Original subtitles

This programme contains strong language from the outset.

NEWSREADER: Police in Australia say they fear the worst

for a British tourist who disappeared

after being attacked in a remote part of the Outback.

Peter Falconio was shot by a gunman

who attempted to abduct his girlfriend, Joanne Lees.

The search for Peter Falconio goes on.

The jury unanimously found Bradley John Murdoch guilty

of murdering Peter Falconio.

Bradley Murdoch will spend at least 28 years in prison.

That's who did it.

I definitely did not do it. I'm not a fucking murderer.

This was a real Agatha Christie thriller.

No-one really knew quite what had happened.

He says, "Shut up and I won't shoot you."

Why didn't she see the body?

How do you even know he's dead?

No-one doubts me. It's only the media.

We will find the key to this.

The answer to this case lies in the police file.

People who think they know the story probably don't.

Bang! I'm looking straight

at this bloke I've just seen in the paper!

That's him, all right! Bad news, that bloke.

I couldn't believe this had never seen the light of day.

This case never goes away. It just sleeps for periods of time.

Things like this just don't happen.

Somebody knows what happened that night.

Really knows.

There is so much more to this story than people ever imagined.

Did you say that you spent about four hours with her at Barrow Creek?

Yeah, from the time I picked her up

to the time the coppers came in the morning,

we, um, we sat at the bar.

I told Joanne Lees, I said, "One thing you wanna do

"is get your statement right

"and once that's on paper, you stick to it, mate,

"because they'll rip pieces off you."

And I made that really, really clear to her

right before the coppers ever got there.

She said to me,

"This bloke pulled us up."

There's sparks coming out of the back

and that's why they stopped.

And then Pete got out of the car.

She said the car backfired.

That's why she didn't know whether it was a gunshot or not.

From that point, never seen him again.

But she told me the bloke had a gun!

She said, "He held it against my head while he tied me up."

She wanted to find the Kombi and I turned round and I said,

"Oh, well," I said, "Um, I don't know where we're gonna find it

"at this time of the bloody morning."

And she said, "No, no, I want to find my boyfriend, too."

She needed to find that car.

I said, "I don't think you realise how big this is gonna be."

I said, "If you're missing a boyfriend and your car,"

I said, "This is going to be huge."

The Falconio case was exhausting to cover

because you were on it, you know, 24 hours a day,

travelling, door-knocking.

It dominates your life.

You wake up in the middle of the night thinking,

"Oh, I should follow that lead," or, "I should mention that."

The real mystery about the crime scene

was that there was no body.

No blood, apart from the small quantity of blood

found by the side of the road.

No gunshot residue.

And there was no obvious motive.

And that sounded alarm bells for the police

and from people like me covering the story,

er, no-one really knew quite what had happened.

Initially, Joanne told the police

that her attacker had long, straggly hair

and a Mexican-style moustache.

He was driving a white Ute, possibly a Land Cruiser.

He had a dog. She thought it might've been a Blue Heeler.

But, unfortunately, that description matched hundreds,

if not thousands, of other men in the Northern Territory.

Soon after the attack,

police discovered there was CCTV video of a man

who could possibly be the attacker,

and they realised that if they could identify him

and if they could identify the car he was driving,

they'd got their man.

Three or four years later,

when Joanne Lees identified her attacker in court,

it was an electrifying moment.

"Miss Lees told the jury

"she looked into her attacker's face for about ten seconds.

"She said she was screaming for Pete to come and help.

"He never came."

Rex Wild QC asking, "Is that man here in court today?"

Joanne Lees looked across to Bradley John Murdoch

and said, "Yes, I'm looking at him."

You could hear Bradley Murdoch's temper rising

and he mouthed,

"It wasn't effing me!"

Or words to that effect!

In 2005, Bradley Murdoch was convicted

of the murder of Peter Falconio

and the attempted kidnapping of Joanne Lees.

But the more you look at the case afterwards,

the more you realise that the evidence didn't quite add up

and you began to realise

that perhaps the police hadn't got the right man.

