Peter Falconio’s parents need to move on but want to find his body, as there’s no sign of Joanne Lees
The parents of murdered backpacker Peter Falconio are glad their son’s killer Bradley Murdoch is dead, but the news is bittersweet. His ex-girlfriend Joanne Lees has moved on with her quieter life.
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The parents of murdered backpacker Peter Falconio have been fielding interview requests for more than two decades, but what could be some of the last round of door knocks came on Tuesday when this masthead told Joan and Luciano that their son’s killer was dead.
“I’m glad he’s gone,” Joan said, in an exclusive sit-down interview at her home in northern England.
For the elderly couple and their three surviving children, the news of Bradley John Murdoch’s death by throat cancer was bittersweet – on one hand, the monster who shot 28-year-old Peter at point blank range and kidnapped his girlfriend, Joanne Lees, was finally gone.
On the other, it meant their hopes of finding Peter’s body and burying him in the UK had further dwindled. Murdoch, who always professed his innocence, took that secret to the grave.
“Police are continuing the search and they have got a few leads, I believe,” Joan continued.
“Whether they will come to anything, I don’t know. We still hold hope.
“We never give up because we want him back here [in the UK], if possible.”
Peter and Joanne, then 27, had been driving their Kombi campervan along the Stuart Highway near Barrow Creek – about 300km north of Alice Springs – on July 14, 2001, when Murdoch waved them down.
He lied to the couple, telling them sparks were flying from the exhaust. The plan was for Peter to check the exhaust while Joanne revved the engine, but it didn’t get that far.
When Peter turned around, Murdoch – who was on a drug run between Adelaide and Broome – pulled a gun and shot him in the head.
He then pointed the gun at Joanne, cable tied her hands, and shoved her in the back of his LandCruiser utility alongside about $200,000 of hydroponically-grown marijuana, and took off towards Broome.
When Murdoch made a stop along the way, Joanne managed to escape and spent five hours hiding barefoot in desert scrub, while the killer tried to hunt her down with his dog.
By the time she flagged a truck down and called police, she was scared out of her mind.
Joanne, now 51, lives about 9km from the Falconio family. Ms Lees was unable to be reached for comment, when approached by this masthead on Tuesday.
There’s little wonder why – her version of events was heavily criticised from the moment she first fronted the media with police, just days after her boyfriend was shot dead and she spent half the night running from his killer.
She wore a pink T-shirt which said ‘cheeky monkey’ to the press conference because she was a backpacker with a limited wardrobe, she didn’t cry for the cameras, and she had a fresh haircut – all of which was seen by the general public as suspiciously cold and composed.
Some wrongly took her behaviour as an indication that she had something to do with her boyfriend’s murder, which she later described as feeling like “a stab to the heart”.
Despite Murdoch’s guilty verdict being upheld in two courts, conspiracies continued to swirl even decades after the fact – more recently, in the form of a British documentary in 2020 called Murder in the Outback: The Falconio and Lees Mystery.
The four-part series attempted to re-examine evidence presented to the jury during Murdoch’s 2005 criminal trial, which included a bizarre re-enactment of the kidnapping, and redundant inquiries purported by his own disgraced defence lawyer, Andrew Fraser, who was once jailed for importing cocaine.
By the end, the viewer was left with the false sense that Murdoch – a drug runner, known racist, and amphetamine addict who was jailed for almost shooting an Aboriginal woman, and accused of twice raping a 12-year-old girl and assaulting her mother – could be innocent.
Realistically, the only true mystery remaining is the location of Peter’s body.
Murdoch’s DNA was found on Joanne’s shirt and in the Kombi. She also described him to police with incredible accuracy and later identified him from a board of 12 people.
He was caught on CCTV at a truck stop close to where the murder took place, despite saying he wasn’t in the area, and her hair tie was found on his shoulder holster.
Joanne wrote a book about her ordeal, No Turning Back, and has appeared in a few interviews since 2001, but she had largely led a quiet life away from the public eye.
Speaking with this masthead, former Northern Territory Attorney-General John Elferink said Murdoch’s death meant that Peter’s family may never be able to bury and memorialise him.
He explained Peter’s remains would likely not be recoverable, even if Murdoch had revealed the location.
“Murdoch has left the Falconio’s with no comfort whatsoever,” he said.
“The fact is, is that even if a location was able to be nominated, if Falconio’s body was disposed of in the open somewhere between Alice Springs and Broome … that body would have been carrion for the various animals that would have eaten him.”
He said Murdoch has “lived as he died – selfish, self-absorbed and indifferent”.
Murdoch was born in 1958 in regional Western Australia to Colin and Nancy Murdoch, a mechanic and hairdresser.
He was involved with bikie gangs by 15 and got a suspended sentence for killing a motorcyclist in a road collision at 21. Four years later, he married his wife Diane and had a son. The marriage broke down two years later, reportedly due to domestic violence.
His truck business ended in bankruptcy in the early 1980s, before he got a job as a truck driver and largely flew under the radar until he used a stolen rifle to shoot at a crowd at an Indigenous AFL game – almost striking a woman in the head.
Following a 15-month stint in jail, he got a job as a diesel mechanic in Broome and later became involved with drug trafficker, James Hepi, and started running marijuana between Adelaide and Broome.
It was during one of these drug runs that he waved down Peter and Joanne.
Though still devastated by Peter’s death, the Falconio family want to try and move on with their lives with the knowledge that Murdoch is dead.
They were contacted by Australian police not long after this masthead told them the news.
“The police officer emailed me and we talked throughout the night,” Mrs Falconio said.
“We have been going through it for 24 years, and now we want to draw a line through it.”
Outside the post office where Peter’s father Luciano used to work, a weather-beaten park bench is a living reminder of his son.
The engraving reads: “In memory of our son Peter Falconio 1972 -2001”.
Originally published as Peter Falconio’s parents need to move on but want to find his body, as there’s no sign of Joanne Lees
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