Milat

by Clive Small, Tom Gilling

  The third part of the lone killer argument relates to the ‘souvenirs’ and weapons seized in the police raids. A large amount of property belonging to the backpacker victims was found in the Eagle Vale house shared by Ivan and his sister, Shirley. Property belonging to the backpackers that was found in the homes of Ivan’s mother, Margaret, and his brothers William, Walter and Alex all came from Ivan and no other member of the family. Equipment and weapons used in the murders were either under Ivan’s control when found by police, or had been given by Ivan to another member of the family. They included rags similar to those used to bind and gag some victims; electrical tape; cords with blood stains from Caroline Clarke; guns, including the Ruger rifle parts used in several of the murders, found in the Eagle Vale house; and weapons and ammunition, belonging to Ivan, found in the homes of Walter, Richard and Margaret. In addition, the 4WD vehicle described by Paul Onions was Ivan’s.

  Fourth is the character of Ivan himself. He had no close long-time friend. Even among his family there was dysfunction and distrust. Ivan’s demand for control extended to giving clothes and property he had taken from his victims to family members and others, such as his girlfriend Chalinder Hughes, and obtaining gratification and a form of control from watching them wearing the clothes and using the property. These items were strewn around the house in Eagle Vale so that they could be seen, and even used, by visitors. The gratification he derived from these objects came from being able to play the killings over and over again in his mind. They enabled him to relive the violence and the pleasure it gave him.

  Ivan’s self-confidence reflected a belief that his control was so absolute he would never be caught. That confidence did not extend to taking others into his confidence by making them accomplices to his crimes. Nothing in Ivan’s behaviour indicated that he would ever have been willing to put his life and freedom in the hands of another person. Except for the inadvertent partial confession he made to me when I met him inside the Goulburn Supermax, the only person Ivan is said to have admitted his crimes to is his mother, who continued to protest his innocence until the day she died.

  There are some indications that with each successive murder Ivan’s killings were becoming more ritualistic, and that he was spending more and more time at the crime scenes. Some have taken this to suggest the presence of an accomplice. I suggest the opposite—that the more often Ivan killed, the more self-absorbed and self-possessed he became, asking himself, ‘What could I do to make it better, to get more satisfaction?’ The answer was to make the killings more ritualised and to take more time carrying them out. This was the psychological scenario Dr Rod Milton had proposed in 1994, before the arrest of Ivan.

  In the debate about whether or not Ivan had an accomplice it is essential to distinguish between an accomplice—that is, a person (or people) who participated directly in the abductions and murders—and someone who knew what Ivan was doing but played no part in committing the crimes. I suggest that there is no compelling argument for any person other than Ivan having committed the crimes. There are indications, however, that some members of the Milat family knew Ivan was doing something bad without knowing exactly what it was. Given their knowledge of Ivan’s character and behaviour (especially towards his wife, Karen) it seems likely that they would have suspected his bad behaviour involved the abuse of women. Ivan’s brother, George, certainly seemed to believe ‘there was trouble somewhere’. George also seemed convinced that ‘Shirley was in on it’. If anyone in the family knew what Ivan was doing, it seems likely to have been Shirley, since the house she shared with him was full of unexplained property belonging to the murdered backpackers. If she didn’t know before his arrest, she knew enough afterwards to attempt to cover up Ivan’s crimes once he had been charged with the murders. At Ivan’s request, Shirley removed a revolver he had hidden in the backyard so that the police would not find it. While that makes her guilty of concealing a crime, it does not make her an accomplice in the crime.

  If Ivan acted alone, how was he able to abduct, subdue and kill more than one victim at a time? We have seen that on at least three occasions—in 1971, 1977 and 1990—his victims were able to escape. Each of those incidents helps build up a picture of how Ivan gained control of his victims.

  Having picked up his victims, Ivan engaged them in conversation in order to relax them and ensure that they were suitable for abduction. For example, in the case of Paul Onions, Ivan asked whether he had been in the military (if so, Onions might have learnt skills that made it difficult for Ivan to overpower him) and whether he had relatives or friends nearby (if nobody knew where he was, he would not be missed and his disappearance might go undetected for longer).

  Near the Belanglo State Forest, Ivan would make an excuse to stop his car and get out, intending to retrieve his pistol from under the seat and take control. He would tell the victim (or victims) that he intended to rob them and if they followed his instructions then no one would get hurt, but if they tried to resist he would kill them. His purpose was both to enforce cooperation and to confirm his sense of being in control. The next step was to have them bound. He would do this, particularly in the case of a male and female victim, by telling the female to bind her boyfriend with electrical ties that he would give her, reassuring them that it was only to prevent them doing anything silly so that he could rob them without harming them. Having secured one victim, Ivan would then use the tie to bind the second victim himself. Keeping them calm and encouraging them to believe that they would soon be released would have added to Ivan’s excitement. Once both victims were bound, Ivan had complete control and from this point he could enjoy the fear experienced by both victims as they realised he had no intention of releasing them, and the terror experienced by the first victim as his or her partner was murdered in front of them. (Not every abduction followed the same pattern, but the evidence given by those who escaped Ivan supports the scenario described above.)

