Six months after Peter Falconio disappeared, Det Supt Colleen Gwynne huddled under a saltbush not far from Barrow Creek in Australia’s Northern Territory. As she watched the tail lights of her police car disappear down the Stuart Highway, Gwynne felt overwhelmed by the stillness of the desert.

She had returned to the place where the British backpacker and his girlfriend Joanne Lees were attacked to try to understand what Lees experienced that night. Crouched in the scrub, she looked out and imagined Lees cowering, her attacker not far away, searching for her.

“I felt extremely vulnerable out there,” Gwynne says. “I could hear my own heartbeat.

“That’s when it felt really real for me. I understood what this woman had been through and it was terrifying. What she endured and her fight for survival was just remarkable.”

In the darkness, Gwynne recalled the details of the crime: a Kombi van with two British backpackers headed north; a man in a white utility pulled off to one side of the highway, hazard lights blinking; a helpful Falconio coaxed to the rear of the vehicle; male voices discussing something about exhaust pipes and then a gunshot ringing through the night; a terrified Lees pulled from the front seat, stunned by a blow to the head, hands bound, forced into the ute; an anxious killer returning to Falconio’s body; a tiny, wild window of opportunity for Lees to scramble out into darkness and run to this very place, under the saltbush.

Police recreate the scene at the site of the ambush when Falconio and Lees pulled over to help Bradley Murdoch, who had broken down. Photograph: Brian Cassey/AP

Taking on the case

Six months earlier Gwynne was at home in Alice Springs when her phone rang: “Hey, boss, you better come to work. A bloke’s missing and his missus reckons someone’s shot him,” a young police officer said.

Gwynne knew this was no ordinary report and when she pulled into the station she expected to find an operations room set up and the buzz of a big case.

“Alarm bells rang for me straight away when I got there,” says Gwynne.

Gwynne wasn’t in the investigations squad and didn’t have a direct role in the case. Instead, she watched what she describes now as a response with “no clear direction”.

“My memory of the press conference is of Joanne Lees fronting the cameras with Cheeky Monkey plastered across her breasts. It was as if no one thought to ask ‘what would this look like to the world?’ The whole thing was embarrassing,” she says.

Within a week, Gwynne stopped watching the nightly news.

The Kombi van belonging Falconio and Lees was impounded as evidence. Photograph: Ian Waldie/AFP/Getty Images

Then in February 2002, six months after Falconio’s disappearance, Colleen Gwynne was promoted to superintendent, head of crime in Alice Springs. She knew what this really meant: she would be taking on the case.

“The reaction for me was a bit like when you go to a movie and you buy a big bag of lollies,” Gwynne recalls. “The blood sugar levels are high, and then all of a sudden you fall off the side and the low hits you.

“That’s what it was like for me. I was on that high. What a chance, what an opportunity! And all of a sudden, the sugar hangover hit. I was feeling pretty apprehensive.”

Gwynne knew that to solve the case she needed to bury herself in the detail of the crime.

“To deal with the anxieties, I worked day and night and I read every little piece of that case,” she says. “I was up until two or three in the morning, reading, reading, reading. After that, I knew what I needed to do … I had to put together a winning team.”

Joanne Lees leaves the Northern Territory supreme court in Darwin after Murdoch’s conviction for murder was handed down. Photograph: Rick Stevens/AP

Picking her side



There were more than a dozen people involved in the investigation when Gwynne took over the case and she began downsizing.

After watching and observing the team for a week, Gwynne worked out who would stay. The old-school detective who had worked in Alice Springs most of his life: “He went at his own pace, he was smart, he was methodical but he believed that something bad had occurred,” Gwynne says.

The second person Gwynne chose was a talented detective in her 30s who believed Lees was innocent. “She was tired of dealing with drug- and alcohol-induced violent crimes. She wanted something different and she was very committed to solving the case.”

The final team member was an intelligence officer who possessed unrivalled attention to detail.This rigour was exactly what Gwynne was looking for and, while she didn’t know it then, her last team pick would be vital in closing the case.

Surrounded by police, Bradley Murdoch arrives at Darwin airport from Adelaide in 2003. Photograph: David Hancock/AFP/Getty Images

Breakthrough

A breakthrough was desperately needed in the case. Gwynne tasked her team with finding a match for the DNA profile taken from Lees’s T-shirt and the gearstick of the Kombi. At the time there were 2,500 persons of interest. Near the top of the list was a diesel mechanic from Broome, known to police for outback drug running. He fitted Lees’s description and investigators had placed him in the area during the week of the attack. His name was Bradley John Murdoch.

