Territory murder of British backpacker Peter Falconio continues to intrigue public

THERE’S nothing like a good miscarriage of justice to get the investigative juices flowing. Righting wrongs hits the sweet spot because it makes a difference — and gets an audience. The one thing better than a well-told whodunit is the who-really-dunit

THERE’S nothing like a good miscarriage of justice to get the investigative juices flowing. Righting wrongs hits the sweet spot because it makes a difference — and gets an audience. The one thing better than a well-told whodunit is the who-really-dunit, complete with a wrong-guy-in-jail twist to embarrass people in high places.

True crime is an equal opportunity caper. In Australia, we have literary grandees like Helen Garner who spend thousands of hours honing forensic accounts of foul play. The daddy of them all is John Bryson’s Evil Angels, a thread-by-thread unravelling of the Azaria Chamberlain case that is the local yardstick for every real or imagined legal debacle caused by lazy coppers, inexpert expert witnesses, cynical lawyers and dozy jurors.

At the other end of the market are armchair detectives turned “authors”: the needy, the greedy and the gullible, jumbling together selected facts, idle gossip, innuendo and irrelevant or prejudicial “background” to confect an angle.

It’s a crowded field, and polished writers, professional reporters, hungry hacks, rank amateurs and crazy cranks are drawn to the same cases — which is why so many books of wildly varying quality were written about the notorious Falconio case of 2005.

The ambush of the young British couple, Peter Falconio and Joanne Lees, on a lonely Territory highway — with Falconio’s chilling disappearance and presumed murder — had all the elements to titillate an international audience: a premeditated killing, a vanished body and the terrifying abduction and miraculous escape of a beautiful young woman in the outback.

Bradley John Murdoch arrives under police escort at Darwin Airport to face murder charges in 2003. PICTURE: Patrina Malone

The crime riveted public attention. So it’s hardly surprising one-time celebrity defence lawyer Andrew Fraser, abetted by his friend Victor Susman, has invested much time building a de facto defence case for the man convicted of the crime, Bradley John Murdoch.

Murdoch is a piece of work. At 21, he was convicted of causing death by dangerous driving. In 1995, he served 15 months’ jail for shooting at indigenous people in the Kimberley. When he was arrested soon after the Falconio abduction for a depraved double abduction and child rape in South Australia, he seemed a candidate for almost anything.

Murdoch was accused of abducting a friend and her 12-year-old daughter in rural South Australia, far south of where Falconio disappeared on the Stuart Highway near Barrow Creek.

Not that distance was an issue: he regularly crisscrossed the continent, running drugs to the north. And he took amphetamines as well as selling them, a factor in his often erratic behaviour. Murdoch would subsequently be acquitted of raping the child and assaulting her mother.

Despite this, the rape case threw up damaging information against the nomadic truck driver and mechanic. The girl’s mother called him a “dangerous animal” obsessed with guns and drugs — and said he had been “paranoid” about police blaming him for the Falconio murder.

Fraser and Susman, not lacking chutzpah, argue all this makes Murdoch an ideal scapegoat in the Falconio case.

They make the plausible (and convenient) point that a lawless loner with a violent streak was a godsend for baffled Territory police under pressure to charge someone with a crime that was an international embarrassment and bad for the tourist trade. If a croc eats a backpacker, tourism doesn’t suffer. Not so with tourist murders.

English tourists Peter Falconio and girlfriend Joanne Lees. PICTURE: Supplied

It’s tempting for conspiracy theorists to claim the Falconio case is the Chamberlain disaster all over again — a temptation the crusading pair of investigators don’t resist.

Neither does the Ten Network, whose current affairs show, The Project, has recently aired carefully filtered parts of the Fraser-Susman research — it seems its lawyers and producers won’t risk airing material likely to invite lawsuits and criticism.

Fraser and Susman have combed police and prosecution material. They are convinced they’ve found enough gaps in the story to warrant a fresh inquiry. They say Murdoch has been convicted mainly on circumstantial evidence. And they have found a way to undermine the key forensic evidence against him.

Professor Barry Boettcher, the forensic expert famous for discrediting the “foetal blood” evidence that unjustly convicted Lindy Chamberlain in 1982, has taken aim at the most damning scientific evidence against Murdoch: the contention his DNA was found on Lees’ T-shirt. If you believe DNA is infallible, it’s case closed. But as shown in several botched cases, DNA is a scientific tool as fallible as the humans using it.

In Australia there have been DNA debacles in recent years. One was when the Victorian homicide squad confidently leaked that a prisoner already serving time, Russell Gesah, had been identified by DNA tests “proving” he killed mother and daughter Margaret and Seana Tapp at Ferntree Gully in 1984. Unfortunately, Gesah was provably nowhere near Ferntree Gully in 1984.

In another laboratory bungle, a Somali youth named Farah Jama was wrongly jailed in 2008 for the rape of a woman he had never met, in a nightclub he was too young to be admitted to, in a Melbourne suburb he had never visited.

Before Fraser’s well-publicised downfall over cocaine, he won many acquittals by persuading juries a conviction would be unsafe because guilt hadn’t been proven beyond reasonable doubt. He believes the doubt cast by Prof Boettcher is one of several points that would overturn Murdoch’s conviction … if he were ever granted a retrial.

The chances of that, at this stage, are about a snowball’s in Hell — or in Darwin, which is where Murdoch will spend the next 15 years in jail.