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This programme contains strong language from the outset.
Bradley Murdoch, a self-confessed drug runner, has been convicted
of murdering the British backpacker Peter Falconio four years ago.
He's also been found guilty of abducting and assaulting
Mr Falconio's girlfriend, Joanne Lees,
during their holiday in Australia.
Peter Falconio's parents left Darwin Supreme Court for the last time,
having sat through the eight-week trial, the guilty verdict
and today's sentence.
Because of the intense public interest,
the judge allowed a camera into court to record his blunt remarks.
I must sentence you on the basis of facts that I find proven
and that are consistent with the verdicts of the jury.
In July 2001, Mr Falconio and Ms Lees were aged 28 and 27 years.
On 14 July, 2001, you destroyed not only their plans
but the life of Peter Falconio.
I am satisfied that you pretended there were sparks
coming from the rear of the Kombi.
While Mr Falconio was looking to see if sparks were emitted
and, as Ms Lees revved the engine, you shot Mr Falconio in the head.
You then confronted Ms Lees with the gun
and you tied her hands behind her with handcuffs made from cable ties.
Ms Lees either fell or was pushed from the Kombi
onto the gravel verge of the Stuart Highway.
In that process, she sustained abrasions to her knees
and, probably, to her elbows.
I am satisfied that you put the body of Mr Falconio
into the rear of your vehicle
and you travelled across the Tanami to Broome.
Somewhere on that journey, you buried the body of Mr Falconio.
I am satisfied that there is a complete lack of any remorse.
I fix a non-parole period of 28 years
commencing on 10 November, 2003.
Would you please remove the prisoner?
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.
Most 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 ever imagined.
To understand how Murdoch became a major suspect,
you have to go back right to the very, very beginning
of the police investigation.
The police were under an enormous amount of pressure
to find the man responsible for Peter Falconio's murder.
They had the pressure of the media.
The police, you know, realised they had to find someone,
otherwise there would be questions about their investigative ability.
And also, if people thought that there was a madman
going around killing people,
it might deter tourists from visiting the Northern Territory.
The police discovered a quite a significant piece of evidence
very early on in the enquiry into the murder of Peter Falconio.
And that came in the form of a tiny speck of DNA
which they found on Joanne Lees' T-shirt.
Now, that wasn't Peter Falconio's DNA, it wasn't Joanne's DNA.
They couldn't identify where that DNA had come from.
And they realised that if they could identify that DNA
that had been transferred to her clothing,
they would almost certainly find their killer.
We are currently searching the Australian databases.
We have currently notified our friends and colleagues overseas,
including New Zealand, United States, Great Britain.
The police didn't really make any progress for about a year
until they got a tip-off by a man called James Hepi.
Hepi provided the evidence
which police believed could convict Bradley Murdoch.
James Hepi had a good business going down in South Australia,
growing cannabis.
Murdoch was essentially his business partner.
Hepi wasn't very happy with Murdoch.
A certain amount of cash had disappeared
and a certain amount of cannabis had disappeared,
and Hepi believed that Murdoch had done him over in some way or other.
Hepi was arrested by the police one morning for drug smuggling.
And he realised that he could get a fairly lengthy jail term
as a result of this.
He said to the police, well, maybe I can give you a bit of help
regarding the Falconio case in exchange for a lighter sentence.
So he drew the police in.
He said, I believe it was Bradley Murdoch, and this is why.
James Hepi claimed that Murdoch had said to him, back in 2001,
you know, it's very easy to hide a body -
you just bury it in a spoon drain,
which is an area of mud by the side of the road.
And on another occasion,
he remembers Murdoch working with cable ties -
the sort of ties that were eventually used
to tie Joanne Lees' wrists together.
He gave the police the information and, in return,
when Hepi appeared in court, he got his get out of jail free card.
And once the police had Murdoch in their frame,
they had to find DNA evidence from Murdoch
to compare with the DNA they'd found on the back of Joanne's T-shirt.
A 44-year-old man was arrested in Port Augusta Wednesday night
and charged with the rape and abduction
of a woman and her teenage daughter.
Three months later,
Murdoch was arrested for the rape of a mother and her daughter...
..and that gave police the opportunity to obtain his DNA.
Advice from South Australia that Bradley Murdoch had been arrested.
Obviously, it's quite a significant breakthrough in this investigation.