Getting a DNA sample from a person of interest is no easy task. You need to find someone who doesn’t want to be found and then convince him or her to give you a sample. Gwynne knew if her team approached Murdoch directly he would go to ground.

“If he disappeared, we wouldn’t have found him,” she says. “He was an expert in disguise. He was constantly changing the look of his car. He would swap the mudflaps, the plates, the hubcaps and the canvas.”

So they decided to approach Murdoch’s brother, Gary. This was risky and they only had one shot at it, but Gwynne was confident after she learned there was a falling out between the siblings.

“I thought a lot about who could convince Gary to give us a DNA sample. In the end, I sent the young, quiet, female detective because I thought her approach would give us the best opportunity – and my intuition paid off.”

The forensic expert advised that the DNA from Lees’s T-shirt was 150 quadrillion times more likely to have come from Murdoch than someone else.

“I couldn’t believe we had a match. We now know who touched Joanne Lees on her shirt. We now know who touched the gear stick in the Kombi. It was Bradley John Murdoch.”

The press went crazy. Papers across the country homed in on Murdoch and Alice Springs was flooded with TV crews and British reporters.

“Bradley Murdoch knew we were on to him and he panicked. He started to escape and this man knows the bush like no other. We had a window of opportunity to find him and we knew that it was now a hunt.”

Police all over Australia were on the lookout for Murdoch and he may have eluded them if he hadn’t committed another crime.

On 28 August 2002 the South Australian police arrested him in the coastal town of Port Augusta, 300km north-west of Adelaide, for the suspected rape and abduction of a woman and her 12-year-old daughter. Gwynne listened in via speakerphone as they made the arrest.

“I felt a mixture of excitement and apprehension. We were now under enormous pressure. We had to be in a position where we could arrest him and transfer him to the Northern Territory should he be acquitted or bailed of the South Australian charges.”

In 2002 South Australian police arrested Murdoch in the coastal town of Port Augusta for the suspected rape and abduction of a woman and her 12-year-old daughter. Photograph: Tony Lewis/Getty Images

Meeting Murdoch

Shortly after his arrest, Gwynne and one of her colleagues flew down to meet Murdoch. “When we arrived at Yatala prison, my heart was beating like you wouldn’t believe,” she says.

“I was finally going to meet this man. There was an element of excitement too. I’d spent the entire previous night prepping for the interview. I was ready.”

But something was unsettling Gwynne, something she had been trying to suppress since the first time she saw an image of Murdoch.

“There was a remarkable resemblance between Murdoch and my father, who was the most intimidating and violent man, who made my upbringing a living nightmare.”

Gwynne knew that in facing Murdoch, she would also be confronting her own violent past. When they walked Murdoch into the cell, his size startled Gwynne.

“He stood over me with his tall, intimidating figure and I was so small under his frame. He was leaning in, yelling and spitting on my face. My past flashed before me and I knew Murdoch was playing a game of intimidation.”

It was then she found the strength to do something she hadn’t been able to as a child. “I never could stand up to my father but I wasn’t going to take a backwards step now. I played the game and I won. He took the first step back.”

Joanne Lees pictured with Peter Falconio. Photograph: PA

Meeting Joanne Lees

Gwynne was acutely aware that solving the case hinged on getting inside Lees’s head. Up until that point, it had been difficult for Gwynne to get a sense of her. Her original witness statement, taken on the night of the crime, had been lost, and subsequent statements lacked some clarity. According to Gwynne “ambiguity like this could discredit even the best witness”. So in November 2002 Gwynne travelled to the UK to reinterview Lees.

Gwynne always loved the British cop show The Bill. When she walked into Brighton’s Hove police station, the young man at the front desk looked up.

“Morning, guv, cuppa tea?”

Gwynne beamed: “Thanks, mate. One sugar.”

It got harder after that. The interview with a wary Lees stretched on for the best part of a day.

“This was a woman who had no trust. She thought we were a bunch of dickheads who had no idea how to solve a crime,” recalls Gwynne.

Gwynne tackled it head on by acknowledging the inadequacies in the case. She stressed that she was there to make amends, to hear Lees out on her own turf, in her own time. Slowly, Lees warmed up and she began to recount her memories of the attack. It took energy to revisit the violence and Gwynne had great respect for her courage. Afterwards it was as if they’d been through something immense.

