Officers in the missing persons bureau wanted the largest possible TV audience, hoping the girls, or someone who knew them, might have been watching the match. They also set up a toll-free hot-line in a bid to get new information, but there were no firm leads. Welsh-born nanny Joanne and convent-educated Caroline, from Northumberland, had met in Australia, travelling on carefree working holiday visas, like thousands of other young backpackers each year.
Many thumb their way across the continent, as all the guidebooks said as Australia was one of the friendliest and safest countries in the world for hitchhiking. Joanne and Caroline had both travelled the country before sharing a rented flat in Sydney's Kings Cross district. Then they decided to hitch south to pick fruit. On Easter Saturday, 18th April, bother were last seen heading towards Kings Cross station carrying sleeping bags and a tent. Two weeks later, Ray and Gill Walters began to get worried as they had not heard anything from their only daughter, who usually called home once a week.
On 26th May, when Joanne's visa expired, they became even more alarmed and reported her disappearance to police in Wales, who informed their counterparts in Australia. Ian Clarke, a Bank of England regional director, and his wife Jacqueline were less concerned until Caroline failed to make any contact for her father's 58th birthday. Both families travelled to Australia to search for their daughters and refused to accept suggestions that they could have met foul play. They preferred to think they might be staying with Aborigines on a remote desert station or even stranded somewhere in the vast outback.
In August, spurred on by the publicity the families had generated, the police began to make a connection between a series of missing person reports of foreign tourists in New South Wales and Queensland. By the time Joanne and Caroline's badly decomposed bodies were found, five other backpackers were known to have vanished while hitchhiking on the busy Hume Highway that links Sydney and Melbourne.
The first to disappear were two 19 year old Australians on their way to an environmental rally at the end of Then, during , three German backpackers had also gone missing.
It was an emotional time, and a distraught Ray and Gill Walters faced the press to deliver a statement soon after Joanne's body was found. These are evil minded people, and like dogs with rabies there is only one way - they have got to be put down and destroyed.
There has got to be some system whereby we destroy those people for their evil genes. Time passed, but no specialist task force was set up to investigate links between the deaths and the disappearances.
Three detectives were put on the hunt for the girls' killer, but in 12 months turned up next to nothing. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, the story was being reported in the British newspapers.
And in Birmingham, Paul Onions, an air-conditioning engineer who had backpacked around Australia in , was following events with particular interest. The gruesome details brought back a day he would rather have forgotten.
It was January , that a man whom Onion regarded as the first 'real' Australian he had met had given him a lift. But further down the road, near the turn off to the Belanglo State Forest, the man pulled a gun and tried to rob him. Onions had reported the incident to nearby Bowral police the very same day. He was not to know that not only had they failed to take any action, but they also lost his report. Four crucial years were to pass before the police and Paul Onions were to make contact again.
In late , Father Stephen Gray conducted a moving memorial service in the heart of the forest for Caroline Clarke and Joanne Walters.
But it was not to be. On 5th October , Bruce Pryor parked his jeep deep in the forest and started looking for firewood. He soon stumbled upon a human thigh bone and then an upturned skull. Police soon found the remains of 19 year old Deborah Phyllis Everist, who had last been seen on 30th December , with her boyfriend James Gibson at a Sydney backpackers' hostel.
The couple had told friends that they planned to hitch south down the Hume Highway to Albury for a conservation rally. Pathologists were unable to determine the exact cause of Deborah's death because of the time that her body had been in the open.
But there was evidence she had been hit with a sharp object, as well as stabbed in the head and body. Her black bra and pants had been removed and cut with a knife, she had been gagged and tied up with her own tights. James's body was lying in the fetal position within 50 metres feet of his girlfriend. Like all the other remains, it was almost completely covered with sticks and branches to accelerate decomposition. The most cursory examination of the four bodies showed the killings had been especially violent.
Like all the remains recovered from the forest, none showed any signs of defensive wounds. Police now had no doubt they were hunting a serial killer and on 12th October , special Task Force Air was established under the command of Superintendent Clive Small. Twenty detectives were assigned to the team, along with crime scene specialists and forensic experts.
