Born Killers. Christopher Berry-Dee
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became apparent that a sadistic murderer was on the loose – and that he was unlikely to stop killing any time soon.
These first two victims were a pair of nineteen-year-olds, James Gibson and Deborah Everist, from Frankston, Victoria. They were last seen alive on Friday, 30 December 1989. This was at Surrey Hills in Sydney, from where they were planning to hitchhike the 140km (87 miles) to Albury.
The next victim followed soon after. Sunday, 20 January 1991, was the last day that twenty-year-old German backpacker Simone Schmidl was sighted in the town of Liverpool, west of Sydney. An intrepid girl known to her friends and family as ‘Simi’, she had been hitchhiking south to meet her mother in Melbourne.
Twenty-one-year-old Gabor Kurt Neugebauer and his twenty-year-old girlfriend Anja Habschied were two more German hitchhikers out on their own. They left Sydney’s King’s Cross district on 20 December 1991 to travel to Darwin. They never made it.
British pair, Joanne Walters and Caroline Clarke, left King’s Cross on 18 April 1992, a Friday. They had planned to travel around Australia, paying their way by picking fruit en route. Instead, like the rest of Milat’s victims, their remains were later discovered in Belanglo State Forest.
Caroline’s parents, Ian and Jacquie Clarke, remember being a little apprehensive before Caroline flew to Australia. Ian Clarke recalls: ‘Off she went, and she was having a wonderful time. You know, we always talked about hitchhiking as something that should not be encouraged. And we always said to Caroline, look whatever you do, never do this on your own. Always use public transport, even if it meant working for a bit longer to pay for the fare. Well, well, she didn’t.’ When Caroline went missing her family did everything they could to search for her. They created fly-posters with Caroline’s photograph and details on them and sent them to all the major backpacking hostels. Backpackers were asked to take bundles of posters with them and hand them out to other travellers. In this way, news of the missing girls quickly spread across the continent. However, despite Ian and Jacquie’s best efforts, news was slow in coming through. It was a terrible time, as Jacquie explains: ‘You can’t believe anything has gone wrong. But, of course you just can’t believe it. However, as the weeks turned into months, the realisation dawns. I was in a state of limbo, I must say.’ Her husband was equally traumatised, adding: ‘I don’t think we really, until quite late on, finally faced up to the fact that they weren’t coming back. Then a different kind of anguish comes in; when you know they are dead. Then you can start to mourn them.’
The Clarkes were able to begin to mourn their youngest daughter in September 1992. On the nineteenth, the remains of Joanne Walters were discovered under a rock in Belanglo. Her clothing, which lay nearby, had been carefully arranged, suggesting a sexual element to the crime. The following day, the body of Caroline Clarke was discovered by police just fifteen metres away. The body was also left in a ‘posed’ position, which clearly signified something to the killer. According to forensic psychiatrist Dr Rod Milton: ‘She was lying face down, with one arm up and her head on her hand, and she had been repeatedly shot through the head. The autopsy reports show several entry points to the skull, which suggests that the killer had moved the head in order to do what pleased him. This was a particularly cold-blooded murder, although it is not unknown for serial killers to arrange the bodies in a particular way. There was some similarity between Miss Walters and Miss Clarke, in that they were both laying face down, and both had their hands raised up somewhere near the vicinity of the head.’
Once the Clarkes knew that their daughter had been murdered they wanted to find out by whom. Ian Clarke says: ‘We knew the broad outline of what had happened to Caroline, and that was horrid because it was such an evil and disgusting event. You know, you start reliving it on their behalf, conjuring up what they’d gone through.’ Sadly for the Clarkes, it would be a while before the identity of their daughter’s killer would be revealed.
The Hume Highway is the major arterial link between Sydney and Melbourne. The road travels for much of the way along the Great Dividing Range and passes through the Murray River towns of Albury and Wodonga. The Hume Highway was developed when paddle steamer trade along the river was the only way of marketing the crops and produce of the surrounding countryside. It passes near the Snowy Mountains, through the Riverina, Bushranger Country, and the Southern Highlands of New South Wales. It was along this same road that Milat picked up all of his victims for their final ride.
Ivan Milat, a trawler and opportunist – like so many serial murderers – would cruise the Hume on a regular basis. He was a hunter and this was his turf, the place he was most familiar with and where he was most comfortable in selecting his prey. The only other area where Milat felt as secure was the Belanglo State Forest, where he would take his victims to act out the final agonised stages of their lives.
Ivan’s method of selecting his victims was very straightforward. When he spotted a likely victim or victims on the highway he would pull his blue, four-wheel drive vehicle over and start by offering a tried-and-tested cheery grin. He was adept at playing the role of the Good Samaritan, a friendly travelling companion. But once Ivan was sure his new travelling companions were safely in his control things would quickly change. By the time his victims realised they were being kidnapped it was too late. A gun would be pulled and his passengers would be tied up in quick order. Then it was off to the forest. Ivan’s special place.
Milat enjoyed the isolation that the bush afforded him. Taking his victims to such a lonely setting was the perfect place for him to abuse them without fear of being disturbed. He could work in private, uninterrupted, a cold and selfish killer who could take all the time he desired with his immobilised victims. Like other such killers, he could control not only the manner of his victims’ deaths, but what happened to them afterwards. He would play with the corpses of his victims, posing them in positions that held some secret meaning for him and then secreting the bodies in places and in a manner that would signify something intensely personal to him. In this he was following his own inner signature, lost in the compulsive pleasure that it lent him. Once he was sated, Milat would strip the corpses of any jewellery or possessions he wished to retain and then, almost carelessly, hide the bodies beneath a makeshift blanket of branches and leaves.
There is something about Australia’s serial killers that seems to separate them from the often-diverse backgrounds of repetitive murderers from other countries. Australia’s serial killers are almost exclusively from underprivileged backgrounds. They have poor work histories and nomadic tendencies. It is almost as if they are born outlaws who believe from the very beginning that they can and will do as they please. According to Paul Kidd, author of Australian Serial Killers, Milat exemplifies this attitude. He writes: ‘Milat was an extremely clever serial killer. I mean this within the Australian genre. By that I mean, it is a lonely place, it’s in the bush, he is abducting strangers, people he doesn’t know. He’s taking them to a place of absolute isolation where he’s committing his crimes… he is secreting the bodies, hiding the bodies, in a place where they are unlikely to be found. Ninety per cent, or more probably, of Australia’s serial killers, are pure opportunists.’
Ivan was born on 27 December 1944, the fifth child in a family of fourteen. The Milat family lived in a very rural area and as such were a close-knit group. Suspicious of outsiders, they turned inwards and were bound together only by their loyalty to one another and their fierce family privacy. It is not difficult to imagine the Milat family as a hillbilly clan at large in the countryside.
One of the Milat family’s favourite activities was gunplay. Ivan and his many brothers loved to mess around with guns – they even manufactured their own rifles and revolvers. Taking their weaponry, they would disappear into the forest to hunt rabbits and birds. Their father, Stephan, a Croatian immigrant, was a ruthless disciplinarian who thought nothing of beating his boys for any unruly behaviour. The Milat children had an absolute fear of their father, and when they weren’t working alongside him on the family’s tomato crops they would generally try to escape his attentions altogether.
Stephen Milat was, of course, a product of a different time and culture. His neighbours recall one particularly disturbing incident of abuse involving Stephen standing upon the backs of two of his prone sons and bludgeoning them mercilessly with a piece of wood.