Falconio murder TV series: ‘Crap’ isn’t a strong enough word for it

Channel 7’s series Murder in the Outback: The Falconio and Lees Mystery is muck-raking at its hurtful worst.

Peter Falconio and Joanna Lees

Paul Toohey wrote the book on the Peter Falconio murder. Not the first book or even the second, which appeared within a week of Bradley Murdoch’s conviction and were little more than joyless compilations of their writers’ daily court reports. Toohey missed his deadline by a year, but when he delivered The Killer Within, you learned all sorts of things about all sorts of things. By the by, you learned that the jury got it right.

A Darwinite, Toohey saw his quarry clearly. “There are Murdochs all across northern Australia and they run to type: fastidious men with pissed-off, resentful minds,” he wrote, itemising the utes these Murdochs drive, the drugs they traffic and ingest, the dogs they keep, the guns they carry, the knives they favour, the stones they choose to sharpen those knives, and the CRC goop they use to keep those stones honest. Where other writers relied on Red Centre cliches for their cut-and-paste colour, Toohey rubbed his nose in the dirt, ran down Murdoch’s cronies, and came up gloriously filthy. What he produced was an example of long-form journalism at its finest.

But Channel 7’s series Murder in the Outback: The Falconio & Lees Mystery is muckraking at its hurtful worst.

There is no mystery here. Bradley Murdoch killed Peter Falconio on the Stuart Highway just north of Barrow Creek on the night of July 14, 2001. Falconio’s girlfriend Joanne Lees, the traumatised witness, hid in the scrub while Murdoch and his dog hunted her. She survived and behaved strangely after that, naturally. Only a moron would suggest she was in on it.

Toohey is a taciturn man. Not wishing to vex the old scrote, I asked him for a word on the TV series, one word and no more. Crap was the word I expected, and truly, it would have been a kindness. But Toohey was feeling expansive. “Balderdash,” was his considered reply.