Did Outback Peter fake his own death?

Agatha Christie could not have contrived such a baffling plot, nor filled it with so many red herrings. But now the mystery of what really happened to Peter Falconio, the young British traveller who disappeared in the Australian Outback a year ago next week, has taken an astonishing new twist.

All efforts to catch the mystery gunman believed to have killed 28-year-old Falconio before driving away with his blood-soaked body as his girlfriend Joanne Lees cowered in nearby bushes, have met with abject failure. Countless theories have been put forward - some believable, some nonsensical - but none has provided a definitive explanation of the strange events on that night of July 14, 2001.

Now the Daily Mail can reveal that Australian police are investigating a startling new possibility: that Falconio faked his own death and may still be alive. While this claim has been the subject of bar room banter throughout the Northern Territory for some time, it now emerges that a document outlining the theory has been on police files for several months.

The letter was sent anonymously to detectives in Australia by an informant in Britain. It describes how, before leaving for his trip in Australia, Falconio allegedly asked for detailed information about life insurance policies and ways in which deaths could be faked.

Similar allegations are made in an affidavit by a friend and workmate of Mr Falconio, which has been seen by the Daily Mail.

Meanwhile, police are questioning another man who claims to have seen and spoken to Mr Falconio on the east coast of Australia recently. Although they have been unable to find evidence to support his claims, they say he has provided 'substantial information' and are convinced of his sincerity.

The extraordinary developments come amid a plethora of new, unanswered questions about the case.

There is, for example, the baffling matter of the distinctive breed of dog that Joanne Lees reported as having accompanied the couple's assailant. A witness now claims that, just two days before the incident, she was unable to identify an identical dog.

The same witness also claims there was a striking resemblance between the description Joanne gave of the assailant's truck and a vehicle parked nearby as they were talking.

As we shall see, some of those who initially supported Joanne against those who doubted her story are now beginning to voice qualms of their own.

And although the Australian police continue to stand by her, John Daulby, the Northern Territory's Assistant Crime Commissioner, has promised to give full consideration to all new information and has called a press conference next week to discuss recent developments.

Mr Daulby points out that inquiries about an insurance policy on Mr Falconio's life were made as a 'matter of course' early in the investigation and nothing suspicious emerged.

And in an exclusive interview in Darwin yesterday, the 51-year-old investigator with 28 years' experience made it clear that he still believes Joanne's story.

'We have questioned her thoroughly, over and over, and she has given us a very full and believable description,' he says.

Yet although the tentacles of the Northern Territory police have stretched around the world in the course of this investigation, it remains defiantly unsolved.

Forensic scientists have gone over the couple's old orange and white camper van with a fine-tooth comb, collected some finger prints, but found nothing conclusive.

Joanne has even been hypnotised to help her recall details from that dreadful night. But always the search for the gunman has proved frustratingly fruitless.

Now Mr Daulby concedes that the amount of blood found at the roadside after the reported attack on the couple was 'not necessarily' fatal.

Those who have seen the stain have guessed Mr Falconio would have lost at least a pint of blood. But the average man can lose up to a third of his ten pints before losing consciousness.

Added to the intrigue is a senior police officer's comment this week that 'before you can say with absolute certainty that you have a murder investigation you need to have a body or undeniable evidence that a murder has taken place'.

No inquest has been arranged and will not be until police have exhausted every possible lead and reached the inescapable conclusion that Mr Falconio is dead.

Of course, if eventually proven untrue, the suggestion that he could still be alive will be seen as just another cruel burden to have been heaped on the shoulders of 28-year-old Joanne (whose 54-year-old mother Jennifer died this week) and the Falconio family.

It would be equally unjust were it to be shown - as some amateur Outback detectives suggest - that Joanne was an innocent party in a ruse by her boyfriend to dupe his insurers.

Others have suggested he played a cruel joke on her with the aid of an accomplice after learning, as sources in Britain claim, that she planned to leave him.

Whatever, the truth, there are doubts about this case that simply refuse to go away.

Joanne Lees' account of how she and her boyfriend were tricked into stopping by a stranger with a Mexican-style moustache as they drove their Volkswagen camper van through the Outback is well documented.

Lees, a travel agent, and Falconio, a building contractor, lived in Hove, East Sussex, and had been together six years.

They were eight months into a round-the-world working trip, and had driven from Sydney, via Adelaide, north to Alice Springs, taking in famous landmarks such as Uluru, formerly known as Ayers Rock, and were heading to Darwin.

On Saturday, July 14, a couple of hours after sunset and about ten miles outside a place called Barrow Creek on the Stuart Highway, Joanne told police that a white four-wheel drive vehicle made to overtake their camper van.

The driver had indicated as he drew alongside them that there was something wrong with their van's exhaust system.

They pulled over and Peter Falconio got out to talk to the other driver who had also stopped. She said she could hear them talking amicably at the back of the van before Falconio came and asked her to rev up the engine.

This she did, and then heard a bang which she thought was the exhaust backfiring. Seconds later the other driver appeared with a gun. He gagged and tied her hands behind her and bound her feet and dumped her in the canvas-covered rear of his vehicle.