And the exciting thing about it was we believed,
at that point in time, we can get a DNA sample from Murdoch.
Getting a sample of Murdoch's DNA
was incredibly important to the whole case.
I'll admit that this whole case has exercised my mind
for a very, very long time.
I'm the chief court reporter of The Advertiser newspaper,
which is the main newspaper in South Australia.
I cover the Supreme, District and Magistrates' Courts,
and have done for almost 20 years.
At the time of the Falconio case,
I was a very young, very new journalist,
and I ended up smack dab in the middle of the whole thing.
We got word very early on that Murdoch had been arrested
in South Australia, so I was tasked to go along and cover the case.
The allegation was that, following the Falconio incident,
Murdoch had kidnapped a woman and her daughter
and sexually assaulted both of them.
Oh, if I can't beat it and I get found guilty, well,
I'll just have to sit and wait it.
But I'll tell you what - I'll be a bloody angry man
when I come out.
They said this was in all the evidence,
and all the fucking rest of it.
I said, "Well, that's what I've said right from the start.
"There fucking won't be because I never fucking did it!"
In the hearing,
the prosecution sought permission to DNA test
blood and swab samples taken from Murdoch -
but his lawyer, Grant Algie,
told the court, the application in the rape case
is only a smokescreen to get the DNA for the Falconio investigation.
His defence has always been that he was falsely accused
and set up with respect to these offences.
Bradley Murdoch's DNA has been checked against material
left on Joanne Lees' T-shirt - the results enough to convince
the police he is the man that they've been looking for.
I was advised that it was a match.
How I felt personally was some relief, considerable relief.
All of a sudden, significant circumstantial evidence
started to grow around his prosecution.
At an appropriate time in the not too distant future,
we'll be seeking to swear out a warrant for the arrest
of this person for the murder of Peter Falconio.
Meanwhile, in the rape case in Adelaide,
the jury goes out to consider their verdict.
We had Northern Territory Police officers
with a warrant to arrest Murdoch on his release, if he got released.
Four hours and 12 minutes later, the jury walks back in.
The jury says, we find him not guilty.
Judge Michael David says, Mr Murdoch, you're free to go.
Nobody in the court room knows quite what to do.
Murdoch, all seven feet of him, looks around, wild-eyed...
..dashes out the dock and toward the door.
The Northern Territory Police
and the South Australian Police leap up from the public gallery
to try to intercept him and crash tackle him into the wall.
Journos are caught in the middle of all this -
we're being pushed all over the place.
Judge David yells out, "Stop, stop!"
"You can't arrest a person inside a courthouse - it's illegal!"
Next thing you know, a flood of coppers
comes in from the other direction,
catch Murdoch on the middle landing, handcuff him,
turn him around backwards and start frog marching him down the stairs.
Within seconds of him getting out of the court,
he was rearrested by the police from the Northern Territory
over the Falconio murder.
The defence obviously objected to this,
but there was nothing they could do.
Brad, did you kill Peter Falconio?
Get in the car, come on. Come on, let's go, come on.
Any hopes of release, any hopes of freedom were dashed there and then.
And you could see not only the disappointment
but the rage that created within him.
One of the things that Murdoch's defence counsel insisted
was that it was a frame-up, that no sexual offending had occurred,
that this was all staged simply to get Murdoch's DNA into the record.
Oh, mate, it's all happening out here! They're recording now.
It's fucking chaos!
And I just can't shake the feeling that that's what it was all about.
When we first discovered Jo on the side of the road...
..geez, the emotions.
I've seen a lot of things over a lot years,
but that, I have never seen before in anybody's face.
That girl was that scared.
She had what we referred to as "100-mile an hour" tape.
She had that wrapped around her neck fairly tight through her hair.
Cable ties around her wrists were fairly tight.
And she had a bit of tape around her leg. I pulled that off,
and I thought, "Oh, I better keep this stuff.
"You know, she's been tied up.
"She's out here in the desert," you know,
"I better keep this stuff as evidence." You know.
When we got to the Roadhouse at Barrow Creek, I told Rod to
stay in the truck with her, keep her...keep her calm.
While I went in to make a phone call
and let people know about what just went down,
Rod took Joanne to the toilet block and then he just cleaned her up.
She had scratched knees and shit.
And then after the coppers said to me,
"Don't wash your hands, don't clean up, don't do nothing, wait till
"we get there," I thought,
"Oh, well, that's blown that out the window." You know.
