Some time after dark on July 14, 2001, on the Stuart Highway about ten kilometers north of Barrow Creek, a four-wheel-drive pulled alongside a Kombi camper van and its driver waved the couple inside to stop. Peter Falconio, twenty-eight, and his girlfriend Joanne Lees were English backpackers touring Central Australia. The man said he had seen sparks coming from their exhaust. Falconio walked to the back of the van with him. Lees heard a bang. The man came to the driver's window with a gun, bound her wrists behind her with cable ties and electrical tape and forced her into his vehicle. She got away into the scrub and hid for about five hours while he searched with a flashlight, and then ran out onto the highway to stop a road train. Peter Falconio has never been found.
The investigation became one of the biggest in Australian history and a story of enormous size in Britain, and Lees in particular was subjected to intense public scrutiny. In the early months, with hundreds of people still being treated as persons of interest, a man came forward to say he knew who had done it and gave police the name Bradley John Murdoch, a Western Australian mechanic, truck driver and drug runner. A blood sample from the scene, found on Lees's T-shirt, was matched to his DNA, and an elastic hair tie belonging to Lees was later found wrapped around a holster among his belongings; the lead investigator, Colleen Gwynne, suggested he had kept it as a trophy.
He was born on February 19, 1958, in Geraldton by some accounts and in Northampton by the ABC's, the late third son of a mechanic and a hairdresser, and grew up in nearby Northampton and then in Perth, where he fell in with a motorcycle gang. At fifteen he left school and went back to Geraldton. In 1980 he received a suspended sentence for causing death by dangerous driving after he hit and killed a motorcyclist at Port Pirie in South Australia. His marriage broke up over domestic violence. In August 1995, drunk, he fired shots at people celebrating an Aboriginal football grand final at Fitzroy Crossing in the Kimberley and served twenty-one months for it; by then he had a racist tattoo and had begun voicing white supremacist views. By the end of the decade he was based in Derby and then Broome, driving road trains and running cannabis across the continent to Sedan in South Australia, which he later admitted in court.
In 2002 he was taken into custody in South Australia over the abduction of a twelve-year-old girl and her mother from a Riverland property. The jury heard he had bound, gagged and handcuffed the girl and raped her, then driven both of them to Port Augusta, telling them as he let them go that he was heading west to kill a man and then himself. He was acquitted on all counts in November 2003 and was arrested immediately afterward and charged with the murder of Peter Falconio.
The trial opened in the Supreme Court of the Northern Territory in Darwin on October 17, 2005. Murdoch pleaded not guilty to murdering Falconio and to the assault and attempted abduction of Lees, and took the stand, where he admitted his drug running and denied the killing. The Crown's case rested on Lees's identification of him from photographs and on the DNA. Murdoch suggested his blood might have reached her T-shirt when he visited the same Red Rooster restaurant as the couple that day. The Crown said he had put Falconio's body in his vehicle and disposed of it somewhere on the long road between Alice Springs and Broome. On December 13, 2005, the jury convicted him unanimously, and he was sentenced to life with a non-parole period of twenty-eight years. Chief Justice Brian Martin called the crime nothing short of cowardly in the extreme and noted his complete lack of remorse. His appeal, which argued that Lees's identification was tainted because she had seen his photograph on the internet before speaking to police, was dismissed on January 10, 2007, and the High Court refused special leave on June 21, 2007. A later appeal filed in 2013 was withdrawn in March 2014.
He never said where the body was. In 2016 the Northern Territory passed a no body, no parole law aimed at him, removing the parole he would have become eligible for in 2032. In 2022 he was moved from Darwin's Holtze prison to the Alice Springs Correctional Centre. Accounts of his cancer differ: the ABC reported in 2025 that he had been diagnosed with terminal throat cancer in 2019, while the coronial inquest heard that he complained of a lump in his neck in November 2024 and was diagnosed with aggressive metastatic cancer at the Royal Adelaide Hospital. In June 2025 the Northern Territory Police offered a reward of $500,000. On June 25, two officers visited him at the Alice Springs prison hoping to play him a video recorded by Falconio's parents; he declared his innocence and refused to watch it. A week later officers visited him in the palliative care unit of Alice Springs Hospital, and he yelled at them to get out. He died there on July 15, 2025, at sixty-seven, a day after the twenty-fourth anniversary of the killing. In March 2026 the Northern Territory coroner, Elisabeth Armitage, found that he had died of natural causes from stage-four cancer after high-quality medical care, and made no recommendations. He maintained his innocence to the end. The reward remains on offer, and Peter Falconio's parents, Joan and Luciano, have never been able to bury their son.
February 19, 1958: Bradley John Murdoch is born, in Geraldton by some accounts and Northampton by the ABC's.
1980: he receives a suspended sentence for causing death by dangerous driving.
August 1995: he fires shots at people at Fitzroy Crossing and serves twenty-one months for it.
July 14, 2001: Peter Falconio, twenty-eight, disappears on the Stuart Highway north of Barrow Creek; Joanne Lees is bound but escapes and hides.
2002: Murdoch is taken into custody in South Australia over the abduction of a twelve-year-old girl and her mother.
November 2003: he is acquitted on all counts in that case and is immediately arrested and charged with Falconio's murder.
October 17, 2005: his trial opens in the Supreme Court of the Northern Territory in Darwin.
December 13, 2005: the jury convicts him unanimously, and he is sentenced to life with a non-parole period of twenty-eight years.
January 10, 2007: his appeal is dismissed.
June 21, 2007: the High Court refuses special leave to appeal.
March 2014: a later appeal, filed in 2013, is withdrawn.
2016: the Northern Territory passes a no body, no parole law aimed at him.
2022: he is moved to the Alice Springs Correctional Centre.
June 2025: the Northern Territory Police offer a reward of $500,000.
June 25, 2025: visited by officers in prison, he declares his innocence and refuses to watch a video from Falconio's parents.
July 15, 2025: he dies in Alice Springs Hospital at sixty-seven.
March 2026: the coroner finds that he died of natural causes from stage-four cancer.