Latest news with #Lees
Daily Mirror
17-07-2025
- Daily Mirror
'Outback Killer' escapee Joanne Lees now after quitting UK and taking new name
Joanne Lees was thrust into the spotlight in 2001 when she survived an attack in the Australian outback that saw her boyfriend, Peter Falconio, murdered - here's what happened to her after In 2001, Joanne Lees became the focus of intense media attention after surviving a brutal attack while traveling with her boyfriend, Peter Falconio, who was murdered during their trip across the Australian outback. Their attacker, Bradley John Murdoch - better known as the "Outback killer" - has now died aged 67, taking details of his victim's body to his grave. Murdoch was previously diagnosed with terminal throat cancer in 2019 and was transferred to a palliative care unit in Alice Springs Correctional Centre, in Northern Territory, Australia. The couple was driving through the remote outback late at night when another driver signalled them to pull over. According to Lees, then 28, Murdoch shot Falconio and attempted to tie her up, but she managed to escape, hiding in the grass for hours before flagging down a passing truck. Falconio's body was never recovered. Lees first came to public attention recounting the harrowing ordeal she endured with Falconio, her long-term partner whom she met in 1996. They had travelled extensively across Southeast Asia before spending five months in Sydney and planning their fateful road trip across Australia. After the attack, Lees' story divided public opinion, especially following the trial of Murdoch, who was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. During the trial, it emerged Lees had an affair with another British backpacker, Nick Reilly, in the months before Falconio's disappearance. The revelation, coupled with Lees' candid interview with Martin Bashir, sparked controversy. Speaking to Bashir, Lees admitted the affair was a mistake. "I did love Pete with all my heart," she said, "and when that happened I did overstep the boundaries of friendship, but it made me, like, love Pete even more and value what we did have." During the interview, she did not reveal whether she would have confessed to the affair if her emails weren't caught by police. In a police interview, she called the emails "irrelevant" despite Nick using a code name 'Steph' when they discussed meeting up in Berlin after the murder. Lees was criticised and branded suspicious for her demeanour during interviews and for altering parts of her statement, but she maintained that her interview with Bashir, for which she was paid £50,000, was meant to keep the case in the public eye. She also addressed other criticisms, such as the 'cheeky monkey' t-shirt she wore in the aftermath, explaining it was simply all she had with her at the time. She also denied being emotionless, saying she "wears her heart of her sleeve," adding: "Well, I do in the company of my mates." In 2006, Lees published her memoir No Turning Back, detailing her early life, including growing up in financial hardship with her late mother. She reportedly received a £25,000 advance for the book. Years later, Lees studied sociology at Sheffield University and is now a social worker. In 2017, she revealed she had discovered a half-sister named Jessica McMillan in Sydney, the daughter of Lees Australian father, who she is estranged from. The sisters quickly formed a close bond, with Lees seeking Australian citizenship to be nearer to Jess. In her book, Lees, who is now 51, did not share any details about her dad, but did say that she grew up in Huddersfield, Yorkshire, with her mother, Jennifer James, her stepfather Vincent James and step-brother Sam. "We didn't have much money but she worked hard to make sure I had a happy childhood," she wrote. Speaking to The Daily Telegraph in Australia, Lees described the reunion as 'almost like a mirror' and said it made her feel 'less alone in the world.' In an interview on Nine's 60 Minutes, Lees reflected on the impact of the tragedy, saying: 'Pete lost his life that night but I lost mine too. I'll never be fully at peace if Pete's not found, but I accept that that is a possibility." She even returned to the site of the attack to try to understand the mind of the attacker, driven by her enduring love for Peter.