  One question remains: why did Ivan’s killing spree end? Over a period of more than two decades, Ivan’s violence appeared to have been triggered either by instability in his relationship with a woman or by his lack of a relationship. When he was charged with abduction and rape in 1971, Ivan was not in a relationship with any woman. He met his future wife, Karen, in 1975 and used threats of violence to control their relationship. The marriage is believed to have been going through a bad spell before the attempted abduction of Mary and Therese in 1977. Ivan’s wife left him in February 1987 and told him she wanted a divorce. The disappearance and murder of Peter Letcher in November 1987 coincided with a time when Ivan had lost control of his family. According to some members of the Milat family, Ivan had several affairs after separating from his wife and during the period of the backpacker murders (from December 1989 to April 1992), but any such affairs were short-term and insecure: they did not give Ivan the control he needed.

  I would argue that by introducing Ivan to her friend Chalinder Hughes, Shirley—either wittingly or unwittingly—put Ivan into the kind of stable relationship that tended to mitigate his impulse to kill, and that Chalinder, by entering into that relationship, took away his need to seek gratification by abducting and murdering hitchhikers. I believe it was those two women who saved more hitchhikers from becoming Ivan’s victims.

  AFTERWORD

  Ivan Milat’s record of violence towards women dates back many years before the backpacker killings. In the wake of his conviction for those murders, a number of other unsolved killings and disappearances were reinvestigated. Milat has been named as a person of interest in connection with almost every unsolved disappearance to have occurred in New South Wales in the two decades before his arrest. It is possible that murders Milat himself could not have committed were committed by others copying his methods.

  Many thought the Belanglo murders would never be solved. Proving the doubters wrong meant following every clue and logging every piece of information. The experiences gained and lessons learnt during the two and a half years of
Task Force Air’s existence would lead to significant changes and improvements in the management of major investigations, including the development of the E@gle.i information management system (which, at the time of writing, holds more than 12,200 major investigations and more than 8500 briefs of evidence); the introduction of cold case homicide reviews and the establishment of the Unsolved Homicide Squad; and the systematic review of long-term missing person cases. Several unsolved homicides and missing person cases that had been allowed to languish, sometimes for decades, have been solved as a result. A number of killers have been gaoled.

  While much has been achieved, much still needs to be done. Since 1970 no trace has been found of more than 600 long-term missing persons in New South Wales. Of these, around 130 have been classified as ‘suspected homicides’, but have not been referred to the Unsolved Homicide command. While they continue to be categorised as long-term missing persons rather than suspected murder victims, these cases will be denied the full resources of a homicide investigation. Their families and friends and the community at large deserve more.

  The murder of seven backpackers in the Belanglo State Forest between December 1989 and April 1992 cast a shadow that did not lift with Ivan Milat’s conviction. While Milat is destined to spend the rest of his life in gaol, he has continued to haunt the popular imagination. He is a personification of evil that will not go away. Nobody has suffered more from the legacy of Milat’s crimes than the families and friends of the seven young backpackers whose lives he cut short. It is fitting that this book should end with the words of those families and friends.

  Frank and Angela Klaassen, who live in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, knew the Neugebauer family through their nephew, Arthur Priem, in Holland. They recall how, in April 1992:

  Arthur rang to let us know that Gabor’s parents, Manfred and Anke would be coming to Australia with Anja’s brother, Norbert, to look for Gabor and Anja. He asked if we could meet them at the airport and give them any assistance they needed. We asked our longtime friends Rita and Peter O’Malley to come with us to the airport as Rita was German and could help with translations, if necessary. Unfortunately, their inquiries in Sydney and travels around Australia were to no avail and the three left Australia coping with the despair of not finding any evidence of Gabor and Anja.

  Manfred and Anke would return to Sydney several more times during the investigation. ‘During these visits Manfred and Anke stayed with us and so did Herbert Schmidl, Olga Habschied and her son Norbert,’ the Klaassens recall, ‘and Rita became invaluable in helping the police with translating documents and making phone calls to Germany.’

  Rita’s godchild, Kim Shipton, remembers: ‘Rita and Peter offered their time and energy voluntarily and as a priority, which reflected their caring and giving nature. Their lives were deeply enriched by their experiences and by the friendships built with the victims’ families.’

  On behalf of his wife, Anke, and himself, Manfred Neugebauer writes:

  It was Christmas Eve 1991 when we last talked with our son Gabor in Sydney by telephone. Every year, it is still a time of grief for us. The days are short and the nights are long and the snow covers the ground around our home in Germany. We remember the familiar sound of his voice. His final resting place is now in the cemetery, only a five-minute walk from here, and Anke visits and cares for the grave almost daily.

  When Anke visits Anja Habschied’s mother, Olga, near Munich, 650 kilometres away, both mothers drive to Anja’s grave to think of Anja and Gabor, the young couple whom Ivan Milat denied the right to live a full life.

  The Australian authorities have done their best to discover the facts, but Milat has still not confessed to his crimes, so we can only imagine what happened in the Belanglo Forest on Boxing Day 1991. Milat’s failure to confess means there are many questions still unanswered. Part of Anja’s body has not been recovered. Did he act alone?

