Melbourne man thinks missing brother could have fallen into Ivan Milat’s path

A Melbourne man who championed a three decades-long campaign to find his brother now thinks he may have tried to hitchhike and fallen into Ivan Milat’s path.

Exclusive: A Greenpeace worker who vanished more than three decades ago may have fallen victim to backpacker killer Ivan Milat, according to his brother, after this masthead revealed the serial killer could have murdered up to 80 people.

Owen Redman, 25, left his West Brunswick rental for the last time on February 21, 1991, dressed in his favourite outfit – a floral shirt, velvet corduroy jacket, jeans, and boots. No one knows where he was going, but he was never seen again.

His younger brother, Dylan Redman, has championed a decades-long campaign to find him, believing for a long time that Owen may have started a new life somewhere like Alice Springs, where his family lived for many years before moving to Victoria.

Dylan has maintained that it wouldn’t have been out of character for his brother to pack up and leave, but he now thinks Owen may have tried to hitchhike away from Melbourne and fallen into Milat’s path.

“I would hate that it could have happened to Owen, but two friends of his were murdered and they had all been hitchhiking to festivals,” Dylan told this masthead.

Owen Redman was wearing these clothes when he went missing in 1991.

Owen knew Milat’s first-known victims, James Gibson and Deborah Everist. They had been hitchhiking to ConFest, an alternative lifestyle festival on the NSW-Victorian border, in 1989 when they were killed by Milat and dumped in Belanglo State Forest.

Their bodies, along with five others, were uncovered between 1992 and ’93.

James, Deborah and Owen were in a community of hitchhikers in the late ’80s and early ’90s who regularly caught lifts from strangers in different areas, spanning northern NSW to southern Victoria.

At that time, hitchhiking was socially acceptable and no one knew there was reason to be afraid.

James Gibson.

Deborah Everist.

Owen had hitchhiked to ConFest with his girlfriend in 1990, a year after James and Deborah went missing, and saw missing person’s posters for the couple all over the festival. The disappearance sparked fear in the hitchhiking community and many stopped altogether.

Owen’s girlfriend, who only wanted to be identified as Anne, told this masthead people got nervous when the couple didn’t turn up at the festival. There were rumours in the very early ’90s that they had been murdered.

“I remember James’ brother was over for dinner one night with a few people and someone came up to me and said ‘I think James and his girlfriend have been murdered’, so that spread really quickly,” she said.

Anne says it’s definitely possible that Owen was a victim of Milat, but there are factors about his disappearance that could point to suicide – specifically, the fact that his electronic contact lens case was left in his bedroom.

“He had this electronic cleaning case that he’d put his contact lenses in and it would sterilise them overnight, and it’s really pivotal because he never went anywhere overnight without it,” she explained.

“Even when he’d go to ConFest or something, he’d find someone with a generator and plug it in, but wherever he went he didn’t take it with him, which means he either wasn’t planning on staying away for long or he wasn’t planning on coming back at all.”

She also said dressed for a night out on the town, rather than to go on a trip. He also didn’t pick up his final pay cheque and never touched his bank accounts again.

Dylan Redman thinks his brother Owen may have tried to hitchhike away from Melbourne and fallen into Ivan Milat’s path. Picture: Derrick den Hollander

“I think, if he was trying to start over and hit reset on everything, he would have wanted to find a different version of himself and thought he didn’t need that stuff,” he said.

“Owen was the sort of person who was pretty brave and he would just do whatever suited him, and he would have had the confidence to engage with someone like Milat – and maybe that’s just my interpretation of my big brother – but he seemed very open to exploration.”

Ivan Milat was sentenced to seven consecutive life sentences. Picture: Supplied

Milat was arrested in 1994 and sentenced to seven consecutive life sentences, but three key police investigators who helped track his down told this masthead, and host Meni Caroutas in the podcast series Ivan Milat Untold, that he may have had many more victims dating back to the 1970s.

One suggested there could be 60 more victims, another suggested 80. The third said Milat was a “strong contender as the reason a number of people went missing after the 1970s”.

They came to the same conclusions in three separate interviews.

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Originally published as Melbourne man thinks missing brother could have fallen into Ivan Milat’s path