In order to understand how Brad Murdoch

was ultimately convicted of the murder of Peter Falconio,

you've got to go back and ascertain

how he became the number-one suspect.

So first of all,

he fits, roughly,

the description that Joanne Lees gives of the attacker.

Joanne Lees' evidence at trial

was she saw her attacker for about ten seconds.

We also know that she was stoned.

Joanne Lees said that she and Peter Falconio

smoked a joint

about an hour before the incident.

She admitted the dope was "quite strong".

Joanne also said,

"Some things that occur while I'm stoned

"stand out as vibrant and clear in my memory,

"whereas other things are more hazy."

Therefore, how accurate is her identification of that person?

Joanne had different versions of the suspect's appearance.

To begin with, er,

she said he had shoulder-length hair,

he wore a cap with a motif on the front,

he had a checked shirt.

He looked about 40, 45 years old.

Now, she was going, initially,

from her memory of the gunman in the cab.

Subsequently, she was shown pictures

of a man who appeared in the Shell truck stop video,

who could possibly be the attacker.

She thought he was too old to be the man who attacked her.

Later on, she changed her mind quite drastically.

Joanne Lees faced intense questioning

about apparent inconsistencies in her story,

particularly her identification of the accused, Bradley Murdoch.

She was shown this security video from a local petrol station.

At the time, she dismissed the man as a suspect.

She told the court...

The identification of Bradley Murdoch

became a very contentious aspect of the trial.

About a year after the incident,

Joanne Lees was on holiday in Sicily

and there was a story on the BBC website

about a man being arrested

in connection with the attack on Peter Falconio.

She went online

and saw a picture of the suspect,

who was Bradley Murdoch.

Several weeks later,

she was shown a police photo-board

and she identified Murdoch as being the man who attacked her.

You have to ask whether her original viewing of the picture

on the BBC website influenced her identification

of Murdoch on the police photo-board.

And, of course, it became a very, very contentious point.

Under a second day of cross-examination,

Grant Algie put it to Miss Lees

that she had identified the wrong man.

He suggested the witness had been influenced

by a photo she'd seen of Murdoch on the internet

a month before she identified him as her attacker.

Ultimately, the judge decided that her evidence could be accepted

and the court had to accept his ruling.

For the last ten years, Victor and I have been looking at this case

and I've managed to get my hands on the police file.

Brad's always wanted to know whether, in our view,

there was enough evidence for a retrial,

based on the ground of fresh evidence.

Effectively, there was one witness against Murdoch

as to the incident,

and that's Joanne Lees.

However, there are a lot of other people

that were peripheral on that night

that it's important to talk to.

Peter Falconio and Joanne Lees leave Alice Springs

about four o'clock in the afternoon

and drive up the Stuart Highway towards Darwin.

A lot of people have urged them not to leave in the afternoon

because it'll mean they'll almost certainly be driving in the dark

at some stage or other.

The Aileron Roadhouse is the first roadhouse you pass

north of Alice Springs.

Joanne always claimed

that they drove straight past the Aileron Roadhouse.

Greg Dick, who was the manager of the roadhouse,

and two members of his staff,

are convinced that Joanne and Peter went in there

for a toasted sandwich.

Greg Dick swears blind

he saw Peter Falconio and his girlfriend Joanne Lees

at the Aileron Roadhouse, north of Alice Springs.

It's not hard to pick the tourists," he says,

when you can count your community on one hand.

They were definitely there.

To me, there's a good set of twins in the same vehicle!

But there's a small problem with their account.

Lees has said she and Falconio did not stop at the roadhouse,

a detail that still baffles the witnesses.

In these sort of situations, you always ask yourself the question,

"What's his motive for telling a lie?"

For the life of me, I can't think of one.

The bloke runs a service station and a pub.

It's all very, very odd, all of this.

As a general principle,

it doesn't matter how much you read about a given event,

it's always important to talk to every witness if you can.

They might have forgotten something

or they might have brand-new evidence

that you weren't even expecting.

G'day. G'day. You must be Greg.

Yeah. I'm Victor. How are you? Good to meet you. I'm not too bad.

