Renee announced it was her birthday. She had a big bottle of vodka. There was even orange juice in the fridge. She asked if anyone wanted a drink. No one did. For journalists on assignment this was unprecedented, but that night a drink didn’t seem right. Not that it was wrong, it was just that it wasn’t needed. Encountering such grand-scale death had changed us all, forever. So we thought. So many to bury in Aceh that they bulldozed them into pits. And they hadn’t even found a body in central Australia. But sure enough, that case about one death in central Australia did grow new legs and become important again. It would be nice to think it was because of something Aceh had showed us: that a single life, a newborn amongst the rubble, was special; or a single death, a wife stolen from her family in the diabolical tidal wash, was important and meaningful. But it wasn’t that.

  The truth was that it wasn’t Peter Falconio’s life that mattered, not to anyone but his family. He was gone and he wasn’t coming back. The life in question belonged to Joanne Lees. Anyone who looked at her story, without emotion, could see she was innocent. Instead, her defiance had turned the whole thing into a cynical expedition. There was suspicion where there should have been none. The magistrate had warned at the start of the committal hearing that this was not to be the second Chamberlain case. Which, to extrapolate, meant Lees wasn’t Lindy II. Maybe not. But most agreed on one thing: Lees had a way of coming over as a pain in the arse.

  13 C/O BERRIMAH JAIL

  Experts. They have their place. At a pre-trial hearing, Northern Territory Chief Justice Brian Martin ruled that most expert evidence would be allowed in open court. There were experts in forensic anatomical matching, experts in normal DNA testing, experts in unusual new methods of DNA testing, all of which pointed to Bradley Murdoch having bled, or opened a weeping sore, on the back of Joanne Lees’ t-shirt, and having handled the gearstick and steering wheel of the Kombi as he shifted it off the roadside after executing Peter Falconio.

  The experts, when talking of the likelihood of the DNA profile having come from one Bradley John Murdoch as compared to a person selected at random from the Northern Territory population, talked in terms of billions and quadrillions. You could tell they liked big numbers. You could also tell they were making them up. The big numbers were there to baffle, to overwhelm and convince. But the DNA wouldn’t have convicted Murdoch on its own. What got him was Lees, who had finally turned up to court as a human being. It was Hepi and the Sheriff. It was Murdoch, who, with his lawyers, had weighed up, no doubt agonisingly, whether he should take his chances and give evidence on the stand.

  It was Luciano Falconio, Peter’s lovely, gentle, inconsolable father, who told the court through tissues that he had not heard from his son since that 14 July night, who buried once and for all the rubbish about Peter pulling some disappearing act, telling how his son, who had disappeared at the age of twenty-eight was to have turned thirty-three last month, was always a boy who’d ring home.

  It was Bev Allan, a part-time lover who liked Murdoch’s speed, who said he’d come home from a trip in July 2001 ranting about roadblocks and denying he was the killer. It was Rex Wild, who trusted his instincts and did not berate or shout at witnesses, but just tried to let the facts – human facts, not expert facts – do the talking. He asked Lees why she had taken money from an English television show. Lees said after ‘having left Australia, I felt desperate and helpless. I wasn’t receiving much help from police. I felt the taskforce had been reduced ... they’d forgotten about Pete ... this was my way of raising the profile.’

  This sounded less than convincing but the judge, Brian Martin, ended all doubt. He was the only person who ever found the key to Joanne Lees’ heart. Maybe it was because of what he stood for – this whole thing, the court, the event, the murder itself. Maybe it was that he just asked the right questions. Wild had been effectively gathering facts but was having trouble with the violin soundtrack. Martin interrupted with some questions of his own.

  Martin: ‘Now, Ms Lees, again this might be difficult. The jury have not had an experience of being stopped on the side of the road on a pitch black night in the middle of the outback. Would you please try and assist the jury with how you felt at the various stages as best you could. For example, you told the jury that when you saw the gun and the events that followed, you were supposed to turn off the ignition and your hands were shaking. Can you give the jury please an idea of how you were feeling emotionally and what was running through your head at the time?’

  Lees: ‘I just kept thinking, this isn’t happening to me. I can’t believe this is happening and I felt alone, I kept shouting for Pete. I thought I was going to die. But mainly I just kept thinking, I can’t believe this was happening.’ Lees was truly weeping. Everyone believed her. Everyone more or less always had, but now there was reason to. She looked liked she had really suffered.

  What the judge’s question had to do with the law, I didn’t know. He should’ve been a journalist. And then he delivered the Ray Martin killer blow. ‘And as the events went forward from there, are you able to tell the jury how your thought processes worked and how you were feeling emotionally? For example, after you’d been tied up and things moved on from there?’

