She wore white blouses and long cream skirts to court. Her long black hair was bunched in a Lady Jayne band. She had an oval face and an angry mouth. She chewed gum, she crossed her very attractive legs, she sometimes took the opportunity to inspect the creature in the dock. During recess, she sat with Falconio’s mum and dad; one afternoon, Luciano patted her shoulder, and kept his hand there for a few seconds.
Murdoch was immense. Lees was voluptuous. Peter Falconio was the man who wasn’t there. As the second witness at the trial, Luciano was asked for his son’s age. He said, ‘It was 28 when he died.’ Murdoch’s lawyer told the jury, ‘Sometimes people disappear.’ Crown prosecutor Rex Wild: ‘He was made to disappear.’
A couple told the court they saw a man they thought was Falconio call into their shop about a week after the murder to buy a Coke and a Mars Bar. They couldn’t get their story straight. The man said he served her, the woman said she did; God knows how they were allowed to give evidence. Police received eight reports of Falconio after 14 July ‘all over Australia’. They also received reports of him on dates before he ever arrived in the country.
‘I’ve heard it said as the Peter Falconio mystery,’ Wild said to the jury. ‘There is no mystery.’ Lees said when Falconio got out of the Kombi to talk to the motorist whom she identified as Murdoch, she heard him say, ‘Cheers, mate.’ His last words. And then she heard a loud sound, like an engine backfiring, like a single gunshot. She screamed his name. ‘He didn’t come,’ said Wild. ‘He couldn’t have come.’
Police searches at the crime scene unearthed bottle tops and the remains of a kangaroo. All that was left of Falconio was a pool of his blood beneath a little pyramid of dirt. He vanished along with his wallet containing $630 and his St Christopher’s necklace.
Murdoch has always maintained the charges were a police stitch-up, that he was going about his illegal business some 600 kilometres away that night. He had the support in court of his girlfriend, Jan Pitman, a big woman who wore three rings on each hand. Sometimes she was joined by true-crime author Robin Bowles, who wore three rings on each finger. Bowles wrote a book about the murder. Slowly, I would expect; whenever she visited the press room, she jabbed at her keyboard with one very long fingernail.
Her book raised the suggestion that Falconio may have been drug-running. Equally, he may have been abducted by aliens. The notion that Falconio was alive and well somewhere — outer space, anywhere — was taken up in two books by two hacks, Roger Maynard and Richard Shears. Maynard’s book was called Where’s Peter? It begged for a subtitle. Something along the lines of Oh For Christ’s Sake He’s Most Likely Fucking Dead is Where.
3
Lees and Falconio were on their way to New Zealand. They had done Nepal, Singapore, Cambodia, Thailand; the plan was to fly out of Brisbane and spend five weeks in the North and South Islands, where they would celebrate their birthdays, his on 20 September, hers five days later. But first, the drive north, through the Outback, towards Darwin.
Murdoch left school at 15. He’d worked as a truck driver and a mechanic. He was a nasty piece of work with form (jailed for shooting at Aborigines after a football match, charged with the rape and abduction of a 12-year-old girl and her mother but found not guilty). He lived in a caravan behind a workshop in Broome. He was fastidious, very particular about things; he said he liked BP service stations: ‘They’ve got clean fuel.’ He drove long distances in bare feet, and stepped out wearing either thongs or moccasins. He stayed awake on the big drug runs by taking speed. ‘I always have it in a cup of tea.’
On the morning of 14 July, Lees and Falconio called into a Red Rooster fast-food outlet. Murdoch camped overnight, and had Weet-Bix and tea for breakfast. He was on his way from Sedan to Broome with about 11 kilograms of dope hidden in the Toyota. Fussily, again, he’d been looking everywhere for a particular grey colour for a dash mat: ‘I was at the end of my tether.’ He was with his dog, Jack, a Dalmatian–Blue Heeler cross. He bought chicken at Red Rooster to share with the dog. ‘Jack was a bit of a liker on nuggets.’
Lees and Falconio watched a camel-racing event, and left Alice in the late afternoon. Lees drove; Falconio rested in the back, reading The Catcher in the Rye. They played The Stone Roses.
By then, said Murdoch, he was nowhere near. He’d turned off Stuart Highway, and into the Tanami Desert, ‘rolling along like Tommy Tourist’.
Darkness fell. At about 8pm that night a man in a 4WD indicated for Falconio to pull over, gesturing that there was something wrong with the Kombi’s exhaust. Falconio stopped the van. He took his cigarettes; ‘Cheers, mate’; and then on a night without a moon in it, an explosive sound, and a stranger coming around to the side of the Kombi and sticking a gun to Lees’ head. He ordered her out. He put his knee on her back, and strapped her wrists together with cable ties. He punched her in the head. He threw her in the back of his 4WD. Lees told the court she was more afraid of rape than death. He just seemed to be all around me and over me.
Amazingly, she managed to escape. She jumped out of the back of the vehicle, ran into the scrub, and hid there for five hours in shock and fear until she flagged down a truck driver. He took her to the pub at Barrow Creek to call police. Saturday night in the Outback: there was more beer and cheer than usual, because they
