Police hope serial killer Ivan Milat will finally reveal his other crimes
Ivan Milat is dying of cancer, but will Australia’s most infamous serial killer finally reveal his other victims before he goes to his grave?
American serial killer Ted Bundy, who kidnapped, raped and murdered dozens of women and girls, was executed in Florida State Prison’s electric chair on January 24, 1989.
For years Bundy insisted he was innocent — even representing himself at trial. Then in his final days, with all avenues of appeal exhausted, he confessed to upwards of 30 homicides. It was dubbed the “bones for time” strategy, derided as a delaying tactic that offered little of probative value and failed to halt his execution. Outside the prison, a crowd chanted “Burn, Bundy, burn”.
Australia, of course, has abolished capital punishment but the country’s most infamous serial killer, Ivan Milat, is facing a death sentence of his own. Terminal cancer has the 74-year-old heading to his grave, according to his family.
Convicted in 1996 of the murder of seven young hitchhikers, he continues to deny involvement and is likely to take his secrets with him.
Milat was transferred from Goulburn’s Supermax prison to eastern Sydney’s Prince of Wales Hospital this month, with relatives confirming he has tumours in his throat and stomach. Yesterday he was escorted out of the hospital under heavy guard in a wheelchair, looking frail and gaunt and with his wrists and ankles in cuffs.
He was driven in the back of a white 4WD to the nearby Long Bay jail, where there is a hospital on site. If investigators could inject Milat with a truth serum before he died, no doubt they would ask if he acted alone, whether there were other murders, and if there were more bodies out there.
Deathbed confession
For the families of victims, investigators and the public, the impending death of a suspect can present a window of opportunity after years or decades without a breakthrough. A deathbed confession is sometimes a final chance to solve crimes that have stagnated into cold cases. Milat has never shown any sign of reversing his denials, but The Australian has been told NSW police know they have to try what may be a final approach to him and are readying in the unlikely event he does want to talk.
“It’s absolutely worth trying,” says criminal psychologist Tim Watson-Munro, when asked if police should make the approach.
“I feel for these families that have had disappeared members and he’s probably a red-hot suspect. They’d want to know where the bodies are.”
Past examples have involved varying motivations and outcomes. In 2013, notorious criminal Mark “Chopper” Read confessed to four murders in a paid 60 Minutes interview before his death, which followed a long battle with liver cancer.
Associates labelled Read’s claims a fairytale, woven by a master storyteller for a final payday, and he privately told a detective he had made it all up, but at least some of what he said was regarded as plausible.
In Queensland, police have investigated deathbed confessions to one of the state’s oldest and most notorious cold cases, the murder of 22-year-old Betty Shanks in Grange, north Brisbane, as she walked home from her tram stop in 1952.
In the Shanks case, in 2004 an 82-year-old man in a nursing home told a carer he was the killer, but detectives said his DNA didn’t match their crime scene sample. He was at least the fifth person to confess to killing Shanks.
Outside the realm of murder, in 1938 thieves on horseback jumped on a moving train to steal the Mount Isa Mines payroll. A lifetime later, in 2013, police reopened investigations into the heist after an alleged deathbed confession by a man who founded one of the region’s most successful businesses. He was said to have also implicated a local publican, the inference being that their later family fortunes might have been built on the back of the daring robbery. Relatives of both men denied they could have been involved.
Internationally, people have sought to clear their conscience, while they still had the chance, on a wide range of crimes and misdemeanours. In the US in 1985 a violinist, at death’s door, pressed home to his wife the importance of his Stradivarius; she discovered it was stolen from a Carnegie Hall dressing-room almost 50 years earlier and was worth a $1 million.
And in Britain, Christian Spurling was in his 90s when he admitted hoaxing a famed 1934 “Loch Ness monster” photograph.
These are trivial when compared with Milat’s attacks on the seven travellers, who he picked up as they headed south from Sydney on the Hume Highway between 1989 and 1992, killing and dumping them in the Belanglo State Forest.
The bodies of Joanne Walters and Caroline Clarke from Britain, Deborah Everist and James Gibson from Victoria, Simone Schmidl from Germany, and Anja Habschied and Gabor Neugebauer, also from Germany, were discovered between September 1992 and November 1993.
Faced with overwhelming evidence, including the recovery of the victims’ belongings at Milat homes and his identification by a lucky survivor, British backpacker Paul Onions, Milat’s last throw of the dice at his trial was to suggest someone else in his family, or closely associated, must have been responsible.
Perverse glory
Like Bundy, there is no sign of Milat developing sudden-onset empathy or a conscience. Talking will not spare his life from cancer and there is no financial incentive. The likelihood of him confessing is probably slim to none. The question is, could anything motivate Milat to say more? Watson-Munro says despite Milat’s long history of denial and obfuscation, there is a chance he will talk, though not out of any sense of duty to his victims or their families.
