This provocative four-part Channel 4 documentary on the headline-making Falconio - Lees murder and attempted abduction case in Australia in 2001 certainly seemed to capture the public imagination provoking much press comment and on-line debate during lockdown. Here we have an apparent murder with no body, the convicted killer still pleading his innocence nearly twenty years on and high-profile press coverage at the time of the crime in both the U.K. and Australia.
I must confess I was initially hooked after the first episode which sought to debunk the evidence at the crime scene and further apparent discrepancies in Joanne Lees own account of what happened on the night itself, as well as portraying Miss Lees herself as a rather unsympathetic witness. Leading the charge to get the convicted murderer Bradley Murdoch re-tried was a gobby Australian defence attorney the first thing about whom you learn is that he himself spent seven years in jail for drug dealing, leaving me personally unsure if that's the type of legal representation I'd be happy with, especially as it's hard to avoid the impression that reopening the case may be more about obtaining his own redemption than his client's.
However, it's only when you get to episodes 2, 3 and 4 that you realise that the programme-maker is attempting a scattergun approach to what they obviously believe is an unsafe conviction with all types of other supposed evidence aimed at clearing Murdoch placed in front of the viewer. These include a videotape of an obviously uptight Lees stumbling through her witness statement, ditto the police reconstruction in which she participates and apparently contradicts herself, interviews with the driver who picked her up on the highway immediately after the attack who now recalls seeing another car on the road and an altercation between three men nearby, one of whom just could have been Falconio, the revelation that Lees was having an affair with a waiter and was planning to meet up with him later, scientific attempts to disprove Murdoch was in a service station the night of the murder and most bizarrely a supposed sighting days later and many miles away of the believed dead man. They even try to disprove the normally conclusive D.N.A. evidence of Murdoch's which was found on Lees' T-shirt.
This seemed to me like trying to crack a nut with a sledgehammer and yet almost every official law-maker represented in the programme was still convinced that Murdoch did the deed. These officials certainly seem more credible than the mostly ragbag witnesses in the defence's corner and I tend to go along with the former. There's little doubt that Murdoch was a bad egg and no other potential suspects were identifiably introduced I felt. It was noticeable that neither Miss Lees or any member of the Falconio family participated in the programme.
On the whole this felt like I was watching a shallow, trashy "tabloid" rendition of an important story rather than the sober, balanced "broadsheet" coverage which I believe it merited. Sensationalist, biased and inconsistent, I doubt it did Murdoch's case many favours in the final analysis.