Missing boyfriend's girlfriend in tears as she relives outback ordeal

Outback ambush survivor Joanne Lees choked back tears today as she relived the night a gunman apparently shot her boyfriend and abducted her on a lonely desert highway in the Northern Territory of Australia.

Lees, 30, from Brighton, looked at murder suspect Bradley John Murdoch, 45, as she walked into court to give evidence against him in a preliminary hearing, but their eyes did not meet.

Murdoch’s head was dropped forward as he sat in the dock of the court room in the northern port city of Darwin.

He has not been required to plea to the charges of murdering Peter Falconio, a 28-year-old British backpacker, and of abducting and assaulting Lees.

He remained motionless throughout most of Lees’s 90 minutes of evidence in which she relived a harrowing five-hour ordeal in the central Australian desert on the night of July 14 and 15, 2001.

Lees, dressed in a white shirt and black knee-length skirt, came close to tears at times and sipped from a glass of water as she described events after the couple drove north along the Stuart Highway in their 30-year-old camper van.

She said the couple had smoked some marijuana and enjoyed a sunset at the remote outpost of Ti Tree before being ambushed near Barrow Creek about 60 miles to the north.

Lees said a white pickup truck with its interior light on pulled alongside their van. She clearly saw the man driving, she said. He was pointing toward the back of the van.

“He (Falconio) told me he was going to stop,” Lees told the court. “I asked him not to.”

Falconio pulled to the side of the road, stepped from the van and walked to the rear where the pickup truck had parked.

Falconio asked her to rev the engine which she did. At that moment she heard a bang, “Like the sound of a vehicle backfiring or the sound of a gunshot”, she said.

The pickup driver then opened the driver’s side of the van brandishing a handgun and told her to turn off the engine.

“I tried to but my hands were too shaky. He did it,” she said.

She was still in the van when the gunman tied her hands behind her back with homemade handcuffs, she said.

She said she struggled as the man then tried to bind her ankles with tape. “I kicked, trying to hit him or punch him in the crotch,” she said.

The gunman stunned her with a punch to the forehead then forced her toward his pickup. He failed in an attempt to tape her mouth shut then placed a bag over her head, Lees told the court.

Lees said she continued to scream for help, despite the gunman warning he would shoot her if she was not quiet.

She asked him if he planned to rape her or wanted money. She repeatedly asked the man if he had shot Falconio. The gunman eventually replied that he had not.

Later, she managed to wriggle out of the pickup, which was still parked at the scene of the ambush, and hid in the desert scrub until deciding, some five hours later, to flag down a passing truck.

“I didn’t think it safe but I thought I would have to be brave and get some help for Pete,” she said.

Prosecutors did not ask Lees if Murdoch was the man who attacked her and Falconio. She is due to continue her testimony tomorrow.

Her evidence is a key part of the case being presented to a committal hearing that will decide if the prosecution’s case against Murdoch is strong enough to send to a jury trial which would impose a mandatory life sentence on him if he is convicted of murder.