Auchterlonie was playing music on his phone. Klein picked up his own phone and switched on the video camera. He filmed Auchterlonie sitting in the front seat. There was some discussion about ‘rolling a joint’ and Klein was heard to say, quietly: ‘Yeah, go it,’ and Milat asked, ‘Can you feel the adrenaline?’ Klein then suggested to Auchterlonie that there might be a bong in the boot of the car and that he should go and have a look. As he walked towards the back of the car, Milat took a double-bladed axe from the boot and struck Auchterlonie in the torso.
Day got out of the car but was ordered by Klein to get back inside, which he did. Klein used his phone to record every moment of the murder. Auchterlonie was clearly in great pain as Milat struck him again with the axe. After Auchterlonie began running around the car Milat screamed at him to lie on the ground. When he did, Milat stood over him, accusing him of ‘spreading stories about him [Milat] and sticking his nose into his business’. Milat then swung the axe again and struck Auchterlonie in the back of his head. Auchterlonie died instantly and Klein stopped recording.
Day then got out of the car and helped Milat drag the body into the undergrowth, where they covered it with branches and debris. The three then drove back to Bargo. On the way Milat said, ‘That [the killing of Auchterlonie] was such an adrenaline rush.’ Klein replied, ‘I told you that you’re going to go down the same path as your uncle.’ The handle of the axe had been wrapped in electrical tape so it could be ripped off, removing all fingerprints, Milat boasted. After dropping off Day and Klein, Milat picked up another friend, who was given the pseudonym ‘Damien’ by the courts, and drove to yet another friend’s place where they watched movies until around 2 a.m.
The day after the murder Milat cleaned his car to remove all traces of the killing and was heard gloating, ‘You know me, you know my family. You know the last name Milat. I did what they do.’ He talked about having stuffed his clothes and the axe into a bag weighed down with bricks and thrown it into the river. The next day Milat said to Damien, ‘Guess who I killed?’
‘Who?’ Damien asked.
Milat replied, ‘Nah, don’t worry about it.’
‘Nah, who?’
‘Auchto,’ Milat said.
Damien asked, ‘What did you kill him with?’
‘I hit him in the head with an axe.’
‘Who did you get it off?’
Milat answered, ‘Ken [a pseudonym for a friend who was not involved in the killing].’
Asked if he was serious, Milat replied, ‘I’m serious. Don’t tell anyone. If Ken finds out that I told anyone he will kill me because the axe has Ken’s DNA on it. If I find out you told anyone I will kill you.’
In the hours after the killing Milat told almost everyone he met what he had done, while also warning them that if they told anyone, he would kill them.
Matthew Milat and Cohen Klein pleaded guilty in the New South Wales Supreme Court to the murder of David Auchterlonie. On 8 June 2012 Acting Justice Mathews accepted prosecution submissions that the killing by Milat and Klein was a senseless, brutal, cold-blooded and premeditated ‘thrill kill’ with no mitigating factors. Twelve months before his guilty plea and while in his cell, Milat wrote several poems. He put them in an envelope addressed to his mother, asking her to put them somewhere safe, but the poems were intercepted by Juvenile Justice authorities and passed on to police. Mathews referred to three poems written by Milat when handing down her sentence. One, entitled ‘Your last day’, reads (spelling as in original):
Click-clack,
hear that,
stopping in the, middle of the track,
Are you Getting Nervous in the back,
Should be Cxxt your getting wAcked,
talk shit here, talk shit there,
No-one’z really gunna care,
but talk shit with every breath,
You just signed away your health,
I can see you start to sweat,
Wanderin what your gunna get,
hopin 4-1 in the head,
Cxxt ILL Put it in Your Leg,
tell me, ARE YA HAVIN FUN,
get up Cxxt, And start to run,
how fAr are ya gunna get,
Your Match Cxxt you have just Met,
stumblin all OVA the place,
Hear the crunch of leaves and feet,
feel your heart, skip a beat,
Are ya gunna get away,
No hope kid this is your day,
The day that you wont be found,
Six feet under Neath the ground.