I couldn't clean her up too much -
and this was the whole problem
because if I'd clean her up too much,
there would've been too much evidence contaminated and destroyed,
so I had to sort to leave her as best we could without going too far.
I had no criticism whatsoever over destorying evidence or trying
to clean her up.
In fact, we were praised for what we did.
Up until the trial,
the only clear evidence against Bradley Murdoch was a tiny
speck of DNA they identified on the back of the Joanne Lees's T-shirt.
When the trial got under way,
it became clear that the police had more DNA.
And that DNA was provided by a laboratory in the UK.
They revealed that they had found Murdoch's DNA on the kombi's
steering wheel, from the gear stick, and interestingly enough,
from within the manacles that had tied Joanne up.
Prosecutors have now revealed for the first time how
they say science can place Murdoch precisely at the scene.
It's claimed there is only a one in 640 billion chance that
blood on Miss Lees's T-shirt is not Murdoch's.
A similar match also made with a swab from the steering wheel
of the couple's kombi van.
Now, I was floored when I found that out.
That was quite a revelation to me because if that was true,
it would've put him at the scene of the crime.
I think it's fair to say that when the DNA match came up,
it exposed a weakness, I suppose, in the defence's case.
And when you put that sort of information to a jury,
you have to assume that they come down on the side of the prosecution.
Convicted Outback Killer Bradley Murdoch will
spend at least 28 years in prison for the murder of
British backpacker Peter Falconio.
A Darwin judge today jailed Murdoch until 2031,
saying he's shown no remorse for his crime.
Victor and I have been looking at this case for over ten years now.
And Brad's always wanted to know whether, in our view, there was
enough evidence for a retrial based on the ground of fresh evidence.
At trial, the ultimate piece of evidence against Brad was DNA.
I think without the DNA,
the case against Murdoch would've gone nowhere.
In this case, the DNA testing was carried
out by members of the Northern Territory Forensic Science Unit.
At Brad's trial, there were lots of little pieces that came
out about the conduct of the exhibits, particularly the manacles.
I'm a geneticist by training and my area of expertise is DNA,
body secretions and blood groups.
I have appeared in a number of legal cases in which the accused has been
exonerated, the most high-profile one of course is Lindy Chamberlain.
I was the forensic scientist whose work enabled Lindy Chamberlain
to be acquitted.
I became involved in the Peter Falconio case
when I was approached by Legal Aid Northern Territory
to read documents of the laboratory work in the case.
There are two actions that I found worrying.
One is that DNA from Dr Thatcher, the head of the department
looking after forensics, was found to contaminate the manacles.
Once you recognise that the DNA from the manacles had been
contaminated, then, in my opinion,
you couldn't rely on any later results from the manacles.
The second point that worried me was that a senior policewoman took the
manacles into the room with Bradley Murdoch when he was in prison.
The court heard from Superintendent Colleen Gwynne,
who visited Bradley Murdoch while investigating Peter Falconio's disappearance.
She took with her the handcuffs used to restrain Joanne Lees
on which Murdoch's DNA was allegedly found.
Asked by prosecutor Rex Wild QC, why,
Ms Gwynne said she had intended to show them to Murdoch.
Under cross-examination, Grant Algie asked...
That is a complete no-no.
You do not take an exhibit that you are wanting to say was
handled by the accused into the same room as that person.
Once that is done, to me,
any results obtained later should be completely ignored.
Since there's a number of events that could have influenced
the DNA results during the case,
these events could well have influenced the court case.
NEWS REPORT: Peter Falconio's killer has been found.
They're now hoping the suspect,
who's being held in an Adelaide prison,
will lead police to Peter's body.
In November of 2003,
I read an article in the paper
about this gunman being arrested for the murder of Peter Falconio.
His name was Bradley John Murdoch.
His photo was all over the internet,
because, you know, they'd found the man.
The first time I met Bradley Murdoch,
I wasn't sure what to expect,
but I actually spent more than 60 hours with him
over two-and-half years, which is quite a lot of time.
I took her to be a nice person.
OK, she's writing a book and what have you,
but she sort of said to me,
"Well, I've got to ask you this question, Brad, did you do it?"
And I said, "No."
And then I turned around and I said, "Next question."
And she said, "What do you mean, next question?" I said,
"Well, that's what they've been fucking saying to everybody else.
