True Crime in the Great Outdoors
The most shocking crimes from national parks, camping trips, backpacker murders, and hiking incidents
The real Wolf Creek - Ivan Milat and the Backpacker Murders in the Australian Outback
Revised August 2024
Between December 1989 and April 1992, seven young backpackers went missing while hitchhiking between Sydney and Melbourne in Australia. At the time, the cases caused plenty of fear amongst tourists in Australia but were quickly forgotten when the perpetrator was eventually caught. For the murdered teenagers, it was a case of being at the wrong place at the wrong time.
The bodies of the hitchhikers were all discovered in the Belanglo State Forest, southwest of Sydney and 80 miles west of the New South Wales city of Wollongong in Australia.
Serial killer Ivan Milat was convicted of the murders on July 27, 1996, and he was sentenced to seven consecutive life sentences. His minimum term before he could apply for parole was set at a surprisingly low 18 years by the judge. Milat served his time at the maximum-security Goulburn Correctional Centre, an Australian super-maximum security prison for men located in Goulburn, New South Wales.
On October 27, 2019, at 4.07 am, the “backpacker killer”, Milat, died at the age of 74 as a result of oesophageal cancer, still claiming he was innocent of his crimes.
Wolf Creek and Mick Taylor the Australian Outback Killer
John Jarratt as Mick Taylor, serial killer, Wolf Creek Fims and TV Series
The actual events of the backpacker killings between 1989 and 1992 were fictionalised in Wolf Creek, a 2005 Australian horror film written, co-produced, and directed by Greg McLean and starring John Jarratt. The story revolves around three backpackers who find themselves taken captive and, after a brief escape, hunted down by Mick Taylor in the Australian outback. The film was ambiguously marketed as "based on true events"; the plot bore elements reminiscent of the Ivan Milat murders and the Peter Falconio disappearance caused by Bradley Murdoch in 2001. Taylor was featured in a light blue 1978 Ford F-100.
“Thirty thousand people are reported missing in Australia every year, 90% are found within a month, and many are never seen again.”
A follow-up to the original film, Wolf Creek 2 was released in 2013, again co-written and directed by Greg McLean and starring John Jarratt, reprising his role as Mick Taylor. The film follows a young German couple and a British tourist who fall victim to the kidnapping and torture of Mick Taylor. The British Tourist is based on the man, Paul Onions, who suffered an attempted abduction in 1990 believed to be by Milat but managed to escape.
The movies were followed by a TV series again starring John Jarratt. The first season of Wolf Creek consisted of six episodes and was released on 12 May 2016. It follows Eve, a 19-year-old American tourist, who is targeted by the crazed serial killer Mick Taylor but survives his attack and embarks on a mission of revenge. The show was renewed for a second season of six episodes in February 2017, released on December 15, 2017. The story centres around Taylor meeting a coach full of international tourists.
Mick Taylor is returning in the film Wolf Creek Legacy, and in it, a family of American tourists wander innocently into Taylor’s hunting grounds. When the parents sacrifice themselves to save their children, the kids find themselves alone, lost and hunted in the vast Australian wilderness. As of August 2024, rhe plan is to shoot in Australia in Q1 2025.
The Australian Backpacker Murders - the victims
The victims were:
Deborah Phyllis Everist (Australian)and James Harold Gibson (Australian), both 19, disappeared in December 1989
Simone Loretta Schmidl (German), 20, disappeared in January 1991
Gabor Neugebauer, 21 (German) and Anja Habschied, 20 (German), disappeared in January 1992
Caroline Jane Clarke, 21 (English) and Joanne Lesley Walters, 22 (English), disappeared in April 1992
Background to the disappearances
All the victims had stayed in Sydney backpacker hostels and had told relatives and friends of their plans before they left Sydney. They headed south along the Hume Highway, the 840 kilometres (520 miles) main link road between Sydney and Melbourne.
James Gibson and Deborah Everist
James Gibson and Deborah Everist
Australian teenagers James Gibson and Deborah Everist checked out of their hotel in Sydney's Surry Hills in December 1989. They set out for their home city, Melbourne, planning to stop at a conservation festival in Albury, on the New South Wales-Victoria border.
The day after they left Sydney, a walker found Gibson's damaged camera on a roadside at Galston Gorge, north of Sydney. They took it home but did not report it to the authorities for another month when there was publicity over the discovery of James' empty backpack. His name on the outside flap of the pack had been cut off, but the name inside was intact.
Simone "Simi" Schmidl
Simone "Simi" Schmidl
A German national, Simone "Simi" Schmidl, left Sydney on 20 January 1991, planning to hitchhike to Melbourne to meet her mother, Erwine Schmidl, who was flying from Germany to join her for a camping holiday. She was last seen alive at a Sydney railway station, catching a train out of the city. When her mother arrived in Melbourne from Germany two days later, her daughter was not at the airport to meet her as planned. She stayed in Australia for six weeks, hoping Simone would show up, but Simi had disappeared off the face of the earth.
Gabor Neugebauer and Anja Habschied
Gabor Neugebauer and Anja Habschied
The German couple, Gabor Neugebauer and Anja Habschied, left the Backpackers Inn at Sydney's Kings Cross on Boxing Day, 1991, to hitch south to Adelaide, then north to Darwin, from where they planned to fly home. Police remain mystified by reports that the couple were seen a few days after they left Sydney in a caravan park in Darwin, where they were said to have missed their flight to Indonesia. A discarded airline ticket was later found near their bodies when they were eventually found.
Caroline Clarke and Joanne Walters
Caroline Clarke and Joanne Walters
British women Caroline Clarke from Northumberland and Joanne Walters from South Wales arrived in Australia separately but became friends and began to travel together. They wrote to their family in the U.K., discussing plans to see the Northern Territory, Uluru, and the Nullarbor Plain in the Western Australian desert.
