Public examines Lees in court of perception

Joanne Lees, girlfriend of dead British tourist Peter Falconio, has been treated like a celebrity. Picture / Reuters

DARWIN - Joanne Lees is no ordinary witness for the prosecution.

Every morning she makes an entrance like a camera-shy A-list celebrity. A big, black limo pulls up outside Darwin's Supreme Court, doors open and Lees dashes inside with barely a glance.

She is not alone. Surrounding her is a phalanx of men in combat fatigues and sunglasses, each ostentatiously carrying a revolver.

There is a reason for this muscle. And for the police liaison officer, British consular official and martial-arts expert boyfriend that assist her during and after the proceedings. And for the special room set aside for her and her team's use.

For there are two people on trial here, and only one of them is in the dock. The other is Lees.

The name on the charge sheet is that of Bradley Murdoch, the brooding, burly Australian car mechanic and drug dealer accused of murdering Peter Falconio on the lonely Stuart Highway.

The one who is not indicted, but might as well be for some of the slyly biased press coverage, is Lees, Falconio's then girlfriend.

She says she was tied up by Murdoch but escaped and managed to hide for five hours before hitching a ride to safety. Not everyone believes her.

After her boyfriend Peter Falconio disappeared in Barrow Creek on July 14, 2001, something went wrong for Joanne Lees quite apart from the tragic loss of her partner.

Lees metamorphosed with bewildering speed in the public eye from tragic victim of a murderous ambush to scarlet woman: if not guilty of her boyfriend's murder, then clearly a woman with something to hide.

The T-shirt started it. Lees's first press appearance in late July in Alice Springs struck observers as less mourning than morning-after-the-night-before.

When she appeared in a figure-hugging T-shirt decorated with the words Cheeky Monkey, the intake of disapproving breath was audible.

From then on, Lees was as much in the dock in the public imagination as Bradley Murdoch, her original sin confirmed by complaints that she was unduly cold.

This past week, Lees's minders have surely impressed on their client the need to show a human touch and so banish the impression she created in Alice Springs.

Testifying at the trial in Darwin last week, Lees, 32, managed a real make-over. She cut an image of elegant but unthreatening sobriety, more city executive than backpacker in her formal black-and-white outfit. And, as she swept out of her large black car each day, she has sometimes paused to greet the clusters of Darwin bystanders, most of whom seemed more sympathetic than the reporters.

Once inside the courthouse, Lees was anything but the ice-queen of earlier media legend, turning to the jury with winning glances, coughing, and even shedding the odd tear as she recalled her ordeal in the Outback four years ago.

Sometimes testy with the defence lawyer, she performed well in the opinion of most observers, gaining sympathy as a more rounded human being than they had been led to expect. Perhaps the stickiest moment for her came on Friday. The doctor who examined her a day after the attack contradicted a part of her story.

Lees testified that Murdoch put a gun to her head and then punched her in the head as she struggled to escape. She had said she was "stunned by the blow". But Dr Matthew Wright, who treated Lees in the Alice Springs hospital, told the court that the British tourist was "fairly quiet and subdued" when she arrived at the hospital.

"Ms Lees had multiple abrasions to her knees and elbow ... and a scratch to her lower back," he said. Under cross-examination Wright said he had made a statement to police in 2001, saying Lees had told him that she was not hit on the head.

But the thrust of Lees's story survived the first week. She has said a motorist flagged the British couple down, claiming sparks were coming from the back of their campervan. The man and Falconio inspected the rear of the van, Lees told the court, adding that she then heard a bang, like a car backfiring. Falconio has never been seen since. Lees said the man then appeared at her window and stuck a gun to her head.

Lees has identified Murdoch in the court as that man. The prosecutor has said DNA found at the scene matched that of Murdoch. Lees said she was tied up and pushed into Murdoch's small truck but managed to escape and hide in bushes. She eventually flagged down a passing truck, which took her to a hotel in the small settlement of Barrow Creek.

The owner of the Barrow Creek Hotel said Lees was curled up in the cabin of the truck, emotionally distressed, with puffy eyes when she arrived.

"She was in the foetal position with her head between her knees," Les Pilton told the court on Friday. He said Lees had to be coaxed out of the truck. While sitting on a bar stool Lees kept asking, "Where's Peter? I can't find Pete. I need Pete," said Pilton, adding she was on the verge of breaking down several times.

Such evidence, and the demeanour of Lees, is clearly having an effect. Many of the locals from around Darwin who turned out daily outside the court clearly viewed Lees as a visiting celebrity.

One local, Maria Savvas, said she noticed a marked change in mood towards Lees in Darwin last week. "For a long time there was a lot of criticism that she came across as cold. She wasn't crying and all that sort of stuff." Now it was a different story.

Lees's tribulations in the media started after that initial appearance in Alice Springs in July 2001. They continued over the years, fortified by her understandable reluctance to face the press again, and by what many considered an undue atmosphere of secrecy.

Ross Wilson, maker of a documentary, The Trials of Joanne Lees, was taken aback by the extent to which rumour was feeding rumour over the case in 2002.

"Almost everyone thought she had killed her boyfriend ... or she had something to do with it," he said. "I would say 80 per cent immediately asked me, 'Did she do it?"'

An interview in March 2002 also excited unfavourable comment, partly because she was paid an alleged £50,000 ($126,000) for it but also on account of her "cold demeanour". At her previous appearance in Darwin in May 2004, giving evidence in Murdoch's committal hearing, the police's decision to smuggle her into the basement of the Supreme Court building, sometimes under a blanket, also fed complaints that she had something to hide.

The subsequent emergence of a hidden lover in 2004 added a twist to the tale. Not merely cold and secretive, Lees now was tagged with a reputation as a Jezebel.

Nick Riley, the Daily Mail reported, had been her "secret lover", with whom, it said, she had been "systematically cheating" on Falconio. As the newspaper put it, the story did "little to enhance her reputation". Indeed, it fed a campaign of innuendo that Lees's sexual history cast automatic doubt on the veracity of her story that Murdoch had ambushed her and Falconio at gunpoint and that Lees had been lucky to escape with her life.

Increasingly lost in the whispering campaign was that detectives never seriously doubted the substance of her story.

- INDEPENDENT