MILAT’S CRIMES
Australia’s biggest manhunt came to an end just over 25 years ago when on May 22, 1994, former road worker Ivan Milat was arrested during a dramatic dawn raid at his home in Eagle Vale, south-west Sydney. Following a 15-week trial, on July 27, 1996, a jury found him guilty of murdering seven backpackers and dumping their bodies in shallow graves covered in sticks and leaf litter in the Belanglo State Forest between 1989 and 1992.
Serving seven consecutive life sentences without possibility of parole, Milat, dubbed the ‘Backpacker Killer’, never showed remorse for murdering the seven travellers – British friends Caroline Clarke and Joanne Walters, German couple Gabor Neugebauer and Anja Habschied, German traveller Simone Schmidl and Victorian couple Deborah Everist and James Gibson – in the most gruesome ways imaginable. Some were stabbed, shot and beheaded.
“It was multiple stabbings and multiple shootings,” lead detective Clive Small tells WHO of the murders. “He took his time during the killings.” Earlier this month, Ian Clarke, the father of Caroline, told The Sydney Morning Herald: “We still think of Caroline every day but it doesn’t mean to say we have to think of Milat every day.”
The former road worker also kidnapped British tourist, Paul Onions, who managed to escape from Milat’s vehicle and was later able to pick him out in a video line-up, giving police the excuse they needed to seek a warrant for the search of various Milat family properties.
It was star witness Onions who testified in front of a jury that ‘Bill’, as Milat introduced himself, turned a gun on him, asking: “Do you know what this is? This is a robbery?” Milat then pulled out a bag with ropes sticking out. “That scared me more than the gun,” Onions said.
Earlier, a search of Milat’s property yielded what Small calls a ‘gold mine’ of evidence, including a part of the Ruger rifle used in the murders, rope and cable ties and the murdered backpackers’ property: tents, clothes, sleeping bags, foreign currency and other camping gear.
“The police did their job, and Clive Small did a great job running the show,” Mark Whittaker, who co-authored Sins of the Brother, tells WHO. “They got Ivan a lot faster than most serial killers get caught.”
Small downplays his role. “I would emphasise it was a very good team effort,” he says. “What you had was a serial killer who was going to continue to kill until he was caught or died himself. We had 44 investigators working on the matter. And when it came to searching the forest, there was a team of 300. So, it was a massive job of co-ordination. And it was a very successful job.”