Peter Falconio murder: British expert says he has identified a ‘most likely’ burial location

The Stuart Highway near where Peter Falconio and Joanne Lees were ambushed by Bradley Murdoch, who shot and killed Falconio in July 2001. Now, 25 years later, a British expert says he has identified the most likely burial location of Falconio. Photograph: AAP View image in fullscreen The Stuart Highway near where Peter Falconio and Joanne Lees were ambushed by Bradley Murdoch, who shot and killed Falconio in July 2001. Now, 25 years later, a British expert says he has identified the most likely burial location of Falconio. Photograph: AAP Peter Falconio murder: British expert says he has identified a ‘most likely’ burial location UK police adviser in the early 2000s and global consultant in ‘no-body’ homicide cases says he has narrowed down the outback search area Peter Falconio murder 25 years on: new footage shows dying Australian outback killer’s refusal to reveal body’s location The former British government expert who consulted on the search for the remains of the murdered backpacker Peter Falconio says he has now identified a “most likely” potential burial location – an abandoned racetrack only 8km from the scene of the infamous outback attack at Barrow Creek. In July 2001, Falconio and his partner, Joanne Lees, both from Yorkshire, were ambushed and attacked by Bradley John Murdoch as they drove along a remote stretch of road in Australia’s Northern Territory , about 300km north of Alice Springs. Falconio was shot and killed at the roadside. Murdoch bound Lees with cable ties in what is believed to have been an attempted abduction but she managed to flee into the darkness and hide in the scrub for hours. New footage shows Peter Falconio murderer Bradley John Murdoch refusing to reveal location – video Murdoch was convicted of Falconio’s murder in 2005 but never admitted his guilt or spoke about where he took the backpacker’s remains. He died in prison last year. This week, 25 years after the attack, the Northern Territory police released a video of an agitated Murdoch refusing to reveal the location before his death. “I know nothing,” he says. View image in fullscreen Peter Falconio and Joanne Lees. Photograph: Family handout/PA The decades-long police search for Falconio’s remains has been underpinned by two assumptions. The first is that the search is a “needle-in-a-haystack” effort in an incredibly large area of red dirt and sun-bleached scrub, stretching south for a distance roughly equivalent to a drive from London to Leeds. The second is that because of that vastness, only Murdoch could ever lead authorities to the site. Dr Mark Harrison, the UK’s national police search adviser in the early 2000s and a world-leading consultant in “no-body” homicide cases, says this is not the case. Harrison told Guardian Australia last year that the chances of locating Falconio’s body remained “high” and that he had identified five possible burial locations using a combination of criminal profiling and physical site analysis. He returned to the outba