Ivan Milat

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 19th of September 1992, two runners were orienteering through Belanglo State Forest in New South Wales when they came across a concealed corpse. Nothing about the scene announced a larger crime. The forest looked like any other stretch of Australian bush.

  That discovery would lead, within two years, to Ivan Milat, a road worker born in 1944 and known to the Australian media as the Backpacker Murderer. He died in 2019, still a figure of dread and fascination.

  This documentary asks how a household of brothers who grew up around knives and rifles produced a man like this. It asks why young travellers could vanish for years without anyone linking their cases. It asks how one hitchhiker's escape, filed away on a scrap of paper, became the clue that mattered. And it asks how many other families may still be waiting for answers.

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• 2. Brothers and Knives

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  Ivan Milat was born on the 27th of December 1944, the fifth of 14 children. His father, Stjepan Marko Milat, was a Croatian emigrant and labourer. His mother, Margaret Elizabeth Piddleston, was Australian.

  The family was poor. They first lived in a weatherboard cottage on a rural farm at Bossley Park, 36 kilometres west of Sydney, before moving to Liverpool. By most accounts the parents worked hard to raise, educate and discipline their children, and they sent every one of them to Catholic schools. Relatives also described the father as a man with a temper, fuelled by alcoholism.

  Ten of the Milat children were boys, and many were well known to local police. They were used to handling knives and firearms, and spent their afternoons shooting at targets in the family yard.

  Siblings later said Ivan showed antisocial and psychopathic behaviour very young. They recalled him attacking animals with machetes, and at age 13 he spent time in a residential school. By 17 he was in a juvenile detention centre for theft, and at 19 he took part in a shop break-in. In 1964 he received 18 months for breaking and entering. A month after his release he was arrested for driving a stolen car, and he was given two years' hard labour. In September 1967, aged 22, he was sentenced to three years in prison for theft.

  A shotgun blast on the 6th of March 1962 may belong to this same period. A taxi driver named Neville Knight was shot during an attempted robbery and left paralysed from the waist down. Milat was 17. No one was caught, and an innocent man, Allan Dillon, served five years for it.

  In May 2015, Milat's brother Boris told Steve Aperen, a former homicide detective, that Ivan had admitted the shooting. Aperen ran polygraph tests on both Boris and Dillon and came away convinced. Clive Small, who later led the backpacker investigation, shared that belief. Milat was never charged, though authorities noted that paralysing victims became a feature of later attacks.

  On the 7th of April 1971, Milat used a knife to abduct two 18-year-old female hitchhikers near Liverpool railway station. He raped one of them before they stopped at a petrol station café, where both escaped. He was arrested the same day and charged with rape and two counts of armed robbery.

  While awaiting trial, he joined some of his brothers in a string of robberies. Then he faked his own suicide by leaving his shoes at The Gap, a well-known Sydney suicide site. Authorities believe he went to Queensland and Victoria, then flew to New Zealand, where he lived for two years. He is also suspected of slipping back into Australia on a fake passport.

  He was rearrested in 1974 after his mother was taken to hospital with a heart attack. The robbery and kidnap cases collapsed at trial with help from the Milat family lawyer, John Marsden. In 1975 Milat began working as a truck driver. By the time of his later arrest he had worked on and off for the Roads & Traffic Authority for 20 years.

  In 1977, he tried to rape and murder two women hitchhiking from Liverpool to Canberra. He was never charged. Seventeen years later, a very different set of hitchhikers would give police the name they needed.

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• 3. Travellers Who Vanished

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  Between December 1989 and April 1992, five groups of young travellers set out along the roads of New South Wales and did not arrive. According to the account that later emerged, Milat would approach backpackers along the Hume Highway, offering them transport to parts of southern New South Wales. Instead he took them into Belanglo State Forest.

  Deborah Everist and James Gibson, both 19, left Melbourne on the 30th of December 1989. They went first to Sydney, where they stayed at a backpacker hostel in the inner-city suburbs. After checking out, they were last seen heading for ConFest, a gathering near Albury, planning to hitchhike there.

