CLAN OF KILLERS
Teen adopted kin’s name and murderous ways
IT IS A TROUBLING sign when a child changes his name to that of a serial killer, and even worse when the criminal is a member of the family.
That is just what Matthew Meuleman did. In 2007, at 14, he took on the surname of his greatuncle Ivan Milat, who was in prison for life for seven murders.
Three years later, the Australian teenager would prove that he was cut of the same monstrous cloth.
On Nov. 20, 2010, the younger Milat and another teen, Cohen Klein, 18, lured schoolmate David Auchterlonie, 17, into the Belanglo State Forest in New South Wales. Milat held out the promise of a booze-and-pot celebration for David’s birthday, but a party was the last thing on his mind.
“Someone’s going to die,” he told friends in the days leading up to the deadly trip. As soon as they got into the forest, Milat took a double-bladed battle-ax and knocked David to the ground.
“You keep looking at me and I’ll cut your head off,” he shrieked as David begged for his life.
Thanks to Klein, who used a cell phone to make an audio recording of the attack, investigators heard every sickening detail — the verbal torment, screams, cries and the sound of an ax tearing into bone and flesh.
The victim’s family endured some of it at Milat’s sentencing hearing in May 2012, in which acting Justice Jane Mathews gave him 43 years in prison. Klein got 30 years for his role as an accomplice.
From the start, Milat made no effort to conceal what he had done; in fact, he seemed proud, boasting about the murder. As he awaited his trial in jail, he wrote poems glorifying gore. “I am not fazed by blood or screams,” goes one of his verses, “nothing I do will haunt my dreams.”
Even more chilling was his casual explanation of why. “You know me, you know my family,” he told a friend. “I did what they do.”
The teenager was truly following close in the bloody footsteps of his killer kin. His method, his rage, even the place, was a twisted homage to his great-uncle, who began serving his life sentence when Matthew was a bubbling blond toddler.
The string of homicides two decades earlier in Belanglo became known as the “Backpacker Murders,” because the elder Milat preyed on young adventurers hiking in Australia.
Officially, seven people died by his hands, but no one knows for sure. One of his 14 siblings, a brother, told police the number might be as high as 2 8. Pol ice have tried to link him to at least six other disappearances, but with no success. Some believe that as many as 100 of his victims may still be hidden in the sprawling bushland.
Hikers in Belanglo stumbled upon the first of the victims to be found on Sept. 19, 1992. The remains of Caroline Clarke, 21, and Joanne Walters, 22, British backpackers who had gone missing five months earlier, were in shallow graves. They had been shot and stabbed.
More than a year later, the decayed corpses of five more hikers, all in their early 20s, turned up in the forest. They were James Gibson, Deborah Everist, Simone Schmidl, Anja Habschied and Gabor Neugebauer. All died of gunshot or stab wounds, or both. One had been decapitated.
A psychologist skilled in the art of criminal profiling conjured up an image of the murderer: mid-30s, in an unstable relationship, who lived outside of a city and did semiskilled outdoors work. And, the profiler said, he killed for pleasure.
Months went by with no progress until investigators got a call from a British tourist. Paul Onions told them that he had been backpack ing a rou nd Sydney in January 1990 when he hitched a ride w it h a road worker who called himself Bill. Midway through the trip, Bill pulled a gun on his passenger. Onions managed to get away by fleeing directly into traffic. Amazingly, someone stopped, picked up the hysterical stranger and drove him to the nearest police station.
The original 1990 report of Onions’ terror ride — as well as his call to the police after the discovery of the first bodies — was ignored until a new data analysis system brought his weird tale to the forefront.
By that time, investigators had already narrowed the field of possible suspects to the Milat family, specifically Ivan and his brother Richard, who had been working in the area. Ivan’s criminal record placed the spotlight squarely on him, and Onions picked him out of a lineup. Police arrested Ivan Milat and searched his home and the homes of his relatives.
Clothing, packs, sleeping bags and other items that originally belonged to the victims turned up during these searches. A photograph showed Milat’s current girlfriend wearing a Benetton top identical to one that had been owned by one of the victims. There were also guns, ammunition and a cavalry sword.
On July 27, 1996, after a 15-week trial and three days of deliberation, the jury delivered its verdict — guilty. Milat got seven life sentences, one for each of the victims, and six additional years for the attack on Onions.
Milat maintains he is innocent and has vowed to one day go free. When appeals and prison breaks failed, he tried hunger strikes and swallowing razor blades, staples and a spring from his toilet. He cut off a finger and tried to mail it to the High Court of Australia.
When told of his young relative’s “adrenaline-fueled thrill kill,” as the judge called it, Milat reportedly said nothing. He just smiled.