Within three days specially trained sniffer dogs were brought in from Queensland, since Supt. Small feared the worst. An extra 60 police were seconded to begin a meticulous and methodical search of the five square kilometre two square mile strop where the four bodies had been discovered. Small at the time. We start from there and work in. Then on 1st November, the skeletal remains of missing 20 year old German hitchhiker Simone Schmidl were found another five kilometres three miles to the east.
Her body showed signs of having suffered multiple stab wounds. Simone was last seen on 20th January , when, against the advice of her friends in Sydney, she decided to hitchhike down to Melbourne for a long planned reunion with her mother.
Police immediately increased their numbers to 80 and widened the search area to cover more than 20km 12 miles of fire trails. It was now apparent it would only be a matter of time before they found the bodies of the other missing young couple, German Anja Habschied, aged 20 and Gabor Neugebauer, aged In a chilling similarity to the other victims, they too were last seen at a Kings Cross Hostel planning to head out of town and hitch to Adelaide on Boxing Day Detectives already had copies of dental records when their bodies were found on either side of a fire trail on 4th November, just one kilometre half a mile from Simone's.
Again there was similar pattern of tying, stabbing and excessive force. Gabor's body was found with a gag wedged between his teeth. He was still fully clothed and had been shot six times in the head. There was also evidence of strangulation. Anja had been decapitated with a sword or machete while she was still alive and her head has never been found.
Forensic pathologist Dr Peter Bradhurst said the blow was consistent with her kneeling with her head bowed. Dr Bradhurst, who performed the autopsies on all seven of the victims, later said in court that it seemed to him that it 'was more than likely' the killer had not acted alone.
Just one day before the last bodies were discovered, the name Robert Ivan Marko Milat first came to the attention of the police task force. There was little real evidence, but a workmate had voiced his suspicions about Milat's obsession with guns.
The tip off joined the one million plus leads provided by an Australian public horrified that their hospitable nation could witness such an outrage and desperate to help catch the killer. As an outsider, Caroline's father Ian felt the reaction first hand. Ivan Milat was born two days after Christmas in He was the fourth son of Stephen, a 44 year old Croatian immigrant, and his young Australian wife Margaret, who was barely half her husbands age.
The family was to grow to 14 children, with Ivan roughly in the middle. Ivan's father, who had served with the British Army in World War I, worked long hours as a wharf labourer and sometimes put in seven days a week. The family was nominally raised as Catholics but Mr Milat had little time for education or authority apart from his own.
When Ivan was aged four, his father decided to become a market gardener. The whole family was press-ganged into working, which included watering tomatoes up to two o'clock in the morning - but even so they only made a meagre living. The Milat clan lived in a three bedroom house near working-class Liverpool on the outskirts of Sydney.
The children slept in triple-tiered bunks. Another son, Alex, remembers that having guns in the house was like having a spare pair of boots, and all 14 children learned to shoot.
Like most of the others, Ivan went to the local Patrician Brothers High School, where he was considered bright and good at maths and arts. But soon Ivan started regularly skipping classes, so he was moved and spent his early teenage years at Boys Town, an institution for overburdened families and their wayward sons.
He was an altar boy,' recalled Ivan's mother. The family was large and needed money - so, like his brothers, at age 15 Ivan left school and went to work on various building sites. All the boys went on to lives on heavy manual work. Guns and knives were part of the family's pastimes. Ivan inherited his father's obsessive cleanliness and love of order, but by the time he was 17, Ivan was in trouble with the law for breaking into a house and stealing.
In , he was given six months in a juvenile institution for breaking and entering. Over the rest of the 's four more jail terms would follow for breaking and entering, stealing and car theft. His mother blames those years on Ivan falling in with the wrong crowd. However, the police, who were a regular sight at the Milat household, remember it differently. They said the brothers would never give each other up and were always covering for each other.
The sheer number of sons also led to confusion. In , the family moved to the better off Sydney suburb of Guildford where Margaret still lives, It was there that Ivan's youngest sister Margaret was killed when a car driven by brother Wally was in a head-on accident near the family home.
