Ivan Milat belonged to a family whose very name meant violence and murder to the people of the agricultural community where they lived. Backpackers were disappearing on the Hume Highway, only to reappear having been used as target practice for a psychopath with a Ruger .22 rifle. It didn’t take long for locals to finger Milat as the killer, but was it really him?
The Belango State Forest is an extensive pine plantation owned by the New South Wales Government. It is a few miles off the Hume Highway, between Sydney and Canberra, and is an area of free access to the public. On 19 September 1992 two men on an orienteering run through the forest stopped at a control point on their map. It was a large boulder near a prominent landmark called Executioner’s Drop – the sheer rock face of a wooded valley. The smell by the boulder was terrible. One of them thought an animal, possibly a kangaroo or wallaby, must have died nearby and was about to move on when his companion called him over to a mound of branches and decaying leaves. They could see some hair and part of a T-shirt sticking out of the mound and the heel of a shoe was protruding from one end. They ran out of the forest and contacted the police at Bowral, the nearest town in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales.
The police recovered the partially decomposed body of a young woman. She had been stabbed repeatedly in the chest and neck with a single-bladed knife. The following day a search of the immediate area revealed the body of a second young woman not far from the first. An autopsy would show she had been stabbed and then shot ten times in the head from three different angles. It looked as if the killer had used the body for target practice. It didn’t take long to establish the identities of the two women. They were Joanne Walters and Caroline Clarke, both 22-year-old British backpackers. They had left the Kings Cross district of Sydney together in April of that year, saying they were going to head south to look for work, and had not been heard from since. Forensic scientists couldn’t be sure, but they thought that both women had been sexually assaulted.
Further searches in Belango State Forest recovered spent cartridge shells from an American-made Ruger .22 rifle. A forensic psychiatrist visited the scene of the murders and said he thought they were not opportunist attacks. The murders had been pre-planned and carried out by more than one person. The murderers, he said, would have been familiar with the surroundings and probably lived locally. After completing an extensive search through the rest of the forest, New South Wales Police announced it was an isolated incident and no more bodies were likely to be found. Unfortunately they were wrong.
Over the following year the investigation stalled completely. In October 1993 a man collecting firewood in the forest found some bones he thought might be human. Another search discovered two bodies hidden in the brush. Both had been killed in exactly the same way as the previous two victims. They proved to be two 19-year-old Australians, Deborah Everist and James Gibson, who had gone missing from Victoria in 1989. Within days three more bodies were found. They were all German backpackers. Simone Schmidl, 20, had gone missing in January 1991 and the young couple Gabor Neugebauer, 21, and Anja Habschied, 20, in December 1991. It looked as if Anja Habschied had been decapitated with a single blow from a large blade, possibly a sword. More bullets from a .22 Ruger were found in the immediate vicinity of the bodies. At a press conference the police announced what everyone already knew – there was a serial killer, or killers, targeting young travellers on the Hume Highway. The police were frantically going through records of backpackers who had gone missing in Australia. Although there were a number of other missing people, no more bodies were found.
A public appeal for information brought a huge response. The names of several members of the Milat family, who lived in the area, kept coming up. Several people told the police they should talk to Ivan Milat, who was said to be obsessed with guns. The police interviewed him but, with no direct evidence, there was not much else they could do.
As soon as Paul Onions heard reports of the murders he phoned the police hotline from his home in the UK. He told a detective from the investigation he had been hitchhiking along the Hume Highway in 1990 and had accepted a lift from a man driving a pickup who pulled a gun on him. Onions escaped from the pickup and ran, with the man firing shots at his back. He reported the attack to the police at Bowral, but heard no more about it. It was obviously important information, but details of the call were lost in the huge amounts of information being received. It would be five months before the New South Wales Police got back to him. In April 1994 they flew him over to Australia and he picked Ivan Milat out of photographs shown to him.
It was enough for the police to get warrants to search Milat’s house. They found items of clothing and camping equipment belonging to some of the victims and parts of a Ruger .22 rifle hidden in the roof cavity of the garage. Milat was arrested and immediately claimed he was being set up by other members of his family. Forensic tests on the rifle matched it to the bullets found at the site of the killings, and an examination of Milat’s employment records also connected him to the crimes. In searches of the houses of other members of the Milat family, the police recovered more items belonging to the victims. A sword was found in a locked cupboard at the house of Ivan Milat’s mother.
Milat was charged with the seven murders and the attempted murder of Paul Onions. He stuck to his story that two of his brothers were trying to frame him. The weight of evidence against him personally was overwhelming, and the jury found him guilty on all charges. He was sentenced to seven life terms for the murders and six years for the attempted murder of Onions. To this day Milat maintains his innocence. The New South Wales Police think he could well have committed many more murders and may well have been helped by at least one of his brothers. So far they have not been able to establish any links to other missing people in Australia. In 2005 a journalist asked one of Milat’s brothers if Ivan had been responsible for more than seven murders. He said people had gone missing wherever Ivan had been and thought he had killed at least 20 more people.