Original subtitles

Just wait until they come out.

Wait till they stop.

CAMERA SHUTTERS CLICK

SHE SPEAKS QUIETLY

I'm obviously delighted with the unanimous verdict given here today.

The past four years have been very traumatic for myself

and for the Falconio family, and to see justice done today

eases a great burden for us all.

I would like to thank the judge and jury

for their careful consideration, patience and dedication.

Finally, I would like Bradley John Murdoch

to seriously consider telling me, Joan and Luciano and Pete's brothers

what he has done with Pete.

REPORTER: Luciano, what were your feelings

when that guilty verdict was read out?

Extremely happy.

Very, very happy.

This has been a very long and difficult period for all of us.

The most important thing to my family now is to find Peter's body.

Police in Australia say they fear the worst for a British tourist

who disappeared after being attacked in a remote part of the outback.

Peter Falconio was shot by a gunman

who attempted to abduct his girlfriend Joanne Lees.

The search for Peter Falconio goes on.

The jury unanimously found Bradley John Murdoch

guilty of murdering Peter Falconio.

Bradley Murdoch will spend at least 28 years in prison.

That's who did it.

I definitely did not do it.

I'm not a fucking murderer.

This was a real Agatha Christie thriller.

No-one really knew quite what had happened.

He says, "Shut up and I won't shoot you."

Why didn't she see the body?

How do you even know he's dead?

No-one doubts me.

It's only media.

We will find the key to this.

The answer to this case lies in the police file.

People that think they know the story probably don't.

Bang! I'm looking straight at this bloke I've just seen in the paper.

That's him, all right.

Bad news, that bloke.

I couldn't believe this had never seen the light of day.

This case never goes away.

It just sleeps for periods of time.

Things like this just don't happen.

Somebody knows what happened that night.

Really knows.

There is so much more to this story than people have ever imagined.

I've always believed that the longer you spend on a story,

the more it gives back to you.

And that certainly applies in the Falconio case.

It was Sunday, July 15th 2001.

And it's always difficult finding a good Sunday-for-Monday story.

I remember about 2:30 in the afternoon,

a fax came through from the Northern Territory Police,

and it was about a British couple backpacking around the outback,

being held up by a gunman who apparently shoots one of them.

And I instinctively saw it and thought, "That's a good story."

I was one of the first few people to arrive and did a story

based on the limited amount of information that we knew then.

"British woman described yesterday how she hid in fear of her life

"in remote Australian scrub, as she was hunted by a man

"she fears had already shot her boyfriend in cold blood.

"The two travellers, who have not been named, were flagged down

"by the man in their campervan on a desolate stretch

"of the Stuart Highway from Darwin to Alice Springs.

"Their assailant, who is believed to be Australian,

"said that he had seen sparks coming from the exhaust pipe

"of the couple's Volkswagen van.

"Seconds later, the woman heard a shot."

GUNSHOT

"The man punched her and bound her wrists.

"He dragged the woman into the back of his truck at gunpoint.

"Minutes later, while her abductor was momentarily distracted...

"..she managed to free herself...

"..and flee into the scrubland.

"The 27-year-old woman crawled through the dry, spiky brush

"until she was hidden from view.

"The man searched for her for hours.

"Eventually, the man abandoned the hunt...

"..and the woman crept back to the road,

"where a passing motorist picked her up

"and drove her to Barrow Creek, a hamlet with a population of 20."

That night, I was driving from Darwin,

heading to Adelaide.

It was dark.

It was very dark.

There was no moon.

We had two drivers - one's sleeping, one's driving.

I was driving along, I was just in the groove.

Next thing you know, this thing flew out from the left,

out in front of the truck.

I thought, "Shit," you know?

Someone's...

Someone's under the truck.

I was looking under the first trailer.

I looked under the second trailer.

I shone the torch under the truck and I said, "Hey!"

I said, "Come here." So they flew under the trailer

and latched hold of me, you know?

And she had a bit of tape in her hair

and she had these zip ties on her arms,

done up like a chain, sort of thing.

I was asleep in the bunk.

The next thing, I heard Vince talking to somebody

and I flew out of bed, threw a pair of thongs on,

and as I walked around the driver's side,

Vince was helping this young lady up off the road.