G'day, mate. I'm Fraser. How you going? Not bad, mate.

That's the way. Sit down.

So, have you been here a while? 42 years. Wow.

Only one day we want to ask you about

and that's, uh,

the 14th of July, 2001.

They were sitting at that same round table,

but there was a window.

They're going through maps and things and their trip.

The girls were making sandwiches for them

and the other one's making the coffee.

What did you think when she denied having been here?

"Why would she deny it?", I'm thinking.

They were here! The Kombi was right up there,

where those posts are. That fence wasn't there. Right.

Can I just stop you? Was there anyone else hanging around?

A customer come in the shop.

You could see he could live in the bush.

I said, "Where are you off to, mate?"

"I'm going to Policeman's Waterhole.

"You wouldn't know where it is." "Yes, I do."

"I'm going up there to live, four, five months off the land,"

and so on. He does it every now and then around the place.

And then he says, "I'll have a pie." So I grabbed the pie.

I went to squirt the sauce.

"Nah, my fucking dog doesn't like sauce!"

"Right. No worries, mate." Off he goes.

Did you see the dog? No. I come around to sit down,

she jumped up from there, ran outside

and she's that far from him.

They were out there for about, uh, two minutes? Talking?

I know this sounds a silly question,

but it was obvious to you that they knew each other?

Yeah! Yeah! OK. Ah, yeah.

The jury didn't get to hear about this other bloke at the trial

but the coppers, they grabbed a hold of Greg Dick

and got him to participate in a line-up.

Was Brad Murdoch in the line-up? Yeah. OK.

So you go into the line-up...

Yeah. ..and you, the bloke that was here... Yeah.

..wasn't in the line-up? Nah.

I looked at them all, "Nah, he's not in this."

What about Murdoch? No way.

He's too tall! I would have been looking up at him.

That's because the fella I served, I could look him in the face.

Right. BOTH: How tall are you?

I'm shrinking now with my age. I guess... Right. ..probably six.

VOICEOVER: So there was a bloke in the area on the night.

He fits the description of the attacker

and there's a witness who claims this bloke spoke to a girl

who could be Joanne Lees.

Did he follow them from Aileron?

Could he be the attacker?

The Northern Territory is a huge place.

It's Australia's Wild West.

So if you are on the run from the tax department

or the coppers or the family court,

the Northern Territory is the perfect place

to disappear.

I have had clients over the years

that have gone to the Territory

and when their trial's called on,

no-one there!

Never seen again.

After Joanne Lees was rescued by the truck drivers,

they took her to Barrow Creek Hotel.

The police arrived early in the morning.

By that time, the roads north and south had been closed,

people couldn't get through,

so they all go to the pub.

There were a lot of people in the Barrow Creek pub that morning.

There could be a lot of clues there

and a lot of evidence that's never come to the surface.

I've managed to track down a truck driver

who was one of the people bailed up at the Barrow Creek Hotel.

G'day. Phil, is it? Yeah, mate!

I'm Andrew Fraser. Everyone calls me Fraser.

How you going, mate? How are you? Good. Come on in.

Thank you.

OK. First of all, you made a statement to the coppers

and that was early on in the proceedings,

the 29th of July, 2001.

Yeah.

When did you get to Barrow Creek?

The next morning

and, course, we were stopped there.

I couldn't go any further until they opened the road.

And then you were talking to a bloke in the bar. Yeah.

He started talking to me, I didn't start talking to him.

Mm. And, um,

he was dressed pretty much the same,

dark-coloured coat, checked shirt.

And he's got long hair? Yeah!

He's got a checked shirt on that matches the description. Yes.

He's got a baseball hat on that matches the description. Yes.

And he's still got it on? Yeah!

I did mention to him later

that, um, he wants to lose the baseball cap and the dark jacket,

and he said he'd already shaved his moustache,

but, you know, he kept wearing the dark jacket and the baseball cap.

He reckoned he'd been camped

close to where it all happened the previous night

and, course, telling me that he'd buried a pound of dope

out in his campsite, you know, like...

