Paranoid, armed and deadly: The life and crimes of outback killer Bradley John Murdoch

Sydney Morning Herald

15-07-2025

It hadn't been a good trip. There'd been a few dramas. He suspected somebody had been following him on that occasion and he had to deal with it.'
Beverley Allan remembered the day in 2001 when 'Big Brad' Murdoch returned to Broome after one of his many drug-smuggling trips from South Australia. 'He wasn't very happy; he was very strung out, very stressed,' she said. 'He'd had to come back a different route.'
Allan's memory of her then boyfriend's words four years ago offer the only clue why Murdoch executed British backpacker Peter Falconio and assaulted his girlfriend, Joanne Lees, on a stretch of the Stuart Highway 310 kilometres north of Alice Springs.
But, despite testimonies from 85 witnesses and more than 300 exhibits at a nine-week trial, what led to and exactly happened that near-freezing night in the middle of nowhere remains a mystery.
Joan and Luciano Falconio are flying back to England with the agony of not knowing what happened to the body of their son, who was 28 when he disappeared. So too is Lees, who identified Murdoch as her attacker. As well, his DNA was found in a smudge of blood on the back of one of her T-shirts.
On the evidence presented at Murdoch's Supreme Court trial in Darwin, the murder was out of character for a man who meticulously planned trips to avoid risks when he was carrying large amounts of money and marijuana hidden in a spare fuel tank of his four-wheel-drive utility.
Was he a crazed gunman?
No, said prosecutor Rex Wild, QC.
Murdoch was a cunning, alert, meticulous person, Wild said. The killing was premeditated, he said, because Murdoch had taken the time to make handcuffs from cable ties that he used to restrain Lees.
Wild also pointed out that Murdoch cunningly executed his escape, driving 1800 kilometres in about 18 hours across the mostly unsealed Tanami Track to avoid police roadblocks.
Wild suggested that Murdoch - high on amphetamines that he sipped from cups of hot tea and sugar - became paranoid about a couple in an orange Kombi van that he had seen two or three times during his marathon drive.
At about 8pm on July 14, 2001, Murdoch pulled alongside and then flagged down the Kombi that was being driven by Falconio. He shot Falconio in the head from point-blank range then pushed a pistol into Lees's face, punched her, tried to bind her hands and feet, and placed a sack over her head. Her hands were manacled behind her back with the cable ties made of unbreakable industrial plastic.
She was bundled into the back of Murdoch's vehicle before managing to escape into bush, where she hid for five terrifying hours. Murdoch searched for her for a while with a torch and his dalmatian dog, Jack, it is claimed. Eventually she staggered onto the highway and was picked up by two road-train drivers. The handcuffs had to be cut off with bolt cutters.
Some details of Lees's story have changed since she first made statements to police. Maybe she was mistaken, Lees told Murdoch's trial, when she said her attacker pulled her from the front cabin of his utility into the back (there was no window that could allow this to happen).
Wild said that if there were discrepancies in her story it was because she was traumatised by the events of that night. 'She wasn't taking notes,' he said.
But how could Murdoch have become paranoid about a fun-loving couple from Huddersfield, Yorkshire, in their late 20s on the backpacking trip of a lifetime? How could a hulking man, 191 centimetres tall and weighing 105 kilograms, who always travelled with a gun - in the end it was an arsenal - have seen them as any threat?
Murdoch testified that he bought chicken at the same Red Rooster restaurant in Alice Springs which Falconio and Lees visited the day of the murder (an excuse for how his blood got on the T-shirt). But the couple did not have any previous contact or dealings with Murdoch. This was no drug deal gone wrong, one of many unsubstantiated and cruel rumours that have been swirling about this unusual case that generated worldwide fascination with the outback.
Falconio and Lees were minding their own business driving through the outback; a couple of hours before the killing they had shared a marijuana joint as they watched a spectacular sunset at a place called Ti Tree. They were cruising up the highway in their 30-year-old Kombi, happy to stop for a sleep when they got tired with driving the vast distances between settlements along the highway to Darwin.
Murdoch, the drug smuggler who had for years avoided police capture, inexplicably took the risk of shooting a stranger beside the highway in the hope that no other vehicles came along before he could hide the body. He also had the problem of restraining Lees, who said she would rather die than be raped and who fought back violently.