  The next to disappear was Simone Schmidl, a German traveller, on the 20th of January 1991. She told acquaintances she was going to Melbourne to meet her mother, who was flying in from Germany for a camping holiday. She was last seen at a train station, preparing to head for western Sydney to try hitchhiking.

  On the 26th of December 1991, Gabor Neugebauer, 21, and Anja Habschied, 20, both from Germany, left the Backpackers Inn at Kings Cross in Sydney. They planned to hitchhike to Adelaide and Darwin.

  The final pair were British. Joanne Walters, 22, and Caroline Clarke, 21, left Kings Cross on the 18th of April 1992 to hitchhike around Australia. They were headed for Victoria to pick fruit. They made it as far as Bulli Pass, near Wollongong, where they reportedly asked for directions to the Hume Highway.

  Walters and Clarke would be the first of the seven to be found.

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• 4. The Forest Gives Up Its Dead

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  On the morning after the runners' find, police uncovered a second body 30 metres from the first. Dental records confirmed that the two were Clarke and Walters.

  Walters had been stabbed fifteen times: four times in the chest, once in the neck and nine times in the back. The back wounds would have paralysed her. Clarke had been shot repeatedly in the head at the burial site, and police believe she was used as target practice. A thorough search of the forest led investigators to rule out any further discoveries.

  They were wrong. On the 5th of October 1993, a local man searching for firewood found bones in a remote section of Belanglo. He returned with police, and two bodies were soon uncovered. They were identified as Gibson and Everist.

  Gibson's skeleton lay in a foetal position and showed eight stab wounds. A large knife had cut through his upper spine, which would have paralysed him. Other wounds to his back and chest would have punctured his heart and lungs. Everist had been savagely beaten, with her skull fractured in two places and her jaw broken. She had also been stabbed once in the back.

  His body in this forest puzzled the detectives. Gibson's camera had been found by a roadside at Galston Gorge on the 31st of December 1989, and his backpack turned up there on the 13th of March 1990. That spot lies over 120 kilometres to the north.

  On the 1st of November 1993, a police sweep found a skeleton in a clearing beside a fire trail. It was Schmidl, with at least eight stab wounds. Two of them had severed her spine, and others would have punctured her heart and lungs. The clothing beside her did not belong to her. It matched what another missing backpacker, Habschied, had been wearing.

  On the 4th of November, searchers found Habschied and Neugebauer in shallow graves 50 metres apart on a nearby fire trail. Habschied had been decapitated, and despite an extensive search her skull was never found. Neugebauer had been shot in the head six times. There was evidence that some of the victims did not die instantly.

  With those finds, the forest had yielded seven bodies. Detectives now needed a name.

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• 5. Task Force Air

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  On the 14th of October 1993, the New South Wales Police formed Task Force Air, with more than twenty detectives and analysts. The remains showed signs that some victims had been tortured, and the case demanded a dedicated team. On the 5th of November, the state government raised the reward to A$500,000.

  Once police had built a profile of the killer, they were buried in data from many sources. Investigators applied link analysis technology and cut a short list of 230 suspects down to thirty-two.

  Some people speculated that more than one killer was at work. Most of the victims had been attacked as pairs, they had been killed in different ways, and they had been buried separately.

  On the 13th of November 1993, police received a call from Paul Onions, a 24-year-old in the United Kingdom. On the 25th of January 1990, he had been backpacking in Australia and hitchhiking from Liverpool station towards Mildura. A man known only as "Bill" had offered him a ride south out of Casula.

  South of the town of Mittagong, less than one kilometre from Belanglo, Bill pulled out a revolver and some rope. He meant to rob Onions. Onions ran, and Bill shot at him as he fled.

  Onions flagged down a passing motorist, Joanne Berry of Canberra. Together they gave the Bowral police a description of the attacker, his vehicle and its registration number.

  On the 13th of April 1994, detectives re-found the note recording Onions' call. Berry corroborated his statement, as did the girlfriend of a man who worked with Milat.

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• 6. Arrest and Trial

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  Police surveillance of the Milat house at Cinnabar Street began on the 26th of February 1994. Detectives learned that Milat had sold his silver Nissan Patrol soon after the bodies of Clarke and Walters were found. They confirmed he had not been working on any of the days of the attacks. Acquaintances also described his obsession with weapons.

