A terrifying drama that began on a lonely desert road four years ago is being played out in a Darwin courtroom. Joanne Lees' evidence was spellbinding, but the defence says she has the wrong man. The trial continues... Paul Toohey reports.The Northern Territory coat of arms bows to no royalty. Up on the wall, behind the horse-haired wig of Chief Justice Brian Martin, two red kangaroos face off between secret-sacred Aboriginal designs. It is the creature at the top of the crest, however, that carries the resonance.
The wedge-tailed eagle, Australia’s supreme bird of prey, hangs above it all, a magical Aboriginal tjurunga stone grasped in its talons. What the crest won’t tell you is that in the Territory, wedge-tails have become lazy birds. They have evolved from active hunters into highway loiterers that hang off to one side of the bitumen, waiting to feed on what the roadtrains and cars knock over.
And roadkill is very much the business at hand in this, the trial of Bradley John Murdoch, accused of executing Peter Marco Falconio on the Stuart Highway just north of Barrow Creek on July 14, 2001, and of assaulting and depriving Joanne Rachael Lees of her liberty.
There are many reasons for the intense interest in this case. Mainly, it is the notion of two harmless young foreigners, waylaid in a friendly land that had suddenly turned hostile; and the questions, by some, as to the reliability of Lees’ account of her remarkable deliverance. But overwhelmingly it is the setting of the crime – an unextraordinary stretch of outback highway – that has stirred the darker corners of the imagination.
Funnily enough – although he won’t find it so – a man who goes by the name of Stuart Highway was last week sentenced to three months in jail in the court room next door, just as the Murdoch trial got underway. Highway, an activist, had smashed the windscreen of a police car during an anti-drug prohibition rally in Darwin’s Raintree Park in 2002.
With some 50 national and British media hanging around the court, the drug protesters saw an opportunity to interest the media in Highway, whom they now consider a political prisoner. No one raised a camera or opened a notebook for them. The Murdoch trial was, and is, the only story in town.
Star witness Joanne Lees, 32, has been delivered each morning to the courthouse steps in a very shiny black XR-6 Falcon cop car, Tickford-enhanced engine with a spoiler on the back. A getaway car. Lees was silent with the media but gracious. Earlier in the week, as she arrived at court to begin her evidence, Lees had been unable to conceal her nerves, chewing violently at the insides of her mouth while staring bolt ahead as she ran the flash-bulb gauntlet.
The dead, two-tone clothes Lees wore did not help. For the first three days of her evidence and cross-examination, she wore her hair in a single, austere plait, pulled so tight she looked as though her head had been caught in a bus door. On Thursday, the final day of her cross-examination, she had graduated to mouthing slight, polite hellos to the press as she moved through the poking cameras.
Lees had finally begun to relax into herself. She had also let her long hair go free and wore clothes that hinted that she might have a life and a personality beyond her assumed victim status. Lees had clearly grown more comfortable in taking the witness stand; she was not going to be beaten into changing her story. And no one tried to make her do so.
Earlier in the week, Lees and the Falconio family – Peter’s brothers Nick and Paul, and parents Luciano and Joan – seemed to barely acknowledge each other. By week’s end, some sort of understanding had been reached and they were exiting the courthouse as a unit, in what appeared to be a deliberate portrayal of togetherness for the benefit of the press.
Lees, while failing to remember certain parts of what had happened to her on that July 14, 2001, night, was nonetheless immovable on the fact that the man in the dock, Murdoch, was the person who had single-handedly ambushed her and Pete, now believed dead. At left is the picture of Bradley Murdoch that Lees identified as her attacker.
“The body is unfound, despite searches for it. It will be found one day I’d suggest to you,” prosecutor Rex Wild, QC, told the jury, while offering no clue for his optimism on this last point. Wild said Murdoch had told one of his ex-mates, shortly after the Falconio disappearance, that the best place to bury bodies was in spoon drains on the side of bush roads.
Anyone who knows those roads – particularly the Tanami track, which run north-west from Alice Springs to northern Western Australia, and on which Wild alleged Murdoch departed the Territory after killing Falconio – could tell you that those drains appear every few hundred metres. And if not in a spoon drain, then where? Best ask the eagles, and the dingoes.
Wild offered no motive for Murdoch’s alleged out-of-the-blue ambush. Murdoch, 47, a shambling 196cm (6ft 5in) bear of a man, was a very handy diesel mechanic. Murdoch, whose usual address was Broome, WA, although for the past two years has been Darwin’s Berrimah Prison, was in a drug partnership with a man named James Hepi.
