Angie Fuller disappearance: Friends recorded Jake Peters’ outback car chase claims after NT mum went missing

The last person to see Angie Fuller alive admits he returned to the site of her disappearance, tried to access her mobile phone and watched police from afar before eventually reporting her missing.

The Nightly can reveal that in a conversation recorded just three days after the young mother vanished from a remote stretch of road in the Northern Territory, Jake Jefferson Peters expressed his fear of being jailed over his girlfriend’s disappearance and his belief that she had been abducted.

NT Police’s major crime squad suspects Ms Fuller has been murdered and, despite conducting multiple wide-scale searches last year, has found no trace of the 30-year-old.

Homicide detectives say the last confirmed sighting of Ms Fuller was at a truck stop, north of Alice Springs, with Mr Peters at 6.40pm on January 9, 2023.

Investigators also believe her red Toyota Corolla, which she was driving with Mr Peters as a passenger, came into contact with an unrelated vehicle on Tanami Road, north-west of Alice Springs, in the early hours of January 10 last year.

Following her disappearance, her boyfriend claimed that the couple had been run off the road by “three carloads” of armed gangsters before hitting a tree and getting bogged, about 15km west of the Stuart Highway intersection.

Mr Peters said that when he could not get the car unstuck, the pair fled – both barefoot – into the desert to escape from those shooting at them.

Two days later, Mr Peters reported Ms Fuller missing to police.

On January 13, when Ms Fuller’s friends learned she was missing, they visited Mr Peters at his home to try to find out what had happened.

During a recorded conversation, obtained by The Nightly, Mr Peters shared a complicated and chaotic account of what had unfolded before, during and after the late-night incident on Tanami Rd.

Mr Peters said that the couple had gone to McDonald’s in Alice Springs earlier in the evening of January 9 while it was “still daylight”.

“After we got back … (we were) seeing what each other’s been up to … and we checked, we were going through each other’s phones,” he said.

Then, in the early hours of the next morning, they had been driving along Tanami Rd when “these c...s come up our arse”.

Mr Peters said he had told Ms Fuller to “just keep hammering it” to get away from them, before grabbing a wrench and “hanging out the window” to try to hit the other vehicle.

“I was waiting for the perfect moment … just swerve a little bit to the right and just f...ing hit the brakes, like slam them.”

Mr Peters said his girlfriend, who was driving, “didn’t hit them properly”.

“She didn’t slam them and this c... f...ing like connected to us and just f...ing made us go spinning … we’re spinnin’, spinnin’, spinnin’, and then we hit the bush and then f...ing hit a tree,” he said.

“The car stopped and shit.

“She hit the f...ing accelerator. Buried straight in.”

Mr Peters said he tried to push, and then pull, the car out before declaring “we gotta go” and running into the bush.

“When they pulled up, like … whoever it was in that car started swearing, you know, I was like turning around and we just heard a gunshot,” Mr Peters said.

“So she starts running, running, running … a few more gunshots, you know, full on.”

He said bullets were “whizzing past us” before Ms Fuller gave up and told him to continue without her.

“Another gunshot went off, and we just kept going,” he said.

“I thought she was still behind me, and I stayed there, and I was watching, watching, and I could see like c...s just walking around and walking past me and shit, I was like ‘f..., here we go’, you know?

“So I kept going, kept going, and sneaking past them … and then, out of nowhere, I heard her scream … so I start gunning towards that, you know, where that scream came from.

“I was gunning it, gunning it, and I just whistled out and then it stopped.”

Mr Peters said he was “coming up to the hill” when heard Ms Fuller scream once more.

“I heard her yell out, like she said, ‘get the f... away from me’,” he said.

He “gunned it up that hill” to try to “suss it all out” but couldn’t spot Ms Fuller.

“When I hit the hill, and I looked down … more carloads, just like up and down, up and down, pulling up, you know all that shit,” he said.

“I kept going, cos you know, a lot of f...ers were just coming.

“Just kept going and kept going … I made it all the way back here.”

When Mr Peters got home he was in a state of fear, expecting either the gangsters or police to drive up the road to his home.

At some point later that day or the next, Mr Peters returned to the crash site.

“I was running on low fuel so I f...en pull up there and I was like … somebody still feels like they’re there, you know? I feel like I’m still getting watched or whatever.”

Much of Mr Peters’ account is too confusing to distil into a clear timeline but at various points, he mentions calling his parents.

“I end up fucking jumping in my dad’s 4WD, the Rocky, and I took off,” he said.

On Wednesday, January 11, when “the next day kicked in”, he contacted his “cousin who’s a copper”.

“When I got into the next day, and I was waiting… cos, up on the hill I could see all the coppers, you know, going up and down,” he said.

“I was looking out towards … I was thinking f..., you know, she’s gotta be coming.”

Mr Peters said he also thought “she might’ve got locked up or the coppers might have got her.”

“Made contact with my cousin … I went and seen him, and then from there, like, I told him the story,” he said.

“And he was like, ‘go into the police station’. I went to the police station, and now all this shit.”

When Ms Fuller’s friends visited Mr Peters on January 13, he told them he had already been interviewed by police and participated in a walk-through at the crash site.

He mentioned to the women he still had one of Ms Fuller’s phones.

“There was two phones in the car,” he said.

“I ended up with her second phone … her old phone, you know, she’s got a new one.

“I had hers but there was no SIM card in it”

Ms Fuller’s friends asked if her new phone had “disappeared”.

“Yeah… I tried to get into it, it locked me out, I was like, ‘f...’,” he replied.

A friend of Ms Fuller’s asked Mr Peters how he got a scratch on his face.

“When I was running through the bush,” he said.

“What the f...? Look at all these other scratches I’ve got all over me.”

The woman quickly apologised for offending him.

“We just want her to come back,” she said. “We just want to see her again.”

Mr Peters, at one point, compares their stress levels to his own.

“You know, I’m about to go to jail for something I f...ing didn’t do,” he said.

“You know, I love that woman … I wanted to start a life with her.”

The officer in charge of Ms Fuller’s homicide investigation, Detective Sergeant Ashley Dudson, confirmed police had received a number of video and audio recordings but refused to comment on them.

Sgt Dudson said police remained interested in the movements of two vehicles Mr Peters had access to in the time between Ms Fuller’s car getting bogged and when she was reported missing.

The vehicles are a 1986 Camouflaged Daihatsu Rocky with the rear canopy removed and no registration plates and Mr Peters’ 1998 Silver Nissan Pulsar Sedan.

NT Police has also offered a $250,000 reward for information leading to the location of Angie’s body and the conviction of anyone responsible for her death.

Anyone with information is urged to contact police on 131 444 or Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000 and quote #10228143.