  Once the link between the Belanglo murders and Onions' ordeal was clear, Onions flew to Australia. On the 5th of May 1994, he identified Milat as the man who had picked him up and tried to shoot him.

  On the 22nd of May, fifty police officers surrounded Milat's house, and he was arrested on robbery and weapons charges relating to the Onions attack. The search turned up a .22-calibre Anschütz Model 1441/42 rifle and parts of a .22-calibre Ruger 10/22 rifle, both matching the type used in the murders. Police also found a Browning pistol and a Bowie knife. They found items belonging to several of the victims, and searches of his mother's home and five brothers' homes turned up more.

  Milat appeared in court on the 23rd of May without entering a plea. On the 31st of May he was also charged with the seven murders. On the 28th of June, he dismissed John Marsden, his family's lawyer, and applied for legal aid. His brothers Richard and Walter were tried over weapons, drugs and stolen items found on their properties.

  A committal hearing on the murders ran from the 24th of October to the 12th of December, with over two hundred witnesses. At the start of February 1995, he was remanded in custody until June.

  The trial opened at the Supreme Court of New South Wales in Sydney on the 26th of March 1996, with Mark Tedeschi prosecuting. Milat reportedly remained confident of acquittal. In phone recordings made in 2004 for the ABC's Australian Story, he explained his reasoning: "My basic defense in my trial was that it wasn't me. I don't know who did it. It was up to them to prove my guilt, not for me to prove my innocence."

  His defence argued that, despite the evidence, nothing but circumstance tied him to the crimes. It tried to shift blame onto other family members, particularly Richard. In all, 145 witnesses took the stand, including Milat relatives who tried to supply alibis. Milat gave evidence himself on the 18th of June.

  On the 27th of July 1996, after eighteen weeks of testimony, the jury found him guilty. He received a life sentence on each murder count, without possibility of parole. For the attempted murder, false imprisonment and robbery of Onions, he received six years each.

  Karen Duck's testimony added a domestic portrait. Milat, then 38, met her in 1983 when she was 16 and pregnant by his cousin. They married in 1984 and had a daughter, but she left in 1987 because of domestic violence. They divorced in October 1989. At the trial, she called him "gun crazy" and recalled him shooting kangaroos on a visit to Belanglo State Forest.

  The forest would see another killing in November 2010. Milat's great-nephew Matthew Milat struck David Auchterlonie, on his 17th birthday, with a double-headed axe while his friend Cohen Klein recorded the attack on a mobile phone. In 2012, both 19, they were sentenced to 43 and 32 years respectively.

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• 7. Prison and Death

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  On his first day at Maitland Gaol, Milat was beaten by another inmate. On the 16th of May 1997, he tried to escape with George Savvas, a convicted drug dealer and former Sydney councillor. The plan failed, and Savvas was found hanged in his cell the next day. Milat was moved to the maximum-security section of Goulburn Correctional Centre.

  In November 1997, he appealed his convictions on the grounds that his common law right to legal representation, as set out in Dietrich v The Queen, had been breached. The New South Wales Court of Criminal Appeal dismissed it. In 2004, he applied to the High Court of Australia for special leave to appeal on new grounds, and that was dismissed too.

  On the 27th of October 2005, in the New South Wales Supreme Court, his final avenue of appeal was refused. Two more applications failed in 2006, and another failed in November 2011.

  In 2001, he was moved to one of forty-five new units in the High Risk Management Corrections Centre, known as the Supermax, at Goulburn. In 2006, a toaster and television given to him in his cell caused a public outcry.

  In his 2004 Australian Story interview, Milat denied that any family member had been involved in the seven murders. A year later, on the 18th of July 2005, John Marsden made a deathbed statement. He claimed Milat had been helped in the killings of the two British backpackers by his sister Shirley Soire, who died in 2003.

  Milat repeatedly hurt himself. In 2001 he swallowed razor blades, staples and other metal objects. On the 26th of January 2009, he cut off his little finger with a plastic knife, meaning to post it to the High Court of Australia to force an appeal. He was taken under high security to Goulburn Base Hospital, but doctors decided surgery was not possible, and he returned to prison the next day. In May 2011, he went on a nine-day hunger strike, losing 25 kilograms in a failed attempt to get a PlayStation 3.

