HOW I ESCAPED IVAN MILAT
A BACKPACKER TELLS NEW IDEA HOW HE WAS SAVED FROM AUSTRALIA’S WORST SERIAL KILLER
Colin Powis is convinced a changing traffic light is the only thing that prevented voracious serial killer Ivan Milat bashing him to death with a hammer.
It was a summer morning in January 1982 and Colin – then a 21-year-old amateur boxer – was hitchhiking from the Blue Mountains to Cobar, some 585km away, to look for mining work. Around 9am, a small pick-up truck emerged from the mist and the driver pulled over to offer him a lift. Colin, who is originally from the UK and had only been in Australia for 48 hours, is convinced Ivan Milat was the man behind the wheel.
“He looked young, heavily tanned. He had a baseball cap on and was wearing shorts. He had a small moustache,” Colin recalls.
Road worker Milat is currently serving seven life sentences for the gruesome slaughter of seven backpackers, whose remains were found in the Belanglo Forest. The bodies of Caroline Clarke and Joanne Walters, both 22, were found in September 1992. In October 1993, two more bodies were discovered – 19-year-old Australians James Gibson and Deborah Everist had been viciously stabbed to death. The following month the body of Simone Schmidl, 21, was discovered. Two days later, more remains were found. Anja Habschied, 20, had been decapitated. Her boyfriend Gabor Neugebauer, 21, had been gagged and shot six times.
Though it has never been proven, Milat is suspected of being involved in more unsolved disappearances, including that of two friends, Gillian Jamieson and Deborah Balken, both 19.
Colin tells New Idea he began to feel uneasy immediately after getting into the truck. Earlier that day, a woman had warned him that hitchhikers were going missing. And the now 57-yearold didn’t like the way this driver was eyeing him up. “I thought he may have been drunk or some type of perv.”
The man insisted Colin put his backpack behind the drivers seat, claiming it was “safer”, then ordered him to fasten his seatbelt and put the locks down.
“He said: ‘We don’t want you to fall out, mate.’”’
Seasoned backpacker Colin suspected the man may try to rob him. He’d noticed a heavyduty masonry hammer in the back of the truck, near the tailgate. Those suspicions were intensified when the driver began asking Colin some alarming questions.
“The first thing he asked me was: ‘How long have you been in Australia? Who knows you are here?’” Though Colin tried to strike up friendly conversation, the driver wasn’t interested. “He said he worked on the roads and his family was from Yugoslavia, but that’s all.
“He wouldn’t engage in conversation. We drove in silence for the rest of the trip, which was about 30 minutes.” This struck Colin as very odd. “I hitchhiked a lot when I was younger. When people pick up hitchhikers they are curious and want to talk about foreign lands and places.”
The situation took a more sinister turn when the driver made an unexpected detour. “I asked him to just drop me off. He slowed down, turned left, but instead of stopping he continued at least 500 yards (450m) south, away from the busy main road.” Colin recalls how the man’s gruff demeanour suddenly changed. “He became personable and asked me if I wanted to go south with him as he was going about 60 miles to ‘check his traps’. He said he could give me a long ride, and show me some Aussie wildlife.”
Colin says he declined and the driver became irate. He stopped the truck and ran around to the passenger side door. “He had his right hand behind his back and I thought he was loading up to punch me and then drive away with my backpack still wedged behind his seat.
“Reaching into the vehicle to pull out my pack, I had to turn my back. He was so close he was breathing down my neck.”
Colin now believes Milat picked up his hammer en-route to the passenger side and was about to bash him with it. But his plans were foiled when the traffic lights changed, and a stream of cars drove past.
“He seemed to make a quick decision, shrugged, and moved aside. He said, ‘Hey mate. Have a safe trip,’ as I strode away.
“If that light hadn’t changed he would definitely have killed me. He planned on bashing me on the head with the hammer or hitting me in the spine.”
Colin was so spooked by the incident, he warned other hitchhikers for months afterwards. But it was only when he saw a documentary on TV many years later that he finally connected the dots to Milat.
“I recognised him, giving me a very sick feeling.” Colin firmly believes his story is compelling evidence Milat had other victims.
“If he was trying to murder me in 1982 then there surely would have been others,” Colin says, shuddering.