  Lees: ‘It happened … it all happened quite quickly from being tied up to being on the ground. My main thoughts that I remember is just screaming out for Pete to come and help me because I was frightened so much I had just used all my energy and once he’d stood me up and put me in the back of his vehicle I just thought, that’s it. I am definitely going to die. I’ve got no energy to get out of the situation, I just felt exhausted. The next thing, [the] emotion that I can really feel strongly about is when I asked him if he was going to rape me. I was so frightened. I was more scared of being raped than I was of dying and being shot by the man. And then when I asked him if he’d shot Pete, I kept asking, he didn’t give me an answer straight away and just the realisation hit me that he might have killed Pete. I hope that helps you.’

  It did.

  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 Easter Island-statue countenance to shake his head in disagreement.

  All that had been made of Lees saying she’d been pushed from the front of the man’s cabin through to the back didn’t matter anymore. None of Murdoch’s cars had front-to-rear access, but that detail was unimportant. It certainly did not bother the jury. Why shouldn’t she get that part wrong? Who had ever been through what she had and survived to recount the exact detail? As Rex Wild told the jury, she wasn’t there taking notes.

  Martin: ‘And then, as you slid out of the rear of the vehicle …?’

  Lees: ‘After I’d asked him if he was going to rape me and if he shot Pete, I just got some energy from somewhere and some inner strength and my focus was escaping. And that’s when I concentrated on getting out. Just getting out of there.’

  The star witness, by then aged thirty-two, had changed her manner of entrance since the committal hearing. Lees was delivered each morning to the courthouse steps in a shiny black XR-6 Falcon cop car, Tickfordenhanced engine with a spoiler on the back. Lees was silent with the media but gracious. Photos? As many as you wish. Earlier in the week, as she arrived at court to begin her evidence at the opening of the trial, Lees had been unable to conceal her nerves, chewing anxiously at the insides of her mouth while staring bolt ahead as she ran the flash-bulb corridor.

  For the first three days of her evidence and cross-examination, Lees 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 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. As she became human, she became Brad Murdoch’s nightmare.

  Earlier in the week, Lees and the Falconio family – Peter’s brothers Nick and Paul, and parents Luciano and Joan – had barely acknowledged each other. By week’s end, an understanding had been reached. All were exiting the courthouse as a unit, in a deliberately orchestrated portrayal of togetherness for the benefit of the media. At last, impressions did matter to Lees. They had always mattered. Someone had finally got through to her. Her suspicion of the media was well-founded – although she was wrong that all media wanted to lie and distort her story. One journalist, a real snake from England, had been inventing stories suggesting Falconio pulled an insurance scam and was still alive. No one followed up his stories because they were such blatant bullshit. They were also hurtful.

  The Sydney Morning Herald had, after the committal the previous year, broken a story which identified Lees’ secret lover, Nick, in a photograph, although there was no interview with him. It told how they would drink together in Sydney. When the story hit Sydney newsstands, it was borrowed from, heavily, and relayed on to London in a rewrite from a Sydney-based British reporter. Somehow, a new word had been introduced to that story. Joanne and Nick had been seen ‘snogging’. It was a Pommy word and it was a lie. Another story emerged during the trial, from a more serious British broadsheet, that Rex Wild had addressed the judge as ‘Brian’ during the trial. No one but this one reporter had heard it. The implication was either that Rex Wild and the judge were in bed together, or that Darwin was such a Nowhereville that these best buddies got pissed on the weekend and turned up in court to thrash it out on Monday. The reporter’s ears had misheard. It wasn’t an act of reporting evil – even though it looked like it. It was a mistake. The paper apologised.

  When Grant Algie, Murdoch’s barrister, began his cross-examination, Lees acknowledged him with an expressionless stare. She was expecting to go through what she had in the committal hearing, all the detail about the boyfriend Nick, and the drugs, that joint she and Pete had smoked before the attack. Algie, surely, would say that it had interfered with her senses and rendered her description of her attacker unreliable? Lees was bracing for an assault that never came.

  Algie had considered his options very carefully. There was no way the jury would think she had made all this up. As for the affair, it didn’t mean she was a murderer. It had been raised with Lees by Wild in her evidence-in-chief as friendly fire. Anticipating an Algie onslaught, the prosecution needed to air this matter so it didn’t look like they were hiding things from the jury. Lees had explained to Wild: ‘He was a friend, a good friend, and we became close and were intimate at one time. We were just friends and we overstepped the boundary of friendship but that ended and we became friends again.’

  And the joint? To try and pretend to a jury, particularly a Darwin jury, that one joint would leave a person incapable of remembering a life-anddeath experience would be inviting them to regard him, Algie, as a beat-up merchant of the worst kind. It wasn’t raised by Algie. None of it was. He didn’t want to risk painting her as some horrible drug-gobbling slut. It was too chancy. The jury might instead see her for what she was – a young woman who was only doing what young people did. Instead, Algie pressed Lees, gently, on the detail of her recollection. He never once raised his voice at her.