Ivan was one of the first on the scene and reportedly 'took it rough'. Within a month of his sister's death in , he was charged with raping one of two women he had picked up hitchhiking near Liverpool. It was near the point where, 20 years later, the backpacker victims would start to vanish. There was a committal hearing, but Milat, who also faced two armed robbery charges, including one at a bank, jumped bail and fled to New Zealand, where he stayed until On his return he was re-arrested.
He was acquitted of the robbery charges and in a one day trial beat the rape charge after one of the victims changed her story. There was evidence that Milat, then aged 26, had tied up both women and threatened them with a knife, but, incredibly, the police task force investigating the backpacker murders never learned about the chilling similarities of the crimes until late in the day.
Years later, Milat confided to a friend that he was in fact guilty of pulling the bank job but a brother, who was also involved, took the rap. By , Milat was apparently respectable. He still lived with his parents, didn't drink or smoke, and was a workaholic interstate truck driver.
Ivan now met his future wife Karen, then 17, and pregnant to his cousin Mark. Soon, the couple were living together in a caravan in a garden and saving a deposit for a house. Ivan treated Karen's son Jason as if he was his own, and married Karen in the mid 's. The family were not asked to the wedding, as they were in the midst of a feud.
Milat's father had died of bowel cancer in the early 's and there was more tragedy when Ivan's brother David was permanently brain-damaged in a motorcycle accident. By then, Ivan was working for the Department of Main Roads and was away for days at a time.
The marriage under further pressure mainly due to Ivan's frugality. It was alleged during the murder trial that it was at this time he had an affair with Maureen, the first wife of his brother Walter. There was also a violent side to the marriage, well hidden behind the obsessive neatness of the house-proud Milat. In his wife's words, he was becoming 'gun crazy' and often took to beating her.
Then, on St Valentine's Day in , while Ivan was away at work, Karen packed up the house with the help of her mother and fled, taking all the furniture. He didn't see her again for seven years until Karen, then on a witness protection scheme, gave evidence against him at his committal hearing. In , Milat quit his regular job.
He took to working under an alias to avoid tax and stop Karen claiming any of his income. The divorce went through and by the end of the year the two young hitchhikers, Deborah Everist and James Gibson, had gone missing.
The Belanglo State Forest is barely a two hour drive from the heart of Sydney. It is announced by a small sign and turn off alongside the Australia's busiest trunk road, the Hume Highway. Towards the end of , it became the focus of the largest homicide inquiry in the nation's history. Raw police recruits, state emergency workers and others were drafted in to comb wide swathes of the forest, often on hands and knees, for anything that could provide a clue.
They were supported by nine analysts from the State Intelligence Group who cross-checked every shred of information and every possible lead. The nation was horrified as police revealed the brutal nature of the murders.
There was evidence that the killer, or killers, had become increasingly confident with every murder and had spent longer at each successive crime scene. The commander of Task Force Air, Clive Small, by now a Chief Superintendent, revealed that the first three victims had been killed comparatively swiftly. But by the time Gabor Neugebauer was shot, and his girlfriend Anja Habschied beheaded, the killer had begun playing his own perverted games.
Small would later tell Milat's committal hearing. Worse still, it appeared the killer had set up beer bottles on a tree stump to show off his marksmanship to the victims. It even seemed that Caroline Clarke and Joanne Walters had been made to undress and then dress again in a hurry.
Caroline was then shot repeatedly in the head through her maroon sweatshirt. Joanne was stabbed 20 times through her top, which was later to become a significant exhibit in Ivan Milat's murder trial. But at this stage, all that the police knew for certain was that the killer probably drove a four wheel drive vehicle to access the remote bush tracks, and had some knowledge of the forest.
The investigation team also knew that the danger periods were during the holidays. All the backpackers vanished through Australia's long summer, the Christmas break and around Easter. They also though the use of rifles and knives suggested the killer was a hunter. Because the travellers died in the same clothing they had worn on their fateful trips down the Hume Highway, it seemed they were probably killed the same day they went missing. This suggested the killer was living in or around the south-western region of Sydney.
There were plenty of theories but few hard facts. Psychologists helped draft a profile of the killer. A free pardon was also offered to any accomplice not involved in the murders who would give the killer up. Information lines were set up and within the first 24 hours, 5, calls were logged. The public response was enormous. Eventually more than one million tip offs were received, of which police followed up 10, leads.
