Milat
Page 5
According to Alex, the only man in the second car he was able to describe was the one in the back seat next to the woman: ‘[He] appeared to be aged in his middle twenties, a Caucasian, fair complexion with brownish coloured hair which was neatly groomed and cut to the ears and neatly trimmed around the sides to the rear. He was clean shaven and appeared to be well dressed. From memory he was wearing an off white coloured collar style long sleeve shirt.’ As we ‘became closer and almost level’, Alex said, ‘this person raised his left hand and placed it beside his face so it blocked my view of him. At this time I noticed his hands were not rough as if he was an office worker as opposed to a labourer and his hands were clean.’ Alex claimed to have written down the registration number of the second vehicle on a piece of cardboard he had now lost, but to the best of his recollection, ‘the following letter combinations and numbers have some significance to me. They are ALD-537, ALO, DAL and ACL.’
After he was shown pictures, Alex identified Caroline Clarke and Joanne Walters as the women in the two cars. He explained his earlier failure to report the matter to police by saying:
I was of the opinion that it was just some young blokes taking some girls into the forest to have a good time and I didn’t give much thought to it being anything more than that. I didn’t wish to get involved so I didn’t contact the police and inform them what I had seen. From my knowledge and experiences in that area I am aware of countless times when young men and women are observed driving around the forest looking like they are lost or looking for somewhere they can have a good time and I didn’t think that this incident was any different.
Alex said he had seen the Ford Falcon ‘on at least two prior occasions in the forest area’. On one occasion there were five men in the car ‘and all but one had possession of a rifle which were [sic] protruding from the vehicle through the windows’. At least two of the rifles were ‘.22 calibre’, Alex said. One ‘was a Winchester, as I have one of these weapons myself, and the other one appeared to be a Ruger rifle’. On the second occasion, ‘I saw one male occupant who appeared to have an SKS type rifle without the bayonet connected in his possession which was visible through the front passenger side window and a male passenger in the rear nearside seat also had possession of a rifle.’ The sightings were said to be close in time and about nine months before April 1992.
Bill Ayres was then interviewed. Despite having recommended the task force speak to Alex, Ayres gave only very qualified support to Alex’s claims. He had been driving Alex’s vehicle at the time, he said, and while he remembered seeing the two cars turning into Belanglo, he saw ‘nothing else’. However, he added, ‘If Alex says there’s fifteen bullet holes in a signpost, there’ll be fifteen bullet holes in it.’
Given he had been looking through the window of a moving vehicle, the level of detail in Alex’s statement was extraordinary, not to say bizarre. Another anomaly was the eight-day gap between when the girls were last seen leaving Kings Cross and when Alex claimed to have seen them. While, like every member of the task force, I hoped for the miracle breakthrough that would lead us to the killer, there were too many things about Alex’s statement that did not ring true.
Questions began to pile up in my mind. Was it a complete fabrication? If so, what was Alex’s motive? Was Alex involved in the murders and playing a game with the task force? Did Alex know something about the murders and was he trying to tell the task force something without coming out directly and providing that information? Why would he have involved Ayres if he hadn’t expected Ayres to support his story? Were the claims an attempt to distract the task force from the real killer or killers? (When their bodies were found, Caroline had a sloppy-joe-type top wrapped around her head and Joanne had a cloth gag covering her mouth. This information had been widely reported and Alex could have read it in the newspapers.)
The statement also raised some chilling questions about Alex himself. Having claimed to have seen the bindings on the women and the fear in their eyes, how could he explain it away by saying he was ‘of the opinion that it was just some young blokes taking some girls into the forest to have a good time’? Did he regard the abduction and rape of women as harmless fun? Was Alex the backpacker killer? If so, why would he draw such attention to himself?
