Belanglo State Forest: Ivan Milat and at least nine tortured souls haunt notorious gravesite
YOUNG mum Karlie Jade Pearce-Stevenson’s remains were found off a deserted fire trail in the Belanglo State Forest, making her the latest victim to be unearthed in that godforsaken place.
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THE single mother’s lonely bush grave could not have lain in a more godforsaken place.
The skeleton now known to be that of Karlie Jade Pearce-Stevenson was found off a deserted fire trail in the Belanglo State Forest, the country’s most notorious killing field.
The dense pine forest off the Hume Highway south-west of Sydney became synonymous with murder as the bodies of serial killer Ivan Milat’s seven victims were found between September 1992 and November 1993.
The young backpackers had been stabbed, shot, probably sexually assaulted and one of them decapitated with a single blow to the back of her neck.
Her head was never found.
There was evidence that some of them had been allowed to try and run so they could be hunted down. Some had been gagged or hogtied. Two were stabbed through the top of the spine, paralysing them before they were killed.
Whoever slaughtered Karlie and left her body in this bush grave sometime over the following 17 years could not have failed to realise the significance of the site.
Perhaps he believed that no one would think there could be ever be any more bodies in those woods. He was wrong.
The “Welcome to Belanglo State Forest’’ sign at the beginning of the dirt road into the trees was riddled with bullets when Karlie’s body was found on August 29, 2010.
It had been 16 years since Milat was jailed for life for the seven murders and for the abduction of a lucky eighth backpacker who got away.
The awful truth was that the truck-driving roadworker was not the only killer who used the forest to hide their deadly secrets.
Karlie’s remains were in a heavily-wooded area known as Dalys Waterhole, about 2km away from the bush graves of Milat’s victims and outside the section where up to 400 police had spent thousands of hours grid searching.
As police erected a blue tarpaulin above the skeleton, the discovery sparked a frenzy of theories the most prominent being that it was either another Milat victim or a copycat killer.
The body may have been exposed by hazard reduction burning.
One of the trail bike riders who found it said he knew it was a human skeleton the minute he saw it.
“We did a U-turn and as we turned back, the skull flicked up,’’ the man, who gave his name as Dave, said. “There were no clothes with it, just bones.’’
As forensic experts and detectives worked to put a name and a life to the young woman's bones, Milat’s great-nephew Matthew Milat was planning to stamp his own depravity onto the forest.
November 20, 2010, was David Auchterlonie’s 17th birthday and Matthew Milat and his friend Cohen Klein lured him into the forest on the pretext they were going there to drink and smoke marijuana.
Milat had brought along a two-headed axe, picking the site for murder because it was “significant’ as it was where his great uncle “lured a number of people and murdered them”.
A chilling 15-minute mobile recording of the murder made by Klein revealed Milat verbally tormenting his victim while intermittently striking more blows with the axe. He forced David to
lie face down in the dirt where the 17-year-old repeatedly denied doing anything, before the transcript recorded the sound of an axe hitting him in the head.
“The sound of (David) crying out in agony is chilling in the extreme,” Justice Justice Jane Mathews said while jailing Milat and Klein.
Milat is behind bars for a maximum of 43 years and Klein for 27.
That makes a total of nine ghosts in the Belanglo State Forest. The sign at the entrance warns visitors to “Please Be Careful.”
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