True Crime Society - Horror in the Outback – the murder of Peter Falconio

Peter Falconio is a British man who disappeared in outback Australia in July 2001. His remains have never been found. This story is absolutely terrifying and is the stuff of horror movies. If you’ve ever watched ‘Wolf Creek’, it’s loosely based on this case.

Peter was born Peter Marco Falconio on 20 September 1972. He has three brothers and he lived with his family in Hepworth, England. His parents are Joan and Luciano Falconio.

The other person involved in this story is Joanne Lees. Joanne was born on 25 September 1973. Her mother was Jenny and she was raised by her stepfather, Vincent. Vincent had a son from a previous relationship called Sam. The four of them lived in Huddersfield, England. Joanne worked as a bartender and a bacon packer, before getting a job as a travel agent.

Peter and Joanne met in 1996 in a nightclub in England. In 1997, the two moved in together in Brighton as that is where Peter was studying at university.

On 15 November 2000, Joanne and Peter left for a massive trip around the world. Their itinerary included Nepal, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia and Australia.

On 16 January 2001, they arrived in Sydney. They both had working holiday visas. It sounds like they worked to earn some more money, before departing on an Australian road trip on June 25, 2001. They planned to go to Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne, Adelaide, Darwin and Brisbane. They had purchased an orange Volkswagen Kombi campervan to use for their trip.

The trip went well until the evening of Saturday, 14 July 2001. At 7.30pm that night, they were travelling on the Stuart Highway, bound for the Devil’s Marbles. They were around 310kms/200 miles north of Alice Springs. Super remote.

Peter was driving at the time and Joanne was in the front passenger seat.

The two had noticed that a car had been following behind them since they stopped at a roadhouse in Barrow Creek. They kept waiting for this car to overtake them.

The highway throughout a lot of the desert is flat and two lanes – one each way, so overtaking is generally easy.

The car, which was a green Toyota 4WD Land Cruiser eventually ended up driving alongside them. The driver gestured ‘excitedly’ at them to pull over.

Peter did pull their vehicle over and he got out of the car and went to speak to the man. Joanne would later say “Pete was going to stop and I asked him not to.”

The man told Peter that he had seen sparks shooting out of the exhaust of the Kombi.

Joanne would later recount what happened next.

“Pete said cheers mate, thanks for stopping,” she said.

“He asked him if he’d noticed the sparks coming out of the exhaust all the time he had been following us.

Peter returned to the front of the Kombi. He got his cigarettes and asked Joanne to rev the engine, so he could check for the sparks.

“I didn’t really know what I was supposed to be doing as I was revving the engine,” she said.

“I kept revving the engine and stopping and then I heard a bang.

“At first it just sounded like a car backfiring.”

Joanne said that the car, which was 30 years old, had backfired a lot during their trip to date.

Seconds after the bang, the man appeared at her window, waving a gun at her.

Joanne said that she fought with the man and tried to kick him in the groin. The man managed to secure her hands behind her back with cable ties.

“I just kept thinking this was not happening to me. I couldn’t believe that this was happening. I felt alone. I kept shouting for Pete and thought I was going to die,” Joanne sobbed.

“I was more scared of being raped than being shot by the man,” she said.

“[Then] the realisation hit me that he might have killed Pete. I just got some energy from somewhere, some inner strength. My focus was just escaping, and that is what I concentrated on, just getting out of there.”

The man managed to drag her to the Toyota.

“He hit, punched me [in the head]. It stunned me.”

Joanne said the man pulled a sack over her head – which she managed to shake off – tried unsuccessfully to tape her mouth and forced her into the front of his four-wheel-drive utility, where a “broad, chunky dog” sat.

She said the man “somehow pushed me into the rear of his vehicle”.

Joanne said that while lying in the rear of the vehicle she asked the man “why he was doing this”.

“Did he want money? Did he want to rape me? He came back and he told me to shut up or he’d shoot me,” she said.

She said: “He went away and did something. I just kept thinking about Pete – had he shot Pete? – and just kept asking the man if he’d killed Pete and what he’d done to him.”

Joanne said that after hearing a noise like “gravel scraping on the ground, as if he was moving something”, she managed to slide out of the vehicle and drop to the ground.

Joanne ran into the brush nearby and hid from the man.

“I just thought, I am definitely going to die,” she said.

This clip gives you an idea of the landscape.