“We spent this special time together … There were tears, there was laughter … and she renewed her confidence in the Northern Territory police and she was so happy that she gave me a rock from Brighton Beach. I’ve still got that rock.”

Luciano and Joan Falconio after the first day of the murder trial. Photograph: Rob Griffith/AP

‘We know who did this, and we’re going to convict him’

The following day Gwynne travelled to Huddersfield, Yorkshire, to visit Falconio’s parents.

“This was something I was really anxious about,” she says. “I didn’t know what I would find and I wasn’t sure they would want to see us.”

Gwynne had seen plenty of families racked by grief. She knew how it would play out before she knocked on the door. “Joan Falconio was so distraught she couldn’t get out of bed to talk to me. It took her an hour.”

The police officer sat with the family in their lounge room, talking, listening and drinking a lot of tea. “I drank about 30 cups of tea and went to the toilet about every four minutes. That’s a pretty good way to break the ice.”

When the small talk dried up, Gwynne took a deep breath and said what she had come to say: “We know who did this and we’re going to convict him.”

The words hung in the quiet of the room and Gwynne wondered whether she had promised too much. Then, Joan Falconio got up and hugged her.

“We had a moment and that bond has never left me … I knew I had to solve the case and if I couldn’t find Peter, then they wanted the person responsible found, and convicted. When I left Huddersfield that day, the pressure on me and the weight on me was enormous – the hope they had and the way they looked at me, like I was the one that was going to change things for them.”

This weight would bury Gwynne at times, forcing her to immerse herself in the case over and over again, to live and breathe the detail. But it lifted her too, urging her to keep going when closure looked unlikely.

Hair tie or trophy?

Gwynne’s team still didn’t have a body but the evidence was stacking up. Lees had identified Murdoch from a board of 12 people, police knew he had been in the Alice Springs area on the day of the attack and they had a DNA match. But was it enough to put him behind bars? Gwynne needed to be sure that they had found everything. She gathered her team together for “one last push at goals”.

“It was like being four behind in extra time. We knew we had to move fast or we’d be out.”

Then a detective – the one Gwynne had chosen for her acute attention to detail and who had sifted through thousands of Murdoch’s belongings – discovered a small, round, Mary Jane hair tie.

“It was the hair tie that was taken from Joanne Lees when she struggled to survive and keep her life. [Murdoch] had it wrapped around his shoulder holster, inside his belongings. I think it was a trophy but no one will ever know.”

Months later, when the hair tie was presented as evidence in the trial, it clearly made an impression on Murdoch.

“He recoiled and he wouldn’t touch it,” recalls Gwynne. “You could see that he knew that was it. That was the nail in his coffin.”

Best on ground

On 13 December 2005, four and a half years after he stopped the Kombi near Barrow Creek, Murdoch was convicted of the murder of Peter Falconio and the assault and abduction of Joanne Lees. He was given a mandatory life sentence with a minimum 28-year non-parole period.

Colleen Gwynne sat in the front row when the jury handed down their guilty verdict. After all those years of pursuit, the closure was overwhelming.

“I didn’t know how to feel,” says Gwynne. “I wanted to cry. I wanted to laugh. I felt numb.”

She scanned the courtroom for the woman she embraced back in Huddersfield. “There was Joan Falconio and she mouthed ‘thank you’ to me and I had to remove myself from the courtroom. The emotion was overwhelming and I had to find somewhere I could just cry.”

When she regained her composure, Gwynne stood, and she knew both the case and her career were over.

“That was the moment that marked the end of my police career. I would never equal such a challenge. It’s like being best on ground in consecutive grand finals. There’s nothing left after that.”

Walking away

These days Colleen Gwynne works as the Northern Territory children’s commissioner but she still thinks about the Falconio case and the profound impact it had on her life.

“For many years I wanted to forget the case. It’s not until recently that I felt the need to talk about the personal impact it had on me. It’s the Falconio family who I think about the most. They lost their son and brother under some devastating circumstances and their grief stays with me.”

In her new role, Gwynne works to make the Northern Territory a safer place for children and their families. Most of the time she feels worlds away from that desert saltbush and the prison cell at Yatala but occasionally she comes across a story and is reminded of something she has always known – that our pasts shape what we do and where we end up.

“My own story of growing up has compelled me to seek out work that looks at ways of addressing family violence. It’s only in the last couple of years that I’ve realised that we can turn our most difficult, personal challenges into things that are good. If I hadn’t taken on the Falconio case, I might not have made that realisation.”

Colleen Gwynne first shared her story at Spun: True Stories Told in the Territory