by Sue Williams
Joanne, in turn, was charmed by this handsome, dark stranger. With his short cropped hair, soft brown eyes, easygoing manner and old-fashioned gentlemanly courtesy, he was sweet and funny. She’d been out with plenty of boys before, but Peter struck her as different from the rest. He was passionate about what he was doing, determined to succeed, ambitious and confident. Even more attractive, however, was his appetite for life beyond the confines of their villages. He’d already been overseas a few times, on skiing trips to Italy and France, and seemed restless for change.
‘So what do you plan to do?’ she asked him curiously.
‘Aha!’ He grinned back at her. ‘I won’t always be staying here, that’s for sure. I want to travel. I want to get out there and live life …’
Joanne smiled back. Working in a travel agency, she had itchy feet too, but had never roamed far, torn between the desire for adventure and the cosy comfort of staying close to home and her beloved mum. But that evening her imagination was fired like never before, and for the next three months the pair were inseparable.
Joanne had been an average student, plodding and methodical, diligent but uninspired, working hard enough to do well, but impatient to leave school and start earning a living. At Almondbury Junior, a pretty little place tucked away off a main road, she didn’t make much of an impression on either her fellow students or teachers. At her next school, the sprawling Almondbury High — a run-of-the-mill comprehensive with 800-odd pupils — she didn’t particularly stand out either.
‘You know, it’s funny, but no-one recalls her — even the teachers who took her in classes,’ says teacher Yvonne Ainley. ‘I think she was simply never exceptional. She was an ordinary girl. Very ordinary.’
While Joanne was popular with her classmates, she concentrated more on her social life than on her studies. When she left school and went on to college to take her A levels, she worked part-time as a barmaid and, at one point, as a bacon packer in a local factory to pay for nights out and nice clothes in which to enjoy them all the more. After her final exams, she found a job in the local branch of the Thomas Cook travel agency. She was ideally placed to discuss travel plans with Peter.
AT WOOLDALE JUNIOR AND THEN Holmfirth High, Peter Falconio was known as a bright boy who did the minimum amount of work to get by. He wasn’t lazy, it was just that his attention always seemed to be elsewhere. He had a lively mind that flitted from one thing to the next without wanting to spend too much time on any one thing in particular, and generally preferred entertaining his classmates, and taking part in various tearaway adventures, to hunching over his books. He was smart, but not particularly academic, clever in a much more pragmatic way: good at solving problems, thinking his way around difficulties, and relying on his charm to get him out of sticky situations.
‘Educational-wise, he was one of the brightest ones,’ says a friend of the family, Ken Sims. ‘But he’s also been in and out of trouble like many of the youngsters. He’s veered from straight and narrow a bit in the past. It was never anything serious, just a bit of bother from time to time. He was always an adventurous kind of lad, much more so than his brothers. And he was always very high spirited.’
Peter got through his school exams at the age of sixteen but, unsure what to do next, decided he’d have to go on to college in order to make any kind of decent living. At first, he applied for a catering course at Huddersfield Technical College, but quickly discovered it wasn’t for him. He then reapplied for the BTEC national diploma in construction, a qualification accepted by the construction industry for entry into employment at a technician level, or by universities as an entry requirement. The course is held in a charmless modern annex to the college, but tutor Stephen Jones sensed how keen Peter was, especially when he ran into problems transferring his grant from catering to his next choice. Week after week, he waded through the paperwork, and wrangled with the authorities until, finally, he reached an unusual decision. To hell with it: he’d pay for the course himself.
‘It was very unusual, but he was so determined,’ says Jones. ‘He felt the only way out of his financial problems was to get a job and earn money to pay for everything himself. I really admired him for that.’
Peter found part-time work in a bowling alley and behind the bar in the nearby nightclub Hotshots, and started the course at the age of eighteen. He did well in all three. At the nightclub they were impressed at how self-assured and quick-thinking he was whenever there were problems; at the bowling alley, they found him an extremely personable and amiable attendant; and on the course, his tutor took an instant liking to this ambitious young man.
