Australia has some of the worst animal predators in the world—dingoes that will snatch your baby from a carriage, snakes that make herpetologists quake, great white sharks cruising the waters off the Great Barrier Reef constantly looking for their next meal. However, in the late 1980s there was a two-legged predator afoot in Australia who holds the dubious honor of being Australia’s worst killer, and he was far more dangerous than any animal. His bloodlust for human victims was combined with a cunning that no animal could ever begin to equal.
In the end, like so many other serial killers, there is no telling how many people Ivan Robert Marko Milat, known as Marko, would have murdered had it not been for the raw courage of one young man, a British tourist named Paul Onions. Onions was hitchhiking near the Belanglo State Forest in Sydney in January 1990 when a silver four-wheel-drive vehicle stopped to pick him up. The driver, a well-tanned, tightly muscled man with a handlebar moustache, invited him to hop in.
Onions took off his backpack, put it on the seat, and climbed in, and the two men started down the road. The driver said his name was Bill, and everything was fine at first, the two men making friendly conversation. Then, abruptly, “Bill” changed— he began probing into Onions’s life with inappropriate questions that violated his personal privacy. Gradually the man went into an enraged rant filled with racist remarks, including invectives against foreigners such as Onions—who was becoming more and more nervous with the driver’s turn toward psychosis. They were half a mile north of the Belanglo State Forest when the driver suddenly pulled to the side of the road and, gun in hand, announced a robbery.
The situation hardly seemed like a robbery. Why would a man driving an easily recognizable vehicle rob someone? What was he really going to do? Rob Onions, and then let him go to the police? It didn’t make sense. Onions drew the terrifying conclusion that he was going to be killed.
Abruptly, leaving his backpack on the seat, Onions burst out the door and started to run toward the forest. It was a run for his life: The man with the handlebar moustache was chasing after him and shooting, the bullets coming perilously close. Onions zigzagged his way through the forest; once inside he was able to gradually work his way to the road. He frantically flagged down a passing car and poured out the story of what had just happened, and the driver took him to the nearest police station. The police recorded all the details of what had occurred, and had Onions describe “Bill” to a sketch artist.
Onions didn’t know it at the time, but his chances of dying had he not bolted from the car were 100%. Without realizing it, he had encountered the serial killer Ivan Robert Marko Milat.
Gruesome Murders
Two years after Paul Onions was accosted, the bodies of two British women, twenty-one-year-old Caroline Clarke and twenty-two-year-old Joanne Walters, were found in September 1992 at a place appropriately called Executioner’s Drop in Belanglo State Forest. The decomposing remains were not too far from where the driver of the silver car had picked up Onions. The last time the women had been seen was in mid-April, when they were planning on hitchhiking to Adelaide.
The girls had been savagely attacked, and there were some strange elements to the murders. Joanne Walters had been stabbed in a frenzy—one wound thrust so deep that it penetrated her spine and the medical examiner thought it might have paralyzed her. Curiously, the zipper on her jeans had been pulled down but the top button fastened, almost as if the killer had raped her and then hastily buttoned her pants to somehow hide the assault.
Caroline had also been stabbed repeatedly in a manic way and shot ten times in the head. The ME theorized that the killer had actually used her head for target practice. Curiously, too, a primitive brick fireplace had been constructed at the scene of the murder, about 120 feet from the bodies. Its purpose was anyone’s guess.
The media speculated in headlines that a serial killer was on the loose. The police made no progress in solving the murders over the next few weeks and eventually brought in the criminal profiler Dr. Rod Milton. He posited that the killer knew the area, was in his mid-thirties, and had a history of aggression—but that he was not a serial killer. The profiler’s analysis seemed accurate; no other bodies were discovered for a year.
In 1993, two more bodies were found. The victims, James Gibson and Deborah Everist, who had been missing since 1989, were both nineteen-year-old Australians. There were similarities to the first crime scene: For one thing, the zipper on Gibson’s pants was open but the top button fastened. Both victims had been stabbed in a manic way, and a small brick fireplace had been built for no apparent reason at both crime scenes. An investigator theorized that the killer was trying to simulate or symbolize some kind of family home scene.
The new discovery made it clear to the police that they had a serial killer on their hands, and the fact that these victims had disappeared four years before was a sign that there could be many undiscovered victims. A huge search was organized and police and volunteers combed Belanglo State Forest and the area around it.
A month after the search started, there was another grim discovery—the body of a German woman, Simone Schmidl, who had been missing since January 1991. Like other victims, she had been hitchhiking, looking for work. The crime scene contained the same primitive fireplace and twenty-two shells. Three days later the bodies of two young Germans, Gabor Neugebauer and Anja Habschied, were discovered, bringing the total to seven known kills. The two had been savagely attacked; as in the previous cases, the pants of the young man were unzipped but the top button fastened. He had been strangled and shot many times; the woman was headless, and from rough cuts on her neck it seemed that she had been decapitated with some kind of machete or sword.
International Aid
The police had been reluctant to announce that they had a serial killer on their hands, but a victim count of seven left them with no choice. When they released the info, panic spread across Australia like wind bending wheat. Leads poured in.
From the torrent of information that came in, several leads pointed to Ivan Robert Marko Milat. He was the son of a Yugoslavian couple who had fourteen children. Milat, a well-muscled man who loved hunting, had been in trouble with the police (as had his brothers) since he was a teenager. Sometimes, he was in big trouble: In 1971, he was tried for the knifepoint rape of two female hitchhikers, but the case brought against him was weak and he was acquitted. He had also been suspected of other rapes, but the cases went nowhere. However, the police had nothing definitive against Milat until word about the case had spread to other countries, when they heard from a Paul Onions who had barely escaped with his life back in 1990.
Onions flew to Australia from his home in Birmingham, England, and when he arrived he was shown a video lineup. Onions picked out Milat as the man who had tried to kill him. This allowed the police to get a warrant to search Milat‘s property at Eagle Vale, a suburb of Sydney, where Milat lived with his girlfriend. The investigators struck forensic gold at Milat‘s home: They found camping gear stolen from the victims and were able to connect firearms there to the killings.
Afterword
Milat was charged and brought to trial in July 1996. His lawyer tried to blame two of his brothers, Richard and Walter, for some of the murders, but that didn’t work. Milat was convicted of seven murders and received six life sentences, plus six years for trying to gun Onions down.
Answer: I am Peter Sutcliffe.