The Age
16-07-2025
- The Age
Family of outback killer Bradley John Murdoch speaks out
'He was deeply loved. He will be deeply missed,' the statement concluded. Police say Falconio was shot on a remote stretch of the Stuart Highway near Barrow Creek, about 300 kilometres north of Alice Springs, in July 2001. Falconio's blood was found where police believe he was murdered before his body was moved. The British backpacker was travelling around the country with his girlfriend Joanne Lees, who survived Murdoch's attack. The pair, both from Yorkshire, had travelled across South-East Asia before arriving in Australia. Lees told police that at about 7pm on July 14, 2001, the pair became aware that a car was following them as they travelled north up the Stuart Highway towards Devil's Marbles in their orange Kombi van. Driving a white Toyota 4WD ute, Murdoch gestured at Falconio, who was driving the van, to pull over, which he did. Murdoch then told Falconio he'd seen sparks shooting out of the Kombi's exhaust. Lees was sitting in the front of the parked van when the two men went to examine the exhaust, and she heard a loud bang. Murdoch then appeared in the front window, brandishing a silver handgun, which he pointed at Lees' head. 'I just kept thinking this was not happening to me. I couldn't believe that this was happening. I felt alone. I kept shouting for Pete and thought I was going to die,' Lees told the jury at Murdoch's 2005 trial. 'I was more scared of being raped than being shot by the man,' she said. Murdoch moved Lees to his vehicle and tied her wrists behind her back, punching her in the head as she struggled. Murdoch then became distracted, with Lees reporting that she heard 'gravel scraping on the ground, as if he was moving something'. Lees slid out of the vehicle, dropped to the ground and scrambled to a hiding spot behind a bush where she stayed for up to five hours in the dark. Once she was sure Murdoch was gone, she flagged down a truck that took her to Barrow Creek. A widespread manhunt was launched, and the search for Falconio's body began. The case received intense media interest, both in Australia and the UK, with Lees facing particular scrutiny over her recounting of the attack. The murder is cited as one of the inspirations for the 2005 Australian horror film Wolf Creek. The first breakthrough came early in the investigation when a man reported that Bradley John Murdoch was responsible for the crimes. Murdoch was under arrest in South Australia, facing charges over the abduction and rape of a 12-year-old girl and her mother. A DNA sample was taken in the hopes it could be linked to evidence found at the Northern Territory crime scenes. While Murdoch has always maintained his innocence, his defence was ultimately undone by his decision to keep an elastic hair tie that belonged to Lees. The case's lead investigator, former NT police officer Colleen Gwynne, told the ABC in 2016 that an officer had noticed the hair tie wrapped around Murdoch's holster in a search of his possessions, speculating that he was likely to have kept it as a 'trophy'. In 2003, Murdoch was acquitted of the South Australia rapes and immediately rearrested and extradited to the Northern Territory, where he was charged with Falconio's murder. In 2005, Bradley John Murdoch was convicted of murdering Falconio, and assaulting and attempting to kidnap Lees. He was serving a life sentence in Alice Springs prison with a non-parole period of 28 years when he died. 'Your conduct in murdering Mr Falconio and attacking Ms Lees was nothing short of cowardly in the extreme,' Northern Territory Supreme Court Justice Brian Martin said in his sentencing. Loading Murdoch never revealed the location of Falconio's body, and under the Northern Territory's 2016 'no body, no parole laws', he may have never been granted parole. He twice appealed to overturn his convictions, but was unsuccessful. Born in the West Australian town of Northampton in 1958, Murdoch spent most of his life in Broome working as a mechanic. Murdoch had a history of violent crime, serving time in a Western Australian jail in the mid-1990s for shooting at a crowd of Aboriginal football fans. As with all deaths in custody, Murdoch's death will be investigated by the Northern Territory Coroner. On Tuesday this week, Luciano Falconio pleaded for assistance in locating his son's body so that Peter could be buried while he and his wife are still alive. 'I still hope, yeah I still hope, but I don't know if we [will] live long enough', he told News Corp. 'I wish I could find him and make an end to it, bury him.' In a statement, NT Police said it was 'deeply regrettable' that Murdoch had died without ever disclosing the location of Peter Falconio's remains. 'His silence has denied the Falconio family the closure they have so long deserved. Our thoughts are with the Falconio family in the United Kingdom, whose grief continues,' the statement read. 'The Northern Territory Police Force remains committed to resolving this final piece of the investigation.' Less than a month ago, NT Police upped its cash reward to $500,000 for information that would lead to the discovery of Falconio's remains. 'We recognise the passage of time that's transpired, however it's never too late to reach out and start that conversation with police,' NT Police Acting Commander Mark Grieve told a press conference on June 25, adding that he still had hope. 'You just never know how beneficial that information that you may hold, may be – essentially, you just don't know what you know.' The renewed bid for information was made amid reports that Murdoch was in palliative care in Alice Springs Hospital. Grieve said Murdoch had never positively engaged with the police despite 'numerous approaches' including in the same week.
The Age
15-07-2025
- The Age
Paranoid, armed and deadly: The life and crimes of outback killer Bradley John Murdoch
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.
Sydney Morning Herald
15-07-2025
- Sydney Morning Herald
Paranoid, armed and deadly: The life and crimes of outback killer Bradley John Murdoch
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.
Sydney Morning Herald
13-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
The bold bookworms staying a step ahead
With a cold breeze that went straight through you in Melbourne on Sunday, it was the perfect day to sit inside beside the fire with a good book. Instead, a brave bevy of bookworms rugged up and headed to the CBD to explore a novel idea – a walking book club. As joggers in the Run Melbourne 2025 event streamed past, these intrepid souls were exercising their brains as well as their bodies, by walking beside the Yarra River and chatting about books. Members don't actually bury their noses in the pages as they walk, because you'd trip, says Julia Lees, who organises the Walking Bookclub through the Meetup app. She might ask another club member what they thought of the chosen book as they stroll from Federation Square to the Royal Botanic Gardens and back, but otherwise discussion is free-range. After a 90-minute stroll, members gather over coffee or food at Riverland Bar below Federation Square. Four years ago, Lees, a librarian, was running separate book and walking groups, when she had a brainwave – why not combine the two? The Walking Bookclub has been a hit. It has more than 100 members and has covered books from The Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro, to Here One Moment, by Liane Moriarty.