In Wild’s opening address, the court heard that Murdoch was the back-roads courier, running cannabis between Hepi’s properties in South Australia and Broome. Wild said Murdoch repelled sleep on these epic 3400km cross-nation hauls by fuelling himself with speed. Somewhere along the way, according to Wild, Murdoch left the script and became a killer.
The court heard that Lees had earlier identified Murdoch as the assailant in the committal hearing, in this same courtroom, in May 2004. Last week, Lees once again positively identified Murdoch. Wild asked Lees: “Do you see that man [who attacked you] here today?” “Yes,” said Lees, raising her voice. “I’m looking at him.” Murdoch broke his normal Easter Island statue-countenance to shake his head in disagreement.
Defence lawyer Grant Algie, bearded and flowing-haired like a Southern gentleman (which, for the purposes of this case he is – he’s from Adelaide), treated Lees very gently. Wild had said in his opening to the jury that Lees and Falconio had stopped to “share a smoke” and watch a desert sunset some two hours before the attack. Algie did not raise the matter in his cross-examination. For that matter, Algie did not once raise his voice at Lees.
The question of Lees’ infidelity with a man she had met in Sydney, in the weeks before she and Falconio took off on their long drive, was raised as friendly fire by Wild. This matter was of no interest to Algie, who did not once question Lees about it.
Perhaps anticipating that Algie would make something of it, Wild had told the jury in his opening address: “She [Lees] will tell you that she formed a friendship with a young man that went a bit further than it should have; that’s something she’ll tell you about.”
And Lees did tell the jury about it. She volunteered a comment to Wild about the nature of her relationship with this man, only known as “Nick”. Lees said: “We were just friends and we overstretched the boundary of that friendship, but that ended and we became friends again.” Lees never told Pete about Nick. She claimed her times with Peter Falconio, on their northern adventure, were only good times.
Indeed, nothing in the Murdoch defence team’s line of questioning to Lees suggested they had any doubt that something terrible had happened to Lees and Falconio that night. The issue has been whether Lees has correctly identified Murdoch as her attacker.
Algie wondered if Lees was possibly mistaken. Perhaps, he put to her, she had seen Murdoch in Alice Springs shortly before Lees and her doomed boyfriend trundled slowly north, in the direction of Darwin, in their old orange kombi van.
Lees would not be put off. “I’d recognise him anywhere,” she said. Softly pressing, Algie asked Lees if she’d had the opportunity to take a good look at Murdoch during these proceedings. “I’ve had the opportunity,” said Lees, speaking just a few metres from Murdoch, “but I don’t want to look at him.”
At times, the courtroom seemed to be directly transported to that bloodstained stretch of road, a long way to the south. The air-conditioning system in Court 6 provided its own highway soundtrack, every few minutes rumbling deeply and sounding for all the world like a passing roadtrain.
Her voice broken by her interminable nervous throat clearing, Lees recounted in a whisper how “the man” had signalled her and Falconio to pull over because of an apparent engine problem with the kombi – the man had seen sparks coming from the exhaust. The small courtroom was spellbound as Lees told of how she revved the kombi’s engine, at Pete and the man’s request. Then she heard a bang.
“A man appeared at my window,” she said. “He was staring at me ... I saw he had a gun in his hand ... a silver gun ... he was clearly showing me he had a gun ... he asked me to turn the engine off ... I was shaking too much and couldn’t do it ... he did it ...” At that point someone in the room accidentally hit a glass with a pen, causing the crowd to start as if someone had clanged a giant bell.
The jury proved active from the start, sending questions to Lees through Justice Martin seeking clarification on Lees’ line of vision to the back of the kombi when the attack occurred. Lees didn’t claim to have seen her boyfriend being shot; just to hearing that bang and never seeing him again.
Falconio’s beautiful, gentle, heartbroken father, Luciano, Italian by birth and heavy of accent, had already told the court through tissues that he had not heard from his son since that July 14 night. And Pete, who would have turned 33 last month, was not the type not to ring home. The longest Luciano had ever been out of contact with his boy was when Pete – making his way to Australia with Joanne – disappeared for two weeks up the Himalayas.
The court heard that Lees had said, in earlier police statements, that immediately after Falconio’s apparent execution (the blood found on road side, said Wild, matched Peter’s DNA), the man had shoved her into the cabin of his four-wheel drive, in a kidnap attempt. Then he had pushed her through to the back of the vehicle via an access passage which led from the front to the rear of the vehicle.
