And Then the Darkness

by Sue Williams

  Towards the end of August, Murdoch finally had the new aluminium canopy built over the tray. He’d contacted Stephen Galvin to do the work for him. ‘He provided 99 per cent of the materials; I just provided the rectangular hollow section that held the mesh for the doors,’ says Galvin. ‘It was a fully enclosed solid canopy, with hinged mesh doors on the side.’ It was the kind of canopy that would allow no-one to get in, if he was carrying precious cargo — or no-one to get out.

  His next port of call was Broome Tropical Upholstery, a company that had done some work for him before, making a canopy for a vehicle. Owner Louis O’Dore recognised Murdoch as a man who’d introduced himself as ‘Doug’ the first time. He also thought he recognised his ute, ‘but it looked a lot newer, it looked done up,’ he says. ‘It looked like it had been detailed, it had new tyres, exhaust, a totally different frame from the first one.’ That, of course, was the custom-built aluminium canopy, with a plate between the cab and the tray. ‘The second frame had a hard front behind the driver,’ says O’Dore, ‘and a hard back where there was access for a spare wheel. And it had mesh sides, like security mesh, that was rolled and hinged at the top, and an aluminium roof.’

  O’Dore reckoned he recognised his customer ‘Doug’ in another way too. He’d seen the pictures from the Shell Truckstop video on TV. ‘I mentioned I’d seen a photo of the first vehicle,’ says O’Dore. ‘It was at the Truckstop … I just mentioned to him that I’d seen the vehicle, and I believed it looked like the one we did for him. He said he was up there at that time and it could have been him, it could have been his vehicle because he made a stop at that Truckstop.’

  Murdoch also said that someone else had asked him about the same thing. ‘He said the police spoke to him about it and he told them it wasn’t him, he didn’t do anything,’ says O’Dore. ‘So I didn’t think any more of it.’

  JAMES HEPI, HOWEVER, WAS GROWING angrier. He’d hardly seen Murdoch since his return from Sedan in July, and he’d only done a few trips. It meant Hepi had been forced to do most of them himself.

  Murdoch had his excuse: ‘He said his car wasn’t ready,’ says Hepi, ‘It took a few months to fix the car up.’ But Hepi wasn’t satisfied. Their partnership was beginning to fall apart. ‘After that, things started to dissolve,’ he says. Hepi started to look at his business partner more closely. One day they were both down in the shed at the Sedan property, and Murdoch was fiddling with something on the workshop bench. Hepi leaned over to see what he was doing. ‘He was making handcuffs out of cable ties,’ he says. ‘I just asked him what he was doing. Then he put the shit in the bin and went out the back. He’d made them from three zip ties tied together, and extended by 100 mile-an-hour tape wrapped around the zip ties.’ The handcuffs were very similar, Hepi said later, to the ones used on Joanne Lees.

  IN LATE DECEMBER 2001, THE bad feeling reached a head. The pair met in a car park in Perth and had a heated discussion. ‘I wanted to know where the money was,’ says Hepi, who was also owed a cache of drugs by Murdoch. ‘I asked him why he had not met me in Broome. He said he’d had trouble getting across a roadblock … Because of the Falconio murder, police were waiting for him at the border.’

  The pair were furious with each other, and traded insults and accusations about who might be cheating whom. ‘You can get fucked!’ Murdoch finally said to Hepi as he stomped off. That was effectively the end of their cosy drugs partnership. The ill feeling also spilled over to Hepi’s friends in the Riverland, the couple who’d given Murdoch his dog, Jack. Hepi accused the friend of stealing a heater from his house, and the row grew ugly. The friend then went off and sided with Murdoch, who decided to set up in the drugs business on his own from a shed he rented for the purpose in Angle Vale, 40 kilometres north of Adelaide. The friend admitted working as his gopher, locating amphetamines and cannabis, and dropping by to lend him a hand whenever he needed it. Soon after, in March 2002, the friend says Hepi turned up there, intent on taking some of the stockpile of drugs he insisted Murdoch owed him. The friend tried to stop him, and claims Hepi retaliated by assaulting him, threatening to cut off his fingers with secateurs or bolt-cutters and then saying he’d kill him. When Murdoch heard about the incident, he gave the friend a gun so he’d be able to protect himself in future.

