Althie argued that his client ought to be allowed the benefit of the doubt, too. The national manhunt to find the culprit took over two years; police were desperate to make an arrest; was Murdoch simply convenient? Nearly a whole volume of the six-volume set of court transcripts from the trial was devoted to the murky CCTV image of Murdoch or whoever it was at the Shell station on the night of the murder. ‘That man could have come from anywhere,’ Althie said. ‘It’s just a guy at a truckstop with a moustache.’ He also denied that the 4WD caught on CCTV was Murdoch’s vehicle; one of his most compelling arguments was that it didn’t match the bullbar Murdoch bought from someone with the fabulous name of Woggie Minshull.
The jury deliberated for eight hours. I remember strolling around and looking at the artwork in the court building. One showed a former chief justice smoking a pipe in the foreground and a nude peeling her top off in the background. Another was a canvas with white lettering on black paint. It read Thou shalt not kill.
Murdoch was given a life sentence with non-parole of 28 years. In 2014, his lawyers withdrew an appeal against his conviction. He’d wanted a retrial, claiming ‘a miscarriage of justice’. His appeal was based on the notion that the prosecution had groomed Joanne Lees ‘secretly, deliberately and improperly’, because they feared the jury would find her resolutely unlikeable.
Well, possibly. Murdoch still has believers, people on his side. It’s just that they seemed deranged. Someone called Keith Allan Noble is the author of a 2011 book with a curiously placed exclamation mark in the title. Find! Falconio is described as an ‘exposition of Australia’s strangest disappearance (murder or missing?) and of the associated misinvestigations, cover-ups, and incompetence. Reveals the show trial in which the jury was lied to. Encourages readers to get involved in finding the British visitor (and drug courier?) Peter Falconio — dead or alive.’ Noble is also the author of a book which argues the innocence of Port Arthur mass murderer Martin Bryant.
Enough. Good riddance, you would have to think about Murdoch, to bad rubbish. And cheers to the New Zealander who ratted him out. Hepi did it out of self-interest, but not, it seems, for greed. It was thought he’d claim the A$250,000 reward. He talked about it at the trial. A year later, police announced the reward had been withdrawn. They said no one came forward to claim it.
I asked Paul Toohey what he made of Hepi, and he said, ‘I liked James a lot. He was pretty straight-up, a good guy to deal with. 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 sort of look at marijuana dealers as tax-avoiders.
‘He’s a shambolic-looking guy. But 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.’
The prosaic Kiwi, matter-of-fact, not carried away . . . Hepi, like Toohey, was providing a lesson. I wanted to think of it as the quintessential Australian murder — Woggie Minshull’s bullbar, chicken nuggets from Red Rooster at Alice Springs, a mad dog with a gun driving at speed and on speed in terra nullius — but what was the point of collecting these scraps of national characteristics? Murder is just murder.
Chapter 12
Sex and Chocolate: ‘Bones’
I don’t need no money, fortune or fame.
— ‘My Girl’, The Temptations
1
Another murder trial in Australia, again in the fructifying heat of December, again with a Maori at the centre of it, except Tony Williams was the murder victim and his death seemed to offer a parable about the perils of following the yellow brick road to Surfers Paradise. Brisbane was preparing for the joys of Christmas 2014: a downtown pub grandly advertised St Stephen’s Day, 26 December, when it would open at the festive time of 10am. The talk at the cafés and bars all along downtown George Street (steak and schooner specials for $16, COLD BEER! HOT CHICKS! at Grosvenor’s topless bar) was of the recent storm, when large hailstones fell out of the sky with such force that they pulverised cars, tore roofs off houses, and closed the airport — it wasn’t safe to fly with Brisbane under attack from meteors of ice.
Things were back to normal by the time I got to the Sunshine State. There were the moaning crows and squealing ibises in the tops of Moreton Bay figs, and a faint breeze chasing away papery scraps of leaves from the plane trees. The fecund botanical gardens — colonists trialled mangoes, custard apples, sugarcane and tobacco in the grounds — was crowded with fruit bats. One night I couldn’t sleep and looked out my window at 4am; it was already light, so I went for a long walk, and crossed two bridges over the Brisbane River. A yellow-faced cormorant came out of the water, and stretched its wings to dry. It didn’t take long. Joggers and families were out and about in large numbers by 6am. There were mangroves and rainforest, and poetry marking the birth of Brisbane was chiselled in concrete on the banks of the river: A large tree would make the first wharf here, and a ship cut free. I liked those lines very much. I repeated them to myself as I walked alongside