Now, Lees was not so sure about this front-rear access – her attacker may in fact have carried her back out of the cabin and placed her in the rear of the vehicle. Algie wondered how she had come to change this story. Was it because police had told her that four-wheel drives typically had no front-to-rear access? And that this was causing them problems with their investigation?
Lees did not try to cover her tracks. “Yes, the police told me there was no such vehicle with front-to-rear access, and that has put doubt in my mind. I looked for other possibilities.” She said she was no longer certain how she got to the back of the car. “I don’t recollect it now. All I know is I got from the front to the rear.”
As is now well-known, Lees then made her great escape. It was equal parts luck, wit and courage that saw her find her own liberation. But mostly courage. It is a fact that seems never to be fully appreciated whenever her story is retold.
On two separate occasions, the judge directly intervened in Wild’s examination to ask Lees direct questions about her “emotional feeling” during her ordeal. It was at these points that Lees began to really cry.
“My main thoughts that I remember,” said Lees, weeping, “is just screaming out for Pete to come and help me because I was frightened so much. I just had used all my energy and once he’d stood me up and put me in the back of the vehicle, I just thought, ‘That’s it, I am definitely going to die. I’ve got no energy and I’ve got to get out of the situation.’
“The next thing, emotion that I can feel really strongly about is when I asked him if he was going to rape me. I was more scared of being raped than I was of dying and being shot by the man.”
Lees told how when she and Pete were driving around the country, they shared the wheel and it was “driver’s privilege” to choose which CDs to play. Lees drove first as they left Alice Springs, playing Texas – a band that had, from recollection, a solitary steel-string guitar hit, which went: “I don’t want a lover/I just need a friend”. Pete retired to the back of the kombi to read Catcher in the Rye. He took the wheel after their Ti-Tree sunset and exercised his driving rights, playing the Stone Roses. Lees didn’t like the band, but rules are rules.
Wild asked Lees why she took £50,000 from an English television show, in March 2002, to tell the story of her attack. Lees said that “having left Australia, I felt desperate and helpless. I wasn’t receiving much help from [the NT] police. I felt the task force [looking into the attack] had been reduced [in number] ... they’d forgotten about Pete ... this was my way of raising the profile.”
Of course, Lees could have raised the profile of the case far more significantly by talking to all press, at a press conference, with no money exchanged. However, Lees told the court that while she had received “hundreds” of paid offers for her to talk, she had decided against them because “she didn’t want to jeopardise the trial”.
On October 10, 2002, while Lees was working in Sicily, a friend told her to look at a story on that day’s BBC website. The story indicated that police had found a Barrow Creek suspect. Lees looked at the site, which carried a photo of Murdoch. Lees said her thought upon seeing the photo was: “That’s the man.”
Northern Territory police arrived in England eight days later. They brought with them a photo board bearing the faces of 12 men. The court was shown a video of Lees being shown the photo board and selecting face No. 10. The straight-staring rock face of Brad Murdoch.
Algie put it to Lees that because she had seen the photo of Murdoch on the internet, she might have wrongly formed the view that he, Murdoch, was the man at Barrow Creek. “I recognised him as being my attacker,” Lees replied. “I was there, I know what happened, I don’t need to read it in the press.” Algie said she might have been mistaken in selecting photo No. 10.
Lees: “No.”
Algie, very mildly: “I suggest you are wrong.”
Lees: “The pictures I have seen, he is the man that attacked me north of Barrow Creek.”
After Lees concluded her evidence on Thursday, the foreign press began to consider leaving town. The whole week’s hearing had been conducted in such a polite, restrained way. The expected fireworks had not really arrived. With Joanne Lees co-operating with the media by walking into the court via the front entrance every morning and afternoon, no one in the press even seemed too intent spending their after-court hours trying to find and photograph Lees at her secret location in Darwin.
A group of reporters discovered “Tits-Out Tuesday” in a Mitchell Street pub in the city, where local and backpacker girls get doused in water and full of beer and do things they might not otherwise do. Photographers took themselves to see the Territory’s “famous jumping crocodiles” and came home with thousands of useless photos.
But something has stopped them leaving town. The somewhat inscrutable Ms Lees, after completing her evidence, took a seat in the courtroom, along with the Falconio family. It is believed she plans to sit out the remainder of the case. As long as she stays, the press, which has tried so hard to understand her, to the point of looking for things in her which perhaps do not exist, will be going nowhere.
Newshawk: Legalise All Drugs http://www.napnt.org
Pubdate: Wednesday, 26 October 2005
Source: The Bulletin (Australia)
Author: Paul Toohey
Website: http://bulletin.ninemsn.com.au/
Email: bulletinletters@acp.com.au