  Besides our youngest son Gabor, we have two other children, a son, Tibor, and a daughter, Ilka. Both are married and have children. They were totally devastated by the death of their brother. Ilka immediately made a clay sculpture of Gabor’s head which still looks from outside the window into the room that was Gabor’s bedroom as a child. Tibor named one of his twin sons Gabor, thus we have not a son but a grandson, Gabor Neugebauer. Each year Tibor meets with classmates and friends of Gabor to remember him. Some of his old classmates still visit his grave, so Gabor is not forgotten. A few days ago I met the mother of a classmate of Gabor. We spoke and she said to me that when she talks with me she feels like she is looking at the face of Gabor. She reminded me of the saying, ‘A man is not dead until he is forgotten.’ Gabor is not dead.

  Manfred also pays tribute to the Klaassens and Rita O’Malley for their emotional support and for their help in acting as intermediaries between the families and the police task force, particularly Bob Godden and Steve Leach.

  Deborah Everist’s brother, Tim, writes:

  Our father, Frank, passed away after Deborah had been reported missing but before her remains were found, so he never knew what had happened to her nor had he heard the name Ivan Milat. Our mother, Pat, died in 2009, never having gotten over the murder of Deborah.

  I didn’t believe what was happening when it first started. You always think, ‘It won’t happen to me!’ I thought Deb would walk through the door one day. But as things developed I guess I was in shock for quite a few years. Friends and other people would find it hard to say anything but ‘sorry’. I tended to deal with it by not confiding in anyone, choosing at times not to believe what had happened. On learning that I would be called to give evidence and on facing Milat I had an unearthly feeling of rage, torment and disbelief that someone could have absolutely no respect for innocent human life.

  My mother had to endure a life sentence of hell over this horrific event. Having to hear in court the detail of what had happened to her daughter was nearly unbearable in itself.

  For Olga and Guenther Habschied, ‘Time goes by, but it does not heal all wounds. Despite all the years passed, we still have incredible difficulties writing about our children. We are not able to talk about our losses and pain to people outside.’

  Ray and Gillian Walters recall Joanne being ‘very happy picking grapes in the Capogreco Winery in Mildura’, and how, ‘after our own visits to the winery we forged a great friendship with all the Capogreco family, which has lasted throughout these past years’. And yet, they write, ‘We meet people now, perhaps when we are away from home where people do not know us, perhaps on holiday, and they ask the inevitable questions, “Have you any children?” Any conversation about Australia will include questions like, “Have you been to Sydney?” “Have you seen the Opera House?” We still find this very difficult.’

  We met a number of people in Australia, people who have become good friends, and we have received a lot of support from the Welsh Societies and Victim Support Groups, but by far we are most grateful to the Police out there over the years who have looked after us and kept us informed throughout. It would be unfair to name individuals, for they have all been tremendous, but we would like to make a special mention of Detective Sergeant Steve Leach, who is no longer with us, and who became a special friend.

  In a final remark that could speak for all the families and friends, Ray and Gillian write: ‘There is only one man/monster responsible for this tragic case and that is Ivan Milat. We would like to thank everyone who had a hand in his capture and prosecution.’

  Milat is a story of unfathomable cruelty, a portrait in terror. But it is also a story about the small kindnesses of strangers, about the value of friendship, and about the everyday acts of courage and determination that make a huge difference to the lives of us all.

  Anja Habschied and Gabor Neugebauer, German backpackers, last seen leaving Kings Cross on 26 December 1991 to hitchhike to Adelaide. Their remains were found in the Belanglo State Forest on 4 November 1993.

  Black electrical tape with brown leather strap, a w
hite sash cord and black cable tie discovered near the body of Neugebauer. Similar materials were found at Ivan’s Eagle Vale house.

  Indonesian and other currency found in bedside table of bedroom at Ivan’s house. Habschied and Neugebauer arrived in Darwin from Indonesia.

  Caroline Clarke and Joanne Walters, British backpackers, last seen at Kings Cross on 18 April 1992 when they left to hitchhike to Mildura. Their bodies were found in the Belanglo State Forest on 19 and 20 September 1992 respectively.

  Left: Ivan’s photograph, dated 1992, of his then girlfriend, Chalinder Hughes, wearing Clarke’s Benetton top. Inset: Caroline Clarke wearing her Benetton top.

  Walters’ Caribee sleeping bag, found at Richard Milat’s Hilltop house.

  Close up of a .22 bullet fired into a tree near where Neugebauer was found.

  One of thirty-eight packets of Winchester Winner .22 calibre bullets, batch ACD1CF2, found in an alcove at Walter’s house at Hilltop. The bullets were of the same batch number found at the Neugebauer murder scene.

  Top: The shooting range at the former home of Alex Milat at Buxton. Above: Police sifting the shooting range. Thousands of fired .22 calibre bullets and cartridges were found, including some fired by the same .22 calibre rifles used at the murder scenes.

  Ivan holding a rifle, with a revolver in holster. He called himself ‘Tex’.

  Six shot .44 calibre revolver with the word ‘Texas’ scratched into side. Found in an alcove at Walter Milat’s Hilltop house.