Erica Gibson was the shift sergeant at the Alice Springs Police Station in the early hours of 15 July 2001, when a strange call came in.
A truck driver reported that a woman had been abducted on the Northern Territory’s Stuart Highway and her boyfriend was missing.
“We normally got dispatched to general disturbances, drunk people, traffic offences, so this information was remarkable,” Erica tells Woman’s Day.
So remarkable that the case would become known as one of Australia’s most infamous and shocking crimes.
This month marks 25 years since the devastating murder of British backpacker Peter Falconio, then 28, and the attempted abduction of his girlfriend Joanne Lees, 27. In 2005, Western Australian mechanic and drug dealer Bradley Murdoch, 47, was sentenced to life in prison for the crimes.
Murdoch died last year, aged 67, having never revealed the location of Falconio’s remains.
“Peter was a wonderful son,” his heartbroken mum Joan, 80, said last month.
“He was kind to everyone. It’s awful for me and my husband not to have him in our lives.”
The call that changed everything
After getting the emergency call at around 1.30am that day, Erica, then 35, and another officer made the three-hour drive north to the remote Barrow Creek Hotel, where the truckie and his driving partner had taken a distraught Joanne.
Erica found the Englishwoman waiting at the bar. She’d been on a working holiday with Peter, living in Sydney, before the pair bought an old VW Kombi for a road trip.
“She was wide-eyed and had red dirt on her,” Erica remembers.
“She wasn’t overly emotional – more like a deer in the headlights.”
Joanne said that she and Peter had left Alice Springs the previous afternoon, heading north on the Stuart Highway.
At around 7.30pm, “a vehicle behind them flashed their lights”, she recalls.
The moment everything changed
A man with a drooping moustache in a white Toyota Landcruiser ute drove up alongside them, pointing at their car as if something was wrong.
“So they pulled over,” says Erica.
“Peter got out of the car and went to the back with the man to have a look. That’s the last time Joanne saw Peter.”
Joanne said she heard a bang and the man then appeared at her window holding a handgun. It was at that horrifying moment she realised her boyfriend may have been shot.
The man used homemade cable-tie handcuffs to bind Joanne’s hands, then forced the terrified woman into the canopy-covered tray of his ute, which Joanne said held “some kind of bed”.
Joanne asked the man if he was going to rape her. “He just told me to shut up,” Joanne said later in a media interview.
A desperate escape
When the man left her unattended, she embarked on a heart-stopping escape from the back of the ute and hid in the bush. The man searched for her with his dog, before giving up and driving away.
“Then she saw the headlights of a truck coming along and ran out onto the highway,” says Erica, who can still recall how Joanne had only one thing on her mind during the interview.
“She wanted to know if Peter had been found,” she tells.
Later that day, police found his blood at the crime scene and the Kombi was located in bushland nearby. But there was no sign of Peter anywhere.
Joanne was taken to a hotel in Alice Springs and Erica stayed with her.
“She was in deep shock,” says the cop.
Yet her ordeal was far from over. As the horrific story swept the globe and the world’s media descended on Alice Springs, some began questioning Joanne’s lack of emotion. It also later emerged that she’d had a brief affair with a friend in Sydney.
“Joanne endured intense scrutiny,” says Erica.
“But Lindy Chamberlain wasn’t hysterical either.”
The truth finally emerges
Many simply didn’t believe Joanne’s incredible story. British journalist Martin Bashir asked her in a paid TV interview in 2002 if she had killed Peter. She laughed before answering no.
In the end, the evidence supported Joanne. After a tip-off from one of Murdoch’s mates, the drug runner became a prime suspect. The friend had seen him making handcuffs and Murdoch had questioned him about where to bury a body.
When the killer was arrested over another crime, his DNA was taken. It was matched to Joanne’s T-shirt, the Kombi gearstick and the handcuffs. Joanne’s hair tie was also found wrapped around Murdoch’s gun holster. A jury took eight hours to convict him.
“It was one of the most significant cases of my career,” says Erica.
“I still feel for Joanne.”
Today, Joanne is a social worker at a council in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire. Peter’s parents live a few kilometres away and have not given up on one day laying their boy to rest.
“We were hoping Murdoch would reveal where Peter was before he died,” says Joan.
“But even now, we still hold out hope that his remains will be found.”