The assailant searched for Joanne. She said that he passed near her three times. She said he got as close as 18 inches [45 centimetres] for 10 to 15 seconds.

“I was looking at him and he was looking at me,” she said.

She hid under a bush for a “very long time”, trying not to breathe. Joanne said she heard the man searching for her before she heard more dragging noises, doors opening and closing and the vehicles being driven away.

“I thought, he’s come back to look for me,” she said.

“I just had no energy to get out of this situation.I just felt exhausted.”

She managed to flag down a truck driver at 12.35am, five hours after the ordeal started. That man took her back to Barrow Creek.

The police in Alice Springs were called at around 1.30am. Just to give you an idea of how remote the area is, Barrow Creek is around a 3 hour drive from Alice Springs.

Police arrived to start investigating at around 4.20am. The truck driver who helped Joanne took them back to the area where he found her and the search for Peter in that location started at around 7am.

Investigators found a dirt-covered pool of blood. The Kombi had been hidden around 80 metres or 262 feet off the road in scrub.

There was a delay in putting roadblocks on the highway in place. This would have meant that vehicles in the area were stopped and searched, but this did not happen until 8 hours after Joanne was rescued.

Aboriginal trackers were also called in to help search for Peter. This happened within days of the incident, but none of them found any evidence relating to Peter or the gunman.

This is some information about the use of trackers by police:

Since early times, government agencies, explorers, surveyors and members of the general public called upon the tracking abilities of Aboriginal men and women.

The skills of trackers were drawn from bush and hunting knowledge held by Aboriginal groups. A good tracker could pick up the smallest change in the landscape and quickly work out in which direction a person or animal was moving.

The lack of evidence that was found, as well as the sensational nature of the story, led many to start suspecting Joanne and her involvement in Peter’s death.

Joanne would later admit that her story had been altered. She would tell a court that she “started to doubt” herself after police told her there were no four-wheel-drive utilities that allowed access from the front cabin to the tray at the back.

She first told police that her attacker had forced her into the back of the vehicle through a space between the front seats.

“That’s what I believed at the time,” Joanne said. “It was after that interview [with police] that I started to doubt myself,” she said.

Joanne would later say that she could not recollect how she got from the front of the vehicle into the rear before managing to escape.

Joanne was also asked to help police produce an image of her attacker. This happened around 48 hours after the attack.

She could not say whether her attacker wore a hat. “I can’t see at that point because black against the black of night just sort of blends in,” she said. “I just saw his face and the gun.”

Pressed about telling police in 2001 that her attacker had worn a black baseball cap, she said: “I said that but it doesn’t mean he didn’t have a hat on.

“It just means that I didn’t register it or he may have had the hat on but I was just looking at his face, into his eyes and at the gun.”

Police released CCTV that had been taken at a Shell truck stop in Alice Springs, a few hours after the alleged murder. This showed a vehicle that was similar to the one Joanne had described.

Police hoped that this footage would mean that the person in the CCTV would come forward and remove themselves from suspicion in this case. That did not happen and investigators began to focus more on the vehicle involved. They investigated registered owners of 1991-1999 Toyota Land Cruisers and also started looking into tips. 36 men had been named by tipsters as resembling the man in the footage.

One of the men that police tracked down through this info was Bradley John Murdoch. He was first interviewed by police in Broome, Western Australia on 1 November 2001.

As some background into Bradley, he was born on 19 February 1958. He was born in Geraldton, Western Australia. He was an unexpected baby and had two older brothers who were 11 and 14 when he was born. His parents are Colin Murdoch – a mechanic, and Nancy – a hairdresser.

The family moved to Perth when Bradley was 12. He had problems adjusting to life in the city and soon became involved with a gang.

Bradley dropped out of high school at the age of 15. He moved back to Geraldton where he became involved in gang-related, criminal activities. He started his own trucking business at one point, but declared bankruptcy in 1983.

In 1980, Bradley met a woman named Dianne. They would get married in 1984 and they had a son together. By 1986, they were separated due to domestic violence issues.

By that point, Bradley was working as a truck driver aka illicit drug smuggler.

It has been said that he had white supremacist tendencies and had racist tattoos.

In terms of his criminal history, in 1980, when he was 21, Bradley received a suspended sentence after being convicted of causing death by dangerous driving, after hitting and killing a motorcyclist in South Australia.