Investigators used a computer system called Netmap to chart the connections between the fragments of information about names, addresses, gun ownership, vehicles and times.
The clues to catch the killer were there but it was not just a matter of finding them, they had to be matched together. Even satellite photographs were used to see how wet conditions had been on the days the backpackers vanished.
But in far away Birmingham, England, the trap was beginning to close. Paul Onion, aged 27, was beginning to brood about tabloid newspaper reports about the 'Forest of Death'. And details of his own brush with an armed robber on the same road three years earlier seemed more than just coincidence. Onions contacted the Australian High Commission in London and, on 13th November , was put in touch with Task Force Air, to whom he gave details of his attack and a full description of he assailant.
However, it was to be five months before he heard from them again. Meanwhile, the Milat name started to crop up in investigations. Police discovered a statement in their files from Ivan's brother Alex, who had contacted detectives in October with a strange story.
Eighteen months earlier, he claimed he had seen two women tied up in the back of two cars with a group of men near the Belanglo State Forest. But the details and dates did not match and the man Alex said he was with failed to corroborate the story fully. Police discounted Milat's statement. Investigators also found a report from the wife of a worker at a building materials plant, detailing her suspicions about her husband's workmate.
The tip off made in early October just after the second set of bodies was found, referred to a worker called Paul Miller. Police already knew he was actually Richard Milat, Ivan's younger brother. During the murder trial it was alleged that after the British girls' bodies were discovered, Richard had told workmates, 'There's more out there.
They haven't found them all yet. In a phrase which would come back to haunt him, Richard, although he denied making all the statements, was also quoted as saying 'Stabbing a woman is like cutting a loaf of bread. On 16th November, the police in the Belanglo State Forest paused for on minute's silence out of respect for the dead.
Their six week search of the area was now officially over. They found out the dates of his holidays and days off. They also approached Ivan's brother Walter at his home while checking gun licenses. But Ivan had got wind of the investigation and, unknown to detectives, began to stash his firearms in a secret alcove in Walter's home.
In January Senior Constable Paul Gordon followed up his theory that the backpackers were all hitchhiking when they met their murderer. He checked the records for attacks on travellers who had left the Liverpool area and came across Ivan Milat's acquittal in for the rape of two hitchhikers.
The noose was beginning to tighten. Milat was their number one suspect, but the task force still needed stronger evidence before they dared move. They mounted a major surveillance operation shadowing Milat's every move. Tradesmen's vans began to appear regularly near his home in Cinnabar Street, on a housing estate in Eagle Vale, in Sydney's south west district. Milat was seen staring back at police through binoculars from his front window. Then in April came the breakthrough.
Paul Onions told police by telephone from England the full details of what happened while he was hitching south on the Hume Highway in January His attacker drove a white four wheel drive, called himself Bill and had a moustache like Australian cricketer Merv Hughes.
He was also from a Yugoslav background, was divorced and worked on the roads. The description fitted Ivan Milat like a glove. Onions was secretly flown to Australia on 2nd May and took police to the spot, near the Belanglo turnoff, where the man attempted to rob and abduct him at gun point. He was shown 13 photographs on a video of men matching his description and identified Ivan Milat. Milat's ex-wife Karen confirmed that Milat had made trips into the forest as far back as the early 's.
At last the police were ready to move, and planned to raid seven properties owned by the Milat family. On 21st May, three detectives from Task Force Air flew to Queensland to re-interview Alex Milat about his claimed sighting of two women in the forest in There his wife Joan handed them a backpack she said Ivan had given them saying it belonged to a friend who had returned to New Zealand and did not need it anymore.
Subsequent tests showed it had once belonged to Simone Schmidl. Police were also alerted when Joan made some unsolicited comments about serial killers keeping 'trophies' from their victims. That night Ivan was called by a relative in the nearby town of Bargo telling him police had been round asking about a silver Nissan four wheel drive he once owned.
