Quotes of the Day

There aren't too many reasons to stop as you race along the Stuart Highway through the sunbaked, unchanging scrub of Australia's center: a meal at a roadhouse; a photo of a weathered cairn, perhaps. Or car trouble - flat tire, overheated engine - the reason every driver curses, and the one which, on the speed-limit-free stretch between Alice Springs and Darwin, will now forever be linked with the terrible tale of British tourists Peter Falconio and Joanne Lees.

When mechanic Bradley John Murdoch was last week found guilty of killing Falconio on the night of July 14, 2001, and assaulting Lees, he shrugged. During his two-month trial in the Northern Territory Supreme Court, 80 witnesses added their pieces to the puzzle, but none could answer the question dearest to the Falconio family: where is Peter's body? And Murdoch, who insists he's innocent, seems unlikely to do so. His crime began with an apparent offer of help - after convincing the pair that their van had sparks coming out of the exhaust and getting them to pull over, Murdoch coaxed Falconio to the back of the vehicle. When Lees revved the engine as asked, she thought she heard a shot; Murdoch then appeared at her window with a gun. He bound her with tape and dragged her, struggling, into his four-wheel-drive. When he disappeared - presumably to deal with Falconio's body - Lees managed to escape, hiding under bushes while Murdoch and his dog searched for her. Hours later, when she was sure that he'd gone, Lees staggered onto the highway, where two truck drivers stopped, tended her cuts, and drove her to safety. Ambushed on a dark stretch of unfamiliar road in a foreign country, with her boyfriend lost somewhere in the night, Lees made a remarkable escape. But her stoicism and reserve have often counted against the then 27-year-old travel agent, who in the weeks following the attack endured so much speculation about her possible collusion in the attack that both police and Falconio's mother Joan felt obliged to declare their faith in her story. In an age of rampant disclosure, Lees has - save for one British television interview she says she gave in an effort to rekindle progress in the case - maintained an unfashionable public silence ever since.

She finally had her say in four days of testimony, given just meters from where Murdoch sat. The self-confessed drug runner and drifter, who regularly ferried large quantities of cannabis thousands of kilometers from South Australia to Broome in Western Australia, took the stand, too, denying he'd been anywhere near the attack site, just outside Barrow Creek. The 47-year-old had been in Alice Springs that day, as had the young travelers, all three even visiting the same takeaway-food outlet, but he claimed he'd headed not north but west along the Tanami Track - a rough, 1,100-km "back road" to W.A. Murdoch's lawyers, however, were unable to explain how his dna was found in blood on Lees' clothing, and it took the jury only eight hours to decide Murdoch was guilty.

He was caught after the largest investigation ever carried out by N.T. police, who chased 8,000 lines of inquiry to find an attacker who had the advantage of a head start and a lot of country to hide in. But they still have no weapon or body, and plenty of questions. Did Murdoch target Falconio and Lees at random, or had he seen them somewhere that day and decided to follow them? Perhaps in the end it doesn't matter - either possibility sickens. As for a motive, in his sentencing remarks Chief Justice Brian Martin speculated about paranoia and aggression brought on by Murdoch's heavy amphetamine use.

The case drew reporters from around the world, and five books - about the collision of a violent man trawling the Outback and two young lovers exploring its desolate beauty - are on their way. At its heart this remains a story of different kinds of loneliness. There is the landscape's sense of solitude and emptiness that tourists come to savor, and there is the terrifying aloneness of being hunted by a killer for hours in that vastness. Lees has found both hard to shake. "I am skeptical, untrusting, fearful and heartbroken," she told the court, in a rare expression of her emotional state. "It's lonely being me." Unless his appeal succeeds, Bradley Murdoch will serve at least 28 years of a life sentence - the same number of years Peter Falconio was alive.

• Lisa Clausen
• His killer has been convicted, but a British tourist shot in the Australian Outback is still not laid to rest