The fact sheet was long and detailed but it was four words—‘Belanglo State Forest turn-off’—that grabbed the media’s attention. Those words were a red light to Jim Marsden. While asking for bail, Jim said, ‘Two words make it [the case] a bit emotive. They are “Backpackers” and “Belanglo” . . . [Ivan] is only charged with one incident relating to something that occurred four years ago.’ Jim asked the magistrate to discount these words when considering the question of bail. But Mr Flack refused bail, citing the seriousness of the charges and the possibility of further offences being committed.
Ivan was remanded to appear again at Campbelltown Court on 31 May 1994.
10
THE MILATS
Task Force Air had been in operation for only a matter of weeks when it started receiving information about Ivan and the Milat family, but most of it consisted of broad suspicions about ‘that family’ and ‘those boys’. Fear of alerting Ivan made it difficult to follow these up. It was not until after Ivan’s arrest that we could openly investigate the Milat family.
Ivan’s father, Stiphan, was born on 26 December 1902 in the town of Blato, on the Croatian island of Korcula in the Adriatic. He was one of 22 children, only four of whom survived infancy. At the age of 24, Stiphan migrated to Australia. He worked as a miner in Queensland before settling in Sydney, where he had various jobs. Stiphan (who later was also known as Stephen) was working as a wharf labourer when, in 1934, he met fourteen-year-old Margaret Piddlesden, who lived with her parents in western Sydney. Two years later they married and moved to Milsons Point on the north shore of Sydney Harbour.
The family moved between Sydney and Newcastle as Stiphan sought work, mostly on the wharves. By the early 1940s they were living in a large shed on a property in Sydney’s western suburbs, and within a few years Stiphan was growing vegetables for the family and the markets. At other times he worked as a stonemason and a labourer. Between 1936 and 1962, Stiphan and Margaret had fourteen children. The fifth, Ivan, was born on 27 December 1944. In the late 1960s the family moved to Guildford, which would be the family home until Margaret died in 2001. (Stiphan died, aged 81, eighteen years earlier.)
A hard worker and heavy drinker, Stiphan could be a brutal father, although some described him as ‘strict but fair’. Margaret, on the other hand, was permissive and protective towards the children. As Stiphan could never earn enough to support his large family, the children had to leave school early to find jobs.
Ivan went to Patrician Brothers High School at Liverpool and left school at fifteen. By this time he and some of his brothers had shown a deep interest in shooting and collecting guns. Ivan was said to have had the occasional run-in with local police, although his first recorded offences were in 1962 when, aged seventeen, he appeared before the Liverpool Court on charges of stealing from a house. He was released on probation until he turned eighteen, but the same year and while on probation he again appeared before Liverpool Court on a charge of break and enter with intent to steal. This time he was committed to an institution for six months. Two years later he again appeared before Liverpool Court on two charges of break, enter and steal, and was committed for trial at the Campbelltown Quarter Sessions. He was convicted and sentenced to eighteen months’ gaol on each charge.
In 1964 Ivan began an affair with Marilyn, the wife of his older brother Boris. The following year Marilyn had a baby daughter, Lynise. It was an open secret among the family that Ivan was the father. Boris and Marilyn already had a daughter, but their marriage had been turbulent and was collapsing by the time Ivan became involved, although Boris had been trying to save it. While Boris did his best to treat Lynise as his own daughter, her birth marked the start of a long feud with Ivan.
In November 1965 Ivan was arrested and charged with stealing a motor vehicle and stealing electrical goods and a leather jacket. A year later he was sentenced to two years’ gaol. He was released in April 1967, but four months later he was charged at Liverpool with being an accessory to stealing. In October 1967 he was convicted and sentenced to three years’ hard labour.
In August 1971 Ivan’s younger brother Michael, then 22, was interviewed over a recent robbery at the Bank of New South Wales in Canley Heights. Michael named his accomplices as John Powch, John Preston and Ivan. Wearing stockings over their heads and armed with .22 sawn-off rifles and a sawn-off single-barrel shotgun, they had stolen $360. Ivan’s car, a gold Falcon, had been the getaway car. Powch admitted to the offence and, like Michael, implicated Ivan. Powch was interviewed about a second robbery at Revesby on 23 July and again implicated Ivan and the other two. Michael later confirmed Powch’s story.
