On the morning of July 14, 2001, Murdoch was on his way from Sedan to Broome with about twenty-four pounds of dope hidden in his Toyota. He was with his dog Jack, a Dalmatian cross. He bought chicken at Red Rooster for himself and Jack – ‘Jack was a bit of a liker on nuggets.’ Lees and Falconio took turns driving the Kombi. She read The Catcher in the Rye. They smoked some dope Falconio had bought in Sydney and stashed underneath the dashboard, and watched the sunset. They saw a bushfire. They played The Stone Roses – Falconio’s choice, the band wasn’t to Lees’ taste.
Darkness fell. At about 8 p.m. a man in a four-wheel drive indicated to Falconio, who had taken the wheel, to pull over, there was something about the exhaust. And then, the prosecutor said, ‘something happened’. Falconio got out. Lees heard him say, ‘Cheers, mate.’ The day of the Camel Cup, The Catcher in the Rye, The Stone Roses, a bushfire; and then on a night without a moon in it, a loud sound, and Lees screaming, more afraid of rape than death, a silver gun, looking at the man straight in the face for ten, fifteen seconds – ‘He just seemed to be all around me and over me.’ She screamed for Falconio. ‘He didn’t come,’ said the prosecutor. ‘He couldn’t have come.’
The two narratives – English, Australian – intersected in court. And crucial to bringing it to that stage was a New Zealander, James Hepi, Murdoch’s former partner in crime and a key prosecution witness. After the trial, Hepi went to ground. The only journalist he has spoken to is Toohey.
Hepi and Murdoch had smuggled vast amounts of dope, usually powerful skunk-weed, between Adelaide and Broome in Western Australia. Hepi was busted, and knew that he was looking at jail. ‘I had an ace up my sleeve called Brad Murdoch,’ he told Toohey. ‘And I used it.’ Meaning, he suspected Murdoch was Falconio’s killer and gave his name to the police.
Nice guy, was he, this one-time skunk-weed magnate who came from Invercargill? ‘I liked him a lot,’ said Toohey. ‘He was a good guy to deal with and know. Quite clever. Shambolic-looking guy. But this is how open he is: he told me he’d love to be dealing again, but he can’t now that he’s known. Some people would say, “He’s a drug dealer,” and regard him with horror. But half the people I know smoke dope. They’ve got to get it from somewhere.
‘I don’t judge Hepi; I judge Murdoch, because of the type of character he was when he was dealing drugs. He wasn’t an easygoing guy like James. And that’s what it comes down to – are you a human being? And James Hepi is.
‘He said at one point, “I can be a very violent man if I want to be, but I don’t like to see it, because it’s so ugly when it happens.” That’s a reflection on the world he lived in. James could drink a carton of beer and you would not be concerned that he had a switch that would kick in and turn him into someone else. He’s quite level. He’s very practical. His self-interest in those drug-running years was paramount, and he was efficient and just wanted to get the job done.’
When I read the trial transcripts in Darwin, Hepi’s testimony was vivid and arresting. There was such a New Zealandness to his laconic, truculent sarcasm. Yes, he said to the defence, he was definitely interested in collecting the police reward of $250,000 for Murdoch’s arrest: ‘If he’s convicted, I will. Who do I see – you?’
I asked Toohey if Hepi stood out to him as a New Zealander. He said, ‘Well, he had that way of talking, of the way New Zealanders do, using quaint old-fashioned words. Like you do yourself, Steve. We don’t use words like “grand”. You guys do that, and you still drive Vauxhall Vivas. But New Zealanders and Australians move among each other without the other noticing. They don’t really know who’s who anymore.’
Some or all of that was comedy. Toohey’s book is full of high spirits and ironies; it recognises the farce of life. This is only one reason why his book on the Falconio killing – five others have been published – is easily the best. It’s also very likely the last. ‘Thank God for that,’ he said.
The first two books were whizzed into the stores immediately after the trial: ‘A case of pressing “Send” on their computers to their publishers.’ An English journalist wrote one with the tantalising title Where’s Peter? ‘We’re supposed to think he’s not dead.’ An even worse effort entitled Bloodstain was written by another journalist from England, Richard Shears, a reptile whom I saw slithering around Darwin at Murdoch’s trial. A review on Amazon enthuses: ‘It is obvious that Peter Falconio is not dead and that Bradley Murdoch is innocent! Read it!’
Toohey’s book prefers realism. Much of The Killer Within provides an intimate guided tour of where Murdoch drank, fought, hung out, and fried his head and loins on speed. Murdoch, he writes, was ‘an all-Australian maniac’. In an electrifying early chapter, Toohey sits in on drug deals in an upstairs flat ‘in the so-called Bronx of Broome’ – Murdoch’s old neighbourhood. The dealer demands he take a ‘small white pill’ to prove he’s not a cop. He does as he is