Joanne told police that she managed to escape and hid in the bushes as he searched for her by torchlight - she suggested for several hours - with his dog at his side. He failed to find her, and it was some six hours later, when the gunman had driven off, that she summoned up the courage to run out into the highway and wave down a lorry, still gagged and with her wrists bound by a plastic tie.

The lorry's driver and his mate helped search for her boyfriend but all they found was a pool of blood covered in a pile of dirt. There was no sign of the camper van although police later discovered it abandoned nearby on a track.

Joanne Lees was taken to the small Barrow Creek hotel where she was comforted by owner Les Pilton and his partner Helen Jones as the police began their investigation.

The couple listened to her accounts, and in the weeks that followed hit back at anyone who dared question it. But now, 12 months on, Miss Jones claims: 'There are elements that just don't gel. I'm haunted by the black holes.'

Her partner, Mr Pilton, says: 'I'm not comfortable with so many things now.'

As the months have passed with no breakthrough, a growing chorus of critics has claimed that for a woman who was traumatised by the apparent murder of her boyfriend, and an attempt to kidnap and possibly rape and kill her, Joanne's recollection of the attacker and his vehicle was astoundingly well- detailed, especially since, by her own account, she initially had a sack thrust over her head before she got it loose.

She remembered that the bullbars on the front of his vehicle were chrome, that it had bucket seats, and that there were key differences between it and other vehicles police examined in their initial investigation.

Joanne also recalled the man's black baseball cap with an emblem on the front, his dark, penetrating eyes, his long-sleeved dark T-shirt and canvas-like pants.

And she was able to describe the dog as possibly being 'a Red Heeler cattle dog,' despite having only had a brief glimpse of it in the cabin light of the gunman's van as he drew alongside.

In addition, a number of questions about the incident, first raised in the Mail last year, remain unanswered. Why did the gunman leave no footprints as he searched for Joanne for hours, while imprints of her boots were found?

Why was no evidence found of the man's dog, at his side as he searched? And why couldn't the dog find the Englishwoman as she hid?

'That dog must have been deaf, dumb and blind not to have found her - Red Heelers have a natural curiosity and a very keen sense of smell and hearing,' says Connie Redhead, vice-president of the Cattle Dogs Association of South Australia. 'It's all very strange.'

But there are other questions, too. Why did the gunman, knowing Joanne had seen his face, drive away without waiting for daylight, when he would have almost certainly found her?

And why, assuming he shot Peter Falconio, did he take the body with him when an accident or a breakdown could have resulted in him being caught red-handed by police?

There were no signs of Falconio's body being dragged into the gunman's vehicle despite the large pool of blood - confirmed as his by DNA tests - being found on the road. No blood drag marks, no specks of blood at all.

Did Mr Falconio suddenly and inexplicably stop bleeding - or did the gunman care enough about his victim to bind his wounds?

Then there is an element of Joanne's account that perplexed her critics for some time - the question of her handcuffs.

She told detectives that her hands were tied behind her, but that she had been able to 'pull her body through her arms' to bring her hands to the front.

Few believed this - it seemed she would have needed the flexibility of a gymnast - until the crude plastic handcuffs were revealed by police. Then it seemed that Joanne's story had been vindicated.

The length of plastic between the cuffs was indeed wide enough apart for her to be able to bring her hands to the front of her body.

But why on earth would a man with murder on his mind have used handcuffs that gave his victim so much latitude? And why, too, were her feet bound together so loosely that she was able to run from his vehicle into the bushes?

Alice Springs and the surrounding district still buzzes with talk of Joanne's behaviour after her boyfriend's disappearance.

A few days later, she demanded police get a local hairdresser to open up ahead of hours so she could have her hair done for a televised press conference. Then she refused to answer any questions from journalists.

By now, with an unclaimed £90,000 reward for positive information, it might have been expected that someone would have come forward with information about the gunman.

More than 1,500 people have been questioned, fingerprinted and allowed to go because their prints do not match those taken from the van. Other prints have been eliminated but a few remain unaccounted for.

The police have followed up thousands of tip-offs. People looking like the gunman Joanne has described have turned up all over the Northern Territory.

Few have raised as much suspicion as a drifter called Chris Malouf. In July last year he was driving around the Outback in a white van with a canvas-covered rear. He had a Mexican moustache and a baseball cap with a motif on the front.

He has admitted to the Mail that he had seen Joanne and Peter Falconio in Alice Springs as they were setting off to drive north on the afternoon of July 14. He is equally certain they saw him, too.

He says he camped at the roadside later that night and in the morning he drove to the Barrow Creek Hotel - where he was pounced upon by police.

'Joanne Lees was inside,' he recalls. 'She was being interviewed about what happened and was describing the fellow.

'The police made her close her eyes, because the bloke had put a sack over her head, and run her hands over my face and hair and my van to see if she recalled anything. She said it wasn't me, thank God.'

Several days later, former security guard Gordon Pollard was sitting with his mate Bruce Dejersey by the river near the outback town of Katherine when they saw Malouf cutting wood.

They believed he was a 'dead ringer' for the mystery van driver caught on CCTV at an Alice Springs filling station four hours after the attack on the couple, and who to this day has not been traced.

Police say Malouf and the man on the video are not the same. But if so, why hasn't the man from the filling station come forward to clear his name?

And there is one further mysterious event which has raised further speculation, serving only to support those who believe there