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Thomas Warburg Thune. Tonight, we stay in the Commonwealth, but far away from the chilly streets of Victorian London. We travel once again down under to Australia and the outback. Let me take you along to do some bushwhacking, where I will introduce you to none other than Ivan Millat, the Backpacker Killer.
He is probably, aside from Ned Kelly, Australia's most famous killer. And he murdered at least seven young men and women before he was caught. The Serial Killer Podcast now has well over 8 million downloads.
I am humbled by this. And to be honest, I never thought the show would grow so large. I could not have made this show without the support of my loyal patrons. I am very thankful for your support. And to my dear listeners who haven't visited my Patreon yet, I have some very interesting news. My Patreon is now far more customized to meet the feedback I have gotten from you.
There are now several new Patreon tiers that you can join, and they are as follows. The first tier is $1, and by donating that, you are an official TSK patron and an active contributor to this show's very existence. The second tier is $5.
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At $15, I personally thank you for your contribution on the show. And of course, you can also send in questions that I will answer. For the truly dedicated serial killer aficionados out there, I have two new tiers. For $50, I will personally call you and personally thank you and chat with you a bit. Finally.
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At first, the two orienteers thought the strong smell in the forest must be that of a dead animal. But, as they drew closer to the boulder in the isolated gully, what at first appeared to be a kangaroo leg turned out to be a human elbow.
And the fur that they thought they saw sticking out of the leaves was, in fact, the hair on the back of a decomposing human head. Their maps marked the spot as Executioner's Drop. It was the 19th of September, 1992.
And the mystery of Australia's missing backpackers was beginning to emerge in the Belanglo State Forest, just 150 kilometres, that's about 90 miles, southwest of Sydney, Australia's largest city. The next day, New South Wales Police Constable Suzanne Roberts found a second body pushed under a log just 30 metres deep.
from the first corpse. The bodies were soon identified as the remains of missing British hitchhikers Joanne Walters, aged 22, and her friend, 21-year-old Caroline Clark. The two girls had both been bound, stabbed, and shot, suffering multiple wounds. There was also evidence of sexual assault
and that the killer had the chain smoked through the ordeal and taken his time. It was even feared that because their bodies were found lying in the same north to south direction with their heads to the south, there could be some ritualistic element to the killings.
Both women were the last known victims of the man who'd become known across the world as the Backpacker Killer. The two girls' remains were the first confirmation of the police's worst fear that a serial killer was operating near Sydney.
The eerie forest was to give up the skeletal and mutilated remains of five more young people and spark Australia's largest ever murder inquiry before their brazen killer would be tracked down. Yet, it was the tragic story of Joanne and Caroline and their parents' brave yet vain attempts to find them alive.
which came to represent for many the true horror of the case. The girls' names first came to public attention when police took the highly unusual step of interrupting the broadcast of an English-Australia rugby match in June of 1992 to appeal for help in locating them.
Officers in the Missing Persons Bureau vaunted the largest possible TV audience, hoping the girls or someone who knew them might have been watching the match. They also set up a toll-free hotline in a bid to get new information. But, alas, there were no firm leads.
Welsh-born nanny Joanne and convent-educated Caroline from Northumberland had met in Australia, travelling on carefree working holiday visas, like thousands of other young backpackers every year. Many thumbed their way across the continent, as all the guidebooks said, as Australia was one of the friendliest and safest countries in the world for hitchhiking.
Joanne and Caroline had both travelled the country before, sharing a rented flat in Sydney's King's Cross district. Then, they decided to hitch south to pick fruit. On Easter Saturday, the 18th of April, both were last seen heading towards King's Cross station, carrying sleeping bags and a tent.
Two weeks later, Ray and Gil Walters began to get worried as they had not heard anything from their only daughter, who usually called home once a week. On the 26th of May, when Joanne's visa expired, they became even more alarmed and reported her disappearance to police in Wales, who informed their counterparts in Australia.