“If I was a gambling man, I’d say it was very long odds — he’s had years to confess,” says Watson-Munro. “But of course during those years he’s assumed he’s going to live a long time.”
The sudden cancer diagnosis changes the dynamic. Watson-Munro, who estimates he has analysed almost 30,000 offenders in his career, says Milat may have an epiphany, deciding there’s no more mileage in denying it.
“Everyone’s talking about Milat at the moment. In order to feed that a bit more he may make claims about other bodies,” he says.
“The only motivation is glory — perverse glory. It might be a deathbed confession saying there weren’t just those people, there were others, and this is where you can find them. And then he’s immortalised in his own mind prior to dying.”
Former NSW police assistant commissioner Clive Small does not expect Milat to co-operate with police before he dies. But Small, who headed Taskforce Air, the investigative team that identified Milat as the killer under intense public and media scrutiny, says it’s worth a try anyway. Moreover, he says detectives have to make an approach, even if it is only to cover themselves.
“If you don’t try you can be criticised for not trying,” he says. “If you try and you get kicked back, you say: ‘We tried our best and he still wouldn’t talk.’ ”
Cold cases
Remarkably, stories are still emerging of narrow escapes from Milat’s clutches and of murders that may be connected to him.
Colin Powis was watching a documentary at his home in Durham, England, last year when he recognised the serial killer as the man who stopped to pick him up in a ute when he was hitchhiking in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney in 1982.
Powis, then 21, became increasingly concerned about the driver’s dark mood.
Outside Bathurst the driver announced he was going to take a road into the bush to check for hunting traps. Powis refused to go along and “Milat” slammed on the brakes, racing to the tray of the ute where there was a hammer. Powis says he escaped when other cars approached.
On Saturday, The Weekend Australian published the first interview with Brian Letcher, the father of one of Milat’s suspected victims. His 18-year-old son, Peter Letcher, from Bathurst, was found dead in the Jenolan State Forest in January 1988, shot five times in the head.
Much of Letcher’s story had been untold. Adopted at birth by Letcher and his late wife, Ann, Peter had been a rebellious teenager and it was believed he had fallen foul of the local drug trade.
Small is certain Letcher was given a lift by Milat. There was evidence he’d been hitchhiking back to Bathurst from Sydney, where he had been visiting his former girlfriend.
Small points to the similarities between Letcher’s execution-style killing and Milat’s other murders. Ballistic tests had shown the same model rifle used to murder Letcher was used to kill Clarke and Neugebauer, and Milat had worked on the Jenolan Caves road. With Milat effectively on death row, time may be running out to prove a link.
“We have only ever had rumours,” Brian Letcher, 77, said from his Gold Coast home. “If he would confess to it, it would be a big relief, but there’s probably a 100 per cent chance of him not confessing.”
Small’s book, Milat: Inside Australia’s Biggest Manhunt, says Taskforce Air found 43 missing persons and 16 unsolved murders warranted investigation. Of these, suspicions emerged that Milat was involved in the murders of Letcher and two others across a 20-year period.
Keren Rowland, 20, went missing after her car broke down on Parkes Way in Canberra in February 1971. She was found dead in the Fairbairn Pine Plantation three months later.
Dianne Pennacchio, 29, was intending to hitchhike from Bungendore, NSW, to her home in Queanbeyan in September 1991. Her body was found two months later in the Tallaganda State Forest.
They are among cases police could be expected to be keen to quiz Milat about.
He was named a person of interest at an inquest into the disappearances of Leanne Goodall, 20, Robyn Hickie, 18, and Amanda Robinson, 14, who went missing in the Newcastle area from 1978 to 1979.
Separately, women stepped forward to report that Milat attempted to rape them after giving them lifts, Small says.
“There were a whole range of other cases where it was claimed that Milat was suspected of being the murderer,” he says.
“Those claims were investigated by the backpacker taskforce and there were no cases where we found Milat was involved. I know there’s still some suspicions and questions being raised. (But) when you look at the way he carried out these crimes, he was very rigid in the way he carried them out and where he carried them out.”
Watson-Munro says Milat is “clearly a sadistic killer who takes great thrill” in his actions and would probably be enjoying the renewed notoriety. He recommends a candid, matter-of-fact approach from police that plays on Milat’s ego.
“He’s clearly in my view a narcissistic sort of bloke. He’s a psychopath, obviously,” Watson-Munro says.
“So, if there are further crimes, he may wish to lay claim to them, because it would add to the Ivan Milat story, it wouldn’t just be the ones found in Belanglo.”
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