‘He had a big personality, and always a smile, and ready for a laugh,’ says Jones. ‘He was also very upfront and confident. He seemed a lot more mature than his years too, and was a very insightful person. He was quite assertive and always ready to take charge of the situation whenever there were problems. He organised a bowling trip for his fellow students and, when they tried to charge him double what he’d been quoted, he stood his ground and argued until he got what he wanted. He wouldn’t be swayed.’
After Peter successfully finished the course, he began work as a surveyor, bought a small cottage of his own close to his family and planned his next career move. No-one who knew him was in any doubt that, whatever it would be, he’d make a success of it. ‘He was someone who could negotiate his way out of any problem,’ says Jones. ‘He had such confidence, such charm, and could be a real bullshitter when he wanted to be. Others his age might be vulnerable, but he was certainly not. When he left here, I couldn’t help feeling he had a great future ahead of him. He was so full of life, and he seemed absolutely immune to anything bad ever happening.’
If only.
CHAPTER TWO
IN AN AUSTRALIAN WILDERNESS
BRADLEY JOHN MURDOCH WAS A mistake from the moment of conception. His parents, Colin and Nancy, were battlers who’d assumed, edging into their forties with two growing sons aged fifteen and eleven, that the tough times were behind them. The arrival of a new, unplanned baby on 6 October 1958 changed everything.
The family lived in a small three-bedroom fibro house in Northampton, a rough-and-ready town 475 kilometres north of Perth in Western Australia. Nestled between scarred hills with most of its housing spread out and fronting dirt or roughly-tarred roads, it has the despondent air of having been overlooked by the outside world. And that’s because it largely has.
One hundred and fifty years ago, Northampton was a thriving industrial centre with the country’s first lead mine and a rich seam of copper. The ore was transported to Geraldton, 50 kilometres to the south, by the first government-built railway in WA. But eventually the mines were exhausted and the railway closed the year before Bradley was born. The town came to rely instead on its fertile farmlands on the edge of the region’s wheatbelt. In years of plentiful rainfall, the area thrived; in drought, everyone suffered. Locals, anxious to develop a fledgling tourism industry to supplement earnings from the land, tried to woo visitors from the bustling coastal towns of Port Gregory and Kalbarri, both set in picturesque wildflower country nearby. It was a hard ask. Visitors to the area could easily miss Northampton completely, since the scenic route north peels off the highway 200 metres before the town. Those who ventured in found a place that still closed up on weekends and sometimes at lunchtimes, offering little in the way of attractions. With three pubs and three churches, the only other diversion was The Mechanics Institute, a large tin shed where dances were sometimes held. Even new residents to the area found the place cliquey, with some families now proudly into their third generation in the district reminding more recent ‘blowins’ of their pioneer heritage. The local café displays a sign that reads, ‘No cappuccinos here’. It’s a proud boast rather than an embarrassed apology.
Town newcomer Heidi Sommer-Stinson, who used to run a restaurant in the village centre before opening Northampton’s first B&B, despairs at how resistant to change the town is. ‘Change is a threa
t to this place,’ she says. ‘People don’t like change or ever doing anything differently. There’s a lot of stillbirths because there’s still a lot of inbreeding, and it’s all very small-minded.’
Across the hills and over the nearby Greenough River, the neighbouring town of Mullewa is a study in contrast. The bigheartedness of the inhabitants gives it a warm easygoing air, and when they suffer drought, the townsfolk get together to share what they have. In Northampton, it’s quite the opposite. ‘People hoard,’ Sommer-Stinson says. ‘They don’t pull together. There’s no generosity of spirit at all. Everyone’s compartmentalised into those who have wealth and those who have nothing. People are very, very competitive.’