Another poem, entitled ‘Cold Life’, ends with the following lines:
I am not fazed by blood or screams
Nothing I do will haunt my dreams
Maybe they might scare you
Cold blooded killer that’s me not you.
Acting Justice Mathews concluded that ‘the circumstances of this case . . . clearly falls within the worst category of cases of murder . . . The choice of location itself is a significant matter . . . The Belanglo Forest has assumed a form of notoriety in this State, as being the site where Milat’s great uncle, Ivan Milat, lured a number of people and murdered them.’
Her Honour noted that there was evidence before the court that, when Matthew Milat was about fourteen years old, he had sexually abused a three-year-old female relative, but the charges were not proceeded with. She then sentenced Matthew Milat to 43 years’ gaol and Cohen Klein to 32 years’ gaol for the murder of David Auchterlonie.
Chase Day had only been charged with being an accessory after the fact to the murder of Auchterlonie. Nine months earlier, on 11 September 2011, at the Campbelltown Local Court, the charge against him had been dropped by the Crown prosecutor.
When Angel’s remains were discovered in the Belanglo State Forest two months before Auchterlonie was murdered, many speculated that Ivan Milat might have been her killer. But Ivan was in gaol at the time of her murder. After Matthew Milat was convicted of murdering Auchterlonie, some wondered whether he might have murdered Angel. Matthew, however, would have been not much older than ten at the time Angel was murdered. The copycat killer, if he exists, is still at large.
21
IT WASN’T ME
In November 2004 John Stewart of the ABC’s Australian Story program interviewed Ivan Milat by phone inside the Supermax facility at the Goulburn Correctional Centre. Ivan’s sister-in-law, Carolynne, married to Ivan’s younger brother Bill, was in regular phone contact with him. Carolynne told Stewart, ‘Ivan gives me a phone call when he makes a request to use the phone and he has surprised me some mornings and he’s rang me a couple of times during the week. We just have general chats and, with Ivan’s permission, I have also recorded some of those conversations.’
Carolynne maintains that Ivan is innocent. ‘I suppose life would be easier,’ she told Australian Story, ‘if we could accept that he has been found guilty and has done this crime, but that is not the case. He’s, in our eyes, he is not guilty of it, and until the day that we find different, we will support him.’ Explaining why she, and at least some other members of the Milat family, believe Ivan to be innocent, she said, ‘We believe that Ivan was framed. We believe that the stories that Ivan has told us, he saw one of the detectives taking two bags from the boot of his car. Those bags were taken inside his house and then all of a sudden parts were being found in the house.’ Bill Milat also believes Ivan is innocent. He told Australian Story, ‘I’ve never believed that Ivan had anything to do with this, right from the word go.’
In one of his conversations with Carolynne, Ivan denied that his brothers Richard or Walter were involved in the murders. Carolynne had asked Ivan, ‘If you get a retrial, would you use the legal strategy that was used last time, of blaming your brother?’ Ivan replied, ‘I never argued that in the first place. I didn’t know how that came into it. I was totally amazed when I was sitting down and I heard that, I had no idea. Because my basic defence in my trial was it wasn’t me, I didn’t know who did it. It was
up to them to prove my guilt, not for me to prove my innocence.’
Ivan’s lawyers were among those surprised by their client’s claim that he was ‘totally amazed’ when he heard it suggested in court that his brothers were or could have been involved. Ivan’s solicitor, Andrew Boe, responded that he had ‘yet to be involved in a criminal trial where an assertion of fact was put to the Court without specific instructions from a client to do so and the Milat trial was no exception. The apparent suggestion that we did so in this case is a calculated falsehood. It is, however, not appropriate for us to publish Mr Milat’s instructions on this or any other issue at this stage.’ In effect, Ivan’s own lawyers were calling him a liar.
Carolynne and Bill were not the only members of the family to defend Ivan. The following year, during an interview with Crime Investigation Australia for ‘Ivan Milat: The backpacker murders’, Richard declared Ivan to be innocent: ‘No. I don’t think he’s guilty at all. Not by any evidence I’ve heard.’ Later he added, ‘As far as I’m concerned I think he’s not guilty at all. I can’t see no evidence against him.’
