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As already noted, Falconer had emerged as a person of interest for Strike Force Seabrook, the investigation into the death of the Perish grandparents. In the days after his
abduction, the Tuno detectives spoke with colleague Bryne Ruse, who was working on Seabrook. He told them how Andrew Perish believed Falconer had killed his grandparents. In the recorded interview Seabrook had then conducted with Falconer, he'd denied this and expressed fears that his wife, Liz, and daughter Linda were putting out rumours in order to get him. Falconer told Ruse, ‘I think they're going to try to get me knocked . . . It's a known fact.' He said Liz had urged him to apply for a transfer to Long Bay jail, where ‘Neddy [Smith, a notorious killer] was going to knock me.' As for Linda, ‘she's got more murders than a bucketful of worms'. There was no evidence for any of these allegations, but clearly Falconer was scared about something.

Tuno soon came up with a list of Falconer's enemies and a few theories. One was that Falconer might have arranged for the abduction himself and be on the way out west to harm his wife. Liz was warned, and moved out of the property at Brewarrina. But Falconer was not seen, there or anywhere else. Not alive, anyway.

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Just after midnight on 26 November 2001, the phone rang in the Port Macquarie home of Douglas Breakwell, a volunteer in the State Emergency Services. Breakwell, a qualified boat driver, was asked to assist police by taking a punt out on the Hastings River at Wauchope, a town some fifteen kilometres west of Port Macquarie. Fishermen had found a bag and slit it open, discovering what looked like tattooed human flesh. The police wanted to recover it and some similar-looking bags before daylight.

The punt was on a trailer. Breakwell fetched it and a generator and some floodlights from the depot, and with colleagues launched the boat at Wauchope, where the river is tidal. The SES officers and three police motored up the river with the lights on, and presently located a blue plastic bag high on the bank near the high school. There was a strong smell of decomposing flesh. The parcel was about the size of a football and had been tied off with silver duct tape, with the bag being cut off above the tape. The whole thing was wrapped in chicken wire that also contained a river stone, and seemed to have been snagged on a branch by the receding tide.

The police filmed the scene and then manoeuvred the package into a yellow contamination bag. The process was repeated for another five bags found further up the river. Some were bigger than the first parcel. The third was the one the fishermen had found, and it had been further ripped open by the first police on the scene. Inside was a human torso, heavily tattooed with images including a pair of lips, sharks, and a female lying down with her hands behind her head and a towel around her midriff. For some reason, it was the lips Breakwell would remember.

At this point the Homicide Squad was called in, another of the specialist units based at Strawberry Hills. Homicide is widely regarded as elite police work, but it is not appealing to many officers because of its nature and the intensity and long hours often required, which can take the Sydney-based detectives away from home for weeks and even months. The squad tends to attract officers passionate about their work. It deals with most of the murder investigations around New South Wales and consists of a number of teams. Each
is allocated one main investigation at a time, and also does on-call work every six weeks, when team members must be ready to go to any murder in the state at a moment's notice, and handle the initial investigation. If the killer is not caught after a few days, the case is allocated to another team.

Detective Sergeant Paul Jacob was in charge of the on-call team when Falconer's body was found. He is one of the state's most experienced homicide investigators, and has worked on well-known cases such as the killing of Victor Chang and the so-called Granny Killer, John Glover. His long investigation of the 1995 death of model Caroline Byrne, found at the foot of The Gap, Sydney's most frequented suicide spot, was to lead to the conviction of Gordon Wood, later quashed on appeal. He and a small team packed their bags and headed up to Port Macquarie, the main police station near Wauchope, and out to the river.

That morning the most urgent tasks were to establish crime scenes where the six parcels had been found, and to search the river to make sure there were no more. Jacob figured the last thing he wanted was for some other poor bastard to come across another package. It was soon apparent there was nothing to be gained from examining the locations—the parcels had floated to where they were found, and it was clear from their condition that they'd been in the water a while. The search up and down the river found no more packages.