  In May 2019, he was moved to the Prince of Wales Hospital, where doctors diagnosed terminal oesophageal cancer. After treatment he returned to Long Bay Correctional Centre. On the 9th of August 2019, having lost twenty kilograms in recent weeks and running a high temperature, he was moved to a secure treatment unit at the hospital. His status was reported as not life-threatening.

  He died at 4:07 a.m. on the 27th of October 2019, from oesophageal and stomach cancer, in the hospital wing at Long Bay. He was 74.

  Before his death, he wrote to his family asking that the New South Wales government cover his funeral costs. Corrections Minister Anthony Roberts refused. His body was cremated, and the cost was repaid from his prison account.

  In his last days, police said their officers visited him eight times, in prison and in hospital, seeking a confession. They tried different combinations of detectives and played recorded interviews with victims' families. Milat gave them nothing. He reportedly did admit to his mother, with whom he was close, that he was responsible for the backpacker murders.

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• 8. The Unsolved Cases

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  Police have long maintained that Milat may have killed more people than the seven in his convictions. In 1993, Task Force Air began comparing his criminal record and methods against cold cases across Australia. Their list ran to 58 people, including people from the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy and New Zealand.

  His work history made such a search plausible. As a truck driver in the mid-1970s, he carried tyres through Sydney, Canberra, Brisbane, the Gold Coast, Newcastle, Wollongong, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth.

  Task force commander Clive Small named three cases as highly likely. On the 26th of February 1971, Keren Rowland, 20 and expecting a child, set out for a Canberra motel. Her abandoned car was found that evening. The next day, in Liverpool, Milat allegedly boasted to co-workers that he had killed someone and buried the body in bushland. Her bones were found on the 3rd of May near Canberra, 15 metres off a footpath. Her cause of death was never established.

  On the 13th of November 1987, Peter Letcher, 18, set off to hitchhike to his parents' house in Bathurst. Bushwalkers found his bones near the Jenolan Caves on the 21st of January 1988. He had been handcuffed, shot five times in the head and stabbed repeatedly in the back. Milat's estranged wife said he had shown her a dirt track in the Jenolan State Forest days earlier.

  On the 6th of September 1991, Dianne Pennacchio, 29, left the Lake George Hotel in Bungendore on foot, planning to hitchhike. On the 13th of November, forestry workers found her wrapped in pine branches in the Tallaganda State Forest. A knife wound to her spine fitted Milat's method. She died between the murders of Schmidl and of Neugebauer and Habschied.

  Another group of cases lay in the Hunter Region. Leanne Goodall, 20, vanished on the 30th of December 1978 after being last seen at Newcastle's Star Hotel. Robyn Hickie, 18, disappeared from a bus stop at Belmont North on the 7th of April 1979. Amanda Robinson, 14, disappeared on the 21st of April 1979 while walking home from a school dance.

  In a 2001 inquest, state coroner John Abernethy treated Milat as a person of interest in the cases of Goodall, Hickie and Robinson, citing his road work in the region. Milat testified that he had picked up about fifteen hitchhikers, none of them in the Hunter Region. He said he could look the families in the eye. No case was ever brought for lack of evidence.

  The media has speculated about many others. In July 1972, Robyn Hoinville-Bartram, 18, was found shot beneath a bridge near Charters Towers, with the type of .22-calibre rifle Milat used. Her friend Anita Cunningham, 19, was never found. In 1992, the siblings Melony and Chad Sutton, aged 14 and 16, left home in Brisbane to hitchhike to Perth. They are believed to have passed through Belanglo and are still classified as missing.

  Milat has been the subject of several books. They include The Milat Letters, by his nephew Alistair Shipsey, published in 2016. The Seven Network miniseries Catching Milat, shown in 2015, followed the Task Force Air detectives. His crimes also inspired the Wolf Creek films.

  In 2021, a four-part documentary, Ivan Milat: Backpacker Murderer, raised the possibility that he had twenty additional victims. Among those it named were Lydia Notz, a German who vanished from Brisbane in 1976, and Barbara Carol Brown, an American last seen in New South Wales in 1978.

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