What the jury in Darwin did not hear in case it prejudiced their deliberations, however, was that Murdoch had been accused before of committing terrifying crimes against defenceless people.
'Brad is a dangerous animal and he is capable of anything,' said Murdoch's former friend and landlord in South Australia, who cannot be named for legal reasons. He was obsessed with drugs, guns and other weapons such as a cattle prod, she said. In August 2002, a year after the attack in the Northern Territory, Murdoch was said to be highly agitated about the hunt for Falconio's killer and spent much of his time sipping his amphetamine-laced tea and smoking marijuana.
He had befriended the partner of the South Australian woman 18 months earlier and was staying in his guesthouse on their country property. The woman and her 12-year-old daughter were alone in a house nearby; her partner was in hospital suffering from cancer.
'If I had my hands on a gun I would shoot him [Murdoch] in the head right now,' the man, who has since died, told an Adelaide District Court jury which later acquitted Murdoch of raping the girl and abducting her and her mother.
'I want to see Brad put in jail because he's raped my daughter and molested my wife,' the man said.
The woman - who still sleeps with a knife under her pillow in case Murdoch escapes - and police insist there is no doubt that Murdoch committed the offences.
One night Murdoch lured the girl to the guesthouse. Similar homemade cable ties to the ones used to restrain Lees were used by Murdoch to restrain the girl. 'If you move I will give you brain damage,' he told her.
Murdoch stripped off the girl's clothes, threw her on the bed, pinned her face down and twice raped her.
During the attack the girl's hands were tied behind her back, and her eyes and entire head were taped.
Murdoch then went to wake the mother in the main house. He was wearing a gun in his shoulder holster when he took the mother to the back of his vehicle to join her already manacled daughter and told her: 'I need some insurance to get away from this place. Get in the back or I will shoot you.'
Murdoch then chained up the mother in the back of the vehicle. He took them on a terrifying 25-hour drive, stopping three times. The mother feared she and her daughter would be killed at the end of it.
During one stop Murdoch chained the woman to a chair. She screamed as he massaged moisturiser onto her breasts and approached her with a cattle prod, then sexually assaulted her.
But Murdoch was experiencing dramatic mood swings. Inexplicably he gave the mother and daughter $1000 and allowed them to get out of his vehicle at a service station in Port Augusta, telling them: 'You could make some money out of this if you went to the media.'
One reason the jury acquitted Murdoch of the charges is that the woman, a former prostitute, and her daughter did not immediately go to the police. When they arrested Murdoch in a Woolworths store in the town on August 28, 2002 he was carrying a loaded gun in a shoulder holster and another concealed in the waistband of his trousers.
Police said he could not reach for the guns when confronted because he was carrying groceries. A policeman carrying a shotgun kicked him to the ground and other officers fell on him, ending one of the biggest manhunts in Australian criminal history.
A shotgun, a rifle with telescopic sights, a crossbow, ammunition, night-vision goggles, knives, a cattle prod, handcuffs made from cable ties, rolls of handcuffs made from cable ties, rolls of tape, gloves, tins of cannabis, and a large amount of cash were found in his vehicle, police said.
Bradley John Murdoch, 47, was born in the small West Australian town of Northampton, about 450 kilometres north of Perth. His father, who died last April, and mother were middle class, kindly and hard working. Murdoch knocked about the bush most of his life, 'pulling spanners, mechanical work. Bit in the fishing trade, mainly around transport and truck driving.'
He was tough, foul-mouthed, with his front teeth missing and his arms covered in tattoos. He admitted using amphetamines while driving trucks. amphetamines while driving trucks. He admitted not paying his taxes.
But he was almost 40 when he had his first serious brush with the law on the day of the 1995 football grand final in the WA town of Fitzroy Crossing, 350 kilometres north-east of Broome.
Several hundred Aboriginal people were celebrating victory and refused to move from a bridge across the Fitzroy River. They had partied all night and so had Murdoch who, denied passage, drove 25 kilometres to a cattle station where he was working, collected a .308 bolt-action rifle and a .22 lever-action Magnum with telescopic sights, returned to the bridge and opened fire on the parked cars. One bullet came so close to an Aboriginal woman's head she felt the rush of air as it passed.