Did that seem very strange to you,

that somebody you don't know from a bar of soap... Ah, yeah!

..just tells you he's buried a pound of dope?

Yeah, no. He's an idiot, um, to say something like that out loud.

How did he know that I wouldn't turn around

and speak immediately to one of the police officers? Mm.

I said to this bloke, um,

"You're lucky you didn't have a dog with you. He'd be a goner."

His, um, exact words, pretty much, were,

"Ah, that's easy. Shoot the dog and get another one later." Mm.

Can you have a look at this photo

which is contained in the police file?

Is, uh, that the bloke you were talking about?

That's him, all right.

Bad news, that bloke, I reckon.

I did not like him at all. Yeah.

He, um, was too full of himself.

The more I've thought about it over the years,

the more I've thought that

he was trying to draw attention to himself for some reason.

He literally made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

I didn't trust him one little bit.

Did you ever stumble over him again,

by any chance? No, never ran across him again.

Did you ever see the police at all

about this after making your statement?

No. No.

So, they never came back to you at all? No.

This person of interest

was spoken to by the coppers a couple of weeks later.

He identifies his car at the Shell truck stop

and says he's 99 percent sure it's his car.

They take his DNA at that stage

and then they eliminate him.

They also eliminate him because Joanne Lees saw him

at the Barrow Creek Hotel that night

and didn't identify him as her attacker.

You can't escape the fact

he's made a whole heap of voluntary admissions against his own interest.

According to Phil Cook,

this bloke said he was camped in the immediate vicinity that night.

If that's the case,

he must've heard a gunshot. If there was one!

"I shaved my moustache off.

"Buried a pound of dope because they were going to close the road."

And he's talking to Phil Cook

about, "Well, you can always shoot your dog and get another one later."

DOG WHIMPERS

GUNSHOT

During the trial, it came out

that the police had found a freshly-killed dog,

which had been shot,

not far from the crime scene.

Joanne Lees said that her attacker had a cattle dog.

At trial, she said it was of a medium build,

"a broad, chunky dog" with pointy ears.

"Black, or brown and white."

The dog that was found was a freshly-killed brown cattle dog.

What if that's the dog that Joanne said she saw that night?

Could this be the dog shot by a person of interest?

I'm not saying he did anything, but let's hear from him.

I reckon he's got a lot of questions to answer, if we can find him.

And somebody might know him, might know where he is.

I've dealt with more crooks

than you've had hot dinners over the years,

but there's only one thing that bothers me

and that is cold calling,

knocking on a door of somebody you don't know from a bar of soap.

You never know what's on the other side of the door.

It might be Grandma,

but it might be some young bloke who's full of speed or grog,

uh, and is violent.

You just don't know.

I've, uh, had Dennis Allen, Mr Death,

pull a shooter on me when he answered the door one day.

Luckily, I was his solicitor, so he put it away the minute he saw me.

But you get a bit of a fright

when somebody answers the door with a .357 Magnum in their claw.

I hear he's a bit of a drinker,

so we might go round a few of the bars and have a bit of a sniff about

and see if anybody knows anything about him.

One bloke said to me,

"Nobody's seen...

"..for a very long time."

I said, "How long?" He said, "Years."

We've been digging around for ages

and we've got wind of somebody who may know our person of interest.

I'm going to knock on their door. They may talk to us, they may not.

We've been looking for this bloke for ages.

We've tried everything.

We've tried ringing people that might know him...

It's Andrew Fraser, uh, calling again.

..tried old employers...

Hello.

We found a place where he had worked

right on the border of Northern Territory and Western Australia,

contacted that mission.

He's evaporated.

We've even looked on the electoral roll.

He's not online.

There's not a mobile phone in his name that we can ascertain.

Does this bloke not want to be found?

It's played on my mind what went on that day.

I've wondered about him for years.

I still reckon he's the bloke.

"Joanne Lees was the last person to see Peter Falconio alive

"after they were ambushed by a gunman

"on a remote road in the Australian Outback.

"She managed to escape,

"but it's believed Peter was shot."

During the writing of the book,

I went to the UK to talk to the Falconios.

