Almost three years after she fled from a deranged stranger on a remote Australian outback highway, Briton Joanne Lees is poised to face the man accused of killing her boyfriend and changing her life forever.
Lees will be the star witness at the committal hearing beginning today in Darwin of Bradley John Murdoch, 45, a truck driver charged with the July 2001 shooting of British holiday maker Peter Falconio and assaulting and abducting Lees.
Her evidence is crucial to the prosecution's attempt to resolve one of Australia's biggest crime mysteries, as Falconio's body has never been found, despite extensive searches involving police, Aboriginal trackers and helicopters.
Lees has kept a low profile since arriving in Australia earlier this month, staying in a secret location and refusing to speak to the press so as not to prejudice the case.
"I want Bradley Murdoch to receive a fair committal hearing as I believe this is the only way justice can prevail," she said in a statement released through the Northern Territory police.
Falconio's brothers Paul and Nick have also flown in from Britain for the committal, with Paul expected to be the first witness to take the stand today.
Lees and Falconio were in the eighth month of a world trip when tragedy struck on July 14, 2001, along the Stuart Highway north of the central Australian town of Alice Springs.
Lees told police the couple had been driving north just after dark when a man in a Toyota pick-up truck drew alongside and indicated a problem with their car.
She said Falconio stopped and got out. She heard a gunshot and never saw him again.
The gunman then seized and bound her, forcing her into his truck at pistol-point.
She later escaped, hiding in scrub for five hours as he searched for her, before finally driving away.
Lees crawled out of the bush soon after midnight, flagged down a passing truck and told a tale which set off one of the biggest manhunts in Australian history.
Police searched for the killer for a year until Murdoch, a loner who regularly ranged across the roads of the central desert, was picked up in South Australia in August 2002 over an unrelated matter.
Darwin detectives questioned him in Adelaide and he was finally extradited to the northern capital last November and charged in Falconio's death.
Lees holds the key to a successful prosecution.
She can identify the killer, and has provided potentially incriminating DNA from a shirt spotted with blood in her struggle with him.
Murdoch denies he is the man, saying police framed him.
The committal hearing is expected to last three weeks and will be covered by a large contingent of local and foreign media fascinated by the tale of a holiday turned nightmare in the outback.
The Falconio case has evoked memories of the 1986 Darwin trial of the parents of baby Azaria Chamberlain, who similarly disappeared without trace during a trip to central Australia.
Lindy Chamberlain and her husband were accused of killing their child, but later acquitted after a court accepted their story that the infant was snatched from the family campsite by a dingo -- a wild native dog.
In a book about the Chamberlain case titled The Country of Lost Children: an Australian Anxiety, author Peter Pierce suggested that fear of being lost in hostile desert or bushland has been deeply etched into the national psyche ever since Europeans colonized the continent.
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