In November 1995, he was imprisoned for 21 months. In August 1995, he was drunk and he started shooting at people who were celebrating at an indigenous Australian rules football grand-final match at Fitzroy Crossing in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. He was released after 15 months.

Jumping ahead slightly, in 2003, he was charged with two counts of rape of a 12-year-old girl at Swan Reach, South Australia, but was acquitted of those and other charges.

At the end of 2001, Joanne went home to England. After police first interviewed Bradley in relation to the Falconio case in 2001, no DNA sample was collected as there was nothing that immediately connected him to the case.

In May 2002, investigators caught a drug-smuggling accomplice, James Hepi, of Bradley’s. That person began to tell police of Bradley’s connection to the Falconio case. DNA was taken from Bradley’s brother and this tied Bradley to the scene.

In 2003, Bradley was arrested and charged with the murder of Peter Falconio. He was extradited from South Australia to the Northern Territory and at that point, DNA was taken. The sample matched DNA that had been found on Joanne’s t-shirt.

Bradley’s trial started in October 2005 and it concluded on 13 December, 2005. 81 witnesses were called. The jury consisted of six men, six women and three reserves.

The trial was so big that the court building was renovated prior, at a cost of $900k. This was to cope with the demands of the trial and also the huge media coverage that would ensue.

Bradley denied all involvement in the attack. He denied being in the area at the time.

Joanne came back to Australia to testify during the trial. She said that she identified Bradley as her attacker from photographs that had been shown to her. She confirmed that when she saw him face-to-face, that he was definitely her attacker.

During the trial, it was found that Bradley left Alice Springs at a time and traveled in the direction of Barrow Creek which indicated he was likely in the area at the time of the murder.

Expert testimony indicated that he was the man who was captured on CCTV at the Shell station. Bradley’s father and the business associate James Hepi both also corroborated this version of events at the trial.

Bradley’s DNA was found on a pair of homemade handcuffs that had been used in the attack, and as mentioned earlier, also on Joanne’s t-shirt.

The T-shirt DNA was found to be “150 quadrillion times more likely [to] belong to Murdoch” than anyone else.

His DNA was also found on the gearstick of the Kombi.

Bradley’s defense team tried to argue that the DNA could have been due to accidental blood transfer at a Red Rooster restaurant in Alice Springs, prior to Peter being attacked. Bradley said that he had stopped there to buy chicken for himself and his dog. Joanne said that at one stage, both she and Peter had also stopped there. They also tried to argue that it could have been planted.

On 13 December 2005, Bradley was found guilty by the jury in a unanimous verdict. He was sentenced to life imprisonment with a non-parole period of 28 years. He was also convicted of assault related charges on Joanne.

On 12 December 2006, Bradley appealed against his sentence in the Supreme Court. His team claimed that Joanne’s evidence was tainted because she had seen a photo of him online before she was interviewed by police.

His appeal was dismissed by the Northern Territory Court of Criminal Appeal in January 2007.

Bradley then applied for Special Leave to appeal to the High Court of Australia. This was refused in June 2007. It is believed that all avenues of appeal for him have now been exhausted.

There have been some later developments of note.

We mentioned earlier how Bradley said he purchased chicken at Red Rooster for himself and his dog. In 2006, The Bulletin reported that Bradley had refused to eat chicken in prison and said that he was allergic to it. He said he had a “prison dietitian assigned to create a special menu” due to this allergy, requesting that he never be served chicken.

A ‘no body, no parole’ law was brought into the Northern Territory in an effort to get Bradley to reveal where he put Peter’s body. It was speculated in 2007 that Bradley might reveal the location because he did not like the prison he was in and he would speak in exchange for a transfer. This never happened.

In April 2017, the NT News received an anonymous letter claiming that Bradley had “cut [Falconio]’s body up” and placed it in two large bags. The letter claimed that an associate was asked to dissolve the remains in acid and dispose of them in the Swan River in Perth, but the associate had instead gone past Geraldton and buried the bags unopened in remote Western Australia. The NT News forwarded the letter to Northern Territory Police, who said they were reviewing the letter.

In 2022, Peter’s mother Joan appealed to “anyone with a conscience” to reveal where her son’s remains are. On what would have been Peter’s 50th birthday, Joan said “Our pain is always with us. His life stopped on a lonely road. Shot dead by cowardly Murdoch, who will not reveal what he did with him. We want to bring Peter home where he belongs.”

Peter’s body has never been found “despite one of the most exhaustive police investigations ever seen in Australia”.