I met Paul Falconio.

He was very complimentary about his brother.

They got on very, very well.

Joan, Peter's mother, she said on one occasion,

"No-one had a bad word to say about Peter Falconio, my son.

"He was liked by everybody."

They were just ordinary people

caught up in a very, very tragic affair.

And there are so many question marks about this story

and what really happened.

It intrigued not only the media

but many, many people associated with the story

and who were reading about the story, the public at large.

I understand for the Falconio family

that to consider alternative hypotheses

may be very hurtful and stressful. I accept that.

However, as a former defence lawyer,

I would be remiss in my job

if I did not consider

every possible alternative hypothesis

which is reasonably open on the evidence.

And one such theory that came to our attention

is that Peter Falconio may have faked his own disappearance.

It's a statement that comes from somebody who describes himself

as a mate of Peter Falconio's,

and that statement paints a picture of Peter Falconio

that many people may find surprising.

This friend of Falconio's statement suggests that they worked together

for the best part of two years.

"His nickname was Dodgy Pete because he was always known for scamming."

This bloke was working as a temp three nights a week

for an insurance company

and the main thing they were looking at was life insurance fraud.

People were taking out life insurance policies,

they'd pay the policy for a couple of months

and then they'd go to a foreign country and they'd make false claims,

basically pretending to die so they would cash in.

This bloke suggests that,

"There is no doubt in my mind

"that Peter Falconio is capable of carrying out the scam."

Before he went away, the last thing Falconio said to this bloke was,

"Don't worry, mate, I've got the policy."

John Daulby, the senior policeman up in Darwin at the time,

discounted those suggestions.

And there's no way a son could've faked his own death

and maintained his absence for so long,

knowing that his family were so upset.

That proves to me

that the insurance scam allegation was perhaps unfounded.

Bourke's a very remote town.

We're not far off the centre of New South Wales

in the grand scheme of things.

And they actually call it the "Gateway to the Real Outback".

If you broke down out that way somewhere, you'd probably be there

for two or three days.

And your nearest neighbour's probably 20 or 30Ks away!

It's one of them little towns where everybody knows everybody.

When I was growing up, there was, you know, half a dozen pubs and a couple of clubs

and, you know, the place was beamin'.

But just with the drought and everything,

places have shut down

and people have left town looking for other work.

My parents own Browns Service Station in Bourke.

It was a meeting place. A lot of locals came in

but, also, you got a lot of travellers, as well.

Melissa and I worked most Sundays at the shop,

just to give Mum a bit of a break.

It was just a quiet Sunday in the service station.

I was reading the paper and on the second page

was an article of Peter Falconio.

And there's a picture of him and another lady in the back of a van.

I didn't think anything of it.

This was a big shop once. It took up this whole block.

We lived out the back in a flat and the front bit was a shop.

And that day, Melissa was out there,

she was doing whatever she was doing,

and I was reading the race results in the paper,

I heard the door squeak, so somebody obviously came in the shop

and Melissa was on the other side of the sandwich bench, I couldn't see her,

and she's yelling out to me

and I thought, "It's only one person! You don't need help, you're all right!"

She yelled out to me again and I kept reading.

Then the next minute, she turned the paper over that I was reading

and on the front page there was a picture of a gentleman in the bottom right-hand corner.

She tapped it like that and went...

..and I went... She went...

So I've looked and I've put the paper down

and I've walked around the corner,

I'm two steps to the front bench,

bang!,

I'm looking straight at this bloke I just seen in the paper,

and I just went, "You all right, mate?"

and he said "Good" in a Pommy accent,

I picked that up straight away, just such an accent.

So I was sort of in shock and I just said to Melissa,

"Yeah, you're all right, you keep serving him."

I need an excuse to go out and see what's going on out here,

so I said to Melissa, "I'll go and have a look for Sally,"

which was my cattle dog at the time.

So I've walked around, through the counter

and I've come to the front of the shop.

I've opened the door of the shop

and the first thing that caught my eye when I walked out of the shop

was a car halfway parked in the back lane.