That girl was that scared.

She was petrified.

I've seen a lot of things over a lot of years

but that I've never seen before in anybody's face.

I got the wire cutters and cut the cable ties off her.

I literally had to use my little finger

between her skin and the tape to cut it without cutting her neck,

cos I didn't want to do any more damage to her

than what she'd already endured.

I just felt angry -

the fact that some person could do that to another human being.

And she was screaming the whole time, "I've got to find Pete."

We said, "Who's Pete?"

And she said, "It's my boyfriend - he's been shot."

And it wasn't until she mentioned the gun...

..I turned around and went, "Let's get out of here."

If someone's got a gun, we need to get the cops involved.

Northern Territory Police, early on that Sunday morning, the 15th,

found the crime scene.

We found very little direct evidence, as such.

We found blood.

We found the Kombi, kind of hidden.

And a drop of blood was found on the T-shirt that Joanne was wearing.

We have found and have established a DNA profile of a male person

on the clothing of Joanne Lees.

It could be the offender.

The DNA established it was a male person.

We knew it wasn't Peter Falconio's DNA.

But, sadly, there was no record of that profile

within a database anywhere in Australia.

The police were desperate to produce

an artist's impression of the gunman.

And they only had Joanne's information to go on.

So, they arranged for her to sit in with a police artist

who had questioned her about her memory of the gunman

and the inside of the truck he was driving.

Joanne Lees described her attacker as a man wearing a cap,

with quite long hair,

and also a droopy moustache right down by the side of the mouth.

The problem with the Photofit picture was that

there were lots of people around like that.

A lot of people wear flannel shirts and have, you know, facial hair.

So it could have been one of millions of people.

Can you tell me your full name, please? Joanne Rachael Lees.

The purpose of this re-enactment today is an attempt

to reconstruct the events of an incident...

A few days after the incident,

the police decided to conduct a re-enactment of the crime,

and for Joanne Lees to talk them through what actually happened.

He comes in, er...

..more like that, and his keys come here.

I clearly see the gun in his right hand.

They thought that might jog her memory.

How was he holding the gun?

They thought they might find out something they didn't know already.

At some point I started... I think I'm here or closer.

I see the man lift the corner of the canvas. OK.

Joanne went through the motions of how the gunman had attacked her,

how he'd manacled her hands,

how he'd pushed her out of the passenger side door

and how she'd been later put into his utility.

I'm not... I'm not sure.

Re-enactments have their place.

I think that it was pretty brave of Joanne to do that.

I shout out to the man, "Why are you doing this?

"Is it money that you want?

"What do you want?"

And I ask him if he's going to rape me.

She did her best.

But you got to reflect

that this girl had been through quite some significant trauma

and, from my experience, having a victim do that,

sometimes you don't get the best information.

I thought I ran into the bush over there

but now that I'm here, know that he's here,

I must have gone over there.

Can you help me out? Did I run to that side?

I can't recall which side.

This was supposed to be a trip of a lifetime

for Peter Falconio and Joanne Lees.

They'd been together for six years.

They met in Huddersfield, where Peter's from.

Joanne was a travel agent and he was in the building trade.

Joanne firmly believed

that they would get married in Bora Bora on the way home.

As a journalist working in Australia as a foreign correspondent,

there were big stories all the time.

But this was one of the biggest that I've ever covered.

When I got to Alice Springs,

I fully expected to meet a lot of other fellow journalists -

the whole of the British press pack, for a start.

And then we were outnumbered by Australian journalists.

My brief was to find an exclusive for the Mail On Sunday in the UK.

But Joanne was calling the shots and refusing to do interviews.

I urged Joanne that,

"Now is the time to go out and say what you want to say.

"Now is a good time."

But she wouldn't speak to the press at all.

Joanne, is there anything that you'd like to say?

Joanne's not... I think that was the instruction,

that she wasn't going to say anything.

Initially, people thought, "Well, perhaps she's traumatised.

"Give her a bit of time, you know, be understanding, be sympathetic."

But it wasn't long before suspicion started being aroused

about why she wasn't prepared to talk.

Was she trying to hide something?

Was she fearful of being asked questions

which she couldn't really satisfactory answer?