Ian Clarke, Bank of England regional director, and his wife, Jacqueline, were less concerned. That is, until Caroline failed to make any contact for her father's 58th birthday. Both families travelled to Australia to search for their daughters, and refused to accept suggestions that they could have met foul play. They preferred to think they might be staying with Aborigines,
on a remote desert location, or even stranded somewhere in the vast outback. We never gave up hope, said Ian Clark. We dredged around thinking of every conceivable thing the girls could be doing where they couldn't get in touch, going out as Girl Fridays on a yacht, or working on a homestead without a telephone, end quote. In August,
Spurred on by the publicity the families had generated, the police began to make a connection between a series of missing person reports of foreign tourists in New South Wales and Queensland. By the time Joanne and Caroline's badly decomposed bodies were found,
Five other backpackers were known to have vanished while hitchhiking on the busy Hume Highway that links Sydney and Melbourne. The first to disappear were two 19-year-old Australians on their way to an environmental rally at the end of 1989. Then, during 1991, three German backpackers had also gone missing.
It was an emotional time, and a distraught Ray and Gil Walters faced the press to deliver a statement soon after Joanne's body was found. Whoever did this thing, said Ray, speaking for many, I wouldn't call them sick, because sick people can be cured, to an extent. These are evil-minded people, and like dogs with rabies, there is only one way.
They have got to be put down and destroyed. There has got to be some system whereby we destroy those people for their evil genes. End quote. Time passed, but no specialist task force was set up to investigate links between the deaths and the disappearances. Three detectives were put on the hunt for the girl's killer.
but in twelve months turned up next to nothing. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, the story was being reported in the British newspapers, and in Birmingham, Paul Onions, an air-conditioning engineer who had backpacked around Australia in 1990, was following events with particular interest. The gruesome details brought back a day he would rather have forgotten.
It was January 1990. A man whom Onion regarded as the first real Australian he had met had given him a lift. But further down the road, near the turn-off, to the Belanglo State Forest, the man pulled a gun and tried to rob him. Onions had reported the incident to nearby Boral Police the very same day.
It was not to know that not only had they failed to take any action, but they had also lost his report. Four crucial years were to pass before the police and Paul Onions were to make contact again. In late 1992, Father Stephen Gray conducted a moving memorial service in the heart of the forest for Caroline Clark and Joanne Walters. I quote,
We have come here today, where something wicked happened, so that this place can be peaceful again, and its memories put out to rest. End quote.
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That's I-L-M-A-K-I-A-G-E dot com slash quiz. Hey, I'm Ryan Reynolds. At Mint Mobile, we like to do the opposite of what Big Wireless does. They charge you a lot. We charge you a little. So naturally, when they announced they'd be raising their prices due to inflation, we decided to deflate our prices due to not hating you.
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But it's good to have some things that are non-negotiable. For some, that could be a night out with the boys, chugging beers and having a laugh. For others, it might be an eating night. For me, one non-negotiable activity is researching psychopathic serial killers and making this podcast. Even when we know what makes us happy, it's often near impossible to make time for it.
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Bruce Pryor parked his jeep deep in the forest and started looking for firewood. He soon tumbled upon a human thigh bone and then an upturned skull. There were other human bones at the foot of a gum tree, just a few kilometers away from where the British girl's bodies had been found. Police soon found the remains of 19-year-old Deborah Phyllis Everest,
who had last been seen on the 30th of December 1989 with her boyfriend James Gibson at a Sydney backpackers' hostel. The couple had told friends that they planned to hitch south down the Hume Highway to Albury for a conservation rally. Pathologists were unable to determine the exact cause of Deborah's death because of the time that her body had been in the open.
But there was evidence she had been hit with a sharp object, as well as stabbed in the head and body. Her black bra and pants had been removed and cut with a knife. She had been gagged and tied up with her own tights. James's body was lying in the fetal position, within fifty meters of his girlfriend. Like all the other remains,
It was almost completely covered with sticks and branches to accelerate decomposition. He had suffered multiple stab wounds to the lungs, heart, and liver, and a violent cutting blow to the spine, which would have paralyzed him. The most cursory examination of the four bodies showed the killings had been especially violent. Like all the remains recovered from the forest, none showed any signs of defensive wounds.
Police now had no doubt they were hunting a serial killer. And on the 12th of October 1993, Special Task Force "Air" was established under the command of Superintendent Clive Small. Twenty detectives were assigned to the team, along with crime scene specialists and forensic experts.
