Plea to Ivan Milat: was my son your first victim?

Peter Letcher’s death was written off as drug-related. But the links to Ivan Milat are chilling.

Brian Letcher, whose son Peter was murdered, at his home on the Gold Coast. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen

When Peter Letcher was found dead in bushland in 1988, shot five times in the head, the 18-year-old was written off as a victim of the local drug trade.

Now, with the unsolved murder strongly suspected to be the work of serial killer Ivan Milat, Letcher’s father has spoken publicl­y for the first time about the death.

Letcher’s murder pre-dates the backpacker killings that shocked the nation and reverberated around the world, raising the question of whether he was Milat’s first victim.

Terminal cancer means Milat will likely soon take the answer to his grave, adding a sad final chapter­ to one of the least-known tales from Australia’s most in­famous murder spree.

“We have only ever had ­rumours,” Brian Letcher, 77, told The Weekend Australian 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.”

Early in November 1987, Let­cher caught a train from his home in Bathurst to Sydney, 200km away, to see his 15-year-old former girlfriend, Leeann Cald­well.

She had urged him to visit in a letter, one of many documents his father has kept in a bound folder of inquest records and newspaper clippings stretching back more than 30 years. “I don’t really like anyone else, I love you,” she wrote on October 5, 1987. “I was wondering would you like to come down next weekend, please, because we have a lot to talk about.”

Letcher had lived with Leeann­’s family in Bathurst for a while before they moved to Sydney. Her mother, Cecily Caldwell, was expecting him and told police he turned up at their Busby home southwest of the city with no money; he said he spent his dole on paying some debts and his train ticket. During his stay he borrowed $20 from a neighbour of the Caldwells, and $60 from a family friend.

Peter Letcher.

Leanne’s mother recalled him booking his trip home over the phone. He had stayed for a week and she believed he had returned to Bathurst on a train from Liverpool at 4.45pm on a Friday. Before he left, she cut down his grey jeans into shorts, so he could swim at Liverpool’s pool.

Letcher was ­living in Bathurst with close friend Scott Kemp. When he didn’t return, Kemp assume­d he’d made up with Leeann and stayed in Sydney.

On January 21, 1988, bushwalker Sajner Milos stumbled across remains just off a fire trial in the Jenolan State Forest. The bulk of the remain­s were in a hollow­ left by a fallen tree, partly covered by ­foliage. Three .22 calibre­ bullets were found nearby.

Three weeks later, the unidentified victim’s clothes were laid out for the media at Bathurst police station: a pair of grey cut-off jeans, navy blue denim Levis, a singlet and a sloppy joe.

Brian Letcher says he instantly recognised the clothes on the front page of the local newspaper as his son’s. “I remembered buying­ some of the clothes for him. I went straight down to the police station,” he said.

Mr Letcher reveals that he and his late wife, Ann, had adopted Peter as a baby, after they had tried for years without success to have a child. A retired electricity meter reader, he remembers the excitement of carrying the little boy home from Young hospital for the first time. Later, the couple had three children together.

Mr Letcher says Peter started going off the rails in his teenage years after he discovered he was adopted and “fell in with the wrong company”.

Ivan Milat and his seven known victims. Picture: Rick Rycroft

Milat’s victims were for the most part on adventures of a lifetime, but Letcher was a rebellious youth just trying to get by.

“I just couldn’t get through to him that he was adopted and loved by us,” Mr Letcher said.

“We sometimes wonder if he’d lived a bit longer whether he’d have really come good.”

Letcher had no drug convictions and his problems may have been overstated by the Bathurst ­rumour mill. Friends and associates told police Letcher used marijuana, but with barely a cent to his name he was no drug baron.

His housemate, Kemp, said Letcher’s worst crime was to rip off two drug plantations, once turning up with about 30 cannabis plants he’d uprooted. That was about a year before the murder.

Muddying the waters further, the files kept by Letcher’s father show a prisoner wrote a letter claiming he murdered Peter. Yet the confessed killer was incarcerated on the relevant dates and could not have done it.

Another Bathurst local offered a detailed story about who murdered­ Letcher, but retracted his claims. It all served to distract the coroner, who said: “This case brings out one thing. A warning to persons, particularly young persons­, if they become involved in the drug scene … their health is in jeopardy.”

No one at the time considered a scenario that now looms large: that Letcher was murdered at random­ by a serial killer. Milat, reveale­d this month to have cance­r of the oesophagus and stomach, was convicted in 1996 of murdering seven people who were hitchhiking south from Sydney between December 1989 and April 1992.

Police laid out the clothes worn by Peter Letcher in an appeal for information. Picture: Channel Nine

Former NSW police assistant commissioner Clive Small, who led the taskforce that captured Milat, says he is certain Letcher is one of Milat’s victims. He told The Weekend Australian this week that compelling links started emerging after Milat’s arrest for the other murders.

Evidence was discovered that, instead of catching the train to Bathurst, Letcher had hitchhiked. His execution-style killing also mirrored the way Milat had murdere­d some of his victims and disposed of their bodies in the Belanglo State Forest. German backpacker Gabor Neugebauer had five bullets in his skull. Another, English backpacker Caroline Clarke, had 10 spent bullets in and around her head.

Ballistic examinations suggested the Letcher bullets were fired from the same model Ruger rifle used to murder Neugebauer and Clarke. Checks revealed Milat had started working on the Jenolan Caves road at about the time Letcher went missing. A comment to police by Milat’s brother Alex — recounted in the book The Sins of the Brother — aroused early suspicions. “Have you checked out any unsolved murders in the Jenolan State Forest?”

With Milat serving seven life sentences, police did not press charges. Mr Letcher had not heard from anyone for years, until the NSW Forensic and Analytical Science Service called last month.

Two people travelled to Queensland, where he has resettle­d and remarried. The visit­ors said they still had some of his son’s remains. With his wife Carol, he plans to place the ashes at the grave of Letcher’s mother.