Normally when you're covering these sort of cases,

the victim or the survivor would be only too keen

to give a press conference and talk about what happened,

in the hope of trying to track the killer.

The biggest manhunt in Northern Territory history

has so far failed to find the gunman who shot Peter Falconio.

Across the Northern Territory, the search for the gunman goes on,

although police admit it's like looking for a needle in a haystack.

There are 24-hour roadblocks.

All cars are searched, drivers warned.

Heavily armed police in bulletproof vests are ready for the gunman.

Despite the intense public interest in this case,

there's been no sign of the gunman.

The police need some luck.

Police discovered CCTV footage from a Shell truck stop

in Alice Springs from the night of the attack.

It was quite a significant breakthrough in this investigation.

The CCTV had a man arriving in a four-wheel-drive.

Appearance - certainly cap on,

droopy moustache type thing.

To some degree, a person that Joanne had described.

Once the footage was seized, police sent that to

the police technical unit for enhancement.

But it wasn't successful by way of identification

of the car and of the person.

However, once the footage was released to the public,

we saw an influx of calls.

Probably around 2,500 persons of interest or vehicles of interest.

It soon became apparent this was going to be

quite an enormous investigation.

We had thousands of pieces of information.

It was Australia-wide, it was a national investigation.

Considerable money's been spent. At this time, within six months,

I think it was around about two million.

And as the weeks dragged out and the months dragged out,

there was a degree of personal pressure that I felt.

There was a degree of, certainly, anxiety.

We've said all along, this wasn't going to be easy.

It's not easy at all. I'm confident we will catch the killer.

I'm confident that the answer's out there.

I'm confident that someone, at some point in time,

will give us that piece we're looking for.

Nervous police in Queensland and South Australia

pounced on bearded men in white utes -

but the real gunman has disappeared.

Australia's Northern Territory is not a place for the faint-hearted.

People regard it as perhaps the last frontier of Australia, really.

It is really difficult to fully understand

just how wide an expanse of land we're talking about.

Roughly the size of Western Europe.

There were a lot of hidden dangers here which,

if you fall victim to, you can end up in a very unpleasant fate.

That's what happened to Peter Falconio.

The disappearance of Peter Falconio created a lot of ripples.

We had diplomatic issues because we lost a British national.

We couldn't find him anywhere.

Wasn't down a mine shaft, he hadn't been eaten by sharks.

We had no idea where he was.

And the Australian tourism people were concerned about it as well.

The centre of Australia started to take on this scary aura.

And the police particularly were under a lot of pressure.

The question was, is the Northern Territory a safe place to visit?

And I would say, yes, it was - it's a great place.

"But you've got a murderer loose, haven't you?"

"Yes, we do, but we're investigating it."

It's tough.

Time and time again, we received criticism of the police

and our capacity to handle the investigation.

Do we have the resources? Do we have the skills?

Do we have the experience?

Of course my response was, "We do."

Despite a nationwide search,

the police in Australia have found few clues

as to the whereabouts of Peter Falconio or his attacker.

Eight months on and the mystery

of Peter Falconio's disappearance in the Australian...

It's almost a year since Peter Falconio disappeared.

For 14 months, Peter Falconio's family has prayed he'll be found.

The police still can't answer the question everyone wants to know.

The manhunt went cold and nothing was heard for another year or two.

Until the police got a tip-off about a man called Bradley Murdoch.

Bradley Murdoch was living in South Australia.

He had experience in mechanical engineering,

although no real qualifications.

He could tinker around with engines.

Police discovered that he had served time in prison.

And then they found Murdoch's DNA

matched the DNA found on Joanne Lees' T-shirt.

Brad, did you kill Peter Falconio?

After an investigation spanning more than two years,

detectives have charged Bradley Murdoch, a 45-year-old lorry driver,

with the murder of the English backpacker.

Joanne Lees positively identified Murdoch.

I think it's number 10.

We found that he had a similar car.

And we had the DNA, which put him there.

He was the person. He was the murderer.

Bradley Murdoch, a self-confessed drug runner, has been convicted

of murdering the British backpacker Peter Falconio four years ago.

Under Northern Territory law,

Murdoch faces a minimum 20 years' jail.

A Darwin judge today jailed Murdoch until 2031,

saying he's shown no remorse for his crime.