Within three days, specially trained sniffer dogs were brought in from Queensland, since Superintendent Small fared the worst. An extra sixty police were seconded to begin a meticulous and methodical search of the five square kilometer strop where the four bodies had been discovered. The net is really Australia, said Superintendent Small at the time. We have something like seventeen million people.
We start from there and work in." And so it was that on the 1st of November, the skeletal remains of missing 20-year-old German hitchhiker Simone Schmidl were found another 5 kilometers to the east. Her body showed signs of having suffered multiple stab wounds.
Simone was last seen on the 20th of January 1991, when, against the advice of her friends in Sydney, she decided to hitchhike down to Melbourne for a long-planned reunion with her mother. Police immediately increased their numbers to 80 and widened the search area to cover more than 20 kilometers of fire trails.
It was now apparent it would only be a matter of time before they found the bodies of the other missing young couple, German Anja Habschied, aged 20, and Gabor Neugebauer, aged 21. In a chilling similarity to the other victims, they too were last seen at King's Cross Hostel, planning to head out of town and hitch to Adelaide on Boxing Day, 1991.
Detectives already had copies of dental records when their bodies were found on either side of a fire trail on the 4th of November, just one kilometer from Simone's. Again, there were similar patterns of tying, stabbing, and excessive force. Gabor's body was found with a gag wedged between his teeth. He was still fully clothed.
and had been shot six times in the head. There was also evidence of strangulation. Anya had been decapitated with a sword or machete while she was still alive, and her head has never been found. Let us pause there for one brief moment to contemplate that. Decapitation is usually a...
Rather quick method of execution, if it's done in one blow. A typical example of this is when a person is executed by a guillotine. The blade drops and the head is severed from the body immediately. When the head is severed from the body, all the nerve endings going from the spine into the head and back are cut off.
probably causing immediate unconsciousness and death. However, Anya was not killed via guillotine. Anya was decapitated with a sword or machete, and doing this, especially if it's a machete, is not done in one blow. Cutting off a head using a machete involves several blows, slowly chopping the head off.
from the body. This causes massive amounts of pain, shock and horror. So, it's important to keep that in mind before we continue. Forensic pathologist Dr. Peter Bradhurst said the blow was consistent with her kneeling with her head bowed. What immediately comes to mind is the style of ceremonial execution, he said.
Dr. Bradhurst, who performed the autopsies on all seven of the victims, later said in court that it seemed to him that it was more than likely the killer had not acted alone. Just one day before the last bodies were discovered, the name Robert Ivan Marko Milat first came to the attention of the police task force. There was little real evidence.
But a workmate had voiced his suspicions about Mila's obsession with guns. The tip-off joined the one million plus leads provided by an Australian public, horrified that their hospitable nation could witness such an outrage. And they were desperate to help catch the killer. As an outsider, Caroline's father, Ian, felt their reaction first-hand.
The overwhelming feeling from the people of Australia was of shame. A strong feeling of shame that something as dreadful as this could have happened in their country. But who was this Ivan Milat? Ivan Milat was born two days after Christmas in 1944. He was the fourth son of Stephen, a 44-year-old Croatian immigrant.
and his young Australian wife, Margaret, was barely half her husband's age. The family was the growth of fourteen children, with Evan roughly in the middle. Evan's father, who had served with the British Army in World War I, worked long hours as a wharf labourer, and sometimes put in seven days a week.
The family was nominally raised as Catholics, but Mr. Millat had little time for education or authority apart from his own. Dad was strict but fair, remembered brother Wally Millat in an interview. If you came home and you'd been in any sort of trouble, he'd just whack you to the ground. He was strict and ruled with an iron fist."
When Ivan was aged four, his father decided to become a market gardener. The whole family was press-ganged into working, which included watering tomatoes up to two o'clock in the morning. But even so, they only made a meager living. It wasn't tough raising all the kids, because we worked hard, said Margaret, the seventy-five-year-old matriarch of the sprawling family.
We never had trouble with Ivan. None of them, really. End quote. The Millat clan lived in a three-bedroom house near Working Class Liverpool on the outskirts of Sydney. The children slept in triple-tiered bunks. Another son, Alex, remembers that having guns in the house was like having a spare pair of boots, and all 14 children learned to shoot.