A judge sentenced Murdoch to 15 months' jail for the shootings and an extra six months because the rifles he used were stolen. The judge said Murdoch, who had been beaten up several times by Aborigines when he was a boy, had a 'longstanding hatred of Aborigines'. One of his tattoos shows an Aboriginal man hanging from a noose. Eighty per cent of the inmates of Darwin's jail, where Murdoch will serve his time, are Aborigines.
After his release from jail for the Fitzroy Crossing offences Murdoch got a job as a diesel mechanic in Broome, where he lived in a caravan behind the business before moving to other addresses in the town.
By all accounts he was a fastidious person and was always tinkering with his beloved vehicles. In the late 1990s - 'maybe '98, '99, somewhere around that time' - he met drug trafficker James Hepi in the Satay Hut in town.
'Hepi was leaving Broome and he had a couple of clients there that he wanted to look after,' Murdoch said.
The two men went into business together. The business was drugs, large amounts of marijuana grown near Adelaide, where Hepi owned a property. Hepi and Murdoch shared making the long trips from South Australia to Broome to deliver the drugs.
But by late 2001 Murdoch and Hepi had had a bitter falling out over drugs and money. Hepi testified that Murdoch became paranoid, was not pulling his weight with the driving and was scared of crossing state borders. Hepi accused Murdoch of dobbing him in to police. Murdoch accused Hepi of framing him for the Falconio murder. 'You're a f---ing liar,' Murdoch said to Hepi in court. 'F--- you,' Hepi retorted.
Hepi wants to collect the $250,000 reward for information leading to the conviction of Falconio's killer.
Sitting flanked by two security guards in the glass-enclosed dock of the court in Darwin throughout the trial, Murdoch often shook his head and muttered his disagreement when many of his former acquaintances, workmates, girlfriend and business partner testified against him. He attempted to intimidate two women television journalists covering the case, calling them 'blonde bitches' and mocking them in court.
In public, only long-time girlfriend Jan Pittman has remained loyal to him, sitting through the long days of testimony and legal argument in the humid months leading to the Top End's monsoon season.
'He didn't do it,' she said.
Lawyers raised questions at the trial that will continue to be debated.
Why hasn't Peter Falconio's body been found? What was the motive for the crimes? Did police plant evidence to incriminate Murdoch? Could Murdoch drive 1800 kilometres in 18 hours to avoid police roadblocks? Why was there only a small pool of Falconio's blood at the crime scene? What happened to the gun and the spent bullet? Could Peter Falconio have 'disappeared himself'?
But the Crown had even more compelling questions. Among them were: How could Murdoch's DNA have got on the back of Lees's T-shirt if he was not the killer? It was 150 quadrillion times more likely to have come from Murdoch than someone else, forensic experts said. That was the most powerful evidence against Murdoch.
And Lees could not be shaken from her identification of Murdoch as her attacker. 'I'd recognise him anywhere,' she said.
Falconio's murder was unprovoked, swift and callous. The circumstantial evidence presented at the trial overwhelmingly pointed to Murdoch having pulled the trigger despite his strenuous denials.
Some police suspect it was not Murdoch's first killing in the outback, where he had roamed with impunity for years and where there have been scores of mysterious disappearances.
The outback crimes of a mechanic called Bradley John Murdoch, 47
On Tuesday a jury in the Northern Territory Supreme Court found Bradley Murdoch guilty of the murder of British backpacker Peter Falconio four years ago.
The jury took eight hours to convict Murdoch, who was also found guilty of abducting and assaulting Joanne Lees, Mr Falconio's girlfriend.
The judge, Chief Justice Brian Martin, told him: 'You have been found guilty by a jury of the crime of murder. There is only one judgement that is practised by the law in the Northern Territory, and that is imprisonment for life.'
The minimum term to be served by Murdoch will be set at a later date.
Murdoch, a 47-year-old mechanic and drug runner from Broome, Western Australia, flagged down the couple's camper van on a remote stretch of highway north of Barrow Creek, about 320 kilometres from Alice Springs, on July 14, 2001.
He shot Mr Falconio dead before threatening Ms Lees, now 32, with a gun and tying her up. She managed to escape from his truck and hid in the bush for five hours before flagging down a passing truck on the Stuart Highway.
Mr Falconio's body has never been found, but a pool of his blood was discovered at the side of the highway. Mr Martin said: 'The absence of a body is not a bar to a guilty verdict of murder.'
Ms Lees has urged Murdoch to tell her and the Falconio family what he had done with the backpacker's body.