4
That was exactly the kind of thing I wanted to hear. Locals wait seven months for the desert to cool. I wanted the Outback served up as a land of simple contrasts — mysterious and beautiful, hopeless and savage. I’d seen it for myself. The precious year I rode the magnificent Ghan train from Adelaide to Darwin. It took three days and two nights to cross two time zones and three deserts — Great Victoria, Simpson and Tanami — where I rolled along like Tommy Tourist. It was a mesmerising journey. Hour after hour, day after day of the desert void. The train disappeared into it. All around was spinifex grass, cassia trees, mulga bush. Thin, sharp, scraggly things, clinging on for dear life out of all that red earth. Once it entered the subtropical Northern Territory as it neared Darwin, there were water buffalo, rosellas, galahs, even the spangled drongo. Most strikingly, and abundantly, there were also termite mounds, which went by the fabulous word ‘termitaria’.
The only people I saw were the rabble onboard the train. I was among 25 other journalists on a junket; the party included two Australians who I raised hell with one night until about 1.30am, when I left them breaking in to the train’s bar. They spent the rest of the trip under a kind of house arrest, confined to quarters. They were the only people I liked, so I retired to my compartment and stared out the window at the termitaria, at the desert emptiness.
This was the landscape — epic, unpeopled — where I imagined Falconio and Lees experienced terror. As a pampered passenger on The Ghan, I was cut off from the sight or knowledge of Brad Murdoch types tooling around in 4WDs with their eskies and their guns; all I saw were birds, lightning, termitaria. I willingly romanticised death in the north. The setting was so overpowering — the red, hard Outback, and the way it softened heading north, towards the subtropics. Darwin itself was a wonderland. The sky at night was lit by silent electrical storms over the Timor Sea. An illegal snake-dealer was caught with two black-headed pythons in a sack. Fishermen were urged to go up the Howard River where barramundi fed on prawns in the mangroves. There were hermit crab races — two heats of 10 on a sandy board — every night at the Fox ’n’ Fiddle. It was December, the wet season, 34 fructifying degrees, with fruit bats in the tops of the banyan trees. A 2-metre saltwater crocodile was found prowling the streets. A public meeting was held to discuss methods of waging war on cane toads.
It was so exotic, so removed from prosaic New Zealand. But one day in court I heard a sound I recognised. It was the familiar vowels of a New Zealander. It came from the prosecution’s star witness, James Hepi, who led the police to Murdoch, and gave crucial evidence against him. The two men had a brief exchange in court. I felt proud to hear the Australian drawl countered by the musical voice of a Maori.
Murdoch said, ‘You’re a fucken liar.’
Hepi said, ‘Fuck you.’
5
Hepi was Murdoch’s partner-in-crime in the dope-smuggling business. The contraband was usually powerful skunk weed. It paid well. But Hepi got busted with about 4.5 kilograms of the stuff on him, and was looking at jail. ‘I had an ace up my sleeve called Brad Murdoch,’ he said to Paul Toohey, the Darwin journalist, ‘and I used it.’ Meaning, he suspected Murdoch was Falconio’s killer, and gave his name to the police in exchange for a suspended sentence.
Hepi claimed Murdoch had told him that the best place to bury a body was in a spoon drain. He claimed he saw Murdoch making cable-tie handcuffs. Hepi claimed he could definitely identify Murdoch as the man on CCTV at a Shell service station on the night of 14 July, placing him at a time and location near the alleged murder: ‘I know exactly who it is. I spent a lot of time around that man. I know how he stands. I know how he walks.’
There was such a New Zealandness to Hepi’s heavy, truculent sarcasm at the trial. Yes, he said to Murdoch’s lawyer, Grant Althie, he was definitely interested in collecting the police reward of $250,000 that led to the arrest. ‘Who do I see about it — you?’
He was also cross-examined on his attempts to collect the Winfield Gold cigarette butts that Murdoch smoked, with the intent of collecting DNA. ‘If it matched the Northern Territory murder, good job.’
Althie: ‘What did you do about it?’
Hepi: ‘It’s not as if I’ve got a DNA lab in my back pocket, mate.’
Hepi said he threw away the butts. There was other circumstantial evidence, independent of Hepi, that pinned Murdoch to the murder. His DNA was matched to the cable ties, and the Kombi’s gearstick. Althie said the cops put it there.
A spot of Murdoch’s blood was identified on Lees’ T-shirt. Rex Wild told the jury: ‘It’s the most single significant piece of evidence in this case. It ties this man to this woman on this day.’ Althie said the cops put it there.
There were discrepancies. Lees told the court that she had tried to release her hand bindings by rubbing them with lip-balm; police found the lid in a search the next day, but only located the tube three months later. You can guess what Althie said about that, but here is the exact quote: ‘Maybe a kangaroo took it away and put it back. Perhaps it was a dingo, or a zephyr of wind. Another possibility is that somebody, one of the police officers, put it there.’
Lees said Murdoch punched her in the head. Murdoch said if he punched her in the head then she wouldn’t have got up.
