Documentary revives search for remains in Australia’s Northern Territory

Could one of Australia’s most infamous “disembodied” murders be solved by science?

The bold assumption by two scientists, one a UK geoforensic crime scene expert and the other a former FBI profiler, is that the lonely graveyard of Brit backpacker Peter Falconio may still be found in the hands of Bradley Murdoch, who has never revealed his victim’s final resting place, even 25 years after his murder.

Former UK national police search advisor and international consultant on “corpseless” murder cases, Dr. Mark Harrison and US-based profiler Kathy Canning-Mello say they narrowed down possible locations to a very small number of locations using environmental site analysis and criminal behavior characteristics that would influence Murdoch’s choice of body disposal site.

Harrison, who visited the scene on behalf of the UK government and NT Police in the mid-2000s, says the vast and desolate nature of the original search area, which included 500 kilometers of the Stuart Highway, was daunting.

“He had previously worked against the case [but] it can actually be reversed and work for the cause… It’s like time has stopped. It has been preserved, and that is why Peter will be found there.”

Harrison and Canning-Mello spent several weeks in the Northern Territory late last year visiting possible locations for a two-part documentary Country Terror: The Murder of FalconioIt will air on Nine, the owner of this byline, on Tuesday, the anniversary of Falconio’s disappearance.

In the documentary, Harrison describes the types of soil that affect body clearance and the persistent nature of skeletal remains in dry conditions.

He expresses hope that a canine search expert could specifically train a dog to find the type of remains that might be found in one of two selected areas.

“This isn’t just a documentary looking at a famous crime,” he says.

“This is an active investigation using advanced behavioral and geoforensic techniques that have improved dramatically over the last two decades and have been successful 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 forced to pull over in their combi van by Murdoch, a stranger who had been following them in his white vehicle at night.

Murdoch killed Falconio before tying Lees up with homemade handcuffs, but when she fought him off and fled into the bush to hide, Murdoch drove off with her boyfriend’s body.

Shortly after Murdoch was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment in December 2005, Lees told a packed media conference in Darwin: “On a lonely highway in the outback, a stranger killed the man I loved and changed the way I looked at the world forever.”

He said Murdoch “should seriously consider telling me, Joan, Luciano (Falconio’s parents) and Pete’s brother what he did to Pete.”

Footage released by NT Police last week showed him weeks later denying any knowledge of the grave site of gunman Murdoch, who died in July last year. At the time, police raised the reward to $500,000 for information leading to Falconio’s remains.

Canning-Mello, a three-decade veteran of the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit and an expert on gender-related kidnapping cases, says Murdoch’s impulsive criminal behavior suggests he hastily disposed of Falconio’s body after his planned kidnapping and possible rape of Lees went awry.

“So the first location Mark and I identified was an abandoned racecourse track close to the scene of the crime, the site of the botched kidnapping, so to speak,” he says.

“We think this is a place that would be familiar to truck driver Murdoch, who knew the Stuart Highway and dealt drugs from Adelaide to Broome.

“We think he took Joanne there to sexually assault her because what we know about sexually motivated kidnappers is that they take their victims not far from the initial abduction site because their main goal is to be sexually satisfied. The adrenaline is pumping.”

Canning-Mello says she believes Joanne Lees was targeted by an obsessed Murdoch from the moment she spotted the couple in a takeaway restaurant in Alice Springs.

“He’s been obsessed with this since noon that day. He decides to follow them until the inevitable encounter on the Stuart Highway.”

The second site identified by the expert pair is a disused ‘borrow pit’, or quarry used for road construction, on the Tanami Road leading to Broome, where Murdoch lived at the time.

“He would stop by there many times, he knew it was a place where he could take victims and not be afraid of anyone finding a body,” Canning-Mello says.

He says the site came into the spotlight because of Murdoch’s behavior in an alleged crime in 2002, before he was arrested for Falconio’s murder.

He was accused of kidnapping and raping a 12-year-old girl in South Australia and assaulting her mother, but the court acquitted him.

“He used the same type of handcuffs and drove them into a mined area some distance from where he lived,” says Canning-Mello.

“As past behavior is indicative of future behavior, we considered the mine site to be an appropriate location for Peter’s funeral, particularly in relation to where Murdoch would have had to go on his return to Broome that evening.”

The disused racetrack was incorporated into the original site, which was thoroughly searched by NT Police.

But the documentary’s director, Charlotte Hobson, says she hopes police will “support a comprehensive geoforensic survey in areas identified by experts”.

“This is not a hopeless case. The one thing the family feels is that there is some sort of hope that with the skills that Mark and Kathy brought to this case, Peter’s remains may be found in the near future.”

Canning-Mello says she has a deep admiration for Joanne Lees and regrets the pain she felt after initial speculation wrongly linked Lees to her own boyfriend’s murder.

“It’s actually a remarkable master lesson from Joanne on how to avoid getting killed,” he says.

“With his calm wit, intelligence and self-belief, he knew he had to escape to the country, where he hid for four hours before stopping a truck. And that’s what saved him.”

He said Murdoch’s refusal to disclose the location of his victim’s disposal was “due to many aspects of psychopathy: lack of empathy, complete lack of concern for human life, and no sense of conscience or guilt”.

“Also this is a person who has never accepted responsibility for anything he has done, it is always someone else’s fault.

“His whole life was a failure; he even got kicked out of an illegal motorcycle club.

“However, he successfully killed Peter Falconio and buried him where he was never found. So for him, he’ll be proud of that.”

“When Mark first talked to me about this case, my first thought was that we should try to return Peter to his family so they could decide how they wanted to honor him.

“And so Murdoch no longer has that power.”

Country Terror: The Murder of Falconio, will premiere This imprint is on Nine, on Tuesday, July 14 at 20.30/21.30.