Man claims he escaped Ivan Milat and the killer wasn’t acting alone

Ian Hayman is certain he escaped serial killer Ivan Milat’s clutches as a teenager. The 65-year-old recounts the day he tried to hitchhike home and makes a bombshell claim about his encounter with Milat in the 1970s.

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A man has come forward claiming he was almost a victim of serial killer Ivan Milat.

Ian Hayman says in 1971, when he was 15, he was sacked from his job as a strapper at Warwick Farm Racetrack in Sydney and decided to hitchhike home to Wollongong.

“That’s when two guys pulled up in an old two-tone Holden and asked me where I was going,” Hayman told A Current Affair.

“I told them Wollongong, and they said ‘Yep, jump in, we’re heading that way’.”

Hayman said he was asked about his family and their knowledge of his movements.

Ian Hayman claims Ivan Milat didn’t work alone when he terrorised backpackers. Picture: A Current Affair

How the Mirror reported Milat’s arrest at the time.

“It just seemed a little strange because as we were driving along the Wollongong turn-off was there, and the Canberra turn-off was there, and they took the Canberra turn-off,” he said.

Hayman says he told them his older brother was a paratrooper in the army and the passenger said the Holden’s driver — who Mr Hayman claimed he addressed as “Ivan” — had also been in the army.

“And then (the driver) looked at me in the rear vision mirror, it was just horrifying,” Hayman said.

He said the driver’s eyes were “scary as hell, like black, dark”.

Hayman says he saw a revolver in the open glove-box — a “cowboy revolver” — the kind favoured by Milat.

“(The passenger) said, ‘they know he’s coming’, and the driver said, ‘no they don’t’, and he said ‘yeah, his mum, they know he’s coming’,” Hayman said.

“And that was when he got all aggro and just slammed the brakes on and pulled over and told me to get the — out of the car.”

Ivan Milat is serving a life sentence for the murders of several backpackers.

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For nearly three decades Hayman says he didn’t give the encounter much thought, until he saw a documentary about the Backpacker Murders.

“My heart rate was just skyrocketing, I was pale,” he said.

He said he was totally certain the driver was Milat.

Hayman also believes he knows the identity of the passenger on that day, but it cannot be revealed for legal reasons.

Despite Milat serving life behind bars for his brutal crimes, there have repeatedly been claims that the murderer did not act alone.

Milat was found guilty in 1996 over the murders of seven people.

In 1992, British tourist Joanne Walters was found clutching several strands of hair. Original forensic testing showed that the hair matched neither Milat nor Walters, but a subsequent forensic investigation concluded it did match Walters’ own hair.

A jury found Milat guilty on July 27, 1996. He was handed seven consecutive life sentences for the murders of Walters, Caroline Clarke, Simone Schmidl, Anja Habschied, Gabor Neugebauer, James Gibson and Deborah Everist, without the option of parole.

He was also convicted of the attempted murder, false imprisonment and robbery of Paul Onions, a British backpacker who escaped an attempted kidnapping at gunpoint.

Originally published as Man claims he escaped Ivan Milat and the killer wasn’t acting alone