While this was happening, Jacob and his small team interviewed the fishermen again, and ensured the parcels were on their way to the morgue at Newcastle. A system of record management was instigated so their locations and contents could be tracked.

The Tuno detectives heard about the discovery when they got to work at 8 am, and Luke Rankin remembers phone calls back and forth as the Port Macquarie police opened the parcels and passed on details of the tattoos they found on the body. Tuno was able to confirm these were Falconer's—they had descriptions of some of his tatts in their records. On the left arm, for example, was the name of his wife, Elizabeth. They were told the parcels had been meticulously sealed with duct tape, which is possibly why the packages were found so soon—the gases produced by the decomposing flesh could not escape, so the six bags had perhaps floated to the surface. (There were actually seven bags in all, although the last one did not emerge from the depths until twelve months later.)

The disposal method was odd, and struck the detectives as both elaborate and careless. It seemed to have been done by one or more people who were not squeamish and had a lot of time and determination. The fact they knew little of the chemistry of the decomposition of human flesh was not surprising, but expecting that parcels wrapped in chicken wire would not be disturbed in a river that sees a lot of fishermen seemed strange.

On 28 November Dr Kevin Lee, a forensic pathologist at the Department of Forensic Medicine at John Hunter Hospital in Newcastle, conducted the first of two autopsies. The bags were X-rayed to ascertain their contents. Bag one, for example, contained two forearms, an upper arm, and both feet. Then the contents of the bags were laid out on a steel table and reconstructed, like a gruesome jigsaw puzzle. The whole body was there, except for all the upper teeth but one, the lower jaw, the stomach organs and a large piece of skin from the
front of the stomach. There were signs of pre-death blows to the face, and some sort of burning or chemical stinging under one arm. There were shotgun pellets in the face, chest and one arm, but the skin had grown over them, indicating they were old: presumably they dated from Falconer's days in the tow truck wars. The body had been cut up with a handsaw. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to remove the teeth, presumably to avoid identification although this was strange given that Falconer's tattoos were so distinctive.

On 2 December Strike Force Tuno became a murder investigation. It was to be run by the Homicide Squad, and a number of the VMO detectives were allocated to the team. This is quite typical: murder teams can draw in officers from different areas with relevant skills and backgrounds. The OIC of the investigation was a thirty-nine-year-old detective named Gary Jubelin, a tough and lean cop of unusual intensity and with a devotion to physical exercise. He was regarded as a hard man to work for or with, because of his relentless dedication to the job and the long hours he put in.

Jubelin was a detective sergeant who'd just completed another investigation when he heard about Falconer's abduction, and then the discovery of his body in the river. He regarded the kidnappers having posed as cops as provocative, almost as though they were taunting the police. Jubelin had two senior constables on his team, Jason Evers and Nigel Warren, and asked them how they felt about requesting the Falconer investigation, which would take them away from home for a while.

The others were keen. Warren was interested in the possibility that it might have something to do with organised
crime—Falconer's background, and the elaborate abduction, suggested that. Warren had been in homicide since joining the squad in 1998 to work on Kerry Whelan's disappearance, and regarded it as the pinnacle of detective work, in part because of the variety of circumstances encountered. Most murders were domestic, or personal, but the Falconer case looked different.

Jubelin asked homicide commander Nick Kaldos for the job and got it, and the team headed up to Port Macquarie. After a one-day handover with Paul Jacob, Jubelin found himself in charge of an investigation that was to occupy a lot of the next decade of his life.

Nigel Warren was the quieter member of the team. In the words of the ebullient Evers, ‘Nigel had a more subtle kind of personality. Gary and I tended to get in people's faces a bit.' Warren managed the exhibits and kept track of the six parcels as their contents were tested. He actually didn't find autopsies unpleasant. He'd been apprehensive at his first one, but when the surgeon made the initial incision he found his mind switched to clinical mode, and he was fascinated by how the body worked, and how much a doctor could sometimes learn from it about the circumstances of a murder. The smell was always a kick in the guts at first, but you learned to switch that off. He figured it was important not to lose your compassion for the victim, but if you couldn't control your emotions, you wouldn't be much use as a detective.