Bradley Murdoch’s parents fell into the narrow middle ground, and found it suited them well enough. They weren’t farmers, and they definitely weren’t wealthy, but both had skills that enabled them to become indispensable in time to both camps. Colin, tall and strong with wavy brown hair, was a skilled mechanic who could fix anything and everything. He had a reputation as someone who could get any piece of old farm machinery working again, whether it involved a simple overhaul, or an innovative patchwork of parts from other pieces of junk he kept in his shed to the side of the house. He was affordable too. Many farmers couldn’t buy new equipment, and those who could invariably preferred not to. So a man like Colin Murdoch, eager to please and happy enough tinkering around to find the most economical way to start a clapped out tractor or replace the engine in a rusted old ute, was a godsend.
Nancy was no slacker, either. As the only hairdresser in town, she set up shop in the bathroom and kitchen of their family home on West Street. Customers would enter through the lounge, and be led into the neat but faded kitchen beyond. For their hair to be washed, they’d be walked through to the next room, the little bathroom and shared laundry. Nancy was always immaculate, her blonde hair bouffanted high above her head in the style of the time; and wash and sets, with a bi-monthly perm, became her stock in trade. The house, already crowded when her two eldest sons were home from school, often also had a local sitting in the kitchen with her hair in curlers, reading a magazine and chatting with Nancy through a shared cloud of cigarette smoke.
The couple were popular in the town, and not only because of their respective trades. They were seen as a close family, firm but fair with their sons; battlers who worked hard and minded their own business. The two oldest boys were good mates, born within four years of each other: Robert in 1943 and Gary in 1947. Adding to Colin and Nancy’s difficulties, however, was the fact that Robert was born without an ear. Nicknamed ‘Speedy’, presumably because his disability made him the opposite, he was a sickly child who was constantly in and out of hospital for operations, one of which saw him fitted with a prosthetic ear.
Gary, on the other hand, was as hale and hearty as his brother was poorly. ‘He was a big blustery fellow, but Robert was very quiet, like his dad,’ says John Drage who grew up next door to the family. ‘But I liked Gary. He was pretty level-headed. He was all right.’
Bradley’s arrival at the Geraldton Regional Hospital wasn’t a terribly welcome event. Neither Robert nor Gary were particularly interested in a baby brother, and Nancy was worn out already with the demands of the three males in the house. Both she and Colin had believed their days of washing nappies and losing sleep at night were over.
BRADLEY GREW UP COMPETING WITH his brothers for his parents’ attention since Nancy was often too exhausted to give her youngest son much time, and Colin always seemed to be too busy. As a little boy, Bradley therefore spent long hours sitting in his dad’s shed, breathing in the scent of diesel and oil, patiently watching his father fix trucks and repair machinery, eagerly handing him his screwdriver, a wrench or nails whenever he was allowed. The skills he picked up in that shed, repairing engines, cannabalising parts of vehicles to add to others, finding inventive solutions to mechanical problems, as well as his parents’ fierce work ethic, were to stand him in good stead for the rest of his life.
His brothers resented him from the word go. Their house was too small for four, let alone five, and Robert didn’t like having to share his windowless bedroom with his kid brother. The wooden floorboards shook as the two eldest raced around the house; their mother frequently screamed for quiet when Bradley tagged along to try to join in. Children in those days made their own entertainment, so the three were often thrown together out of necessity. Robert and Gary would tend to brush Bradley off as a nuisance, and gradually he developed a swagger of false bravado to hide his misery and annoyance. Neighbours grew used to seeing the three boys racing out to the woods to go rabbiting, Gary in front, Robert following, and Bradley trailing along despondently behind, glowering resentment.
‘Brad grew up a real rebel,’ says neighbour Drage, now 60, who used to collect toy cars with Robert. ‘He’d be defiant, kind of: “I’m going to do what I want!” He was a bit of a loner. He was too young for his brothers, really, so he had no-one to play with.’ Bradley had started off life as an outsider even within his own family. It was a slight he was never to forget, or forgive. ‘All that family were very nice,’ Drage adds. ‘But Brad was always a pain in the bum. He was surly and trying to get his own way. He was going right off the rails.’ It didn’t help either that Gary was so popular, with lots of friends and casual acquaintances who’d ask him to join in their activities. It seemed only to underline Bradley’s isolation, and the role that was quickly becoming his: as the misfit, and the rebel without any cause but his own.