At 2am his brother William rang to say he too had been questioned about the car and his involvement in an armed robbery. Milat claims he thought the call was a prank and ignored the order. After a third call, he and his girlfriend, Chalinder Hughes, a public servant, came out to find 50 heavily armed police surrounding them.
The investigators were confident they had their man at last. Now they just had to prove it. Soon after his arrest, Ivan Milat was interrogated by detectives for three hours at his home. He said no to each question. The next day he appeared in Campbelltown Local Court charged with armed robbery and using a revolver with intent to commit an indictable offence in relation to Paul Onions. It wasn't until 31st May that he was formally charged with the murder of the seven backpackers, the attempted abduction of Paul Onions and several firearm offences.
From day one, Milat denied all the charges, but behind the scenes investigators were seizing a wealth of ballistics, scientific and physical evidence. Milat had had ample time to dispose of the evidence. So why didn't he? The evidence found at 22 Cinnabar Street was startling in anyone's language. In Milat's bedroom they found Then, in a wall cavity were found parts of a Ruger trigger assembly, which tests showed was used in the murders.
In a cupboard were more parts of the gun Milat denied that he ever owned, together with a map showing the Belanglo State Forest. Police who had spent months getting nowhere on the investigation could not believe their luck.
Soon they turned up a water bottle that had belonged to German victim Simone Schmidl and an Olympus camera that had belonged to Caroline Clarke. They also found small amounts of foreign coins from all the countries that the backpackers had visited en route to Australia. More disturbingly, in the garage was a pillowcase containing five sash cords. One had bloodstains that DNA tests showed were consistent with blood belonging to a child born to Ian and Jacqueline Clarke.
There was also a tent belonging to Simone and a home made silencer for a rifle. Milat shared the house with his sister Shirley Soire. In her bedroom were found sleeping bags belonging to Deborah Everist and Simone Schmidl. In court it was alleged that Milat asked her dispose of a Colt. Another key piece of evidence was a photograph of Milat's girlfriend Chalinder Hughes in a green and white Benetton top exactly the same as one that Caroline Clarke brought with her to Australia.
And there was more to come at the various homes of the Milat clan, whom anonymous callers to the police hotline had called a 'hillbilly family'. The family had remained close-knit over the years - especially the five brothers, Ivan, Wally, Bill, Alex and Richard, who shared a love of hunting, shooting and cars. In Walter's home was an Anschutz. At Richard's property were Caroline Clarke's tent and bed roll. And at the Milat's mother's home in the Sydney suburb of Guildford where Milat was living at the time of the murders were found a T-shirt belonging to Simone and a Next brand T-shirt that Paul Onions formally identified as his.
It seemed as though the police had an open and shut case. But in fact, all the mounting evidence was still circumstantial. There was nothing which put Ivan Milat in the forest at the time of any of the deaths. And although there were a number of strong leads, some of the best would never be heard in a court of law. Among such leads was the bizarre story that Alex Milat had told police as the second group of bodies was being discovered.
He'd claimed that in Easter , as he drove past the Belanglo State Forest on a dirt road, he had seen two girls tied up and gagged in the back seats of two passing four wheel drives.
Police were incredulous as Alex gave detailed descriptions of the men and the guns he said they were carrying, despite the fact that both vehicles were being driven at speed in the opposite direction. The friend Milat said he was with could only partly verify the story. But later investigators discovered that the registration numbers Alex had gave them matched part of the registration of a car which his brother Ivan had once owned. Was it a round about tip off?
Or was Alex trying to confuse police? He has since maintained he told the complete truth about what he saw in the forest. Police were also intrigued by a 'confession' that Milat allegedly made to a former prisoner called Noel Manning, with whom he had shared a cell while awaiting his rape trial in Manning told police officers Milat had explained how he had raped a girl after stabbing her spine to paralyse her, so the victim could see the crime but couldn't stop it.
Although this was years earlier than the backpacker murders, three of the seven victims had been stabbed in the spine. And there was evidence all had been sexually assaulted.
Manning told his story before the details of Milat's attacks were made public but was never able to repeat them in court. He died, in an apparent suicide, weeks before the trial began. More incriminating evidence against Ivan Milat would also be kept from the jury, this time for legal reasons. This was the story of the rape case. On Friday, 9th April , the 26 year old Milat hit the road in his beloved horse power Falcon V8.