Today marks the conclusion of an intense period of distress

for myself and the Falconio family.

This will enable us to take another step

in the grieving process for Pete.

We would now request you all allow us

some space and privacy to do this.

ROGER MAYNARD: This was essentially a circumstantial case.

And apart from the DNA evidence,

the police didn't really have a lot against Bradley Murdoch.

There was no body.

There was no gunshot residue found on the back of the campervan,

and that's where Peter Falconio might have been shot dead.

And without a body, and without a motive,

you've lost two of the essential parts to a murder.

Was Murdoch really guilty?

This call is coming from prison

and will be subject to monitoring and recording.

I think people were equally divided on Murdoch's guilt or innocence.

A lot of people felt great sympathy for Joanne.

A lot of people thought she was telling the truth.

But a sizeable proportion of people also had their doubts.

Just going to touch up your schnozzle again.

There was nothing about this case that actually made sense to me.

Listening to this story, this just didn't sound right to me.

And it made me wonder - did they get the right man?

For 28 years, only ever defended, never prosecuted.

I just preferred the challenge of getting somebody off,

rather than getting somebody convicted.

Over the years, I must have defended thousands of cases.

Every type of crook you can imagine.

Drug barons, businessmen,

murderers - I've done the lot.

I used to love having the reputation as being the go-to bloke,

or one of the go-to blokes, if you were right in the shit.

And then ten years ago,

Brad Murdoch asked me to re-evaluate his case,

to see whether there was any hope of any sort of further appeal.

For ten years, we've been working towards a petition of mercy.

It's a document whereby you set out, chapter and verse,

everything you see wrong with the case.

But a petition of mercy is notoriously difficult to get up.

Round here. It's a bit warmer. Warmer than Melbourne.

I'd never met anybody like Fraser.

He was bulletproof, or he appeared to be bulletproof.

Our friendship goes back about 30 years.

We hung around the same places.

We drank and we ate at similar restaurants and bars

and kept on bumping into each other and became friends from that.

We're very different from each other

but we've been able to work ourselves into what I would describe

as a formidable partnership.

Righto, you're driving.

I'm not a lawyer.

I came from an advertising background,

so I had to be taught what to investigate.

We're off and going!

When we first spoke to Brad,

he told us a lot of the things that he really felt

had gone wrong with his case.

But it was one thing having Brad say,

"This is wrong and they got that wrong."

Being able to prove that, we had to start from scratch.

Just have a look how many utes there are - one, two, three.

You know, we always laugh that every second car in this town's a ute.

Well, it's not far off the truth.

The pivotal document in this case is the police file.

That's not a single document -

there's hundreds of thousands of documents in it.

The materials that we got came from Murdoch's lawyers,

the Northern Territory Legal Aid Commission.

So, we got every supposed document that they had.

And from there, we've been able to go through them.

We wanted to find witnesses who might be able to tell us things

that we don't already know.

We might be able to find police reports that explain things

that to us, at the moment, are question marks.

What we want to do is re-examine the evidence

that was relied on to put Murdoch away.

That means that we've got to put every piece of evidence

under the most intense scrutiny.

This is a lot of work.

It's as flat as a shit carter's hat, isn't it?

Flat as a strap.

Until you get here, you just don't realise how sparse it is.

We've got the actual police grid references,

so we're going to be able to exactly find where the crime scene was.

In a murder trial, the evidence found at the crime scene

is what the prosecution hang their hat on.

But when I visit a crime scene,

I look at it through the eyes of a defence lawyer.

I'm looking for holes in the evidence.

Holes that lead to cracks in the prosecution case.

So far, everything I've read about the crime scene just doesn't add up.

As a criminal lawyer, the very first thing you do

is go back to the crime scene.

That way, you get a much better grasp

of what everybody's saying in their statements.

According to Joanne Lees, on 14th July,

she and Peter Falconio left Alice Springs and travelled north.

They went to Ti-Tree, where they stopped for a short while,

then they travelled on past Barrow Creek to the scene of the crime.

Well, mate.

Ground zero.

This is exactly 100.3km from Ti-Tree,

so we're within a metre or so of exactly where this crime scene is.

The main blood pool, which is, or which was, the reference point

for the entire crime scene...

