a tight huddle, Luciano with his hands clasped tightly in front of him, and his wife Joan, looking frail but determined on this, her first visit to the country where her son had vanished. She peered through tinted glasses intently, anxiously towards the judge. By their side sat Peter’s brothers Paul, thirty-six, and Nick, thirty-seven, both also looking straight ahead, and both dressed in the aching black of mourning.
JOANNE SLOWLY, AND DELIBERATELY answered all the questions the prosecutor, Rex Wild QC, gently asked her. About the prospect she and Peter might have been going their separate ways towards the end of the trip, Joanne explained he was going to Papua New Guinea for a walking trip while she’d take a break in Sydney, and they planned to meet up again in Queensland before continuing on. About her dalliance with Nick Reilly, she said, ‘He was a friend, a good friend and we became close and we were intimate at one time … we over-stretched the boundary of friendship but that ended and we became friends again.’
About her and Peter’s last day together in Alice Springs, she talked about his trip to the tax advisor, her time on the internet, breakfast, the Camel Cup and lunch at the local Red Rooster fast food chicken restaurant. About their ill-fated drive up the Stuart Highway, she recounted the stop at Ti Tree, the sunset, the joint of marijuana, and then the darkness of an outback night. ‘It began to get darker and darker until it was eventually pitch black,’ she told the court. ‘We were talking about where we would spend our birthdays. We were hoping that Peter’s we’d spend in New Zealand, then we would be in Fiji for mine and then meet with some friends …’ At the thought of their future plans, now never to be fulfilled, her voice eventually broke, and tears slid down her face.
Over the next couple of days, she continued to answer questions that had been asked many times before. She recalled once more being stopped by the man in the white four-wheel-drive, his description, the bang behind the Kombi which at first she thought might have been the exhaust backfiring but which she then believed could have been gunshot. She talked about being threatened at gunpoint, manacled and being pushed by the man out of the Kombi onto the gravel outside as she tasted blood in her mouth.
Wild seemed to gather himself to stand straighter. ‘And do you see this man today?’ he asked. Suddenly, the courtroom grew tense, and everyone leaned forward expectantly. Joanne didn’t hesitate. ‘Yes,’ she said, staring straight at Murdoch. ‘I’m looking at him.’ Murdoch shook his head, as if he couldn’t believe she’d got it so wrong. ‘Oh, yes, it’s you,’ she mouthed angrily.
As she was asked to recount that night in closer and closer detail, Joanne slipped into the present tense. She sounded as though she was reliving the night. ‘I’m moving my head around but he can’t tape up my mouth,’ she said. ‘It gets all in my hair and around my neck but it doesn’t go near my mouth. I’m just calling out for Pete … to come and help me.’ When she talks of the sack being placed over her head, she says, ‘I was screaming, “I can’t breathe!”’ Joanne’s composure finally broke when she talked of lying in the back of her attacker’s vehicle, wondering what he was doing. ‘I just started thinking about Pete and wondering if he had shot Pete,’ she said, her voice quaking as she battled to control the tears. ‘I just kept asking what he’d done to Pete. It seemed a long time.’
Joanne talked of her escape from the back of the man’s ute, hiding in the bushes, and her eventual rescue by road train driver Vince Millar. Her answers
were characteristically slow, careful and matter-of-fact. At that point, however, the court judge, Chief Justice Brian Martin, intervened and asked if she could tell the court how she was actually feeling at various stages. Her eyes widened slightly, then she took a deep breath. It was the moment everyone had been waiting for: a real insight into this woman who’d apparently managed to surmount such incredible odds to get away from the gunman, yet who had seemed so reluctant, beyond reciting the facts, really to open up about the experience.
‘I just kept thinking this isn’t happening to me,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t believe this is happening and I felt alone. I kept shouting for Peter. I thought I was going to die. Mainly, I just kept thinking I can’t believe this is happening.
