The monk publican didn’t explicitly mention god, but seemed to acknowledge the presence of powerful forces in his outback world. It wasn’t just the two bottles of red we’d drunk by the Barrow Creek fireplace. ‘I don’t know why Peter had to disappear as quickly as he did. I don’t believe Peter will be found alive. I believe the gunman knew what he was doing. His intention wasn’t for Peter, it wasn’t for robbery. His intention was for Joanne.’

  Despite the kindness they had shown her, Lees was to savage Helen Jones, in particular, in a paid interview with a British television program some eight months later. ‘I’m quite disgusted she can get off on someone’s tragedy,’ Lees would say. In fact Jones had not discussed her time with Lees in any detail, with any reporter, just spoken generally, and gently, about what happened in the first days after the attack. The question turned as to who was really getting off.

  In late July 2001, police posted a Northern Territory record $250 000 reward for information that would lead to the arrest and conviction of Falconio’s killer. Holding up for the cameras a copy of the reward poster, which bore a photo of his son’s smiling face, Luciano broke down again. He knew by then that he would never see his boy again. He had always known.

  In August it was learned that police had obtained security footage of a stooped man who matched the description Lees had given of her attacker, and of his vehicle. This person had entered the Shell Truck Stop on the north side of Alice Springs and bought $136.65 worth of diesel, paying cash. It was shortly after midnight on 15 July. Police had initially denied any such footage existed.

  Assistant crime commissioner, John Daulby, by then called in to handle the public face of the investigation, said the reason they had taken over three weeks to release the images was because they had been sent on to Queensland where what he called ‘technical’ police – in fact, the Australian Federal Police – were trying to enhance the poor-quality footage in order to try and decipher the numberplate on the vehicle. The photo should have been out in the public domain at the earliest possible opportunity. Daulby knew it. In vain he tried to defend the police position.

  Lees had told police she thought the man seen in the truck stop footage was her assailant. I had already confirmed that in a phone call to Lees’ mother, in England, who said Lees ‘thought the likeness was very good of the man’. Why hadn’t they released the grainy stills? At the very least, Truck Stop Man could have come forward and been ruled out of the investigation. Valuable time had been lost.

  In a tense press conference with mostly local journalists, Daulby and the media lost patience with each other. Reporters had been on their best behaviour up till then, treading lightly around the senior cops and the police media in order not to be spited on some major break in the story. I put it to Daulby that a photo enhancer – even a kid with a computer – could have retrieved for police their best-quality image in half a day. Or less. ‘Do you want us to put up crap and say, “Have you seen this person?”’ he snapped. ‘Or do you want us to put up the best image available?’ What the police released three weeks later was of no discernible improvement on the original.

  Daulby was asked whether they had delayed releasing the images because they knew the man’s identity and were trying not to alert him. It was an attempt to try to find something positive in the inexplicable police stance. Maybe he was being arrested right now? ‘That is absolutely wrong,’ said Daulby.

  The story went quiet.

  Jasmin Afianos, editor of Tennant Creek’s weekly Tennant & District Times, always kept an ear to the ground. In her town, 215 kilometres north of the Barrow Creek crime scene and with a population of 3500, she knew it was not always good for business or her own survival to run a hard-campaigning, small-town newspaper, chasing every rumour down every drain. She still had to do her shopping at the local food barn. She rang me with something she’d heard. Local cops were talking about a stuff-up with the truck stop footage.

  A few days later, there was a page-one lead story in The Weekend Australian headlined: ‘How desert killer case was botched’. Botched is an ugly word. Bungled is jauntier, but the editors knew what they were doing. Bungled suggests clowns at work and leaves room for goodwill. Botched is meaner. It suggests incompetence. The story told how Territory police had thrown away their best chance of getting good images of the numberone suspect in the first twenty-four hours of the investigation. Instead of confiscating the truck stop’s digital hard-drive and examining the contents, as had been recommended by the man who installed the service station’s security system, police declined his help and dumped the images onto a domestic video cassette recorder. Digital footage does not lose quality when transferred to digital media, but it loses quality, dramatically, when transferred to video tape. The police spent weeks trying to enhance an inferior second-generation copy.

  Police thought the man who entered the truck stop at 12.38 am was wearing sunglasses. They thought this because as he stood near the counter paying for fuel, he made a motion as if lifting a pair of dark glasses so he could see properly. But the footage they had salvaged was not clear. It was so poor that police could not be sure whether he was wearing thongs. The man who installed Shell’s security system, Shane Ride of Alice Springs, said police had lost their chance to get Truck Stop Man’s numberplate, and face, by dumping onto VHS. The original hard-drive digital footage was recorded over almost immediately afterwards and was gone forever.

  Shell staff had alerted police on 15 July that they had pictures of a man who might interest them. ‘The Weekend Australian understands police backed down from seizing Shell’s computer hard drive – which contained digital images – after service station management complained they would be left without security.’