"When he tells you where the body is, let us know."
Brad's an interesting enigma, actually.
He comes across, when he wants to, as a really hard, tough man...
..and anyone who has crossed him would endorse that.
He was quite a well-known character around Broome.
He used to be a member of the Gypsy Jokers Motorcycle Club.
And he ran drugs up and down the highway.
About once a month, Murdoch did a run from Sedan
in South Australia through the Northern Territory to Broome,
carrying in a big load of hydro, hydroponically grown marijuana.
They'd sometimes call him Brad Eastwood,
because he does have a rifle that he saunters around with
from time to time.
Got him into a bit of trouble a few times.
INTERVIEWER: Some Australians will sit there and watch this and say,
"She loves a killer."
Well, you know, um, that's up to them to make that decision.
Um, you know? They don't know the man.
Murdoch's girlfriend had only good words to say about him.
She said he was kind, he was gentle,
generous,
loved his animals,
he was considerate of her and her kids.
She was a single mum.
All those sort of nice things, really, that you want in a bloke.
So, he had varying reputations depending on, you know,
which circles you're talking about,
but by the time he was arrested
for the murder of Peter Falconio,
alleged murder of Peter Falconio,
um, the media had done a pretty good job on him, to be honest.
And I hold them quite responsible for the way that he was
depicted before the trial.
And then just slightly turn to your right, please.
That's it.
He is a bad man in one way,
but, you know, do I think, all this time later,
Brad Murdoch is innocent or guilty of the murder of Peter Falconio?
That's a hard question...
..because I don't think he had a fair trial.
When DNA is found on an item,
it doesn't tell us that the DNA got from the person
to the item by the person directly touching it,
or the person ever being anywhere near it,
because their DNA can be transferred without them
actually being involved.
In this case, what the police found was one spot of Brad Murdoch's DNA
on the back of Lees' T-shirt
around about the shoulder blade area.
The thing that has bothered me the most
is why is there so little of Brad Murdoch's DNA on Joanne Lees?
So, we're going to run a little experiment.
We've got two actors.
One's playing the part of Brad Murdoch.
One's playing the part of Joanne Lees.
Are you a True Crime buff?
Do you know this case?
Yeah, yeah. You do?
I've been following it on the TV news.
And we're going to relive Joanne Lees' explanation
of what happened that night
and see how much DNA might be transferred.
And also, we've got Dr Brian McDonald, a DNA expert, here
to effectively supervise the experiment.
He was part of the defence team at trial.
He's considered one of the DNA experts in this country.
We won't shake your hands, you're all gloved up.
All gloved up so I don't transfer my own DNA.
Skin cells from our skin,
one square centimetre of our skin will shed,
on average, 1,000 cells per hour.
It's unbelievable, isn't it?
That's a big number, and so, and we're shedding these
all the time - onto our clothes, onto things that we handled.
Things we're touching.
In our homes, in our vehicles, all that sort of stuff.
In a criminal investigation, if someone's DNA gets transferred
onto an item after it's been seized,
it's classified as contamination.
If it's transferred onto an item
before the crime was ever committed,
then it's irrelevant.
So, the only DNA that becomes relevant for, you know,
the purposes of deciding whether someone's guilty or innocent,
is DNA that's transferred during the commission of a crime.
It would be expected
to be found on the items handled by the perpetrator.
OK, DNA, if it's not in blood, for example, is invisible.
So, this is, for simulation purpose,
is to look at the transfer,
OK, which can occur,
which you're not conscious of or being able to see upfront.
Put your right hand in...
Once the transfer has occurred, turn on the UV light
and we can see where this has gone
in much the same way that DNA might be transferred.
What occurred next?
OK. He opens the door...
OK. ..which was already open. OK.
The attacker opens the kombi door...
..and he tells Joanne to turn off the ignition.
I go to turn the engine off, but I don't know whether I do or he does.
But I know he touches my hand at some point.
Their hands touch.
He is pushing me and he is putting his knees on here.
With the gun still in his right hand, the attacker
moves into the kombi, pushing Joanne towards the passenger door.
He says, "Put your head down and your hands behind your back."
He's closer to me.
And then the attacker ties Joanne's hands with the manacles.
The attacker then pushes Joanne out of the passenger door.
And Joanne finds herself lying face down on the ground.
He gets my ankles.