‘It all happened quite quickly from being tied up to being on the ground. My main thoughts that I remember is just screaming out for Pete to come and help me. I was fighting so much I just had used all my energy and once he put me in the back of the vehicle, I thought, that’s it. I’m definitely gong to die. I have no energy to get out of the situation. I just felt exhausted …
‘The next thing, emotion I can feel really strongly about, is when I asked him if he was going to rape me. I was so frightened. I was more scared of being raped than I was of dying and being shot by the man. And then when I asked him if he’d shot Pete. I kept asking, and he didn’t give me an answer straight away.’ She stopped and wiped her eyes. ‘Just the realisation hit me that he might have killed Pete. After I had asked him if he was going to rape me and if he’d shot Pete, I just got some energy from somewhere, some inner strength. My focus was escaping, that’s just what I concentrated on. Just getting out of there.’
IT WAS AT THAT POINT the popular image of Joanne as a so-called ice queen finally melted. By talking about how she felt during the attack, at last expressing that vulnerability she’d been so determined to hide, she suddenly appeared so much more human. The assembled journalists packed into the press room of the court, and spilling over into a jury room downstairs, scribbled furiously, knowing their headlines that evening were assured. They were still divided over whether to believe her version of events, but even the attitudes of her fiercest critics started to thaw. In the public gallery, Luciano Falconio nodded, as if he had really begun to understand for the first time. And on the benches in front of him, you could feel the jury warming to the young woman before them.
Joanne herself had relaxed. She’d relived the worst part of her ordeal, what else could there be? She opened up again when asked about how she felt after her escape. ‘I didn’t really sleep for days,’ she said. ‘… I didn’t feel utterly safe or secure. I felt vulnerable … I was afraid of the dark, so I kept the light on. I didn’t sleep for days. I just sort of rested.’ She occasionally even allowed her sense of humour to sneak through. When she was asked if her attacker’s four-wheel-drive looked new, she replied drily, ‘Everything would seem new to my Kombi van.’
Gradually, she answered all the points on which she’d been criticised. She’d accepted 50,000 pounds for the Martin Bashir interview, she said, in order to keep the investigation alive it seemed to have fizzled out. She’d said initially the dog was like a Blue Heeler — rather than a Dalmatian crossed with a heeler — because of the similar-sized Blue Heeler she’d seen at the Barrow Creek Roadhouse. ‘I regard Dalmatians as friendly and floppy-eared … always reminds me of [the movie] 101 Dalmatians and I don’t think of that as an Australian dog. The dog the man had that night was clearly an Australian dog.’ And, even though she’d always remained adamant that she’d been pushed from the front of the ute to the back, through an opening between them, she suddenly gave way on the point. It might have been a memory returning, or an eagerness to quash another well-publicised doubt clouding her story. ‘It’s possible he may have pushed me through the side,’ she said.
GRANT ALGIE’S DEFENCE cross-examination started on the Wednesday, just before noon. He ran through the details of Joanne’s story again. He quizzed her on her description of her attacker’s vehicle, its bullbar, its size. He asked her about the man, and exactly what he looked like. He picked through the minutiae of her statements. He asked her again to run over the events of that evening. She volunteered the new information that, when she’d heard the bang from behind the Kombi, ironically, she’d thought at first she was to blame. ‘I just remember thinking, looking straight ahead of me at first thinking, “Oh my God, what’s happened to the vehicle, is it something that I’ve done to cause that?”’ she said. Algie frowned. He then asked her about the man’s stance, about how exactly he attacked her, about her injuries. It was then that Joanne’s chin came up and, instead of playing the meek victim, she began to be more defiant. When Algie asked her if it was possible to sustain such injuries from lying on the ground as her assailant tried to tie her legs, Joanne replied coolly, ‘It must because, because I suffered them.’
She was growing in confidence all the time. When she was asked why she didn’t glance over to where she thought Peter might be lying, she frowned. When she was asked whether she perhaps wasn’t concerned about his well-being, she actually bristled. ‘I was concerned about my own life,’ she replied. ‘All I could see was darkness.’
On the subject of the front-to-back opening of the ute, she again reiterated her doubts. ‘The police told me that there is no such vehicle that has front to rear access and that has put doubt in my mind and I looked at other possibilities that I got through,’ she said. ‘All I know is I got from the front to the back quite easily, I did not walk around a vehicle, so it is possible that the point where the man got the sack from where he lifted up the canvas, the canopy to get the canvas bag, is also a possibility of how I got in … I don’t recollect it now. I just know that I got from the front to the rear, not by my own steam, I was put there forcibly by the man.’