The Ute looked like it had been spray-painted by kids.

It was really thick in places.

And then it only had its back half showing.

So the front half was behind the fence, you couldn't see it,

and the back half was sticking out this way

and they had the hose from the diesel bowser stretched all the way

and they were filling it up halfway up the back lane.

All my life, I'd never seen anyone pull up in the lane to fill up.

The trucks didn't even do it.

It was just weird. It just didn't seem right, if you know what I mean.

I had to have another look in the paper.

And then what I noticed,

they had a picture of a Ute in the paper.

And it was exactly the same Ute as I was looking at.

I just... I could not believe it.

I was just more shocked than anything.

We're in Bourke. Nothing happens in Bourke.

Like, we're in the middle of nowhere.

Things like this just don't happen.

And then Robert's mum and dad came home.

The police were then mentioned.

And then I'd freaked out a little bit and said, "No,"

like, "Let's just sleep on this,"

or something like, "Let's just wait and see."

I didn't go to the police straight away or report it because...

..it's none of my business.

I'm just a boy who lives out in the bush!

Like, whatever I say or do,

I don't think anybody's going to take any notice of me.

Then the next day, when I went to my other place of employment

was when I had the conversation with a co-worker,

which was overheard by a police officer,

and then that's when it got the ball rolling.

Then I had to go to the police station, look at photos and make a statement.

"Today in the Darwin Magistrates Court,

"when shown a picture of Peter Falconio

"and asked if it was the same man,

"Robert Brown replied..."

"He went on..."

"Mr Brown's partner, Melissa Kendall,

"also testified that Peter Falconio had been to the service station.

"She said he asked for the toilet key

"and bought a can of Coke and a Mars Bar."

200 percent sure it was Peter Falconio.

I will undergo any lie detector test.

I will undergo anything anybody wants me to.

I seen Peter Falconio. Simple as that.

I was a metre away from him.

Well, this case of Peter Falconio never goes away.

It just sleeps for periods of time.

I personally believe that he's alive.

Where he is, I don't know,

but upon that scene that day, the incident that day,

I believe that he is alive, yeah.

I can't believe Bradley Murdoch got convicted of it.

In my opinion,

there's no way in the world that bloke murdered Peter Falconio.

No way in the world.

CRICKETS CHIRRUP

Police released very grainy CCTV footage

taken the night Peter Falconio disappeared.

It showed a man and a vehicle

at an Alice Springs truck stop...

..both bearing a resemblance

to Lees' initial description of man and vehicle.

The prosecution emphasised

the man in the truck stop was Brad Murdoch.

The High Court says you cannot convict on DNA evidence alone,

it's not safe enough,

so there must be some corroboration.

That corroboration, the police say,

is Murdoch at the Shell truck stop.

Because of the time that the footage was taken,

it places Murdoch,

they say, in Alice Springs

at a time when he could've committed the crime

and been back at Alice Springs, filling the car up,

before he shot off along the Tanami Track.

The first time I ever visited Brad,

it was no difficulty picking out who he was in the visit room.

He is a huge bloke,

six foot five, but he's big across the shoulders.

You couldn't miss him. You could not mistake the bloke.

There was an anatomical expert,

uh, who believed that the man in the video was certainly Murdoch

and they did that by analysing his body...

..his head, his face,

the way he walked, the way he used his arms,

and all those factors combined

suggested to them that this was certainly Bradley Murdoch.

'My name is Gary Edmond. I'm a law professor

'in the Faculty of Law at the University of New South Wales.

'For most of my academic life, I've been writing on expert evidence...'

How you going?

..and how courts, particularly, deal with forensic science evidence.

These images were used in the case of Murdoch

and they were used by a variety of people in the case to identify

this person as the accused.

What strikes you about the images?

They're very low-quality!

You cannot see much of his face, also.

In the Murdoch case, the investigators

sought the assistance of a doctor of anatomy,

Dr Sutisno,

to evaluate the CCTV

to see if she could offer any assistance in terms of the identity of the person involved.

When Murdoch was in the prison,

they would've taken photos of him and they would've sent those to Dr Sutisno.