It actually is on the roadside of the white line, isn't it?

Taking it from where the pool of blood is,

the Kombi was supposed to be almost right there,

with the attacker's car immediately behind.

She says she's run for ten minutes but, in fact,

the bush she hides under is down there and it's about 35 metres.

15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20.

31, 32, 33.

I'm about here.

She's bolted a little bit south.

More over this way.

If Lees ran for ten minutes,

she would have been lost deep in the bush.

How is it, then, that she was hiding just a few metres from the road?

Do you know, I've just done something else.

As I walk around here, it's making clear footprints.

Yeah. Now, they only found Joanne's footprints.

Where's Peter Falconio's footprints?

Where's the offender footprints? Where's the offender's dog?

According to Joanne Lees, Brad Murdoch owned a dog

that was described as an Australian working dog.

There was no dog shit, there were no dog prints.

Remember this bloke? Yep.

Jack the Dalmatian. Yep. I mean, a bush dog.

A bush dog would have found you, me, anybody in the bush.

She's 30 metres away.

What was unique about the crime scene is not what was there -

it was what wasn't there.

This is where the Kombi was located,

and this is where the bloodstains were found.

And here is an actual photograph, plus a scale,

of the major bloodstain.

My area of expertise is blood groups and body secretions.

Before Bradley Murdoch's trial,

I was approached by Legal Aid Northern Territory

to look at the case.

The blood that was on the road consisted of three pools -

a main pool and two small pools adjacent.

There is some of Peter Falconio's blood

on the road and on small items at the side of the road.

The area was examined by the forensic biologist using luminol.

If blood is present, you get a pale blue luminescence.

Now, if a body had been shot and then dragged somewhere,

you would expect a blood trail.

There was no blood trail in this case.

Further than this, there was no blood spatter found at the scene.

In my opinion, based on the DNA and blood evidence,

I would not expect today

to have a guilty verdict recorded against anybody.

This call is coming from Yatala Labour Prison

and will be subject to monitoring and recording.

Hello. How you doing?

Yeah, really good. Yourself? Not too bad.

Er, you got a pen handy? Yes.

Um, her name is

Robin Bowles, B-O-W-L-E-S.

She wants to come and have a bit of a yarn.

Could you ring her? Mm.

Just let her know I've put her name down on the visits list.

Writing Dead Centre took me probably nearly three years.

I drove about 35,000km around Australia.

And I also had the pleasure of spending 60 hours

with Bradley John Murdoch in prison.

You always ask the hard questions first

when you go and see people in prison,

because they have the right to stop you coming again

and I thought he might not want to see me again.

So almost my first question - did you kill Peter Falconio?

He said, "Well, no, I didn't, and how do you even know he's dead?"

We don't know what happened that night,

but Brad Murdoch is a really careful man.

He's... He's obsessive about tidiness and neatness

and all the little precautions that he used to take to run his drugs.

You know, painting his bull bar different colours,

just to change the look of his van a little bit.

You know, he's not the kind of guy

that would carelessly shoot someone on the side of the road,

where anyone could be passing,

put them into his rig

that's filled with $20,000 worth of hydroponically grown marijuana,

and then let the person who was a witness

escape into the bush

and drive off into the sunset as if nothing had happened.

People often say to me,

"What are you doing acting for a bloke like Murdoch?

"He's a bad bastard - he should be in jail."

Well, actually, that's not how it works.

If you've got a bad head or you've been a naughty boy

in some other area, it doesn't mean you go to jail for life.

If Murdoch's not guilty,

he's done 16 years in hell.

And I know it's hell because I've been there.

Andrew Fraser will be behind bars,

mixing with many clients he's once defended.

I regularly get asked - how did I end up on the wrong side?

Don't think I haven't asked myself that question many, many times.

It's easy to remember when it was - I can pinpoint it.

It was the Saturday of the first Australian Grand Prix in Adelaide.

I'd appeared for a bikie from the Outlaws the day before

and he said to me, "You might want this at the Grand Prix,"

and gave me a bag of coke.

I'd never used drugs before.

And guess what - I liked it.

And, er, before you know it, you're hooked.

Supporting a $100,000-a-year cocaine habit,

Fraser gave advice and encouraged the importation

of cocaine worth up to $2.7 million,

smuggled in African wall plaques.