  Shane Ride had reluctantly revealed to me a secret of his trade: that service-station security cameras were generally of such poor quality they tended not to show any fine detail. Footage was often good enough to convict an unmasked armed robber who turned up at the counter with a sawn-off shotgun, but the cameras were not designed to capture in sharp resolution the numberplate of someone who had driven off without paying for their fuel. They were ostensibly installed as a bluff. Still, for someone who had parked his vehicle as Brad Murdoch had done, next to a diesel pump, close to and in full gaze of a security camera, Ride agreed the numberplate would have been captured. Police should have seized the digital hard-drive and taken it away for analysis.

  Territory police did not admit to the stuff-up. They said growing criticism over their handling of the investigation had been morale-boosting and strengthened the resolve of Task Force Regulus. It was the talk of pressbrutalised football team. Regulus was the twenty-fifth brightest star in the sky and was, according to the ancient Persians, one of four ‘royal stars’. It meant ‘prince’ in Latin. But for police purposes the provenance of Regulus had no pertinence to the Falconio case. It was just a name chosen by a wistful copper, same as the Bureau of Meteorology christened cyclones Tracy, Max, or Monica.

  I took a call from an Alice Springs filmmaker, Chris Tangey, who was having a battle with Territory police. Tangey told how, in the weeks after police had seized Falconio and Lees’ Kombi van, they asked him to film as forensic examiners dimmed the lights in a police shed in Alice Springs and sprayed the Kombi with Luminol. Luminol, when applied to a surface in a darkened room, causes blood to glow bright and ghostly. They asked for Tangey’s help because he was the only professional cameraman in Alice Springs with a Sony PD-150, which could record in very low light.

  Tangey told me that the video he shot appeared to show police ignoring evidence in the form of a glowing handprint. He admitted he was unqualified to form this opinion but he wanted his theory checked out. Tangey ran off a copy of the tape for the police but kept the master. Police were now threatening to come and seize the master tape, but Tangey was stubbornly hanging on to it. He accused police of ignoring the ‘handprint’ he had seen glowing on the back of the Kombi, and thought it further proof of Northern Territory police incompetence. He would only hand over the master to an ‘independent’ policeman from another state.

  I was grateful for Tangey’s call but I thought it was all too overdramatic and took the view that the police knew more about what they were doing than Tangey. Still, it was worth putting a call in to Daulby. And the footage had spooky resonance for another reason. There, among the white-suited staff wandering around the gloomy Kombi spraying Luminol, was forensic biologist Joy Kuhl, still on the job two decades after she had infamously declared that the sound-deadener sprayed on the firewall of the Chamberlain family’s Holden was fetal blood. Azaria’s blood. Mrs Kuhl was a lovely woman who had worked in Territory police forensics ever since. Her burden had been a very heavy one, all over that one mistake, although she has never once conceded she made a dreadful error. Instead, she believed that science was not sufficiently advanced to back her claims. After all, when she made her call about the fetal blood in 1981, DNA was not even an acronym.

  When I called police media about the Tangey angle, the response was surprising. It was put to me that if I sat on the Tangey story, they’d give me something better. There was no demand that I not report the Tangey angle, just a request not to do it right then. I never found out why. Maybe they thought me obnoxious and wanted to get me onside; perhaps they were tired of being beaten around the head by the national media and all the so-called experts on the street; perhaps they wanted something to take the heat off them. It didn’t matter to me. I was never convinced by what Tangey was saying but was interested in something else: in the video dub he had provided me of the Luminol session were the first-ever close-up images of the Kombi. It does not, in hindsight, seem like a world-beating news break. But by then the story was dead and even an incremental development like this was something. All I had to do was publish this ‘better’ police-fed story first, and then I could do what I wanted with the Tangey material.

  ‘What if you were to be told,’ said the police media person, ‘that Joanne Lees is back in Alice Springs with a film crew?’ I was in the BP dunny in Katherine, having just re-entered mobile range after working on another story. I briefly lost unrestricted flow to the yellow urinal scent bar. There was no way Lees would have done this for free. She had promised via Paul Falconio in his Alice Springs media appearance that she would never make money off Falconio’s death. And now it seemed she was. Not that I would blame her for that. It’s just that she should never have made the undertaking in the first place. And just as curious: why were the police telling me? Didn’t they like her anymore?

  Daulby, a big, neat, angular-chested man in a creaseless uniform and standard police-issue moustache, was on the line from police headquarters across town in Darwin. He was angry with Lees. And me. ‘When are you going to apologise?’ he said.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For saying we blotched the investigation.’

  ‘We never said that.’

  ‘Yes, you did,’ said Daulby, ‘I’ve got the paper right here in front of me.’

  ‘We didn’t say you blotched the investigation. We said you botched it.’

  He should have laughed. He didn’t. Daulby was an all right bloke. He could be testy but he could also be reasonable. But as the face of the Northern Territory police force, all the pressure for a result had settled on his shoulders. Calm discussion followed. The headline in The Weekend Australian on 16 February 2002 read: ‘Lees returns to killing scene with TV crew’.

  Joanne Lees, the woman who said she would not take money to tell her story, has signed a contract with a British current affairs program and is back in Australia filming at the scene of her boyfriend’s shooting and abduction.

