Kathy Marks: The doubts and anger of another outback killing

'It was Joanne Lees's first-person account the media wanted. Deprived of that, they began to grumble and speculate'

It was a murder mystery with all the ingredients of a sensational story and, best of all, there was a woman who had survived to tell the tale in all its nightmarish detail.

Joanne Lees was the perfect media victim: young and photogenic, with raven hair and luminescent skin. She and her boyfriend, Peter Falconio, both British, had encountered a psychopath on a lonely highway in the middle of the Australian Outback. She had escaped abduction and an unimaginable fate; he had apparently been shot dead, although his body has yet to be found.

Within days, though, the whispering campaign had begun. Was Ms Lees really all that she seemed? Was her account of hiding in the desert scrub for six hours while the gunman hunted for her with his flashlight and dog not a little far-fetched? Was she really the vulnerable, grief-stricken woman desperate for her lover's killer to be tracked down? To state it plainly, did she do it?

The whispers grew louder, and suddenly Ms Lees was being compared with Lindy Chamberlain, the Australian woman whose claim that a dingo stole her 10-week-old baby near Ayers Rock (now known as Uluru) two decades ago was greeted with widespread disbelief.

Chamberlain served two-and-a-half years of a life sentence before the discovery of new evidence led to her and her husband, Michael, being acquitted of the murder of their daughter, Azaria. The public frenzy of suspicion about her version of events, fuelled by the media and an inept police force, played a key part in Australia's most famous miscarriage of justice.

While there are obvious similarities between the two cases, both apparently involving a violent death in strange circumstances in the red dirt landscape of Australia's central desert, Ms Lees is no Lindy. Crucially, the police have unwaveringly supported her from the outset, stating categorically that they have no doubt that she is telling the truth.

In both cases, however, the public and the media – initially full of sympathy – turned against the women at the centre of the drama because they refused to play ball, failing to conform to expectations of the way they ought to behave after the traumatic loss of a loved one.

Chamberlain displayed little public grief and spent only a brief time helping to search for her daughter. She and her husband, both Seventh Day Adventists, saw Azaria's disappearance as a divine test of their faith. She said in an interview after she was released from jail: "Women are supposed to be stupid, lose their heads and scream and panic, and I don't do it."

Ms Lees, meanwhile, failed to do the right thing because, to the consternation of the British and Australian media assembled in Alice Springs, she simply refused to talk. She did not give a press conference, she granted one brief interview to a local newspaper (which she later regretted) and she announced that she had no intention whatsoever of selling her story.

Ms Lees did not even appear in public for 10 days, although there were tantalising glimpses of her that only whetted the appetite; she was spotted having lunch in Alice one day, and seen in a car on her way to Barrow Creek, the crime scene, where she took part in a reconstruction.

The dramatic sequence of events on the Stuart Highway was already known; a stranger in a pick-up truck had waved down the camper van in which Ms Lees and Mr Falconio were travelling. Mr Falconio had got out to speak to him, and Ms Lees heard what she thought was a gunshot. She was bound, gagged and thrown into the truck, but managed to escape and hid until her assailant drove away, presumably with Mr Falconio's body.

But it was Ms Lees' first-person account that the media wanted, together with a full exposition of her feelings about losing the man whom she planned to marry. Deprived of that, they began to grumble and speculate. The Australians harked back to the Chamberlain case, while the British recalled Tracey Andrews, who killed her boyfriend, Lee Harvey, in Worcestershire in 1996 and then claimed he had been the victim of a road rage attack.

A few questions were asked at the police press conferences in Alice Springs, mainly by British journalists. Were there any problems with Ms Lees's story? Was she a suspect? Was she free to go? Was it true that she and Mr Falconio had had a row? That she had a history of mental problems?

The police were furious, but the reality is that these were reasonable questions that needed to be asked. Women do sometimes murder their partners and there were several apparent holes in Ms Lees's account, including the absence of footprints from the gunman or his dog in the area where they were supposed to have looked for her as she hid.

The Australian press became convinced that British newspapers were airing doubts about Ms Lees' innocence – which was not yet the case – and ran a couple of disapproving stories to that effect. The British press claimed, equally wrongly, that the Australian newspapers were casting aspersions on Ms Lees.

It was an absurd misunderstanding, and it finally drew Ms Lees out into the open. Last Wednesday she gave a highly stage-managed press conference to which just one journalist and a few photographers were admitted. She answered three questions out of 13 that were put to her in writing, and confined herself to criticising the media. "They distort the truth and doubt my story," she said. "They misquote me, making up stories and accusations."

No one was any the wiser, and Ms Lees did herself no favours, appearing strained and uncomfortable and – like Lindy Chamberlain – showing little obvious emotion.

She came across poorly, but that, of course, is not evidence of guilt. Ms Lees is probably still in shock after an unspeakably horrific experience. It is not surprising that she does not want to talk to strangers about her boyfriend. She may well be under sedation.

Her supporters and detractors fall into two clearly defined camps. The former comprise two lorry drivers who picked her up on the highway after she stumbled out of her hiding place, locals at the Barrow Creek pub, where she was initially looked after, Luciano and Paul Falconio, her boyfriend's father and brother, who flew over from England, and Northern Territory police. In other words, everyone who has been in close contact with her.

The latter comprise those who have been excluded from the inner sanctum: the public and the media, with the exception of Mark Wilton, the journalist with the local newspaper, the Centralian Advocate, who scored that one interview.

The Chamberlain case, which was made into a Hollywood film starring Meryl Streep, gripped Australia through a 15-year legal saga that included three inquests, three appeals and a royal commission. Even the killing of a nine-year-old boy by dingoes on Fraser Island, in Queensland, in May failed to sway the significant number of Australians who remain convinced that Azaria was murdered by her mother. The baby's body has never been found.

The Outback stubbornly fails to yield, too, the body of Mr Falconio, which must be agonising for Ms Lees and for his family. It is to be hoped that their ordeal does not last as long as Chamberlain's, and that the gunman who has wrecked their lives is brought to justice. Until that happens, the innuendo about Ms Lees will persist.