On 7 August Ivan was interviewed about the two robberies. Told that Michael had admitted to the Revesby robbery and had implicated him, Powch and Preston, Ivan replied, ‘If your brother puts you in, it’s not much good trying to get out of it. I was in it but it wasn’t my idea.’ He also admitted his involvement in the Canley Heights robbery and was charged at Sydney Local Court with assault and robbery while armed, and two counts of carrying an unlicensed pistol. Ivan’s mother, Margaret, put up $1000 cash for his bail. While Ivan was on bail, a warrant was issued for his arrest on a charge of rape.
Ivan was 27 and had spent more of the past decade in gaol than out. Not wanting to risk another gaoling, he fled, causing his mother to forfeit her $1000 bail money. He was on the run until 25 April 1974. Ivan believed it was Boris who had turned him in. He told the police he had been working for the Water Board under an alias during his three years as a fugitive, but the truth was he had spent most of that time in Auckland, New Zealand, and had returned only after he got into trouble with the New Zealand Police.
Charged with two robberies and rape, Ivan had his application for bail refused. On 9 December 1974 he was acquitted in the Sydney District Court of the assault and robbery charges. Four days later, with John Marsden as his solicitor, Ivan was acquitted in the same court of rape.
In February 1972 Michael Milat had pleaded guilty to one count of armed robbery with wounding, and was sentenced to sixteen years’ gaol and to twelve years’ gaol on each of three counts of armed robbery. All sentences were to be served concurrently. A further five charges of armed robbery were taken into account. All nine offences were committed in south-west Sydney between 22 June and 3 August 1971. Michael’s criminal record had begun at the age of fifteen when he was placed on a twelve-month good behaviour bond for stealing.
John Preston, who had a long criminal record for theft and street offences, pleaded guilty in 1972 to a series of armed robberies with Michael and was sentenced to eighteen years’ gaol. John Powch pleaded not guilty, but was convicted and gaoled for eighteen years. He has spent most of his adult life behind bars, and in the early 1980s was named one of the state’s ten most wanted criminals after escaping from Cessnock gaol in 1980. After teaming up with the notorious drug trafficker David Kelleher, Powch was arrested in 1985 and gaoled for 26 years for conspiring to import heroin, while Kelleher was sentenced to life in gaol. In 2004 Powch was gaoled for nine years and four months on three counts of sexual assault.
In October 1975 Ivan was living with his parents in Guildford and driving Mack trucks when he was introduced to seventeen-year-old Karen Merle Duck by her brother, Wayne, a truck mechanic. Ivan was 31 years old and had been out of gaol for less than a year after being acquitted of the armed robbery and rape charges. A fortnight later Karen and Ivan started going out. Karen didn’t tell Ivan that she was six weeks’ pregnant to another man. About a week later, Ivan stopped the car in which they were driving, walked around to Karen’s side and, grabbing her by the throat, forced her to have sex with him. The violence of the assault was similar to that described in the 1971 rape allegation. Karen came forward in 1994 after Ivan’s arrest and told police, ‘he grabbed me by the throat and . . . I just sort of lay there and said he could help himself because I’d had it’. Later, Karen told Ivan that she was pregnant, but he claimed to have known already.
Despite Ivan’s violence, Karen continued seeing him while she lived with her parents at Lurnea in Sydney’s south-west. On 24 July 1976 Karen gave birth to a son, Jason. Karen remained at the family home for another two years before moving out to live with Ivan in a caravan in the yard of the family home at Guildford. It was during this two-year period that a man resembling Ivan attempted to rape two eighteen-year-old hitchhikers on a dirt track off the Hume Highway just south of Mittagong. (See Chapter 7 for a detailed account of this incident.) Although the evidence provided by the women in 1994 was insufficient for court purposes, it convinced me and other members of the task force that it had been another abduction and intended rape, if not an attempted rape and murder, by Ivan.