Despite the macabre level of detail in Alex’s statement, the most crucial piece of information—a complete or near-complete car registration number—was missing. The ‘letter combinations and numbers’ he claimed to remember (ALD-537, ALO, DAL and ACL) were so vague as to be virtually useless. All in all, Alex’s statement offered no tangible leads that could be pursued using normal investigative techniques. Would hypnosis help him remember the car registration and other information? It would be an unusual tactic, as evidence obtained under hypnosis would have little or no credibility, and evidence contaminated by information gleaned from hypnosis risked being thrown out by the courts. On the other hand, we had already obtained a signed statement from Alex and this would not be contaminated by hypnosis. In my view, it was worth the risk. A short time later Alex was hypnotised. Nothing was gained or lost, but lingering questions over Alex’s motives remained.
Around the time Alex made his statement, Lyn Butler contacted detective Ewhen Hreszczuk of South Region Major Crime Squad, whom she knew, with information related to missing backpackers and the Belanglo State Forest. A week earlier, on 11 October 1993, Paul Douglas had dropped into the Albion Hotel, Parramatta, for a drink with Lyn’s husband, Des. Douglas and Des were workmates at Boral Australian Gypsum Ltd. They began to talk about the bodies found in Belanglo and media speculation that there might be other victims. Both men were troubled by comments made to them by another Boral workmate, Paul Thomas Miller, over the past twelve months.
Sometime around Easter 1992—before any of the bodies had been found, but while there was widespread media coverage about missing backpackers, including Gabor Neugebauer and Anja Habschied—Miller had said to Butler, ‘I know who killed the Germans.’ The comment came out of the blue. Immediately after saying it, Miller had changed the subject.
Five months later, on 21 September, Douglas and another workmate, Nick Collins, were discussing the discovery of Clarke’s and Walters’ bodies when Miller joined the conversation and said, ‘There’s more bodies out there. They haven’t found them all yet.’ Later the same day, during another conversation about the bodies, Miller said, ‘You could pick up anybody on that road and you’d never find them again. You’d never find out who did it either.’
A few weeks later, Miller said to Douglas, ‘There are two Germans out there they haven’t found yet.’ During yet another conversation, this time about the sentences imposed by the courts on rapists, Miller said to Douglas, ‘Stabbing a woman is like cutting a loaf of bread.’ (Three of the four bodies discovered by this time were women. All had stab wounds although one, Caroline Clarke, had also been shot.)
Douglas and Butler knew that while Miller used that name at work, he also had another name: Richard James Milat.
Miller had spoken to his workmates about coming from a large family of brothers, some of whom were wild and violent, and of having a violent relationship with his partner. Miller often came to work drunk or high on cannabis. Some workmates regarded smoking cannabis as Miller’s full-time occupation.
Believing Miller was affected by cannabis when he spoke about the missing Germans and the forest, Douglas and Butler didn’t take him seriously at first. But when Miller repeated his claims they began to feel uneasy, especially as they were aware of the propensity of some of his brothers for violence.
Miller’s habit of altering his appearance also aroused suspicion. He was constantly changing the colour and style of his hair. He regularly grew, and then shaved off, a goatee beard. His moustache varied in style from one that sat neatly above his top lip to a Merv Hughes–style handlebar moustache. His side levers also changed, sometimes stopping halfway down his ears and at other times growing down to his beard.
Then
there was his use of two names, Paul Thomas Miller and Richard James Milat, and two driver’s licences, one in each name.
Suspicion followed Miller, even after he accepted a redundancy package and left Boral at the end of 1992, having worked there for about three years. The company became aware that he had been using false tax file numbers. It was also common knowledge at Boral that Miller had a brother, William Milat, who had worked at Boral for a year from late 1988.
After listening to Paul Douglas and her husband discussing Miller, Lyn Butler joined the conversation. The three of them agreed that Miller’s behaviour was too weird to ignore. Des Butler decided to ring the Crime Stoppers hotline. A few days later Lyn Butler contacted detective Ewhen Hreszczuk.
