‘I looked at evil’: surfer who escaped Ivan Milat

Chris Swan was 16 when he hitched a ride. More than 20 years later, a familiar face flashed on the news.

Chris Swan, with then girlfriend Esther Fraser; and backpacker killer Ivan Milat.

Chris Swan was a carefree teenage surfer when he hitched a ride on the NSW central coast with his girlfriend Esther Fraser in 1971.

There was something off about the man in the flatbed truck, who stared ahead at the road in stony silence as he drove the pair, both 16, from Avoca Beach.

“My girlfriend was in the middle­ and she was wearing a little­ pair of hotpants and I’m on the side,” says Mr Swan, now 63.

Things turned sinister when the driver suddenly swung off the main road and headed up a desert­ed bush track.

“I’ve gone: ‘What’s going on?’” says Mr Swan.

“He’s gone: ‘Mate, I just want to look at some land.’ ”

The teenager glanced down, saw ropes on the floor, and panic kicked in. Grabbing Esther, he leapt from the vehicle as it slowed down.

More than 20 years later, Mr Swan saw a face flash up on the news and instantly recognised the man who had given them a lift.

It was Ivan Milat, charged in 1994 with the murders of seven young hitchhikers.

The same face was back in the news this week, when Milat was transferred from Sydney’s Prince of Wales Hospital to Long Bay prison.

As Milat has been diagnosed with terminal ­cancer, time is runnin­g out to get answers from the serial killer on the full extent of his crimes.

“I’ve got no doubt who it was — that it was him,” Mr Swan told The Australian.

“You know the face, you recog­nise the eyes.

“His eyes were really evil. I reckon I looked at evil.”

Speaking publicly about the ordeal for the first time, Mr Swan said he could see the driver weighing up his options. As he and Esther ran, the flatbed truck passed them again.

The area, outside Kincumber, has never been developed, evidence the driver was lying about wanting to look at property.

Mr Swan’s former girlfriend, Ms Fraser, now a travel agent, confirmed the incident this week.

But unlike Mr Swan, she can’t remember the driver’s face. Milat murdered seven young men and women who had been hitchhiking south from Sydney between 1989 and 1992.

All were found in the Belanglo State ­Forest.

Mr Swan said he phoned the taskforce investigating those murders­, but never heard back.

“If he has driven up that track, there’s every chance there could be bodies up there,” he said.

“Or else, if there was someone that disappeared in that area at that time, it could well be related.”

In 1971 Milat, then 26, was charged with the rape of one of two women hitchhikers he had picked up in his gold Ford sedan at Liverpool, in Sydney’s southwest, in April.

Facing additional armed robber­y charges, he faked his own death by leaving his shoes at well-known suicide spot The Gap in Sydney in October and went on the run. His movements over the next three years are unclear­.

Milat went to New Zealand but conceivably also went north from Sydney for a period.

For Milat to have picked up Mr Swan, he had to have been driving someone else’s vehicle.

Mr Swan remembe­rs the vehicl­e as being like a fruit and vegetable market truck.

Separately, a retired detective is investigating evidence potent­ially linking Milat to the 1972 ­murders of hitchhikers Robin Hoinville-Bartram and Anita Cunningham.

Hoinville-Bart­ram’s remains were found under a bridge on the Flinders Highway, about 80km west of Charters Towers in Queensland, in Novemb­er that year.

Cunningham’s body has never been found.