  He also put in a call to his old mate Darryl Cragan, now living in Katherine, and asked him if he too would be interested in coming over to SA to help with his new drug business. Cragan agreed, and Murdoch picked him up at Adelaide airport in the April, installing him in Angle Vale to pack cannabis, and then later in an old rundown stone farmhouse he also rented on 4 hectares just outside Port Broughton, a fishing town on the Yorke Peninsula. There, he gave him a Ford Falcon sedan and a Glock 9 millimetre semi-automatic pistol for protection. With his new team in place, Murdoch was now ready to start working his own business, doing his own deals, and making his own money.

  But with that, Murdoch and Hepi were now effectively rivals in the drugs business, as well as deadly enemies. And the repercussions of that falling out would prove devastating to them both.

  MURDOCH HAD BEEN FRIENDS FOR years with a young man called Benjamin Kotz, the son of some friends of his parents. They lived in Salisbury Downs in SA and whenever Murdoch passed through, he’d drop in for a cup of tea and a chat. Kotz, twenty years younger, grew up calling Murdoch ‘Uncle Brad’ and was devoted to the older man. With a similar obsession with cars, he looked forward to his visits. Indeed, sometime later, Murdoch helped Kotz out trying to fix up a rusted, unregistered Toyota Landcruiser he had. When it couldn’t be salvaged, Murdoch bought it from Kotz for parts for $10,000. Murdoch then stripped the chassis from the vehicle and fitted the cab and drive train from the old Telstra Landcruiser on to it. Along the way, he also put Kotz’s ute’s build and compliance plates onto the new vehicle, and asked Kotz to go and register it for him in his own name. Kotz happily obliged.

  But on one occasion when Murdoch called round, he didn’t seem too happy. ‘Me and my mum were there,’ says Kotz. ‘Dad was working away. He looked very pale.’ It was easy for Kotz to overhear the conversation. ‘He said to my mum that he’s done something wrong and he’s never done this before. He had dobbed in a Kiwi mate to the police. He was upset with his partner the Kiwi mate and he also told them there was drugs in his car.’

  JAMES HEPI WAS ARRESTED BY the police as he drove into Broome on 17 May 2002, with 4 kilograms of cannabis that he’d brought up from Sedan. He was incensed. He’d been running a tight operation, and there was only one person who could have dobbed him in. But his immediate concern was the trouble he was in. This was serious. Four kilograms was a substantial quantity of cannabis and the police were clamping down on suppliers of the drug. Also, there were so many health reports coming out about how the cannabis now being grown was much stronger than before — and so much more dangerous as a result for young people, with links to depression and the country’s spiralling youth suicide rate. In addition, Hepi was known to have crossed a border, thus importing the drug from another state into WA — once again, a much more serious offence. With a sinking heart, Hepi knew he was in for a sizeable stretch in jail. So when he was handed a phone at the police station in Broome to contact a solicitor, he told him to fix up a meeting with detectives. And when he was finally led into the police interview room to see them, he took a deep breath.

  ‘I want do a deal,’ he said. ‘I’ve got some information you might be interested in. It’s about that killing up at Barrow Creek …’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  A TV CONFESSION

  IT WAS THE MOMENT EVERYONE had been waiting for. Joanne Lees too. She looked nervous, tossed her head to flick her hair aside, and coughed a short little dry cough. ‘Did you,’ top British TV current affairs presenter Martin Bashir was asking her, ‘kill Peter Falconio?’

  Joanne looked at him, almost incredulously.

  And then commercial TV did what it does so well — it went to an ad break. But not before fre
ezing the image of Joanne’s face so it looked as if she was hesitating forever, dumbfounded in guilt, caught in the full beam of the spotlights. It was a moment of extraordinary television and an incredible irony that Joanne, who’d be putting so much effort into avoiding the press, at the end of the day walked right into one of the oldest tricks in the book.

  When the program resumed, however, she smiled and answered with a definitive ‘No!’