  Ms Lees was in Barrow Creek, 200 km north of Alice Springs, on Thursday afternoon with a TV crew from Tonight with Trevor McDonald, a bi-weekly show claimed to be the most popular current affairs program in Britain.

  And Northern Territory police have found the manner of Ms Lees’ unannounced return surprising.

  Police did not know Ms Lees was in Australia until she and the secretive crew turned up in Alice Springs on Thursday morning. Ms Lees phoned police headquarters from her hotel room and said she wanted to see Barrow Creek task force superintendent, Kate Vanderlaan.

  Ms Lees wanted an update on the investigation into her boyfriend’s shooting, but also tried to persuade police to cooperate in an interview with the TV crew.

  Alice police referred the request onto Deputy Commissioner John Daulby, based in Darwin, the only police officer doing official interviews. He told the crew he would not be available until later this week.

  ‘I guess we’re mildly surprised at her return to Alice Springs,’ Mr Daulby said. ‘We certainly weren’t aware of it but I must say Joanne Lees is free to go about her business. She doesn’t have to tell us what she does.’

  Mr Daulby said NT police had not kept in regular touch with Ms Lees.

  ‘I must say that our contact with Joanne has been based upon [if] Joanne wanted information, she would call us,’ Mr Daulby said.

  ‘It’s not like my weekly calls to the Falconio family. Joanne doesn’t want that kind of contact, that’s Joanne’s position.’

  David Mannion, editor of the joint Granada-ITV production, refused to confirm whether Lees was involved in a re-enactment of the crime, or how much she was being paid. Asked if his program, known for its exclusive interviews, paid people to appear, Mannion told me: ‘It’s not unheard of.’

  Les Pilton was quoted in the story as saying he was surprised Lees hadn’t stopped by. ‘As far as I know, poor Jo’s still in England,’ Pilton said. ‘If she came here, surely she’d drop in and say hello.’ But Lees was not happy with the Barrow Creek people, particularly Helen Jones, and in the program launched her outlandish attack about Jones ‘getting off’ on her tragedy.

  My story for The Weekend Australian was wrong in one respect – Lees had not returned to the precise killing scene. The TV crew had taken her to some anonymous stretch of the Stuart Highway to do her re-enactment. It would later be revealed that Lees was paid A$82 000 for the story, which aired in Australia in March 2002 and went down very badly. She told her interviewer that police ‘more or less implied I was the murderer’. With all her unwillingness to cooperate, and with police having full knowledge of her yet-to-be-revealed secret, she was fortunate they had the good sense not to charge her with murder.

  ‘Slap in the Face’, said Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, complaining that Lees had monstered those police and people who had helped her in ‘her darkest hour’. Up till then it had been possible to have some respect for Lees’ refusal to play the media game. Her fears of the overwhelming media creature were valid. But now she was playing the game, using the media to swipe at the media.

  By late February 2002, Northern Territory police announced they would review their investigation. The idea was to fine-comb and see if taskforce officers had missed something. It was time. The investigation had gone nowhere. The review would offer nothing useful; it would only serve to embarrass or annoy cops who believed they had done all they could. What they really needed was for the killer to make a mistake.

  The Tangey story came out. Police dismissed the ‘handprint’ Tangey had seen as inconsequential. And fair enough. There was no sensible reason they would ignore vital evidence. And despite their annoyance with Lees, police never once publicly cast doubt on her story. In order to clear up scuttlebutt about how Lees would not have been able to move her manacled hands from her back to the front when she escaped the gunman, and to clear up an error in the re-enactment Lees had performed for Granada TV, police revealed an exact replica of the handcuffs the gunman had fashioned out of black cable or zip-ties. A policewoman demonstrated how she was able, with no effort, to get her cuffed hands from behind her back to the front of her body, as Lees had described. It was convincing, for those who needed it. Daulby said the cuffs ‘have been constructed for a unique purpose, and that purpose is to incarcerate and detain somebody’.

  In July 2002, a year on from the crime, police released to the public photos of Lees’ bloodied knees and hands, taken shortly after she was rescued. It was another attempt to get people, and the media, to focus on the reality that something actually had happened to Lees out there in the desert. I noticed Daulby’s hands shook as he held the photos. Later I talked to some of his colleagues about this; they had noticed it too. Daulby had now done numerous press conferences so it wasn’t as though he was intimidated by the media. I wondered if it was because he was reluctant to let this evidence be made public, and was angry at perhaps having been ordered to do so. Maybe it was because the public tendering of these images confirmed, finally, that police simply did not have a clue. And it was a painful admission for him to make. Maybe he’d had too much coffee that day. I never envied him his job.

  The photos showed, up close for the first time, the blue t-shirt Lees was wearing at the time of the attack. It contained a lively DNA spot on the back – possibly blood, and possibly the gunman’s. The t-shirt had a twenty-cent sized ‘Hugs not Drugs’ sticker still attached, which Lees had been given upon entering the Alice Springs Camel Cup, an annual event for tourists, earlier on the day she and her boyfriend were hijacked. And there was mystery DNA on the gearstick of the Kombi. Police had taken the DNA profiles offshore, to international databases, looking for a match. No luck.