- Murdoch murdered backpacker Peter Falconio
- Never disclosed where he dumped the body
- Transferred to hospital for final days
Outback killer Bradley John Murdoch has been transferred from jail to palliative care for his final days.
Murdoch, 67, is receiving care at Alice Springs Hospital as he battles terminal throat cancer.
He is wheelchair-bound and ‘just about dead’, a source told NT News. It’s understood he visited Alice Springs Correctional Centre a final time earlier this month to say goodbye to his fellow prisoners, and has since been allowed on excursions around Alice Springs under guard.
The ruthless drug runner had been in jail for the past 20 years for shooting British backpacker Peter Falconio and tying up Mr Falconio’s girlfriend Joanne Lees before she made a harrowing escape on the night of July 14, 2001.
Murdoch had tricked the couple as they drove between Alice Springs and Darwin in their VW Kombi campervan.
After shooting Mr Falconio in the head, he threatened Ms Lees before he bound her hands behind her back with cable tie restraints and bundled her into the back of his ute.
But while Murdoch disposed of Mr Falconio’s body, Ms Lees managed to escape, running barefoot through the bush where she hid while Murdoch hunted for her with his dog.
Five hours after her boyfriend’s murder, Ms Lees eventually flagged down a truck and raised the alarm.
No trace of Falconio’s body has ever been found, and Murdoch has never provided as much as a clue.
The road trip-turned-outback nightmare has been the subject of multiple books, TV programs and documentaries, as well as wild theories about where Falconio’s body lies, and the fruitless searches for it.
Murdoch has steadfastly refused to end the mystery of what he did with Mr Falconio’s corpse, which remains one of the greatest riddles in Australian crime.
The only trace of Mr Falconio was a small blood stain on the tarmac of the highway where the shooting took place.
Murdoch has always denied being the killer, and protested his innocence throughout a murder trial which saw him convicted in December 2005 and sentenced to life imprisonment.
The former mechanic, who drove road trains and trucks across the Outback, lodged two unsuccessful appeals, and was refused special leave to appeal to the High Court of Australia in 2007.
His life sentence carried a non-parole period of 28 years, which would expire in 2032, but he can never walk free without revealing the location of Mr Falconio’s body under the Northern Territory’s ‘no body, no release’ laws.
However, Murdoch is now expected to die from cancer before the end of this year.
Mr Falconio’s mother broke a long silence about her son’s murder in 2022 to beg for information about the location of Peter’s body.
On what would have been his 50th birthday, Joan Falconio and husband Luciano, 80, issued a heartfelt plea backed by a demand for Northern Territory police to put up a $1million reward to fund a renewed hunt for her son’s body.
Despite several searches, including a five-day operation in 2019 when police emptied an outback well, Murdoch’s hiding place remains a mystery.
‘His life stopped on a lonely road… shot dead by cowardly Murdoch, who will not reveal where or what he did with him,’ Mrs Falconio said.
‘Our pain is always with us. We want to bring Peter home where he belongs, near his family.’
After arriving in Australia via Southeast Asia, Mr Falconio and Ms Lees visited Uluru and Alice Springs before driving 200km north to the Ti-Tree Roadhouse to watch the sunset as they smoked a cannabis joint.
They set off again, bound for the tourist attraction known as the Devil’s Marbles, before they noticed they were being followed by a white 4WD with a green canopy, which they expected to overtake them.
Around 7.30pm, the vehicle drew alongside and signalled for the couple to pull over, indicating there were flames supposedly coming from the back of their van.
Ms Lees could see a dog in the cabin next to the driver. Behind the wheel was Murdoch, a mechanic from Broome, who had no front teeth and a history of violence.
Mr Falconio got out of the van and Ms Lees heard a bang, and then the 4WD driver appeared at her window and forced her into the back of his vehicle.
However she escaped from under its canopy and dashed into the scrub.
At about 1am, believing Murdoch had given up looking for her, she came out and stopped a passing road train, whose driver took her to Barrow Creek Roadhouse.
Murdoch would not be charged in relation to Falconio’s murder until 2003.
He was arrested shortly after being acquitted in SA of the abduction and rape of a 12-year-old girl.
After a seven-week trial, Murdoch was found guilty after he denied murdering Mr Falconio and assaulting and attempting to kidnap Ms Lees.
Murdoch disputed the evidence of his DNA on Ms Lees’ T-shirt and on the gearstick of the Kombi, which police found dumped the morning after the murder, 80m into the bushes off the highway near Barrow Creek. In 2008, Ms Lees instructed NT Police to destroy the van, which she and Falconio had bought at a used car market in Sydney.
In the years since, as she dealt with her trauma, Ms Lees has given various interviews.
She also wrote No Turning Back, one of six books published about the case.
Cult horror movie Wolf Creek, a fictional film about a serial killer, was reportedly based on both Murdoch and backpacker murderer Ivan Milat.
Now aged in her early 50s, Joanne Lees has never married or had children following the tragic death of her boyfriend, and lives in a home she owns in Huddersfield, in West Yorkshire.