Joanne grew positively bold, however, when the subject turned to her feat of moving her manacled hands from behind her back to her front. She told Algie she’d demonstrated it to the police, and then made an offer that stunned everyone. ‘I think I kept my hands together, but if at any point the jury would like me to demonstrate that, just let me know,’ she said. There was a murmur through the courtroom, a ripple of interest piqued.
Algie demurred quietly. His defence was based on chipping away at the credibility of the prosecution witnesses, especially Joanne. The last thing he needed was a vivid demonstration that what she said was true.
Chief Justice Martin, however, disagreed. The next day, he delivered his ruling: Joanne should indeed be taken up on her offer. Algie protested: he insisted he didn’t plan to challenge her assertion that she’d managed to move her manacled hands. Martin wouldn’t be moved. In a situation where the defence was questioning generally the reliability of her evidence, she should be allowed to prove the truth of her words in this instance.
As a result, during the break, Joanne changed into trousers and had her hands cuffed with a man’s tie — to be tied with the cable ties once more would be too traumatic. Then, in front of the jury, she started the demonstration, the movement that journalist Richard Shears had said would be impossible even for a ballet dancer. With bated breath, the jury watched as she finally moved her hands deftly past the soles of her feet from back to front. It took her precisely a second and a half. In the press room later, everyone else had a try. Only two journalists were able to replicate the action successfully. Shears didn’t even try.
The cross-examination finished abruptly without any of the grillings onlookers had expected about the couple’s plans to part for a while, the dope they’d smoked together, and Joanne’s affair with Reilly. It seemed as if Joanne’s newfound confidence and her much more gentle and emotional presence, with all the fresh sympathy it was now evoking, had taken Algie by surprise, and knocked much of the stuffing out of Murdoch’s men.
BEFORE JOANNE’S APPEARANCE IN court, the jury had been selected, painfully slowly as Murdoch came close to using up every single one of his challen
ges. At the start of the trial, eventually, Wild had laid out the prosecution’s case, and both Paul Falconio and his father Luciano had testified. There was silence as Paul described their close-knit family of parents and four brothers, and said how Peter would always call home, no matter how far away he was. ‘Has there ever been any period as long as this when you haven’t heard from Peter whilst he was alive, to your knowledge?’ Wild asked him finally. Paul’s voice remained strong. ‘No,’ he replied, ‘never.’
When Luciano took the stand, there was no-one who didn’t feel for the heartbroken man who seemed to have shrunk over the past four years. In heavily Italian-accented English, he told how his son would try to ring home every week, without fail. ‘The only time he’s gone a fortnight without ringing anyone, on the beginning of the trip, when he was in Himalaya,’ he told the court. ‘Because there is no telephone up on the top of the Himalaya, you know.’
The last time he and his wife had ever heard from Peter had been the day before he’d gone missing. Luciano had answered the phone, but passed it on to Joan. ‘I did speak very briefly but I always leave it to the mother because children like to speak to the mother more than the father,’ he said. ‘He was down in Sydney and Joanne had got a job in a bookshop and he was supplementing his income …’ By then, tears were flowing down his face so fast, he had to stop. In the public gallery, a few onlookers wiped their eyes. Peter’s father eventually recovered enough to answer a couple more questions, then Wild left it. Algie decided not to cross-examine. It would have been too cruel.
At the end of that first week of the trial, Joanne and the Falconios emerged together on to the steps of the courts. Joanne looked quietly composed, plainly relieved to have finished giving her evidence, and pleasantly surprised by how cordial the press had been to her. Now she had shown something of the spirit that had allowed her to escape from her attacker in the outback, had at last shown some emotion, and was now giving them the opportunity for a photograph every day, instead of racing in a car through to the back entrance of the court, it was something of a redemption. Everyone had also remarked favourably on her transformation since her last appearance the year before. British commentators were busily comparing her to Victoria ‘Posh Spice’ Beckham; one Australian magazine printed her photograph next to one of Liz Hurley for comparison.