He is wrapping tape around my ankles.
The next thing I recall is being on my feet.
He is wrapping tape around my mouth.
I'm moving my head all around and it goes around my neck.
The attacker pushes Joanne from behind
to walk her to the passenger side of the ute.
I'm not sure what happens next, but he's pushing me
and pulling me to get through.
The attacker pushes her through the gap between the seats into the back.
A little while later, Joanne escapes out the back of his ute
and that is pretty well the description of it.
OK.
Oh, there you go.
Here we go. Wow, look at that. It's on her shoulder, on the sleeve.
On her hands.
On her hands, on her wrists, arms, but look on the ankles,
on the tape on the ankles?
All the spots where there's been real action,
like, putting the... The cable tie cuffs on, yeah.
It's on her shorts and it's on her legs.
It's everywhere.
So, what we've got on the fabric is varieties of intensity.
Bright areas on there would suggest that there's more DNA
on some areas than on others.
All the bits of tape which were handled by the male actor
have clear evidence of fluorescence on them. Yeah.
What we can see is, you know, the handling on these items
will clearly transfer fluorescent material and, as a consequence,
would potentially transfer...
DNA. ..DNA.
Joanne Lees never mentioned her attacker was wearing gloves,
so if there'd been all the struggling and wrestling
that Lees gives evidence about,
wouldn't you expect there to be more of her assailant's DNA on her
than one spot on the back of the T-shirt?
Looking at the police file, we know that Lees and Falconio
were in Alice Springs on the day of the incident,
running a few errands.
Looking at Brad's evidence
we also know he was in Alice Springs on one of his drug runs.
So, the question is,
was there any opportunity for there to be a cross-contamination?
Lees and Falconio start off early at the Green Frog Cafe.
Well, they parked their car there and then they go
and see the accountant, and Joanne Lees goes and does some shopping.
Then they have brekkie at the Green Frog.
We know all of these,
because these are the timeline that Joanne's provided to the coppers.
We know from the police reports that Lees
and Falconio visited Red Rooster between 1 and 1.30.
Joanne says she ate nothing, but Peter had something to eat.
Murdoch said he went to Red Rooster around 10.30 in the morning
and bought some chicken nuggets for his dog, the Dalmatian Jack.
Let me give you a hypothesis.
He goes into Red Rooster. He has got a weeping wound.
You know when you grab the back of a chair?
A bit goes on the back of the chair.
If she went and sat on the same chair that Murdoch had touched...
..all of a sudden she gets the one spot on the back of her top.
It certainly is not beyond the realms of possibility
that this is how Brad's DNA got on the back of her shirt.
If there hadn't been the DNA evidence in this case, you
have to ask yourself, would Bradley Murdoch have been convicted?
Because a lot of the evidence was circumstantial.
The only real evidence was the DNA.
Dr Jonathan Whitaker is a British expert on DNA.
Today, he told a Darwin court of discovering the DNA of the
accused, Bradley Murdoch, on cable ties used to restrain Joanne Lees.
Swabs from the gear stick from the couple's Kombi van were also tested.
On those samples, Dr Whitaker told the court it was 19,000 times
more likely to be Bradley Murdoch's than anyone else's.
Certainly, the jury must've concluded that there was
a strong possibility that Murdoch was at the scene of the crime
after they'd heard this DNA evidence, you know.
It was pretty compelling.
18 years on, I am very keen to find out whether the DNA evidence
was as strong as the prosecution made out.
Dr Brian McDonald was originally asked to give an opinion
about this case by the defence.
I've been in the DNA business for nearly 30 years now.
The numbers of cases that I've done, which now amounts to, you know,
approaching 1,000, would involve sexual assaults, drug matters.
Murders often rely very heavily on DNA.
When I started looking at the DNA evidence in this case, it
became very obvious that there was very little clear evidence at all.
We'd like to have sort of to start with get a bit of your
general view of the strength of the DNA evidence against Murdoch.
OK, so what was presented in court were DNA profiles from four
samples - the stain from the back of Ms Lees' T-shirt, a swab from
the gear stick of the Kombi, a swab from the steering wheel of
the Kombi, and a sample from the manacles that were put
together for the purposes of handcuffs.
The DNA profiles in those samples was dramatically different.
The first sample that was tested and identified
Bradley Murdoch's DNA was the T-shirt sample.