She carried out what's described as morphological analysis,

which is really just a comparison of the shapes and forms

and relative proportions of features of the face.

"Does the nose look similar? Is the relationship between the nose and the lips about the same?"

Dr Sutisno was satisfied

that it was indeed Murdoch at the truck stop.

She positively, or categorically, identified him.

The identification at the truck stop was maybe very important to the jury

and may well have contributed to the jury being satisfied

that it was indeed Bradley John Murdoch.

"The evidence of Dr Meiya Sutisno,

"who positively identified Murdoch from a video taken in Alice Springs,

"is being challenged.

"The defence claims her methods of facial and body mapping

"are not scientifically accepted."

The Court of Criminal Appeal was satisfied

her identification of Murdoch was inappropriate.

All that Dr Sutisno should've been able to say

is that there were similarities between Murdoch and the person in the video.

In Australia, there's no requirement for expert evidence to be reliable.

Jurors don't know that.

They'll tend to think that if someone's come into court as an expert,

then their technique's reliable, they're offering valuable evidence,

and yet that's not necessarily the case.

Some techniques are reliable, some aren't,

and that may not be disclosed or explained at trial.

I was in court every day for years,

and this is a general problem that faces the criminal justice system

where people say, "I am an expert,"

and the jury go, "That sounds all right to me."

That can lead

to a substantial miscarriage of justice.

A witness the Crown called as to height

was David Ringrose.

Ringrose measured the height of the man in the footage

and based on that assessment, the jury accepted it could've been Murdoch.

Considering how much weight the prosecution put on that footage,

we considered it was really important

to have the footage re-examined

by an independent expert.

Video footage, on the face of it, always tells the truth

because it captures what it sees.

But it is the interpretation of that which is often subject to dispute.

I don't believe there's anyone else in Australia

more experienced than I am

in making height determinations for court cases.

The types of trials I've been involved in

cover quite a range,

but mostly they were robberies, murders and drive-by drug shootings.

Quite often, a bank robber will wear a mask

and so height is one of the key elements

that you can use to determine who they are.

The angle that the camera has been taking the imagery at,

the fact that it's at a perspective angle, it's at an oblique angle,

that it's looking down from the top,

all these can confuse people.

One only has to look at the football on a Friday night

to see that from one angle, it looks like the man has placed the ball on the line

and from the other angle he dropped it.

The prosecution expert in this case

used an entry-level piece of software

designed to open up photogrammetry to the masses.

So I believe the version back in 2004

did not contain enough parameters, enough factors,

to thoroughly take into account

the distortions in the lens

of a cheap CCTV camera.

Therefore, the result that you get out will be compromised.

Well, by compromised, I mean inaccurate.

In the footage here, we can see the distortion is visible

if you look down the doorframe here, how it's curved.

The way I go about getting height measurements

is to use a control point near to the top of the man's head.

So in this case, we have the height marker on the wall

and we have the top of the doorframe.

I accept that there is lens distortion in the image

and all I can do is to minimise its effect

by making measurements on the person of interest

as close as possible to the control point

so that both of those points will be affected by the same amount.

On this image, which is the same as the prosecution expert used,

the big red arrow indicates

the control point, which is on the wall,

which is the height indicator, at 1.85 metres above ground level,

which is about six foot one.

And the height that the judge said Murdoch was

would fall here.

That would be 1.96, or a touch over six foot five.

The prosecution measured the person

at 190.5 on average,

or six foot three,

with an uncertainty range of 3%.

I measured the person in the video

with an average height at 186.

So they're the three key values - my reading,

the estimation from the prosecution and the known height of Murdoch.

Therefore, I would think that it's unlikely that that is Murdoch.

Based on my calculations, the man in the footage

is ten centimetres shorter than Murdoch, which is four inches.

The only clear evidence against Bradley Murdoch

was a tiny speck of DNA on the back of Joanne Lees' T-shirt.

Wow, look at that! It's everywhere.

This evidence should never be reported

as that person's DNA.

I do not believe that Bradley Murdoch

should have been convicted.

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