When Hreszczuk and his partner, Detective Brett Coman, did a name check they found that Miller had convictions dating back to 1972, when he was sixteen. His record comprised convictions for break, enter and steal; theft; possessing and smoking cannabis; and driving offences under the name Richard Milat. They contacted detective Godden at the task force and passed on their information. (Coman was later seconded to Air.)
Early in the investigation Richard and Ivan, another brother, had been separately mentioned as suspects, often because of the family reputation rather than for anything they were known to have done. There was a common view that ‘the Milats are strange’, ‘they have been in trouble with the police’, several of the brothers were ‘gun nuts’, and so on.
As thousands of pieces of information continued to pour in, the police hotline received a call from a woman we will call Mary, who lived in south-west Sydney. Mary said that in 1977, as eighteen-year-olds, she and her then friend Therese had been hitchhiking from Liverpool to their home in Canberra when they accepted a lift from a man in his ‘early 30s’ with ‘black straggly hair’. Just south of Mittagong, where he had stopped to buy petrol, he turned right off the Hume Highway, telling them ‘it was a shortcut to Canberra’. A few minutes later he turned onto a dirt track and stopped the car. ‘I forgot to go to the toilet back at the garage,’ he said. He opened the boot and bonnet, then grabbed Mary by her arms and said, ‘Okay, girls, who’s first?’ Mary said she punched the man and that she and Therese ran into the bush. They found a spot to hide and lay in the bushes for several hours before the man gave up looking for them and left.
Mary and Therese walked back along the road until they found a farmhouse. After hearing their story, the occupants offered to drive Mary and Therese to Bowral Police Station. They didn’t report the matter, but accepted a lift back to the highway and hitchhiked on to Canberra. On the same day that Mary contacted the backpacker hotline, Therese, who lived in western Sydney, independently rang the hotline. Both women told the same story, which they later confirmed in statements.
During March 1994 Mary and Therese were separately shown a series of pictures by police that included Ivan Milat and his brother Richard. While Mary did not select anyone from the photographs, Therese pointed to photograph 4 (Ivan) and said, ‘[His] eyebrows are similar and shape of face is similar.’ She then pointed to photograph 11 (Richard) and said, ‘At first glance, most similar, triggered some memory.’ Neither amounted to a positive identification that could be used in court, but they added to the suspicions that were building around the Milat brothers.
The same month Therese, who was employed by SBS, appeared on a Four Corners program about the unsolved backpacker killings. When the program went to air, the name ‘Milat’ appeared in the corner of a blackboard in the background of one of the scenes. It had gone unnoticed during both the filming and editing, but was noticed by Alex when it was screened. He reported it to the ABC, who deleted it from any further showing of the program. The slip could have proved catastrophic, but Alex did not appear to have told other members of the Milat family about the reference. Fortunately, nothing further came of it.
On 9 November 1993, a week after Mary and Therese had rung the hotline, a call was received from Joanne Berry of Canberra. Berry said that in January 1990 she had been driving along the Hume Highway to Canberra when, just outside Berrima, she saw a 4WD car on the side of the road and a man running towards her, chased by another man. She stopped and the first man called out, ‘Help me, he’s got a gun.’ Berry let him into her car and drove him to Bowral Police Station, where he reported the incident. The man told her his name was Paul Onions, he was English, and he had been hitchhiking when the man chasing him had offered a lift. Onions had become suspicious when the man stopped the car. When he produced a gun, Onions leapt out and ran.
Two days after Joanne Berry made her report, the hotline received a phone call from England from a man who said his name was Paul Thomas Onions and that he had visited Australia between December 1989 and June 1990. In January 1990, he said, he had caught a train to Liverpool, from where he intended to hitchhike to Melbourne. He got a lift with a man he described as being ‘in his early 40s who was fit looking, about 5'10" tall . . . [and had] . . . a Merv Hughes moustache with black hair’ driving a ‘white Toyota Land Cruiser 4WD with woolly seat covers’. Onions remembered them driving for about an hour before the man pulled over to the side of the road and ‘pulled out a black revolver. I jumped out of the car and ran. He chased me and I jumped in front of a car. The lady driving stopped the car and she took me to Bowral Police Station’. Onions explained to the Bowral police that he had left his backpack with all his property, including his passport, in the car when he fled.