Like most of the others, Ivan went to the local Patrician Brothers High School, where he was considered bright and good at maths and arts. His brother Alex said that Ivan was a bit smarter in the head than the rest of them. But soon, Ivan started regularly skipping classes.
So he was moved and spent his early teenage years at Boys Town, an institution for overburdened families and their wayward sons. Ewan's mother recalled that the brothers there never had any trouble with him. He even was an altar boy. The family was large and needed money. So, like his brothers, at age fifteen—
Ivan left school and went to work on various building sites. All the boys went on to live lives of heavy manual work. Guns and knives were part of the family's pastimes. Ivan inherited his father's obsessive cleanliness and love of order. But by the time he was 17, Ivan was in trouble with the law for breaking into a house and stealing.
In 1962, he was given six months in a juvenile institution for breaking and entering. Over the rest of the 1960s, four more jail terms would follow for breaking and entering. Stealing and car theft. His mother blames those years on Ivan falling in with the wrong crowd. However, the police, who were a regular sight at the Milat's household, remember it differently.
They said the brothers would never give each other up and were always covering for each other. The sheer number of sons also led to confusion. In 1969, the family moved to the better part of Sydney suburb of Guildford, where Margaret still lives today.
It was there that Ivan's youngest sister, Margaret, was killed when a car-driven bribe brother Wally was in a head-on accident near the family home. Ivan was one of the first on the scene and reportedly took it rough. Within a month of his sister's death in 1971, he was charged with raping one of two women he had picked up hitchhiking near Liverpool.
It was near the point where, twenty years later, the backpacker victims would start to vanish. There was a committal hearing, but Millat, who also faced two armed robbery charges, including one at a bank, jumped bail and fled to New Zealand, where he stayed until 1974. On his return, he was promptly re-arrested. He was acquitted of the robbery charges,
and in a one-day trial beat the rape charge after one of the victims changed her story. There was evidence that Millat, then aged 26, had tied up both women and threatened them with a knife. But, incredibly, the police task force investigating the backpacker murders never learned about the chilling similarities of the crimes until late in the day. Years later,
Millat confided to a friend that he was in fact guilty of pulling the back job, but the brother who was also involved took the rap. By 1975, Millat was apparently respectable. He still lived with his parents, didn't drink or smoke, and was a workaholic interstate truck driver. Ivan now met his future wife, Karen, then 17.
and pregnant to his cousin Mark. Soon the couple were living together in a caravan, in a garden, and saving a deposit for a house. Ivan treated Karen's son Jason as if he was his own, and married Karen in the mid-1980s. The family were not asked to the wedding, as they were in the midst of a feud. Millette's father had died of bowel cancer in the early 1980s,
And there was more tragedy when Ivan's brother, David, was permanently brain damaged in a motorcycle accident. By then, Ivan was working for the Department of Main Roads and was away for days at a time. The marriage was under further pressure, mainly due to Ivan's frugality. It was alleged during the murder trial that it was at this time he had an affair with Maureen,
the first wife of his brother Walter. There was also a violent side to the marriage, well hidden behind the obsessive neatness of the house-proud Millat. In his wife's words, he was becoming gun-crazy and often took to beating her. Then, on St. Valentine's Day in 1987, while Ivan was away at work,
Karen packed up the house, with the help of her mother, and fled, taking all the furniture. He didn't see her again for seven years, until Karen, then on a witness protection scheme, gave evidence against him at his committal hearing. In 1989, Millat quit his regular job he took to working under an alias, to avoid tax and stop Karen claiming any of his income.
The divorce went through, and by the end of the year the two young hitchhikers, Deborah Everest and James Gibson, had gone missing.
Forever!
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But there was one problem. Paperwork. Mountains of it. Filing, invoices, you name it. This work ain't fit for a pilot. Luckily, their captain had an idea. She used the smart buying tools on Amazon Business so they could work more efficiently and get back to doing what they do best. I know, right? Amazon Business, your partner for smart business buying. And so ends part one of the tale of Ivan Milat.
Next week, our story of Jack the Ripper runs towards its final destination. So, as they say in the land of radio, stay tuned. This podcast had not been possible if it hadn't been for my dear patrons that invest in this show via Patreon. My special thanks go out to those of you that have stayed loyal for a long time.
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