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Where is Peter Falconio?

On 14 July 2001, English tourists Joanne Lees and Peter Falconio, both from Huddersfield, Yorkshire and in their late twenties, were heading up the Stuart Highway for Darwin in their 30-year-old Kombi, which they had bought in Sydney specifically for touring the outback. They had been travelling the world together for six years and had been in Australia for about six months, starting their trip with a working stint in Sydney where they had both made many friends. It was their intention to drive to Darwin and on to Brisbane, where Peter would fly out to Papua New Guinea and Joanne would go back to Sydney to catch up with friends. They would meet up again in two weeks and travel on to New Zealand, Fiji and the US.

A couple of hours earlier they had taken a break from listening to music while cruising the lonely highway, sharing a marijuana joint at a stop called Ti Tree and cuddling and watching the sun set spectacularly over the desert. But in a couple of hours their plans would change forever in the worst possible way.

Their orange Kombi was about 10 kilometres north of Barrow Creek when a white Toyota Land Cruiser ute overtook them and the driver waved his hand to flag them down, indicating that there was something wrong with the back of the vehicle. Joanne didn’t want to stop but Peter was driving and pulled over to the side of the road, where he got out and went to the back of the Kombi with the stranger while Joanne stayed in the cabin with the engine running. A few moments later she heard a bang like a car backfiring and then the man appeared at her window holding a silver handgun.

The tall, thickset stranger got into the driver’s side of the Kombi, pushed her forward and, despite her violent struggling, tied her hands together behind her back. He dragged Joanne out of the Kombi, loosely bound her feet, threw her into the back of his ute and left her there, she wasn’t sure for how long.

Realising that her partner had most likely just been murdered and soon it would be her turn, Joanne managed to untie her feet and with her hands still tied behind her, she dropped from the back of the ute and fled into the pitch-black undergrowth along the side of the highway until she stumbled into a large bush and hid beneath it, not daring to breathe. There she stayed, curled up and crouching forward with her head on her knees, terrified to make the slightest sound, as the killer frantically searched for her. Time and again he passed nearby and she could hear his dog panting. She heard him dragging something along the ground. She saw the headlights of a vehicle scan the bushes in search of her. That the reflector strips on her shorts were never caught in the headlights and the man’s dog never smelt her fear is a miracle.

Almost five hours later at about 12.45am and still not certain whether the killer had gone, Joanne plucked up enough courage to run in front of a road train and was rescued by driver Vince Millar and his co-driver Rod Adams. Almost in disbelief at finding a distraught young lady in the middle of nowhere telling a tale of murder and abduction, the truckies cut the hand-ties from Joanne’s wrists and drove her to the nearby Barrow Creek pub, where they rang the police.

When the police arrived several hours later they found Peter and Joanne’s Kombi driven off the road and blood on the highway where Joanne said she had heard the shot come from. Joanne was able to give them a positive description of the man who had apparently killed her partner in cold blood and then attempted to abduct her. Seeing as the man had made no attempt to cover his face, they could only assume that she would also have been murdered, after he had had his way with her. Joanne Lees also had some tiny specks of blood on her T-shirt that could not be eliminated by DNA testing and it was assumed that they belonged to the killer.

Within months a Broome diesel mechanic, 43-year-old Bradley John Murdoch, came under suspicion, as several people told police that Murdoch had gone to great lengths to change the appearance of his vehicle, had shaved off his distinctive Merv Hughes moustache and also shaved his head. Police questioned Murdoch but he claimed that he had been hundreds of kilometres away on his way home from a marijuana drug run in South Australia. They couldn’t disprove this but the times and places he provided didn’t quite add up as the perfect alibi.

Unfortunately for the police investigating the case, the law of the Northern Territory at the time didn’t allow for them to forcibly take Murdoch’s DNA, the results of which would allow them to either charge him with murder or not pursue him any longer. Then they got the break they desperately needed. In August 2002, Bradley Murdoch, who was said to be highly agitated about the search for Peter Falconio’s killer and couldn’t stop telling people that he was a prime suspect, was arrested and charged with the abduction and multiple rapes of a woman and her 12-year-old daughter in rural South Australia.

After a 25-hour drive in which the females were chained together and repeatedly assaulted at gunpoint, Murdoch dumped them at a Port Augusta service station, gave the mother $1000 and told them, ‘You could make some money out of this if you went to the media.’ The woman eventually went to the police, who arrested Murdoch on 28 August 2002 in a nearby Woolworths store. He was carrying a loaded gun in a shoulder holster and another in the waistband of his trousers.

Aware that Murdoch was a prime suspect in the Falconio case, the South Australian police legally took his DNA and sent it on to the Northern Territory. The DNA from the blood on Joanne Lees’ T-shirt and the sweat on her hand-ties was 150 quadrillion times more likely to have come from Murdoch than any other Northern Territory person. They had their man. Trouble was, he looked liked spending the next 20 or so years in a South Australian prison for the abduction and assaults on the mother and daughter. Incredibly, that was not to be.

Murdoch was acquitted of all the South Australian charges on the questionable grounds that the woman, a former prostitute, and her daughter did not go to the police earlier. Murdoch was immediately extradited to the Northern Territory, where he was charged and tried for the murder of Peter Falconio and the attempted abduction of Joanne Lees. When asked if the man who’d assaulted her was in the court, Joanne Lees pointed to Murdoch and said, ‘Yes. I’d recognise him anywhere.’

Despite driving 1800 kilometres in the 18 hours following the incident to create an alibi, the DNA and other evidence was too overwhelming and in December 2005, Bradley John Murdoch was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment with a non-parole period of 28 years. All avenues of appeal have since been exhausted. The remains of Peter Falconio have not been found to this day.