‘Did serial killer Ivan Milat take my gorgeous girl?’
The backpacker murderer continues to torture one heartbroken mum of a missing girl, even as he rots in jail
The silver pendant hangs low around Anne Robinson’s neck, directly over her heart. Inside the tiny locket is a grainy colour photograph of a gorgeous, innocent girl with a beaming smile.
The girl’s name is Amanda. She was Anne’s second born. And on Sunday, it will be 40 years since she disappeared without a trace after attending a school dance.
Even more disturbing is that Amanda was just one of three young girls from the same place who vanished within four months of each other – Leanne Goodall, 20, disappeared on December 30, 1978, and Robyn Hickie, 18, in April 1979, just
two weeks before Amanda.
The three young women, all from the same tiny area on the eastern side of Lake Macquarie, north of Sydney, have never been seen since. But monster Ivan Milat – who killed seven young people between 1989 and 1993 and buried their remains in the Belanglo State Forest – remains a prime suspect in the disappearance of Amanda, Leanne and Robyn.
The trio of missing girls have been forever linked. None have ever been found and no one has been convicted of their murders.
“It’s just so hard. It doesn’t get easier. It is there all the time,’’ mum Anne says on the eve of the 40th anniversary of Amanda’s disappearance. “I still can’t sleep.
I am awake half the night. You don’t know where they are, what happened to them, what they did to them. It is so hard. You try and be tough, but you’re not.
“It is with you all the time. You can be walking around Coles and you will start crying. You can’t help it. It just comes over you. You can’t control it. It is just this sadness that hits you.
“She was only a little girl who had just turned 14. And she wasn’t a worldly little girl either. She was just a gorgeous little girl.’’
With the nightmares also come the unanswered questions. And there are two words which continue to strike fear in Anne – Ivan Milat.
PERSON OF INTEREST
“I hope not. I couldn’t bear it. I cannot bear the thought of it,’’ she says.
But the evidence points to him. The backpacker killer was working in road gangs in the area at the time the three girls disappeared and Milat was formally named as a person of interest at a 2001 inquest into the murder and disappearance of the three girls.
Forever playing the victim himself, Milat has denied any knowledge of the trio’s disappearances.
In his cold and dark testimony at the 2001 inquest, he even leaned forward, stared at the families of these three innocent girls and said, “I was mystified when I read about one person who went missing in December and they didn’t report her missing till February. I could ask how they let a 14-year-old run around at midnight.’’
It was a vile and nasty comment that still makes
‘It is with you all the time. It’s just this sadness that hits you’
Anne’s blood run cold.
Anne was in hospital when Amanda attended a school dance at Gateshead, near Newcastle, on the night she vanished. She only agreed to let her daughter go because one of Amanda’s friends’ dads had agreed to pick them up.
But Amanda missed her ride and was left to catch a bus home. She wasn’t seen again after hopping off the bus and waving goodbye to some school friends just several hundred metres from her home. Anne found out the following morning that her daughter never made it home.
“You age 20 years in the first second you hear. And it doesn’t get any easier,’’ admits Anne, who was also taunted with a disturbing letter Milat sent to the lawyer representing Amanda and the other missing girls after the inquest.
Milat also wrote to the families following the inquest, continuing his filthy diatribe via words on a page. .
“…perhaps you should tell the families that due to their failures and taking more care e prior to when their children went and more importantly the past then... it is doubtful if anything will ever be known.”
Sadly, any answers are already too late for Leanne’s mother Beth Leen, who died in 2012 aged 85. “Poor little Beth,” says Anne. “The last thing she said before she died was, “Where’s my baby?’’
The mothers had never met before their girls vanished. But for decades they somehow found the strength to push for answers, including getting the biggest missing persons investigation in NSW history launched in the late 1990s.
Now both aged 77, Anne and Amanda’s father Ron will continue the fight for justice.
CASE REOPENED
Anne has been told that police have recently reopened the cases involving the trio, and she is calling for an increase of rewards to $1 million for information leading to the killer of each girl.
“We really need this $1 million reward. For all the girls. I don’t go just for Amanda, I include all the girls. Not just one. Because they all need to be found,’’ says Anne.
“It is like that our girls were not important. And they were all good girls from good families. There are so many devastated families. Forty flaming years, that is more than half my life.’’
‘I don’t go just for Amanda... they all need to be found’