‘So you stand by him?’ the reporter asked.
Richard replied, ‘Yeah until you’ve got more proof.’
In a 2010 interview with Crime Investigation Australia for ‘Families of Crime: Backpacker bloodshed’, Richard was asked what he thought about being dragged into the trial by Ivan as a suspect for the murders. He replied, ‘Yep, Ivan would do anything, and I wouldn’t blame him.’ Later in the program Richard said, ‘It was okay by me on that part because I knew it weren’t me so I got no worries, no matter how much implication you can say . . . I knew why he was dragging me into it, trying to save himself.’
Richard’s attitude towards the May 1994 police raids was also interesting: ‘Fifty police officers come here, Channel 2 helicopters or Channel 10 helicopters, some, somebody’s helicopters. Heaps of detectives come here and handled us like Gestapo—every sort of threat you could have. Other than that [it was] just a normal police operation.’
But not all members of the Milat family have been as supportive of Ivan. George, ten years younger than Ivan, made no secret of the fact that he believed him to be guilty. George explained that his father, Stiphan, had been angry that several of the children, including Ivan, could not stay out of trouble with the police and thought they should be locked up. He claimed that on one occasion his father was so furious that ‘he tried to pay the police one day 50 bucks each, throw them in gaol and don’t let them out . . . he didn’t want them home’.
George had no doubt that Ivan committed the murders ‘for the fun of it’ and that ‘he wouldn’t have stopped if he didn’t get caught’. Asked if he thought Ivan was sorry for what he did, George replied, ‘No, he just doesn’t care.’ George then made a completely unexpected and startling claim: Ivan had admitted the murders to his mother, Margaret. ‘She goes down [and visits Ivan in Supermax], comes back and I was having some lunch with Mum, across the table and I looked at her. I said “Mum, did he tell you something you didn’t want to hear?” “He admitted he was guilty.” I said, “How do you feel? . . . he’s out of the way. You can rest up.” ’ Despite Ivan’s admission, his mother continued to protest his innocence until her death at the age of 81 in 2001.
Ivan’s sister, Shirley, also maintained that Ivan was innocent until she died in 2003. But George offered an explanation for this. According to him, some members of the family knew ‘there was trouble somewhere’, but didn’t know Ivan was murdering the backpackers. Later he appeared to contradict himself by adding that ‘they reckon Shirley was in on it . . . I can’t really say Shirley did [actually commit any of the murders], all I can do is say she was involved.’ He explained that ‘there was incest in the family’: Ivan had been having an affair with Shirley since the early 1950s, when she was in her twenties. ‘Shirley’s gone, Ivan’s gone and everything’s just stopped.’
When asked about Ivan’s relationship with Shirley, Ivan’s brother Richard replied, ‘what’s the difference, one or the other, if you’re doing it with your sister or your mate up the road?’
Boris, two years older than Ivan, was another brother who was convinced of Ivan’s guilt. Asked when he first suspected Ivan, Boris replied, ‘I woke up straight away . . . what I knew about Ivan, something was telling me strongly that something wasn’t right.’ He described Ivan as being ‘a completely, completely evil person and I would say that if he never got caught he would have went on to more evil things . . . I’d see 10,000 Ivans die before I’d see one of them [backpackers] die. I just hate him for what he’s done . . . He’s probably sitting in gaol right now thinking he shouldn’t be there, and that’s, that’s the truth.’
After Ivan’s conviction another brother, Alex, became active in the gun lobby. In 1998 he announced that he was going to stand as an independent member in the Queensland Parliament on a pro-gun, pro-knife-carrying and anti-political-correctness ticket. Everyone should be given a .303 calibre rifle to protect Australia, he said.
