Bradley Murdoch supporter and key witness in Peter Falconio murder trial declares killer ‘a p**ck of a man’

Greg Dick — who ran the outback roadhouse where Peter Falconio was last sighted — was one of the few people to back killer Bradley Murdoch. Now there’s something he wants to get off his chest.

When outback murderer Bradley Murdoch carked it in Alice Springs hospital on Tuesday night, he took the secret of where he left Peter Falconio’s body to the grave. But in a nearby ward, also nearing death, one of the few men to ever publicly support Murdoch had something he wanted to get off his chest.

Murdoch did it.

“He’s a prick of a man, and that’s it. That’s all there is to say,” Greg Dick told the Herald Sun.

“He did it. I think that’s the case. He’s just a bad, bad man.”

Mr Dick, 79, is a notorious eccentric who ran the Aileron Roadhouse from the mid-80s until three months ago, when a serious fall and rapidly deteriorating health forced him to sell up.

He was one of the last people to see Falconio and Joanne Lees alive.

As a key witness for the prosecution at Murdoch’s 2005 trial, Mr Dick told the jury he and his staff served Falconio and Ms Lees their final meal together: toasted sandwiches, soft drinks and tea on the afternoon of July 14, 2001.

After looking over some paperwork and leafing through brochures about tourist attractions the backpackers set off in their Orange Kombi van.

Greg Dick ran the Aileron Roadhouse from the mid 80s until three months ago. Picture: Brad Hunter

Greg Dick leaves the Supreme Court in Darwin after giving evidence at Murdoch’s murder trial.

Dick at work at the Aileron Roadhouse.

But in the years since, Mr Dick publicly cast doubt on Murdoch’s conviction, saying in 2016 “I still reckon they’ve jailed the wrong man”.

His comments about an unidentified “fella” who was “definitely not Bradley John Murdoch” possibly being responsible for the murder of Falconio and the attempted abduction of Ms Lees were latched on by disgraced former lawyer Andrew Fraser, who made a healthy buck flogging a bizarre documentary to UK’s Channel 4, and the Seven Network.

Mr Dick’s declaration from his Alice Springs hospital bed this week should put to bed the nasty conspiracy theorists who refuse to be swayed by the overwhelming evidence that resulted in Murdoch being found guilty, by a jury after just eight hours of deliberations.

Bradley John Murdoch is escorted out of the South Australian District Court in handcuffs in 2003.

Murdoch’s dwindling band of supporters have claimed – as one of his barristers, Grant Algie KC once did early on in the case – that the brutish former mechanic was denied a “fair go” by the public.

In reality, Murdoch was afforded special treatment from the moment of his arrest to the day he died.

The taxpayer footed the bill for a crack legal team, including the late Ian Barker QC, who was regarded by many as the best Australian criminal lawyers of his generation.

The federal government also footed the $1m bill to turn a store room in the Darwin Supreme Court building into a courtroom built specially for Murdoch’s trial.

At the time, the reason given for the construction of the Murdoch courtroom was that the size and complexity of the case meant jurors needed to be shown evidence electronically, rather than on paper print-outs.

But it later emerged that the trial judge, Chief Justice Brian Ross Martin, ordered a Hannibal Lecter-style, high-strength perspex screen be built around the dock, out of concern that the hulking Murdoch posed a security risk.

Director of Public Prosecutions Rex Wild QC in court. Picture: Susan Bown

Chief Justice Martin had been impressed by a similar high-security in the courtroom used for the infamous “bodies in the barrels” trial of the Snowtown murderers in South Australia, which he also presided over.

Former Director of Public Prosecutions Rex Wild KC declined to comment on Murdoch’s passing this week, but in a never-before reported speech given at an overseas conference on the eve of the trial he detailed how the extraordinary steps his office took to ensure Murdoch got a fair trial, including managing dozens of press inquiries from fascinated UK news outlets.

Mr Wild described the task as “akin to herding cats”.

“Murder and mayhem in the centre of the Australian continent is the stuff of mystery thrillers,” Mr Wild said.

Mr Wild was forced to become a gatekeeper of sorts. His office regularly received faxes from overseas outlets offering “substantial amounts of money” to Ms Lees for exclusive interviews.

In another unheard of move, Mr Wild – at Murdoch’s lawyers’ request – had parts of his opening remarks at the committal hearing suppressed from publication, in a move that outraged local outlets.

The police investigation was so thorough it at times gifted Murdoch’s defence team material to unfairly attack the stoic and traumatised Ms Lees.

Joanne Lees arrives at the Darwin Supreme Court. Picture: AP

Peter Falconio and Joanne Lees.

The couple were ambushed by Murdoch on the Stuart Highway, 300km north of Alice Springs in July 2001.

Perhaps the most bizarre example of that was when officers made Ms Lees pick Murdoch’s mug shot out of a lineup of 12 similar-looking men, a test she passed with flying colours.

But itching for a stronger case, police also had her perform a similar task with a lineup of dog photos, hoping she might identify Murdoch’s Dalmatian-blue heeler cross, Jack.

Ms Lees failed, pointing to an Aussie Cattle Dog, and was criticised for having a dodgy memory. The so-called “dogalog” has not taken off as a common investigative method.

Once found guilty, Murdoch’s special treatment continued. He spent the early years of his life sentence at the old Berrimah jail and the new Holtze Prison. He was given a sought-after job in the kitchen.

Murdoch’s family, in a statement this week, said he had “incredible” culinary skills.

In reality, according to a former fellow inmate, the slop served up in Territory prisons was simply so awful that Murdoch’s signature recipe of scones with jam were considered a gourmet delight.

Murdoch is led through Darwin airport by police. Picture: AFP

The statement sought to portray Murdoch as a “gentle giant”, but behind bars, he was a grumpy, racist, oaf of a man who intimidated fellow inmates with the force of his sheer physical size and reputation.

The family’s kind words were in stark contrast to the graphic death threats which came barreling down the phone line to the NT News newsroom in 2019, when a journalist first revealed Murdoch’s terminal cancer diagnosis.

Fortunately, some of the special treatment afforded to Murdoch over the years was not in aid of his cause.

To secure some closure for Ms Lees and the Falconio family, former Attorney-General John Elferink introduced a “no body, no parole” law in 2016, which amounted to throwing away the key to Murdoch’s cell.

Publicly, Elferink denied the law was designed to keep Murdoch locked up forever, but when the law was waved through parliament, everybody knew Murdoch was being handed the life-without-parole sentence he had always deserved.

Originally published as Bradley Murdoch supporter and key witness in Peter Falconio murder trial declares killer ‘a p**ck of a man’