On July 14th, 2001, 27-year-old English backpacker Joanne Lees flagged down a truck on a lonely stretch of the Stuart Highway in central Australia. She had a horror story to tell. According to Lees, in the dead of night, she and her boyfriend Peter Falconio had been attacked on the highway. She claimed Falconio had been shot and she had been bound before escaping into desert scrub.
Tapping into long held fears about the Australian outback, the story created a firestorm of tabloid headlines in the UK and Australia. International tourists stayed away from the Northern Territory as a massive police manhunt went nowhere for 16 months. That is until a tip-off led to a small-time drug runner, Bradley John Murdoch, being arrested. Murdoch flatly denied it all, but the jury disagreed and found him guilty of murder, sentencing him to life in prison.
For some experts and onlookers, the guilty verdict in Murdoch's murder trial has always felt clouded with doubt. In one of the most detailed re-investigations of the Falconio case ever mounted, Murder in the Outback: The Falconio and Lees Mystery, a new four-part series for Channel 4, will explore the details and the questions that surround this infamous case.