  Bashir then asked the same question in a different way, and again Joanne looked nervous, but this time composed. After all, being asked if she really was a killer could be the question, if the gunman was never caught, that might well dominate the rest of her life, exactly as it had Lindy Chamberlain’s. ‘There’s no weapon, there’s no gun, there’s no body,’ said Bashir. ‘The attacker’s footprints aren’t found, but yours are. There’s Peter’s blood on the ground. So some people say the person who murdered Peter was Joanne. What do you say to that?’

  Joanne’s eyes narrowed and she swallowed. ‘It’s,’ she said, with a grimace, ‘totally untrue.’

  For eight months Joanne had been pursued by the media but when she finally decided to speak publicly, she earned yet another tide of recriminations. She’d agreed to appear on the British ITV current affairs show Tonight With Trevor McDonald, produced by Granada Television, for the Bashir interview aired on 18 March 2002, and for a payment of $120,000 (50,000 pounds). After rebuffing the media in Alice Springs, saying she would never sell her story, she was described as having done exactly that. Not surprisingly, among those criticising her the most were those who’d had their offers turned down.

  BASHIR WAS A STRANGE CHOICE, many onlookers thought, for her one and only interview. As one of the highest profile TV journalists in the world, he’d certainly had more than his fair share of attention-grabbing interviewees, including the historic Princess Diana audience when she’d revealed her ‘three-person’ marriage; the English au pair Louise Woodward accused of murder in the US; and the five young men suspected of killing Stephen Lawrence. Later, he was to garner even more attention with his Michael Jackson interview in which the pop star disclosed that he shared his bed with teenage boys. He wasn’t without controversy himself, either, with Jackson later releasing a tape showing Bashir ingratiating himself with his interviewee, and a TV watchdog finding him guilty in 2003 of misleading someone to secure an interview.

  Earlier, another TV team, this time from Britain’s Channel 4, had tried unsuccessfully to persuade Joanne to talk to them for a documentary about the incident. Their program, The Trials of Joanne Lees, by filmmaker Ross Wilson, was centring more on the vilification of someone who might otherwise be treated as a heroine. It was believed to be taking a sympathetic attitude towards Joanne.

  Bashir, on the other hand, was renowned for his hard-hitting style, and not allowing his interviewees, once they were on camera, room to be evasive. He was the same with Joanne. As well as asking her bluntly, twice, if she’d killed her boyfriend, he also put to her all the problems with the case. In the hour-long special entitled ‘Murder, Mystery & Me’, he quizzed her about the lack of her attacker’s footprints at the scene; the fact that no blood was found on the vehicle; why the dog hadn’t bounded after her when she escaped; how a speck of the gunman’s blood had found its way on to her top; and why people should believe her when she stepped through her handcuffs, something not even a ballerina could do. She couldn’t give satisfactory answers to many of the questions, and that was really not much of a surprise — she didn’t know. It was a few days later that the police scotched one of the doubts by finally releasing a replica of the cable tie handcuffs, and a policewoman demonstrated how easy it was to step over the tie between each of the hands.

  But it was only when Bashir asked Joanne how her hunter hadn’t found her that night, that she sounded at all inspired. ‘I believe someone,’ she said, ‘was looking out for me that night.’

  She also warmed to the subject when she was asked about her attitude to the media, and why she hadn’t simply agreed to media interviews, or answered more questions at that disastrous press conference. ‘In hindsight, I could have done that,’ she says. ‘But I was just thrown into that. I haven’t had any media experience before. I didn’t realise how people were going to analyse every answer I gave or criticise me for questions I didn’t answer, let alone the questions I did. I didn’t realise I was on trial. And to me, they were ridiculous questions. I thought people should just focus on finding Pete.’

  As to whether it would have helped the case if she had agreed to use the media, she replied that the case was already on all the front pages and at the top of every TV and radio bulletin anyway. ‘I probably would have been willing to do more to raise public awareness but having had such bad treatment from the press, I did become withdrawn. I didn’t feel strong enough at the time … I didn’t really understand.’

  She ran haltingly through the events of that dark night, yet came over as more deserving of compassion when, in a rare moment of candour, she said she blamed herself for the attack. ‘I feel guilty that the man didn’t want Pete … he just wanted me,’ she said. ‘He just wanted a female and he had to get Pete out of the way.’

