During one stop Murdoch chained the woman to a chair. She screamed as he massaged moisturiser onto her breasts and approached her with a cattle prod, then sexually assaulted her. But Murdoch was experiencing dramatic mood swings. Inexplicably he gave the mother and daughter $1000 and allowed them to get out of his vehicle at a service station in Port Augusta, telling them: “You could make some money out of this if you went to the media.” One reason the jury acquitted Murdoch of the charges is that the woman, a former prostitute, and her daughter did not immediately go to the police. When they arrested Murdoch in a Woolworths store in the town on August 28, 2002 he was carrying a loaded gun in a shoulder holster and another concealed in the waistband of his trousers. Police said he could not reach for the guns when confronted because he was carrying groceries. A policeman carrying a shotgun kicked him to the ground and other officers fell on him, ending one of the biggest manhunts in Australian criminal history. A shotgun, a rifle with telescopic sights, a crossbow, ammunition, night-vision goggles, knives, a cattle prod, handcuffs made from cable ties, rolls of handcuffs made from cable ties, rolls of tape, gloves, tins of cannabis, and a large amount of cash were found in his vehicle, police said. Bradley John Murdoch, 47, was born in the small West Australian town of Northampton, about 450 kilometres north of Perth. His father, who died last April, and mother were middle-class, kindly and hard-working. Murdoch knocked about the bush most of his life, “pulling spanners, mechanical work. Bit in the fishing trade, mainly around transport and truck driving.” He was tough, foul-mouthed, with his front teeth missing and his arms covered in tattoos. He admitted using amphetamines while driving trucks, and not paying his taxes. But he was almost 40 when he had his first serious brush with the law on the day of the 1995 football grand final in the WA town of Fitzroy Crossing, 350 kilometres north-east of Broome. Several hundred Aboriginal people were celebrating victory and refused to move from a bridge across the Fitzroy River. They had partied all night and so had Murdoch who, denied passage, drove 25 kilometres to a cattle station where he was working, collected a .308 bolt-action rifle and a .22 lever-action Magnum with telescopic sights, returned to the bridge and opened fire on the parked cars. One bullet came so close to an Aboriginal woman’s head she felt the rush of air as it passed. A judge sentenced Murdoch to 15 months’ jail for the shootings and an extra six months because the rifles he used were stolen. The judge said Murdoch, who had been beaten up several times by Aboriginal people when he was a boy, had a “long-standing hatred of Aborigines [sic]”. One of his tattoos shows an Aboriginal man hanging from a noose. Eighty per cent of the inmates of Darwin’s jail, where Murdoch will serve his time, are Aboriginal. After his release from jail for the Fitzroy Crossing offences Murdoch got a job as a diesel mechanic in Broome, where he lived in a caravan behind the business before moving to other addresses in the town. By all accounts he was a fastidious person and was always tinkering with his beloved vehicles. In the late 1990s – “maybe ’98, ’99, somewhere around that time” – he met drug trafficker James Hepi in the Satay Hut in town. “Hepi was leaving Broome and he had a couple of clients there that he wanted to look after,” Murdoch said. The two men went into business together. The business was drugs, large amounts of marijuana grown near Adelaide, where Hepi owned a property. Hepi and Murdoch shared making the long trips from South Australia to Broome to deliver the drugs. But by late 2001 Murdoch and Hepi had a bitter falling out over drugs and money. Hepi testified that Murdoch became paranoid, was not pulling his weight with the driving, and was scared of crossing state borders. Hepi accused Murdoch of dobbing him in to police. Murdoch accused Hepi of framing him for the Falconio murder. “You’re a f---ing liar,” Murdoch said to Hepi in court. “F--- you,” Hepi retorted. Hepi wants to collect the $250,000 reward for information leading to the conviction of Falconio’s killer. Sitting flanked by two security guards in the glass-enclosed dock of the court in Darwin throughout the trial, Murdoch often shook his head and muttered his disagreement when many of his former acquaintances, workmates, girlfriend and business partner testified against him. He attempted to intimidate two women television journalists covering the case, calling them “blonde bitches” and mocking them in court. In public, only long-time girlfriend Jan Pittman has remained loyal to him, sitting through the long days of testimony and legal argument in the humid months leading to the Top End’s monsoon season. “He didn’t do it,” she said. Lawyers raised questions at the trial that will continue to be debated. Why hasn’t Peter Falconio’s body been found? What was the motive for the crimes? Did police plant evidence to incriminate Murdoch? Could Murdoch drive 1800 kilometres in 18 hours to avoid police roadblocks? Why was there only a small pool of Falconio’s blood at the crime scene? What happened to the gun and the spent bullet? Could Peter Falconio have “disappeared himself”? But the Crown had even more compelling questions. Among them were: How could Murdoch’s DNA have got on the back of Lees’s T-shirt if he was not the killer? It was 150 quadrillion times more likely to have come from Murdoch than someone else, forensic experts said. That was the most powerful evidence against Murdoch. And Lees could not be shaken from her identification of Murdoch as her attacker. “I’d recognise him anywhere,” she said. Falconio’s murder was unprovoked, swift and callous. The circumstantial evidence presented at the trial overwhelmingly pointed to Murdoch having pulled the trigger, despite his strenuous denials. Some police suspect it was not Murdoch’s first killing in the outback, where he had roamed with impunity for years and where there have been scores of mysterious disappearances. The outback crimes of a mechanic called Bradley John Murdoch, 47 On Tuesday a jury in the Northern Territory Supreme Court found Bradley Murdoch guilty of the murder of British backpacker Peter Falconio four years ago. The jury took eight hours to convict Murdoch, who was also found guilty of abducting and assaulting Joanne Lees, Falconio’s girlfriend. The judge, Chief Justice Brian Martin, told him: “You have been found guilty by a jury of the crime of murder. There is only one judgement that is practised by the law in the Northern Territory, and that is imprisonment for life.” The minimum term to be served by Murdoch will be set at a later date. Murdoch, a 47-year-old mechanic and drug runner from Broome, Western Australia, flagged down the couple’s campervan on a remote stretch of highway north of Barrow Creek, about 320 kilometres from Alice Springs, on July 14, 2001. He shot Falconio dead before threatening Lees, now 32, with a gun and tying her up. She managed to escape from his truck and hid in the bush for five hours before flagging down a passing truck on the Stuart Highway. Falconio’s body has never been found, but a pool of his blood was discovered at the side of the highway. Martin said: “The absence of a body is not a bar to a guilty verdict of murder.” Lees has urged Murdoch to tell her and the Falconio family what he had done with the backpacker’s body.