I believe your reporting was fair...

Hello, and I suppose Happy New Year would not be out of place, either!  I just had to write, having sat through your book Dead Centre and found myself unable to put it down till I was finished.  Your style of writing is most enjoyable and zips along nicely.

I wish I could write as well!  I can remember quite vividly the first time I saw the news bulletin about this alleged murder and abduction/escape; I scoffed then at the original version of events, and was never happy with the way Joanne Lees presented herself or her rendition of the evening in question.  I have read and watched true crime stories for over twenty years and find them fascinating, so to have this unbelievable case unfolding here in this incredible way was riveting.  Reading your account of the whole drame from start to conviction was wonderful, as you had access to information I had not seen/read previously.  I was glad that your account showed such anomalies with Joanne's story; I have read other accounts of other cases and I thought as I read Dead Centre "ahh, Munchausen's by Proxy" or at least certainly Joanne had a lot of desire to seize attention to herself.  ("I want to get on with my life", "..how I was treated..")

I was pleased, too, to read of your interviews with Bradley Murdoch, as this humanised him in a way I'd not seen to date.  I am ambivalent about his guilt, and just this month (Dec07) have read in the press about doubt over the LCN DNA testing, and especially of such a small (minute) sample.  And you said at one point that someone had said it was not proper blood but something else, and I was thinking about the ooze you get after squeezing a pimple - the clear watery stuff.  Anyway, nothing you wrote makes me change my mind about Ms Lees and her ambiguity, and her unsettling changes in her renditions of what happened.  You didn't actually say outright what you personally believe happened, and I was trying to read the lines of type and then between them simultaneously.

I believe your reporting was fair, and even though Mr Murdoch was convicted, I am somehow dissatisfied with the verdict; I would be happier if the prosecution had produced evidence that a) Peter Falconio is definitely dead, that b) he was murdered, that c) he was murdered by gunshot and d) that Bradley Murdoch did it.  It was all too circumstantial, and if only the jury had known what you knew from the committal hearing.  We both know that trials are not necessarily about the truth, but who can tell the best story.