He was hunting for hitchhikers. At Liverpool he picked up two 18 year old girls wanted a lift to Melbourne. Bother were undergoing psychiatric treatment and were on Valium. The girls dozed off and awoke on a dirt road where Milat produced knives and told them he was going to have sex with both of them. He brazenly promised, 'You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to kill you. You won't scream when I cut your throats, will you?
Later, they both escaped when he pulled into a gas station to buy them a fizzy drink. Perhaps the episode was a twisted dress-rehearsal for what would follow years later. Or perhaps it was the regular but unreported pastime of a man who since the age of 17 had spent five years behind bars.
In any case, Milat was caught on the road after a police chase. He always claimed that the women consented to sex and in , after a poor performance from the victim, a NSW Supreme Court jury believed him. Milat was a free man and didn't appear in court again until when he stood charged with the backpacker murders. A seasoned detective on Task Force Air who put Milat through intense interrogation said, 'Ivan is the coolest man I have ever interviewed. It now appeared there was a pattern emerging in Milat's attacks.
Although Ivan seemed to have had several girlfriends, there were just two major relationships in his life and the timings of bother were crucial to the commission of his crimes. Ivan was introduced to his future wife Karen in October It was a time of apparent stability in his life. He had five jobs in 18 years and all his bosses described him as the ideal employee. Although their relationship was turbulent, Ivan and Karen appeared happy together and they were married in But then, in , Karen walked out on her husband.
On 13th July they were divorced. Six months the first two backpackers went missing. For a period of two and a half years, between January and April , Milat became a ruthless, cold blooded and sadistic killer who scoured the Hume Highway looking for victims. Then the murders stopped just as suddenly as they begun. Perhaps it was the unlikely relationship that Ivan Milat struck up with 43 year old divorcee Chalinder Hughes, the Indian born and English educated registrar at the Federal Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission.
Two years later, after there had been no more attacks, she was in his bed when the armed police raided Milat's house in Cinnabar Street. There was one more coincidence that pointed to a link between the murders and Milat's emotional state. After Milat's arrest, police checked all unresolved rapes to see if he was involved. There was just one case in when two Asian girls hitching down the Hume Highway were picked up and taken to the Belanglo Forest. A man they later identified as Milat demanded, 'Okay girls, which one of you wants to go first?
Police found that the date coincided with one of Milat's temporary break-ups from Karen. The evidence mounting against Milat was certainly sensational, but his trial proved to be even more dramatic than anyone could have expected. Justice David Hunt warned the jury of eight men and four women, who had been whittled down from the originally sent notices to appear, that the case would be emotional - he might also have added confusing, confounding and contradictory.
Seventeen weeks later, when he came to his summing up, Justice Hunt said that in 17 years as a judge he had never known a case when the prosecution and defence cases had varied so much. The committal of Ivan Milat at Campbelltown Local Court in Sydney's south west district, that began in October , had revealed the prosecution's huge weight of evidence against the road worker.
Now, after 15 months of delays caused by legal aid arguments, it would soon be time for the defence to play their surprise trump card - which left some believing Ivan could after all be an innocent party. Crown Prosecutor Mark Tedeschi QC started by outlining the attempted abduction of Paul Onions who, he said, Milat intended killing purely for psychological gratification. He then graphically explained the injuries that were suffered by the seven victims of the killer. These killings were for killing's sake.
Though it was bogged down in essential detail the Crown case was simple. The physical evidence found at 22 Cinnabar Street linked Milat with all four groups of bodies found in the forest, and the modus operandi of the killer showed that whoever did on murder did them all. The jurors had the chance to see for themselves the sites where the bodies of the seven backpackers were discovered.
On 18th April the Belanglo State Forest was closed to the public to protect the anonymity of the jury and the court adjourned to examine the area. The prosecution took three months to make their case.
But among all their damning ballistics and forensic evidence it was the testimony of two very different witnesses that probably convinced the jury there could be no reasonable doubt.