On 24 November analysts began to examine the records of the Police Modus Operandi Unit and extract all records of abductions and kidnappings since 1985. Inexplicably, there was no record of the incident described by Berry and Onions.
Among the hotline calls was another from a local woman who said she ‘didn’t know if she could help’, but was suspicious of a man who lived in the area. He drove a 4WD, owned lots of guns and was into shooting. His name was Ivan Milat. She had no other information about the man, but hoped her call might be of some assistance.
8
BREAKTHROUGH
Between October 1993 and February 1994 Strike Force Air tripled in size, from thirteen investigators and two analysts to 33 investigators and eleven analysts, supported by ballistics and other forensic officers. With the increased resources, no more daily media briefings and a slowdown in the flow of information from the public, we were able to restructure the investigation around a number of broad investigative strands: Ruger rifles; the ammunition found in the forest; the statement by Alex Milat; known users of the Belanglo State Forest; three persons of interest (not including the Milats); a series of murders on Sydney’s north shore; and a number of other unsolved murders. While following up these leads, we would compile a brief of evidence for the coroner that, in the event of an arrest, could be converted to a criminal brief.
At this time the Milats were clearly a family of interest. Although there was no admissible evidence against any particular member of the family, we had enough information to suggest that one or more of the brothers might well have been involved in the murders.
The hotline had provided us with our strongest lead yet: Paul Onions’ story of being given a lift by a man with a gun. We knew Ivan Milat owned a vehicle similar to the one described by Onions, that he often used the name ‘Bill’ and that another brother had the name ‘Bill’.
A thorough investigation of the Milat family was a priority, but not one we could afford to pursue at the expense of every other lead. We now had a list of more than a dozen missing persons suspected of having been murdered, together with six unsolved murders and five people nominated by members of the public as possibly connected with the backpacker murders. Any one of these might have led us to the killer. Nevertheless, I assigned a team of six detectives under Detective Sergeant Royce Gorman, who had a couple of priority lines of investigation, to turn his attention to the Milat family.
On 6 February 1994 Detective Sergeant Rex Little of Bowral Police took a statement from Joanne Berry in which she re
peated her story of having rescued Paul Onions from a man with a gun just outside Berrima and taken him to Bowral Police Station. After speaking to Berry, Little searched the archives of Bowral Police Station for any record of Onions’ original report. Eventually he found a typed ‘Occurrence Entry’ relating to the incident, which had also been recorded in the notebook of a constable attached to the police station. The information provided by Onions had never been followed up. Five of the seven backpackers had been murdered after Onions had reported the matter to Bowral Police.
Around 20 February I asked Detective Paul Gordon to check the criminal histories of all members of the Milat family, particularly Ivan. A day or so later Gordon told me, in front of Rod Lynch and others, that the Milat family, including Ivan, had little or no criminal history. I asked Gordon if he had carried out a thorough check and he told me he had. We had been told by a number of sources, however—including then Superintendent John Laycock who had lived near the Milat family in Guildford for many years—that Ivan and some of his brothers had criminal records for armed hold-ups and related offences going back to the 1970s, and that Ivan had been involved in an abduction and sexual assault. I asked Gordon whether he had checked the criminal histories held on microfiche. He hadn’t. In 1984 the police had switched to a computerised system, but pre-1984 records still had to be checked manually at the Central Records Office. I would have expected even the most junior detective to have been aware of this, since fingerprint checks were so central to a detective’s work. I told Gordon to go and check those records. A day or two later Gordon returned to the task force office with a smile on his face and declared, ‘He’s our man. He did it.’ I replied, ‘A big call, tell us all about it,’ and he went on to outline Ivan’s arrest for rape in 1971.