Girlfriend 'picked out photo of Falconio murder suspect'
The girlfriend of a British backpacker killed in the Australian outback more than four years ago identified her attacker to police in the year after her attack, a court heard today.
Joanne Lees looked at a selection of photos shown to her by police in Sussex and pointed to the man she said attacked her and killed Peter Falconio, 28, on a remote highway north of Alice Springs in the country’s red centre on July 14, 2001.
Bradley Murdoch, 47, of Broome, Western Australia, denies murder, depriving Miss Lees of her personal liberty and unlawfully assaulting her in aggravating circumstances at the Northern Territory Supreme Court in Darwin.
The court was shown a police video taken at Hove police station on November 18 2002 of an interview between Miss Lees, Det Insp Phil Warner from Sussex Police and two female detectives from the Northern Territory.
In the short video Miss Lees was shown a series of passport-style photos of men and, within a minute, pointed to one of them and without hesitation told police: “I think it’s number 10“.
In court in Darwin today, the judge, Chief Justice Brian Martin, told Miss Lees that “I think” could mean a number of things and asked her how sure she was that the man she identified was her attacker.
“I was very positive,” she said.
Earlier she told the court that in the days following the attack she felt pressured, vulnerable and did not sleep for days.
After being rescued she was taken to a Barrow Creek pub, around 10km away from where the attack happened, where she stayed the night before being interviewed by police the next day. She was then taken to Alice Springs where she worked throughout the night of July 15 to produce a “comfit” image of her attacker.
But she said she was not confident about the hair on the picture, as it was “not quite right“.
Miss Lees, 32, of Brighton, told the court: “I felt pressure to get some photo out there to the public so people could be looking for this person.”
She said: “The police, they left me in the care of a woman I didn’t know. I had only met her at Barrow Creek. I didn’t know her or her family. I didn’t feel entirely safe or secure, I still felt vulnerable.
“I didn’t sleep. I was afraid of the dark so I just always slept with the light on. I didn’t sleep for days, I just rested.”
Wearing a light blue skirt and white blouse, Miss Lees told the court that in March 2002 she agreed to take part in an interview with Martin Bashir, for which she was paid £50,000.
Asked why by director of public prosecutors Rex Wild QC, she said: “Having left Australia I felt desperate and helpless.
“I wasn’t receiving much communication from the police and I was aware that the task force had been reducd and people weren’t concentrating their efforts or I felt they weren’t trying to find Pete and had forgot about the investigation.
“It was my way of raising the profile and trying to find some publicity again.
“I was told that it would be shown in Australia and that there would be numbers for the viewers to ring in if they had information.”
She said she had turned down “hundreds” of other offers for interviews out of a fear of prejudicing the court case.
Later, Miss Lees told the court that she was shown a CCTV image of a man at a truck stop in Alice Springs by police that she had said was “too old” to be her attacker, but asked if she had a different view now, she said: “Yes, that it’s the man who attacked me.”
Asked why she had changed her mind, she said: “The police were able to show me a better quality picture.”
The court also heard that on October 10 2002 while she was working in Sicily, a friend told her to look at a story on the BBC News website, which contained a report on the case and a picture of a man.
Asked by the judge, Chief Justice Brian Martin, whether she expected to see a photograph of a suspect of a man who might be the person who attacked her, she said: “No.”
She said the picture, which was 1.5 by 2.5 inches, was “clearer” than one she had earlier been shown by police.
She told the judge: “I didn’t really study the photograph of the man for long. I just knew that it was him.”
Miss Lees was also shown three pictures of different dogs. She said one of them was a dog called Tex she met at the Barrow Creek pub where she was taken after being rescued and that it looked similar to her attacker’s dog.
The second was one of a blue healer in a “dogalogue” – a book containing pictures of dogs – that she told police also looked similar to her attacker’s; and the third was a photo of a different dog that the court heard resembled a dalmatian and also looked similar to her attacker’s.
Asked by Mr Wild why she did not pick out a picture of a dalmatian in the dogalogue, she said: “I regard dalmatians as friendly, floppy eared and they always remind me of the film 101 Dalmatians and I don’t think of them as an Australian dog.
“And the dog the man had that night was clearly an Australian dog, a blue healer, a breed that I had never recognised or seen before.”
Talking of the third picture, she said: “It was similar to Tex, the dog that I had identified as similar to the dog at Barrow Creek.
“It’s like the dog the man (her attacker) had.”
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