And she had been wearing this T-shirt for some time, hadn't she?
That's my understanding, yes, yes.
There's a number of different samples taken from it.
The only one that I can see any real evidence of Bradley Murdoch
is just this one spot on the back-shoulder area.
It was a full single profile matching Bradley Murdoch.
The likelihood that it is him is very, very high.
The likelihood that it is someone else is very, very low.
But it does not tell us how it got there.
It certainly does not tell us that there was direct contact
between Mr Murdoch and this T-shirt.
All the other samples - the steering wheel and the gear lever,
the manacles - are complex low-level mixtures.
And when you say complex, does that mean there's more than one
DNA profile in what they were finding? That's right.
So a complex mixture is one with very small amounts of DNA and
multiple individuals contributing to them.
The chance of identifying someone clearly is very, very small.
The types of mixtures that were present in the Kombi van
would probably not exclude a large proportion of the population.
Brian's told us that the DNA found in the Kombi is so weak that
it's difficult to attribute to any one person.
I wonder if the DNA in the Kombi being described as a match
with Murdoch could have meant the jury thought it was definitely his?
This evidence should never be reported as that person's DNA.
Being Bradley Murdoch's DNA? Yeah.
Describing the evidence as containing Mr Murdoch's DNA
I think is misleading.
And I certainly wouldn't conclude that Mr Murdoch's DNA was present.
Most lawyers will deny this, but the presentation of a criminal trial
is essentially telling a story.
It's a scenario based on the evidence laid out by the prosecution
to the jury, and it's up to the jury then to look at
the story and decide whether, on the evidence, that story has been
proven beyond all reasonable doubt.
The story here is the gruesome tale of a bad man in cold blood,
shooting a young man, and then trying to kidnap his girlfriend.
The prosecution claimed at trial that, beyond all reasonable doubt,
Brad Murdoch was the killer.
However, the more we have delved into this case, the more
obvious it has become to us this case is riddled with doubt.
During the trial, the Crown presented Joanne Lees as
a witness of truth.
But we now know that even the police doubted her story.
Also, there was a lot of controversy about the way Joanne Lees
went about identifying Murdoch.
I think it's number ten.
Then there's the so-called crime scene.
There is no shell casing, no blood spatter, brain matter, drag marks -
absolutely no evidence of a murder.
And, more importantly, there's no body.
And there are other holes.
The analysis of the CCTV footage taken at the truck stop that
is said to be Murdoch today may not stand up to scrutiny.
And the account given by the truck driver who picked up
Joanne Lees could put a number of other people in the frame.
Knowing what we know today, my very firm view is that
Bradley John Murdoch would have been found not guilty.
I don't think he did it because he's not stupid.
You've got a big load of drugs on, you don't go mucking around
up the highway, shooting people and kidnapping women -
it just doesn't fit.
In a circumstantial case, we never know whether the person
did it or not - hardly ever.
But I think it's quite a strong case against Murdoch.
It's one thing to have his DNA on her shirt, but then what are
the chances the person who's matched that DNA has a gun, has
a dog, has a similar car, similar to the person in the truck stop video?
I was pleased that they found Murdoch guilty because,
particularly because, that gave some closure to the Falconio
family, it did give some closure to Joanne Lees, and it also gave
closure for the police, which was really important.
I do not believe that Bradley Murdoch should have been convicted.
In my experience, juries do not really understand DNA evidence
and, if DNA is led,
the jury simply equate the presence of DNA with guilt.
I'm absolutely convinced the police got the right person.
My only slight doubt is did Bradley Murdoch have an accomplice?
Was there somebody else on the road who helped him get rid of the body?
I do believe that Bradley Murdoch killed Peter Falconio and
I do believe Joanne Lees' account.
I don't think there is anything unjust with Murdoch's conviction.
Sometimes, I still question the way they got there.
I don't think anybody killed him.
Well, I know for a fact he's still alive, unless something
happened to him after the day he walked out the shop but,
yeah, he's still alive and kicking somewhere.
There's only one thing that can really unravel the mystery -
that is, if you find the body of Peter Falconio.
And if you find the body of Peter Falconio, then you can almost
be certain how he died and possibly who killed him.
I hope we do find Peter Falconio.
But there's only one person who knows where Peter's buried,
and that's Murdoch.
Has he got anything in him to stand up and say where it is? I hope so.
I hope so.
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