You know you've got a problem but you keep going.

And it took a shattering experience, to quote my psychologist,

to make me wake up.

I received a total of seven years with a five-year minimum.

What did I lose? I lost everything.

My wife left me while I was in jail and I can't blame her for that.

I lost my right to practise.

I lost my professional standing.

Lost the lot.

But even though I'm struck off, you can't take that out of your system.

It's like the old war horse with the scent of blood in his nostrils.

You know, up he gets and off he goes.

And the Falconio case just doesn't smell right to me.

And I am convinced

that there's somebody out there who holds the key to all of this.

VINCE MILLAR: People that think they know the story probably don't.

You know, who knows the story?

She does.

I know what part I played in it.

But, you know, the police didn't get there till daybreak.

There is so much more to this story than people have ever imagined.

I can tell you one thing -

it's a bit of a change of speed being a cow cocky

as opposed to being,

as they used to describe me, high-profile criminal lawyer.

In 2011, I was diagnosed with multiple myeloma.

It's a blood-borne cancer.

I had a stem cell transplant in 2012.

I've been good from then until only a couple of months ago,

when it looks like I've had a relapse.

No. Sorry, girls.

Wrong way.

Well, I think when I was first diagnosed and I sat in the car,

that's when I was faced with the fact that,

well, this could be game over.

Go on!

HE SIGHS You dopey bastard!

I genuinely want to help this bloke

because I genuinely believe

he has had about the roughest end of the pineapple you could ever get.

I think on some level, he wants one more case.

He wants to just resolve this...

This great wrong to someone who's been in jail for a very long time.

Part of the Murdoch case for him is redemption -

perhaps not so much for him but perhaps for his children,

so that they have the opportunity to be proud of their father again.

VINCE MILLAR: The Falconio murder has affected my life

in the way that it...

..has never really gone away.

I wish I was never, ever any part of it, you know?

But, you know, you can't change history.

You know, it is what it is.

I shouldn't have even been there. I should have been home in bed.

It was the first time ever that I was heading home.

And the boss turned me around and sent me back to Darwin.

Which brought me on that spot,

on that night, at that time...

..on that day.

Vince Millar was the first person

that Joanne Lees spoke to after the event.

He was the person that rescued, for want of a better word,

Joanne Lees when she ran out on the road in front of his truck.

Reading Vince's statements, again,

there's one bit that continually catches my eye.

Only minutes before Joanne Lees jumped out in front of his truck,

Vince describes very odd behaviour

on the road ahead

while he was driving.

Vince describes headlights in the distance,

doing circles,

lights going on and off - very odd behaviour.

This aspect of Vince's story

has never been followed up on or investigated.

A few years ago, after a lot of trying

and a lot of discussion,

Vince finally agreed to talk to Victor and I.

We went to see him at his home.

We wanted to find out more about those lights.

And he agreed to allow Victor to film the interview on his phone.

You're driving along and you see in the distance...

Cos you're sitting up a long way in those trucks, aren't you? Yeah.

15 feet or something, I think you... Is that right -

you said something like 15 feet? Something like that, mate, yeah.

Jesus, it's a long way up.

Yeah, but the point of that is, it's as flat as a strap out there,

so you can see for miles. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

And just tell us... You say you saw...

..headlights, sort of, backing and shunting.

One car doing it or more than one? Oh... Hard to say.

And, um...

Pulled up where?

And then, er... And then...

There's a red car

and there's a bloke, you said...

Your expression just then was "looked like jelly".

Like... Like a ragdoll, sort of thing?

Are we the first people you've told about the red car and stuff?

Oh, no, no. What I mean...

Yeah, of course you would - they're your mates.

The way they got in that car and took off -

there was something that they didn't want me to see.

Well, thinking back now, putting all the dots together and that, I'm...

I'm pretty sure...

..that the bloke in the middle very well could have been Peter Falconio.

Now, after what Vince has told us,

we're no longer just looking at Brad Murdoch and his white ute.

Who were the blokes in the red car?

Who was jelly man?

And what were they doing there?

Suddenly, there are all these other people in the frame.

And that changes this entire case.

She cheated on her boyfriend shortly before he disappeared.

Lees was treated as a possible suspect.

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