Ivan did not pay board while he and Karen lived at Guildford, but she helped with the housework and he did odd jobs and maintained the house. Karen described Ivan’s father, Stiphan, as ‘a nice person who kept very much to himself while Margaret was very permissive with the children’. Karen got on well with Margaret, although in disputes Margaret always took Ivan’s side.
Karen described how Ivan behaved as a stepfather to Jason and spoiled him, ‘buying him all sorts of presents’. During the pregnancy she had considered having an abortion, but decided not to. When she told Ivan he ‘complimented’ her on the decision. When Karen told Ivan she would like to have another baby, a girl, Ivan said he’d like a girl too, before suddenly changing his mind and telling her he’d shoot her if he ever found out she was pregnant.
To Karen, Ivan appeared to have settled down, staying out of trouble with the police and taking jobs that kept him close to home. But she didn’t find it easy to live at the Guildford property in the caravan. There were ten in the house: Ivan’s parents and his brothers Richard, David, Paul and George, and George’s wife Patsy and their two girls. Jason couldn’t play in the backyard because it was unfenced and the brothers left bits and pieces of cars scattered all over the yard.
In 1980 Ivan obtained a bank loan to enable him, Karen and Jason to move into a house at Blackett. Years later Karen heard that Ivan and his younger brother, Wally, had wanted to buy another property but the owner didn’t want to sell; one night they went to the property and shot all the cattle. According to Karen, Ivan became abusive after they moved into the house at Blackett. He was very tight with money, refusing to give her any for anything but food, and he only ever used cash. He had no credit cards. Karen described Ivan as obsessive about cleanliness, criticising her if he found any dust in the house.
Once, in 1982, Ivan lost his temper and smashed a coffee table to pieces. He then gathered the fragments together on the floor and told Karen that if she threw them away he would wreck the whole house. The broken table was left there for a week to teach Karen not to challenge him.
During the same year Ivan and Karen stayed for a few days at Alex Milat’s home at Yanderra, a village beside the Hume Highway near Bargo, where they lived during much of the 1970s and ’80s. During their stay, Karen said, Ivan took her to the Belanglo State Forest so that he could shoot kangaroos. Even then he seemed to be familiar with the forest.
In 1983 Ivan’s father died. That same year Ivan and Karen married, but their relationship was already on the slide and Karen left with Jason to stay with her mother, who had moved from Lurnea to the Central Coast. After several phone calls and letters from Ivan, Karen went back to him, claiming she ‘loved him’.
Ivan enjoyed hunting and Karen described him shooting kangaroos and target-shooting in bush areas such as the Wombeyan Caves. During a visit by several of the brothers to Wally’s property on Wombeyan Caves Road, Wally and Ivan amused themselves by shooting at rocks, trees and cans. Ivan also took Jason shooting, once shooting a kangaroo and cutting its throat, and another time shooting and skinning a deer.
Over the next few years Ivan regularly accused Karen of having an affair with the man next door; threw things at her if he found dust in the house; got angry if she spoke with the neighbours; and tried to stop her having friends, male or female. Several times Ivan threatened to throw hot coffee over Karen, and once he threw hot liquid near Jason when he would not take his asthma medication, causing the boy to faint. Whenever Ivan was away he would ring up at night to make sure Karen was home. Taking offence at something Karen’s brother said to him while drunk, Ivan knocked him unconscious with a chair. On another occasion Ivan challenged Karen in front of a friend; when she returned the challenge Ivan took her outside, put a gun to her head and said he would shoot her if she ever did anything like that again. In Karen’s opinion the abuse was less about physical violence than about wanting absolute control.