  She was also critical of the police, claiming that when publican Les Pilton first rang the Alice Springs station, the officer put the phone down on him, thinking it was a hoax call. ‘He rang again,’ she said. ‘They asked me to describe the gun. They said, “No way!” Four hours later, I finally saw a police person.’ That claim was denied by police, a denial later borne out by a review carried out into the police investigation, and the recollections of Pilton and truckie Vince Millar.

  Strangely, considering the program-makers had paid to have Joanne on board and had flown her back to Australia, a reenactment was performed by an actor. It was believed that, although requested to do so, she hadn’t proved willing to do it herself.

  Indeed, the first police learnt of Joanne’s presence in Alice Springs was when she called them from her hotel room, asking them to be part of the program. ‘We certainly weren’t aware of it but I must say Joanne Lees is free to go about her business,’ said Assistant Commissioner John Daulby, who later agreed to make a statement for the show, in the interests of keeping the case in the public eye. ‘She doesn’t have to tell us what she does.’

  The return trip was reported in Britain by one newspaper, the Daily Mail, under the banner headline ‘How could she go back?’, using the opportunity once more to repeat factual errors about the police not finding any DNA evidence on Joanne’s clothing, and claiming that the man had hunted her for several hours with his dog.

  There were others with their noses out of joint too. During the filming in Barrow Creek, Pilton said he was disappointed Joanne didn’t drop in at the roadhouse to say hello. Similarly, Millar tried to phone her in Alice Springs, but his calls were not returned. Helen Jones, however, came in for the biggest blast. In the interview shown in the UK — but in a part cut out when it was aired in Australia — Joanne accused her old Barrow Creek ally of ‘getting off on someone else’s tragedy’, because she’d spoken to the media. Jones was hurt, angry and indignant, saying afterwards she’d only spoken to the media after consultation with police who thought it might help refresh someone’s memory about Peter. In an interview with New Idea magazine, she hit back at Joanne, saying the ‘black holes’ in her story worried her. She said Joanne had claimed Peter was asleep in the back of the Kombi as they arrived at Ti Tree, which meant he wasn’t seen. ‘Joanne says no-one saw Peter because he was asleep in the back of the Kombi at the time,’ Jones said. ‘My question is: “Was he even there?”’ She also pointed out the confusion over who was driving. ‘I always thought Peter was driving the Kombi that night, but in the British interview Jo says she was the one at the wheel.’ In addition, she said she was worried at reports of an argument between the couple in Alice Springs.

  But Joanne had her reasons for returning to Alice Springs, quite apart from the TV program. On
e afternoon, she gave everyone the slip, rented a car and drove out to the Shell Truckstop where the video was taken. Owner Val Prior was the only one to spot her there. ‘I caught sight of her, and watched her,’ she says. ‘She just drove around the diesel pumps in a hire car. We didn’t interfere with her. We let her be. I guess she just wanted to see. Poor girl. I feel for her, and all the families involved. What must have she been thinking?’

  DURING THE TV INTERVIEW, Joanne gave generally quite a controlled performance, as she recounted her ordeal in her slow, deliberate way of speaking, choosing her words carefully and obviously trying to keep her emotions in check. That thick bottom lip, however, although in normal circumstances considered so attractive, couldn’t help but give her a look of petulance, a stubborn and obstinate appearance. As an exercise in winning over the public sympathy, it wasn’t a great success. Even when she cried, it didn’t come over terribly naturally. It wasn’t her fault, of course, that she didn’t cry gracefully for the cameras, but it didn’t help. Fighting back the tears, the most moving moment of the interview was when she confessed that she still felt in touch with Peter. ‘I talk to him every day,’ she said. ‘If I’ve got a decision to make, I ask him what he’d do. It’s really difficult to talk about Pete before I start crying. He’s the nicest person I’ve ever met.’ Her face dissolved and she buried her face in her hands, still determined not to be seen crying on screen. ‘Okay,’ she said, wiping her eyes, ‘okay.’ When asked whether she could live without Peter, she was also reassuringly human. ‘I don’t want to. But I can. What’s happened to me is I nearly lost my life and it’s made me appreciate every single day. I do love life and I’m going to get on with it. I’d prefer it if Pete was by my side doing that but I think it would be a miracle for that to happen.’