Bradley John Murdoch was born in Geraldton, Western Australia, on October 2, 1958. He worked as a mechanic and a long-distance driver and had convictions including shooting at a crowd of Aboriginal people at a football match in 1995. He ran cannabis between South Australia and Western Australia in a modified Toyota Land Cruiser.
On the night of July 14, 2001, Peter Falconio, twenty-eight, and his girlfriend Joanne Lees were driving a camper van north of Barrow Creek on the Stuart Highway when a man flagged them down, saying there were sparks coming from their exhaust. Falconio went to the back of the van with him. Lees heard a shot. The man then bound her wrists with cable ties and put her in his vehicle, and she got out and hid in the scrub for five hours while he searched with a torch and a dog, before flagging down a road train.
Falconio was never found. The case became enormous in Britain and Australia, and a substantial part of the coverage consisted of publicly doubting Joanne Lees, whose account was picked over for four years and who was widely treated as a suspect by the press. Her account was correct in every particular that could later be tested.
Murdoch was identified by DNA on the gearstick of the van and on the cable ties, and by CCTV from a truck stop at Alice Springs. He was convicted in December 2005 and given life with a minimum of twenty-eight years. He refused ever to say where the body was, and the Northern Territory passed a no body no parole law in 2016 in response. He died of throat cancer in custody on July 15, 2025, a day after the twenty-fourth anniversary.