Sometimes Ivan spoke about doing violence to others. When Ivan saw a girl hitchhiking, he turned to Karen and asked what she thought would happen to the hitchhiker. ‘She’s going to get rooted,’ Ivan told her. ‘Killed and rooted.’ (As Dr Rod Milton noted, ‘If Ivan actually used those words in that order, it suggests he had memories or fantasies about sexual interference with bodies after death.’) One day Ivan claimed to have picked up a female hitchhiker himself, telling Karen, ‘She just got rooted and dropped off.’ It was an apparent reference to the 1971 rape charge. He also claimed to have killed a man and left him in the bush. Once, when a car pulled out in front of Ivan, he grabbed his pistol and threatened to shoot the man. Guns remained a constant feature of Ivan’s life. Karen knew that Wally Milat allowed Ivan to buy guns using his name, and that Ivan had driver’s licences in several different names. (He did not obtain a driver’s licence in his own name until 1981.)
Although Ivan continued to spoil Jason, he and Karen stopped talking. Feeling that she had become a prisoner in her own home, Karen threatened to leave, but Ivan told her she was staying whether she liked it or not. Karen suffered a nervous breakdown and was on heavy medication. In 1987, after a violent row during which Ivan threw a glass at the front door, just missing Jason, Karen and Jason left. She remembered it as 14 February: Valentine’s Day.
A year later, there was a fire at the home of her mother and stepfather (Karen’s mother had remarried) at East Lambton, a suburb of Newcastle. The fire had been deliberately lit, and destroyed the family car and garage and another car nearby. Karen believed the fire had been set by Ivan, who had demanded her mother tell him where she was living, and had threatened to burn the house down if she didn’t. Ivan, who was by then working for the Department of Main Roads (DMR) in southern Newcastle, was interviewed by police but denied starting the fire. The fire was later investigated by Task Force Air.
According to family members, Ivan had a number of girlfriends after his split with Karen, but none of them mentioned that in early 1988 one of those girlfriends had been his brother Boris’s wife, Marilyn. Ivan ran into Marilyn by chance at Gosford, on the Central Coast, where Boris, Marilyn and their children had been living for several years. Boris and Marilyn were now divorced, largely because Boris had been unable to accept Marilyn’s earlier affair with Ivan. They had been estranged from the broader Milat family for around fifteen years.
In late 1988 Ivan left the DMR and got a job at the Boral plasterboard factory near Granville in western Sydney, using the name of his younger brother Bill in order to avoid paying maintenance to Karen. Aware that Karen was in the process of divorcing Ivan, Marilyn urged him to marry her, but Ivan wasn’t interested and ended their relationship.
The divorce was finalised in October 1989. To Ivan, it was humiliating proof that he had lost control of Karen. As part of the divorce settlement, the house in Blackett was sold and Ivan returned to the Milat family home in Guildford. Once again, he responded to his marital upheaval by turning his attention to hitchhikers. Two months later James Gibson and Deborah Everist were abducted and murdered in the Belanglo State Forest. Over the next two and a half years another five backpackers would be abducted and murdered in the forest, and there would be an attempt to abduct—almost certainly with the intent to murder—a sixth: Paul Onions. On 19 September 1992, five months after the la
st murder, the body of one of the backpackers was found in the forest.
Ivan spent the years 1989–92 living at the Milat home in Guildford, but in mid-1992 he began building the house in Eagle Vale with his sister Shirley. She was a year younger than Ivan and in 1964 had married Gerhard ‘Jerry’ Soire. They had two children and lived at Liverpool before moving to Pleasure Point in south-west Sydney. After they divorced, the children did not stay with Shirley.
The intense publicity and police attention resulting from the discovery of the first two bodies brought an end to the Belanglo murders.
Around mid-1993 Shirley and Chalinder Hughes were working together at an accountancy firm. Shirley thought Chalinder, who had gone through her own divorce three years earlier, and Ivan would be good for one another and she introduced them. Within months they were in a serious relationship. After Shirley and Ivan moved into their new house in Eagle Vale, Chalinder was a regular overnight visitor, although she kept her own home at nearby Kearns. Her visits continued until Ivan’s arrest in May 1994; after this Shirley moved in with Chalinder and stayed for a year.
11
COMMITTAL
With Ivan denied bail and the charges against him adjourned, Rod Lynch and I knew the next eight days would be critical to the success of the prosecution. We had literally hundreds of exhibits to examine, and we needed a clear understanding of exactly what evidence could be used with respect to each of the murders and the attempted abduction of Paul Onions.
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