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Could one of Australia’s most infamous “no body” homicides be solved by science?
The audacious premise of two scientists – one a UK geoforensic crime site expert, the other a former FBI profiler – is that British backpacker Peter Falconio’s lonely gravesite can still be found 25 years after his murder at the hands of Bradley Murdoch, who never revealed his victim’s last resting place.
Dr Mark Harrison, a former UK national police search adviser and international consultant in “no body” homicide cases, and US-based profiler Kathy Canning-Mello say they have narrowed down probable sites to a very few locations, using environmental site analysis and offender behaviour characteristics that would influence Murdoch’s choice of body disposal sites.
Harrison, who visited the crime scene in the mid-2000s for the UK government and NT Police, says the vast and desolate nature of the original search area – which effectively included a 500-kilometre stretch of the Stuart Highway – was daunting.
“It has previously worked against the case [but] can actually be turned on its head and work for the case … It’s almost as if time has stood still. It’s preserved and therefore Peter is there to be found.”
Harrison and Canning-Mello spent several weeks in the Northern Territory late last year visiting prospective sites for a two-part documentary Outback Terror: The Falconio Murder, which airs on Nine, the owner of this masthead, on the anniversary of Falconio’s disappearance on Tuesday.
In the documentary, Harrison describes soil types that impact on body disposal and the lasting nature of skeletal remains in dry conditions.
He expresses hope that a canine search expert could train a dog specifically to locate the type of remains that might lie in one of two selected sites in particular.
“This isn’t simply a documentary looking back at a famous crime,” he says.
“It’s an active investigation using enhanced behavioural and geoforensic techniques that have evolved dramatically over the past two decades and have had success in locating victims.”
Falconio was shot dead on a remote stretch of the Stuart Highway, in central Australia, after he and his girlfriend Joanne Lees were coerced into pulling over in their combi van by Murdoch, a stranger who had been following them at night in his white utility.
Murdoch killed Falconio before tying Lees with homemade handcuffs, but when she fought him and escaped into the bush to hide, Murdoch drove off with her boyfriend’s body.
Shortly after Murdoch’s conviction and life sentence in December 2005, Lees told a packed media conference in Darwin, that “on a lonely stretch of outback highway, a stranger murdered the man I loved and forever changed the way I would see the world”.
She said Murdoch “should seriously consider telling me, Joan and Luciano (Falconio’s parents) and Pete’s brother what he has done with Pete”.
Footage released by the NT Police last week shows an aggressive Murdoch – who died weeks later in July last year – denying any knowledge of the burial site. At the time, police increased to $500,000 a reward for information that can lead to Falconio’s remains.
Canning-Mello, a three-decade veteran of the FBI’s Behavioural Analysis Unit and expert in sex-related abduction cases, says Murdoch’s impulsive criminal behaviour suggests he hastily disposed of Falconio’s body after his planned abduction and likely rape of Lees went wrong.
“So the first site Mark and I identified is an abandoned racecourse track close to the crime scene, the failed abduction site so to speak,” he says.
“We feel like it’s a place that would have been familiar to Murdoch, a truck driver who knew the Stuart Highway and was running drugs from Adelaide back to Broome.
“We think he would have taken Joanne there to sexually assault her because what we know about sexually motivated abductors is that they take their victim to a location not that far from the initial abduction site, because their whole point is to be sexually gratified. The adrenaline is pumping.”
Canning-Mello says she believes Joanne Lees was targeted by an obsessed Murdoch from the time he spotted the couple in a takeaway restaurant in Alice Springs.
“He’s had that obsession from around noon that day, he decides to follow them right up to the fateful encounter on the Stuart Highway.”
A second site identified by the expert pair is a disused ‘borrow pit’, or quarry for road construction, on the Tanami Track that leads to Broome, where Murdoch lived at the time.
“He would have driven by that site many, many times, would have known it as a location that he could take the victims to and not fear anybody finding a body,” Canning-Mello says.
She says the reason why that site became a consideration is due to Murdoch’s behaviour in an alleged 2002 crime prior to his arrest for the Falconio murder.
He was charged with abducting and raping a 12-year-old girl and assaulting her mother in South Australia, although a court acquitted him.
“He used the same kind of handcuffs and drove them to a mined area some distance from where he was living,” Canning-Mello says.
“Past behaviour being predictive of future behaviour, we considered the mine site a viable location for Peter’s burial, especially as it relates to where Murdoch would have had to travel on his way back to Broome later that evening.”
The disused racecourse was included in the original area searched thoroughly by NT Police.
But Charlotte Hobson, the documentary’s director, says her hope is that the police “would support a comprehensive geoforensic search of the sites identified by the experts”.
“It is not a hopeless case. The one thing that I hope the family feels is some sort of hope that Peter’s remains could be found in the near future with the skills that Mark and Kathy have brought to this case.”
Canning-Mello says she deeply admires Joanne Lees and regrets the anguish she suffered when initial speculation wrongly implicated Lees in her own boyfriend’s murder.
“In fact it’s a remarkable masterclass that Joanne delivered in how to avoid being murdered,” she says.
“Through sheer wits, intelligence and self-belief she knew she needed to flee into the outback, where she hid for four hours before flagging down a truck. And that’s what saved her.”
She said Murdoch’s refusal to reveal his victim’s disposal site was due to “many aspects of psychopathy – a lack of empathy, no concern at all for human life, and no feelings of conscience or guilt”.
“Also, this is a person who has never accepted responsibility for anything he’s ever done. It’s always somebody else’s fault.
“His whole life was a failure – he even got kicked out of an outlaw motorcycle club.
“However, he successfully killed and buried Peter Falconio in a place that has never been recovered. So for him, he’s going to take pride in that.
“When Mark talked to me initially about this case, my first thought was we need to try to get Peter back to his family so they can make the decisions about how they want to honour him.
“And so that Murdoch doesn’t have that power anymore.”
Outback Terror: The Falconio Murder, will premiere on Nine, the owner of this masthead, at 8.30pm/9.30pm on Tuesday, July 14.
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