As Clarence Darrow said, “I have read some obituaries with great pleasure”. One such is the news that Bradley John Murdoch died of terminal throat cancer earlier this week. Let’s hope it was a long-drawn and painful end.
Not just for his crimes – which covered the grotesque gamut from drug-running, causing death by dangerous driving, shooting at a group of people and cold-blooded murder to, allegedly, rape, abduction and torture – but for the sadistic mental torture he exerted on his victims and their families, even from prison. Just days before Murdoch’s death, the father of murdered British backpacker Peter Falconio made one last plea for the killer to finally reveal the location of his son’s body.
Murdoch kept his smirking silence to the end.
Murdoch was convicted in 2005 over the murder of Falconio, 28, and the assault and attempted kidnap of the backpacker’s girlfriend, Joanne Lees, on a remote stretch of highway in the Northern Territory.
The young British couple had been driving along the Stuart Highway near Barrow Creek, north of Alice Springs, on July 14 2001, when they were flagged down and ambushed by Murdoch.
Murdoch shot Falconio dead and attempted to abduct Ms Lees. She was later able to escape, hiding in bushland for hours until she was able to wave down a passing road train.
Sentenced to life with a non-parole period of 28 years, Murdoch had refused to reveal where he hid Falconio’s body, and it has never been found.
Murdoch clearly enjoyed his reputation and the torment he was able to inflict, even at a distance.
The drug-peddling thug was convicted in December 2005. I went to every single court hearing Murdoch sat through, interviewed nearly everyone involved with the case, and closely traced his background and that of Falconio and Lees. I’m regularly interviewed for TV and radio, and by those documentary makers. And the one question I’m invariably asked is: Did he really do it? Surely, without the body, there’s always going to be doubt?
Well, no, there isn’t.
But, like Martin Bryant, deservedly rotting in Tasmania’s Risdon prison, Murdoch had no shortage of useful idiots and cretinous conspiracy theorists.
Murdoch relished the notoriety and the mad conspiracy theories that swirled around him to suggest his innocence.
When, in fact, there is no doubt that Murdoch was as guilty as sin.
Let’s get this straight: Murdoch did kill Falconio and did try to abduct Lees. There was DNA from Lees’ blood on Murdoch’s T-shirt. She described him with amazing accuracy for an identikit image. He was caught on CCTV at a truckstop close by the place where he’d intercepted the couple. In addition, he was discovered to have kept a trophy of the attack on Lees in his car in the form of her missing hair tie.
Murdoch was arrested with an arsenal of weapons. Even for an apparently simple supermarket trip, he was carrying a loaded gun in a shoulder holster and another concealed in the waistband of his trousers. His car was stocked with a shotgun, a rifle with telescopic sights, a crossbow, ammunition, night-vision goggles, knives, a cattle prod, handcuffs made from cable ties, rolls of tape and gloves.
Murdoch’s car matched the one seen in CCTV at a nearby service station shortly after the attack on the British backpackers, and his height matched that of the driver.
His DNA was found on a pair of homemade handcuffs used in the attack, on Ms Lees’ T-shirt and on the gearstick of the van the couple had been driving […]
The court has heard DNA found on Ms Lees’ bloodstained T-shirt worn on the night of the attack was 150 million billion times more likely to have come from Murdoch than from anyone else.
Anyone who tries to argue, against all evidence, that the DNA wasn’t Murdoch’s also has the major problem that Murdoch himself admitted it was.
[Murdoch] gave evidence the DNA may have gotten on her T-shirt when he visited the same Red Rooster restaurant as the couple that day.
Then there was the unintended confession.
As Murdoch told a snitch planted in his cell in the early days, he didn’t want his elderly widowed mum to know the truth about her youngest son. But after she died, what excuse could he have had for refusing to tell police the location of Falconio’s body, to allow his family to take him home for burial? Murdoch had been sentenced to life imprisonment with a non-parole period of 28 years and every appeal had been quashed. He had nothing further to lose by finally pinpointing the body. He knew how much more suffering he was inflicting on his victim’s grieving parents, and on Lees.
Instead, as Falconio’s mother told me, every time there was a knock at her door, every time the phone rang, she thought it might be news about her son. Can you imagine such pain?
And why would you want to compound it, by trying to paint such a monster as an innocent, archetypal, Aussie folk hero?
John Jarratt, the actor who has portrayed outback serial killer Mick Taylor in two Wolf Creek movies and a TV series, says real-life killer Bradley John Murdoch was “a belligerent arsehole” who may have refused to reveal the location of Peter Falconio’s body as a final insult.
“It could be his last little ‘up yours’ to cash out without telling anyone where the body is,” says Jarratt, 73, of the convicted murderer, who has died in custody aged 67. “He was a really nasty, horrible human being from all accounts.”
Jarratt is also adamant that ‘Mick Taylor’ was not based on Murdoch, nor Ivan Milat.
“It was honestly just a coincidence that [the movie] happened [around the same time as Murdoch’s trial], but it’s always cast its ugly shadow on Wolf Creek.”
But at least the movie has the excuse of not even pretending to not be a work of fiction, nor Jarratt anything but an actor playing pretend.
The useless idiots who perpetuate Murdoch’s final insult have no such excuse.