In 2007 Wally Milat’s wife, Lisa, ran for the ACT Senate as a member of the Liberal Democratic Party. The next year she ran for the Wingecarribee Council in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales and two years later, again as a member of the LDP, she ran for the lower house seat of Hume, south of Sydney. Among other things, the LDP sought a relaxation of gun laws. Asked about Ivan, she replied, ‘You can’t choose your relatives.’ Wally also defended a relaxation in gun laws, saying, ‘Guns in themselves are harmless, aren’t they? It’s only the people you put behind them, same as in a car.’
A decade after the trial the Crown prosecutor, Mark Tedeschi, commented that Paul Onions was ‘the most important witness in the prosecution case . . . He was the only person who had . . . been the subject of an attempted abduction by Ivan and got away . . . he not only gave evidence which positively identified Ivan Milat as the man who had . . . attempted to abduct him, but he also gave a very good description of his car . . . and . . . the only description of his method.’ In addition there was all ‘this circumstantial evidence and forensic evidence . . . there was an enormous amount of evidence . . . his possession of the guns was unexplained’.
Tedeschi noted that Ivan ‘was asking the jury to accept that all of this evidence was . . . just some terrible coincidence . . . and I think at the end of the day the jury must have felt that it’s a little bit like the coincidence that . . . you have a whole lot of pieces of metal lying around . . . and a big wind comes up and just happens to blow it into a jumbo jet . . . a fully functioning jumbo jet’.
22
DID IVAN ACT ALONE?
While the jury answered the question of whether Ivan Milat murdered the seven backpackers in the Belanglo State Forest, it left another unresolved: did Ivan act alone?
Some evidence appeared to point strongly in the direction of there being more than one killer. In three cases two victims were abducted at once, raising the question as to how one offender could control two victims. Two different types of weapons—a knife and a firearm—were used in the murders of Anja Habschied and Gabor Neugebauer, and of Caroline Clarke and Joanne Walters. Two .22 calibre rifles, one a 10/22 Ruger and the other an Anschutz, had been used to fire up to a total of around 100 bullets 165 metres from the Neugebauer crime scene. Richard was supposed to have remarked that ‘Stabbing a woman is like cutting a loaf of bread’, that ‘There are two Germans out there, they haven’t found them yet’, that ‘I know who killed the Germans’, and that ‘There’s more bodies out there, they haven’t found them all.’ The comment about ‘the Germans’ was said to have been made before the bodies of Anja and Gabor were found, while the comment about there being ‘more bodies out there’ was said to have been made before the last bodies were discovered. Justice Hunt himself told the jury that ‘as a matter of common sense and experience, it is obvious that more than one person would be needed, particularly when more than one hitchhiker had been picked up, to subdue them and to ensure that there wo
uld be no trouble in killing both of them’.
Why, then, am I so sure that Ivan committed the murders by himself?
At law the prosecution was not required to prove whether Ivan acted alone or in company. The fact that he was involved in each of the murders and the abduction was sufficient. As Justice Hunt observed during the trial, ‘The Crown says it does not have to prove in this case whether or not the accused acted alone in the course of these killings. The Crown says either the accused did it himself, did the acts himself, or alternatively, the acts were done by him with others in a joint enterprise in which he was responsible for the acts of those others.’ By avoiding the argument over whether or not he acted alone, the Crown blunted many of the defence’s claims and minimised the opportunities for the defence to sidetrack the jury by taking the focus off Ivan and raising hypothetical scenarios that could have created confusion or doubt. It was a successful strategy, as Ivan’s conviction proved.
The strongest evidence that he acted alone is not in the court record but in the story of Ivan’s life. His first known ‘abduction’ occurred in 1971, when he picked up two female hitchhikers, bound them both and had sex with one of them. They escaped when Ivan stopped at a petrol station on the Hume Highway. Ivan was arrested after a police chase, but he subsequently beat the charges. The next documented case, involving Therese and Mary, occurred six years later. They also escaped Ivan’s clutches. Again, Ivan was alone when he attempted to abduct them. In 1990, when he attempted to abduct Paul Onions, Ivan was again alone. In all three cases Ivan was by himself, showing that he was confident of subduing either one or two hitchhikers without the help of an accomplice.
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