As with the earlier kidnapping investigation, there was very little evidence. The parcels had probably been thrown off Bain Bridge west of Wauchope and drifted some way downriver. There were no eyewitnesses to the dumping, and no forensic evidence of any use: Tuno discovered the plastic bags, chicken
wire and tape used were commonly available around the state, and the river stones in the parcels came, according to a geologist, ‘from eastern Australia'. So they turned their attention to Falconer's life. ‘He was a big manufacturer,' Jason Evers recalls. ‘He used to bring ute loads of meth from Brewarinna. He made lots of money. At one stage the Crime Commission took a house and a boat off him [as proceeds of crime].'

The most extraordinary aspect of the case, apart from the way he'd been abducted and killed, was the number of suspects. At the start they had over seventy persons of interest, and all had to be investigated to see if they met the three key criteria required to commit a crime: motive, opportunity and capability. This should have been a narrowing-down process, but Falconer, because of enemies he'd made in his career and the fact he'd recently been talking to the police, had been disliked by so many violent criminals that by the end of this process—which took months—most of the seventy remained as possibilities.

The team was expanded to some thirty detectives and analysts in its early months, located in the training room at Port Macquarie police station. They spent much of their time using phones and staring at computers, to the disgust of some of the more traditional police at the station, who wondered why they weren't out busting down people's doors. One reason they didn't do this was that there turned out to be few local suspects. Initially the detectives wondered if the way the body had been disposed of suggested a local connection. Obviously the intention had been that it never be found, which might mean the perpetrators had not taken pains to dispose of it far
from where they lived. But Port Macquarie is better known for its retirees and holiday-makers than its violent criminals.

Another reason the police spent so much time at their computers was because the team knew from experience that information management, undramatic as it is, would be crucial for a complex and possibly long investigation of the sort this looked like being. You never knew if a piece of information gathered now might become vital in a year's time, even crucial when exposed to fierce analysis in the Supreme Court one day. So every piece of data had to be logged onto the investigation database, called eaglei, and put in the correct category and linked to other pieces of information where possible connections existed. Someone had to ensure that it was read by the right people and, if necessary, acted upon. As the database grew—and in the first months it grew exponentially—the categories had to be revised and refined, and the connections reviewed and redrawn. Once Nigel Warren had established records for all the exhibits—he created a big paper chart for every parcel—he helped control the flood of information produced by all the other detectives.

As it became clear that Falconer's enemies were mainly in Sydney, after a few months Tuno relocated to the Homicide Squad headquarters in the city. It lost most of its members, as usually happens when a case is not solved soon. The general principle with murder is that the longer a case goes unsolved, the smaller the chance it ever will be, which means resources get switched to newer cases where they're likely to do more good. This is why in the coming years Tuno would have to fight not just for resources but, at times, for its survival.

The smaller strike force comprised Jubelin's original team plus Glen Browne and Luke Rankin from VMO. They'd kept Browne because he was good—Evers had worked with him before—and because of his extensive knowledge of south-west Sydney, where he'd spent most of his career. Rankin, although he was younger than the others, had a spark and a good analytical mind.

Like all investigations, this one threw up a lot of work that led nowhere, but some of it had potential. Terry Falconer's son James had received a phone call saying, ‘Your cunt of a father is in the ground and you're next.' This was traced back to a prison phone, linked to inmate Rob Institoris, husband of Terry's daughter Linda. She, like her mother, Liz, had been in bitter conflict with Terry. The police learned that Liz had feared for her safety once Terry got out of jail, and had been keen to turn the criminal world against him, telling people he was a police informer.