The first was Karen Milat, aged 37, who rarely looked at her ex-husband as she recalled four different trips to the Belanglo State Forest with Ivan in On two occasions he had gone to shoot kangaroos and finished one off by cutting its throat. The other two times they just drove around and had a picnic. Despite Milat's claims he had never been to the forest, Karen told the court how he seemed to know his way and never used a map. The second key witness was Paul Onions, who had escaped from Milat in and whose identification of him in from police photographs helped lead to his arrest.
Mr Onions, now aged 30, told the terrifying story of how Milat had pulled a revolver on him while he was hitching south along the Hume Highway. Milat said it was a robbery but Onions saw some rope sticking out of his bag.
I saw the rope and that scared me more than the gun I undid my seat belt and jumped straight out of the vehicle. Onions tried to flag down passing cars as Milat chased him and fired a shot at him. I just froze and then I started dodging and weaving as best I could. When no cars stopped, Onions said he was about to give up when he felt Milat's hand on his shirt. He struggled and managed to get away. But the young engineer was lucky.
He stopped a passing van, jumped inside and locked the door. It was the 13th week of his trial that Milat climbed into the witness box and swore to tell 'the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth'.
He could have made an un-sworn statement from the dock but to the surprise of many choose to give evidence and, more importantly, to face cross-examination. Dressed in a navy blue suit, Milat coolly answered the questions of his counsel Mr Terry Martin. He denied having any knowledge of or involvement in any of the deaths or the abduction of Paul Onions.
He admitted having up to 30, rounds of ammunition for Chinese made rifles at his home but had no idea how the vital Ruger rifle parts came to be hidden there.
He claimed the had never been to the Belanglo State Forest, contradicting the sworn evidence of his former wife. And he had no explanation as to how any of the victims' property came to be in his and his brothers 'homes. It was soon after this that what many regard as the turning point came under cross-examination from Crown Prosecutor Mark Tedeschi, to whom the ever-cool Milat just kept up his denials. The usually cocky Milat could only answer, 'They must have.
Then he died, at am Sunday in Long Bay jail , maintaining his innocence over the brutal murders of seven young backpackers found in the Belanglo State Forest between and He loved art and the environment, and often volunteered in the country fire service and anti-logging protests.
He wanted to have one more adventure before returning to study, and deferred the sculpture course he'd enrolled in at Frankston Tafe, inviting his girlfriend to join him on his travels. Deborah Everist was also 19, and was described by friends as vivacious, funny and bubbly. She was studying psychology while working at the Quadriplegic Society part time, but had dreams to one day become a journalist.
She also deferred university to look after her ailing father, so had some free time up her sleeve to join James. On a Saturday morning in December , the couple decided to hitchhike north to Sydney and meet some friends before heading to a bush camping festival near Albury.
They made it to Surry Hills, Sydney, with no issues, but arrived to find their friends had already headed to the festival. They stayed the night and checked in with their parents before setting off down the Hume Highway again the next morning.
Four years later, the young couple's bodies were found 25 metres apart in the Belanglo State Forest. Both had suffered multiple stab wounds and had paralysing spinal wounds. When she was 21, she travelled to Australia after working hard as a bookkeeper to save enough money. She left Guildford in Sydney's west on January 20, , with the plan to catch a bus to Liverpool and hitchhike along the Hume Highway to Melbourne. By this point, she'd already hitchhiked along the familiar Hume Highway numerous times with fellow backpacker friends after travelling large chunks of the country with companions she'd met along the way.
Her body was found two years later in the Belanglo State Forest, she was gagged and had an elastic band around her skull.
She died from multiple stab wounds. German couple Anja Habschied, 20, and Gabor Neugebauer, 21, were easy going travellers, who neither drank nor smoked. They'd already travelled Europe together before they ventured over to Indonesia. Gabor was quiet and shy, but was a confident backpacker. After serving 15 months compulsory service in the German military, he applied to study geology, but when he didn't get entry he settled for philosophy instead.
The victims had been shot, stabbed, beaten, or in one case, decapitated. He had been suffering from terminal stomach and esophagus cancer for almost a year when it eventually claimed his life at 4am that morning. Hamish Goodall.
Crime experts believe the notorious serial killer could be responsible for up to 20 other murders.
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