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18-10-2005 Scotsman Outback odyssey that turned into a trip to terror By Gethin Chamberlain Chief News Correspondent THE British woman at the centre of one of Australia's most notorious and baffling murder cases came face to face in court yesterday with the man she claims killed her boyfriend, trussed her up and hunted her through the Outback while she cowered in the dark. In a dramatic first day of a trial which is expected to last for up to two months, Joanne Lees confessed that she had been conducting an affair behind the back of her murdered boyfriend, Peter Falconio, and described how she smoked drugs with him hours before he was killed. Mr Falconio, 28, vanished after getting out of the camper van in which he and Ms Lees were travelling north of Alice Springs in July 2001. Despite one of Australia's biggest searches, involving police in helicopters and on motorbikes and aboriginal trackers combing the Australian desert, the only trace of the Yorkshireman has been a pool of his blood staining the highway. Even the prosecution admits it has only a circumstantial case in some respects against the man in the dock, 47-year-old Bradley John Murdoch, who denies the killing. There are no direct witnesses, the body has not been found and even though Ms Lees says she heard what she thought was a gunshot, she did not see the killing. But the prosecution is hanging its hopes on three scraps of DNA evidence. One, a smudge of blood found on Ms Lees' T-shirt, it claims is a good match for Murdoch. For the other two, it will rely on a British expert to convince the jury that his tests should carry more weight than those run by Australian investigators, who found them to be inconclusive. Dressed simply in a white blouse and plain black skirt, Ms Lees arrived at court smiling for a battery of cameras and television crews, after previously going to great lengths to avoid the media. On the first of three days of evidence from the 32-year-old, Ms Lees told how, on the night Mr Falconio disappeared, they had smoked a cannabis joint together as they watched the sunset in a layby north of Alice Springs. "I was very happy. It was a beautiful sunset," she said. Within hours, according to prosecutor Rex Wild, Mr Falconio was dead. He told the Northern Territory Supreme Court how Ms Lees described seeing a man holding a western-style revolver to her boyfriend's head, then hearing a sharp retort, like a car backfiring or a gunshot. Despite her struggles, Mr Wild said, the man then tied her up with cable-ties and duct tape. "She was very frightened. She was pushed across into the passenger seat and told to bend forward and hold out her hands behind her back," he said. She was forced out of the van and landed on her knees on the gravel road, with the man sitting on her back, trying to tie her legs with duct tape while she continued to struggle. Mr Wild said she asked: "What do you want? Is it money, the van? Just take it. Are you going to rape me?" He said the man replied: "Shut up and I won't shoot you." MS LEES AND HER LOVERS Ms Lees, a support worker for people with learning difficulties, met Mr Falconio, a surveyor, in a Huddersfield nightclub in 1996 and moved to Brighton to live with him in August the following year. The couple arrived in Australia on 16 January, 2001, as part of a round-the-world trip. Ms Lees says she hoped they would eventually marry, but after Mr Falconio's death it emerged that she had been cheating on him with an English backpacker. She told her boyfriend that she was meeting friends every Thursday night; in fact, she was sleeping with Nick Riley, a man she had met in Sydney's Dymocks bookshop. "He was a friend, a good friend, and we became close and we were intimate at one time. We were friends and we overstepped the boundary of friendship. But that ended and later we became friends again," she told the court. She described Mr Riley as a "special friend" and made sure that she masked his identity, referring to him as Stephanie in a string of secret e-mails. THE TRIP Ms Lees and Mr Falconio were heading across Australia to Darwin, Cairns and then on to Brisbane. Their mode of transport was a 30-year-old van. There were problems with its exhaust and a few days before the attack the steering column had to be repaired. Nonetheless, it was her boyfriend's "pride and joy" and they slept in it every night. Ms Lees smiled and laughed yesterday as she recalled how she had chosen the band Texas as the music to be played at the start of their journey, despite it not being Mr Falconio's favourite, as it was the "driver's privilege". THE ATTACK It was a winter's night on 14 July, 2001, near Alice Springs in central Australia. According to the prosecution, Murdoch had been tailing Ms Lees and Mr Falconio's van in a pick-up truck. Seven miles north of Barrow Creek, Murdoch pulled level with them and Ms Lees maintains that she looked across to see him indicating a problem with their exhaust. Mr Lees says she was not keen on stopping but they decided to pull over and Mr Falconio got out. She says she heard the men talking about sparks coming from the back of the van. The prosecution says that Mr Falconio came back to ask her to rev the engine, picked up his cigarettes and returned to the back of the van. That, she says, was the last she saw of him. Moments later, there was a sound like an engine backfiring or a gunshot. THE ESCAPE Murdoch threatened Ms Lees with a revolver and bound her hands with plastic cable ties before placing a sack over her head and loosely taping together her feet, according to her account. When he returned to the side of the road - possibly to move the body, the prosecution speculated - she seized her chance, scrambling out of the back of the pick-up. Despite the tape on her feet she managed to run 200ft and hid in the desert scrub. The prosecution described how she curled up into a foetal position - "a bit like a rabbit" - and covered her eyes. Murdoch had a dog and a torch, but he failed to locate her. She heard a vehicle being driven north, then someone coming back, and the sound of something, possibly the body of Mr Falconio, being hauled along the gravel. By now she had managed to wriggle her hands round in front of her and tried to loosen the bindings. A tube of lip balm belonging to Ms Lees was later found by police in the bush. Five hours later, she stepped out in front of a "road train" lorry driven by Vince Millar, who braked hard to avoid hitting her. Of Mr Falconio, there was no sign. THE ACCUSED Murdoch, 47, of Broome, Western Australia, had been working for the West Kimberley Diesel company as a casual employee. But he also transported cannabis from South Australia to Broome, and regularly made the 2,113-mile journey until 2001, using amphetamines to help him stay awake for long distances. But according to the prosecution, he was not having such a good night and he later told his then girlfriend, Beverley Allan, he had been convinced someone was following him. He felt he had to "deal with it". After returning from the trip, he shaved off his distinctive Mexican-style moustache and cut his hair. Later, in another conversation, the prosecution claims he said: "The best place to bury bodies is in a storm drain on the side of the road - just cover them in dirt." THE EVIDENCE The prosecution hopes that three scraps of DNA evidence will help to sway the jury. The samples were found on Ms Lees' T-shirt, the gearstick in the van and the tape around the cuffs. Key to their case is a "smudge" of blood on the pale-blue T-shirt that Ms Lees was wearing. According to the prosecution, the probability of it belonging to anyone other than Murdoch is "very low". The two other matches are in greater doubt; conventional tests in Australia were inconclusive, but a UK expert will testify that he managed to secure a match. The prosecution is also relying on CCTV images showing a man at a truck stop in Alice Springs at 12:38am on 15 July, whom experts will say is similar to Murdoch, though the defence says the man in the pictures is shorter by some 3in. The final piece of evidence is the "Lady Jane" hairband which Murdoch had when he was picked up in August 2002, to hold together a broken buckle. It was the same as one Ms Lees was wearing on the night of the attack. The trial continues.
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................................................................................................................. Copyright ©2004 Gethin Chamberlain. All rights reserved. |
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