  Whenever Algie referred to Lees, he called her ‘Joanna’, not Joanne. Whether he did this deliberately cannot be known. But after all that time he might have been able to get that much right. Maybe it was a subliminal hint that back where she came from, in Yorkshire, she had a different name. Split personality. Algie used other affectations. The cable-tie handcuffs that Murdoch was alleged to have made and used to manacle Joanne Lees with were not, in Algie’s lexicon, handcuffs or manacles. They were ‘wrist bandages’. And the man who attacked Lees and Falconio was never a killer or assailant – and he especially wasn’t Murdoch. He was the nebulous ‘bad guy’. It was an attempt by Algie to acknowledge that perhaps Lees had been through a trauma while making it plain there was some other monster still roaming at will.

  Algie: ‘Did you grab the man’s testicles and squeeze them?’

  Lees: ‘I think I … that’s what I was aiming for but I just reached sort of his inner leg but it had no effect.’

  Algie: ‘I mean, from the position in which you’ve described, with your hands handcuffed behind your back, you wouldn’t physically have been able to reach to grab a man’s testicles, would you?’

  Lees: ‘Yes.’

  Algie: ‘But didn’t you tell the police…’

  The attack, in real time, had been over in minutes. Lees was dragged, for hours, through the fine detail of how Algie’s bad guy had restrained her and held her on the ground. Algie found it strange that as the man led Lees to his vehicle, parked behind the Kombi, she didn’t try to glance back to see where Peter was. ‘I was concerned for my own life,’ said Lees. Murdoch also had his hand on the back of her neck, guiding and forcing her to his car. As for the dog, which she would wrongly identify as a blue heeler when it was in fact a dalmatian-cross, she had, in fact, only seen it for a few seconds, in the dim cabin light.

  Lees’ strong belief had once been that she had been pushed into Murdoch’s cabin and then shoved into the back of the vehicle through a passage. This was supposed to be one of her biggest hurdles. Lees knew, by now, that Murdoch’s vehicle did not have front-to-rear access. She was now not so certain how she got in the back.

  Algie: ‘Can you … are you able to explain how it would appear that your belief you had then you no longer hold?’

  Lees didn’t try to cover her tracks: ‘Yes. The police told me that there is no such vehicle that has front-to-rear access and that has put doubt in my mind and I looked at other possibilities … all I know is I got from the front to the back quite easily. I did not walk around the vehicle.’ It was simple. She had a sack over her head. Murdoch had pulled her out of the front and shoved her in the back.

  At one point, Algie said as a statement rather than a question to Lees that Murdoch was not the man at the truck stop. I looked over to the jury and saw one woman actually roll her eyes.

  Algie: ‘Whatever did or didn’t happen at Barrow Creek, Mr Murdoch wasn’t the man you’ve described as doing these things. Might I be right about that?’

  Lees: ‘No.’

  Algie: ‘Do you think you might be mistaken in identifying [photo] number 10 as the man north of Barrow Creek?’

  Lees: ‘No.’

  Algie: ‘I suggest that you are wrong when you say that Mr Murdoch or any image of him represents any man who might have been north of Barrow Creek. Do you disagree with that?’

  Lees: ‘He is the man who attacked me north of Barrow Creek.’

  Algie: ‘Thank you, Ms Lees.’

  There were many reasons for the intense interest in the case, none of them singularly persuasive. It had become a juggernaut upon which everyone had clambered. There was no point getting off until the end. It wasn’t just the media. Presumably there was an audience out there, taken by the notion of two harmless young foreigners, waylaid in a gracious land that had suddenly turned hostile. It was the questions about Lees and her remarkable deliverance, which some could still not accept as truth. And it was the unremarkable scene of the crime, just another stretch of the straight-through-the-middle Stuart Highway, which for some reason had been stirring the darker corners of the collective imagination. No one could really explain the fascination. It certainly wasn’t a cautionary tale. Other English couples would continue to travel the Stuart Highway. Someone tried to give the fascination a reason, a logic, suggesting: ‘It was just that this could have happened to anyone.’ Perhaps, but it had happened to them. It seemed to me, more than anything, the story of an all-Australian maniac.

  Funnily enough – although he didn’t find it so – a man named Stuart Highway was being sentenced to three months in jail in the courtroom next door, just as the Murdoch trial got underway. Highway, a normally mild, usual-suspect activist around Darwin who protested about almost everything, had smashed the windscreen of a police car during an anti-drug prohibition rally in Darwin’s Raintree Park in 2002. Attempts by Highway’s mates to interest the national and international press in what they saw as a political jailing failed. He wasn’t David Hicks.

  At times the Darwin 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 was providing its own highway soundtrack, every few minutes rumbling deeply and sounding for all the world like a passing road train. Above the judge, on the coat of arms, two red kangaroos faced off between secret-sacred Aboriginal designs. A wedge-tailed eagle, Australia’s supreme bird of prey, hung above it all, a magical Aboriginal tjurunga stone grasped in its talons. What the crest didn’t let on was that wedge-tails had evolved into opportunistic birds that hang off to one side of the bitumen, waiting to feed on what the road trains and cars knock over. Roadkill was the business at hand.