He lumbered his way through school with scarcely a second glance. What was the point of all that English and maths when he’d already decided to become a mechanic like his dad? Teachers at the local primary school, Northampton District, were fighting a losing battle to get the kids interested in the world beyond the district’s farms and small businesses. The school was well-equipped for a small town, with basketball courts, a row of handbasins in the playground, and the obligatory tall watertank, but today the school sits empty, with another built out of town, just up the highway, further displacing the heart of Northampton. Bradley did just enough to get by each day in class. ‘He battled to get through school,’ says his dad Colin. ‘He liked sport, but not lessons.’ Teacher Bob Johnson remembers his brother Gary fondly, but not Bradley. ‘Gary was a nice kid, everyone knew him. But Bradley … no-one really had much to do with him. He was a loner.’
Outside school, it was easier to get the other kids’ attention. Bradley was a big boy, tall and strong for his years. ‘He was always a fighter,’ says his dad. ‘He was a very good fighter.’ To others, he quickly became known as a bully. Old schoolmates remember a thickset kid who found it easy to intimidate others and often infuriated teachers with his insolence. Secretly, Bradley delighted in the kind of attention he craved but was never able to get at home. Family life there was becoming more fragmented — his parents were beginning to despair of their youngest, and found him more and more difficult to control. Bradley was angry and resentful that they seemed to lavish so much time and money on Robert, and he envied Gary the freedoms he was able increasingly to claim for his age. Bradley felt his brothers were always labelling him a pest, and trying to brush him off. He felt increasingly distanced from his parents, too, who seemed very old, and the gulf between them only widened over the years.
Bradley was later to claim there was trouble in Northampton between white kids and Aboriginal kids, and that his father Colin was often used by the police to spy on the black community. As a result, says Bradley, he was regularly beaten up by black children. No locals, however, have any recall of such disturbances, some going so far as to say that relations between the two groups were always extremely civil. Rather more locals, indeed, remember Bradley picking on black kids, but most will say that smaller white kids copped it too.
As he entered his teens, Colin and Nancy found it even harder to control their youngest son. Robert was working for the CBH Group, which stores, handles and markets grain, and G
ary had started his own truck business, and, with the older boys away, there was no-one left to act as a check to Bradley’s behaviour. ‘They were such good parents to those boys,’ says one elderly local. ‘But that’s just no guarantee these days to how kids’ll turn out.’
When Bradley turned twelve, Colin and Nancy decided to make a last ditch effort to keep their youngest son on the rails. Perhaps feeling guilty they hadn’t paid him more attention, and possibly worried at the way he was turning out, they made a monumental decision. Although they’d been happy in Northampton, there was no high school in town, and they decided to move to Perth so Bradley could attend high school there, rather than commute to Geraldton every day. He could start with a clean slate, wouldn’t be out of their sight for so much of the day, and they could do more to try to keep him on the straight and narrow, they reasoned. It was an eleventh hour bid to save their youngest son from spending the rest of his life on the wrong side of the thin blue line. But it was to be totally in vain.
Bradley didn’t want to leave the familiar surroundings where he felt comfortable and in control. It was a wrench to move from the only home he’d ever known and a shock to be suddenly the new kid in a huge, unfamiliar city. In Northampton, he knew how far he could push things; in the big smoke, he knew no-one, and he felt vulnerable and lonely. He compensated, as before, in the only way he knew how: by shouting louder and striking first. Dave Headley, a schoolmate from Perth’s Como Senior High, remembers Bradley as a bully with a mean streak that made him unpredictable and dangerous to the younger kids and irritating to the bigger ones. ‘He didn’t seem to fit in with any particular group, he just seemed to be a bit of annoyance to a lot of people. He seemed to get a bit of pleasure out of other people’s misfortunes. You never wanted to trust him. He had a bit of a short fuse too.’