In April 1992, they left Sydney and planned to earn some money in Victoria picking fruit. They hitch-hiked first to Bulli Pass, on the Pacific Ocean coast south of Sydney, where they were last seen asking directions to the Hume Highway. From there, they were never seen alive again.
Discovery of the bodies in Belanglo State Forest
On 19 September 1992, two runners taking part in an orienteering event discovered a decaying corpse in the Belanglo State Forest in New South Wales, Australia. The following day, police found a second body and the bodies were soon confirmed to be of Caroline Clarke and Joanne Walters. They were left near a network of fire trails which cross the forest, including such sites as "Executioner's Drop" and "Miner's Despair".
Joanne had been stabbed multiple times, and wounds to her spine would have paralysed her. Caroline had been shot several times in the head, and the police believed she had been used as target practice.
Despite a thorough search of the forest at the time, no further evidence or bodies were found by police.
A year later, in October 1993, Bruce Pryor found a human skull and femur in a particularly remote section of the forest. Pryor had been visiting the Belanglo forest every week for nine months, trying to locate further clues after the discovery of Caroline Clarke and Joanne Walters, as the authorities appeared disinterested.
Two bodies were quickly located by police after a search of the area around the skull by forensic investigators. These were later identified as Deborah Everist and James Gibson. Gibson's skeleton showed stab wounds, and his upper spine had been severed, causing paralysis. Deborah Everist had been savagely beaten, with her skull being fractured in two places, her jaw broken, and there were knife marks on her forehead. Gibson's backpack and the camera had previously been discovered by the side of the road at Galston Gorge, in the northern Sydney suburbs over 75 miles (120 kilometers) to the north.
On November 1, 1993, a skull was found in a clearing in the forest by police Sergeant Jeff Trichter. The skull was later identified as that of Simone Schmidl from Regensburg, Germany. The clothing found at the scene was not Simone's but matched that of another missing backpacker, Anja Habschied.
The bodies of Habschied and her boyfriend, Gabor Neugebauer, were found on November 3, 1993, in shallow graves 160 feet (50 meters) apart. Anja had been decapitated, but despite an extensive search, her head was never found. Neugebauer had been shot in the head. Simone’s skeleton showed stab wounds, including one which severed her spine.
All the bodies had been deliberately posed face-down with their hands behind their backs, covered by sticks and ferns. There were the remains of bushfires encircled by stones near the bodies, suggesting the killer had camped there, and shell casings of the same caliber were also identified at each site. Beer bottles and cigarette butts were also scattered around, as well as duck tape, ties used for hands and nooses to lead the victims.
Police were puzzled and considered several factors:
All the backpackers except Simi were traveling around Australia in pairs; two of the pairs included men, and one was an ex-soldier. How did the killer manage to overpower them?
Were there several killers at work?
Were the victims drugged? Did the killer use a firearm to pacify the victims, together with alcohol and drugs?
After developing a profile of the killer, the police narrowed the list of suspects to a shortlist of 230 and then subsequently to an even shorter list of 32, which, it turned out later, included the killer, Ivan Milat.
The story of Paul Onions’ attempted abduction in Australia
Paul Onions
On 13 November 1993, New South Wales police received a call from Paul Onions from Willenhall in the West Midlands, U.K., who, aged 23, had left his engineering job in England to backpack around Australia three years earlier.
On January 25, 1990, Paul took a train to the Hume Highway to try to get to Victoria to earn some money picking fruit. While hiking along the road, he came across a roadside transport cafe.
As he was leaving the car park of the cafe, a mustached, smiling Australian walked over to him. `Where are you heading to? Do you need a lift, mate?’ he asked. He told Paul his name was Bill, and he seemed a genuine and friendly man. Onions said, "After we set off in his four-wheel-drive, I talked about my family and plans in Australia, and he chatted about the sort of work he did. He was quite cagey about his job, and all he would tell me was that he spent a lot of time on the road”.
"Bill" stopped the 4X4 truck close to the entrance to Belanglo State Forest, got out, and told Onions he was looking for some music cassettes under the seat. Paul felt slightly suspicious, so he followed him out of the vehicle using the excuse that he needed to stretch his legs. After a couple of minutes, they both got back in the car, but seconds later, the man got out again and started rummaging under the seat. Bill pulled out a black revolver and pointed the gun straight at Onions, and then he reached under the seat again and pulled out a bag containing a rope. At that point, Paul undid his seat belt, jumped out of the truck and ran for his life under gunfire. Unfortunately for Paul, Bill managed to catch up with him and dragged him to the ground.
Onions told 60 Minutes in 1996, “When I seen the rope, that just scared me more than the gun. As soon as I seen the rope, I thought that's going to take a bit of time and he's going to do whatever he wants. I just thought, This is it, run or die''.
Somehow, Onions managed to get up and make another run for it into the path of an oncoming car driven by Joanne Berry, who was with her sister and five children, which fortunately stopped, and he jumped into the back seat. As they drove off, Paul remembered the gunman standing with a stupid grin on his face, which he could not get out of his head for years.
Onions and Joanne Berry managed to get to Bowral police station, where they gave detailed information about the attacker’s appearance, job and the type of 4X4 he drove. Still, staff merely handed him $10 to return to the British High Commission in Sydney, and the report was filed in a drawer for years.
But after reading newspaper reports about the remains of several partially buried bodies having been found in the nearby Belanglo State Forest, Onions called Australia in December 1993 from England to remind the police of the story of his assault by the mysterious Bill. Unfortunately, his call was not investigated for five long months.
On 13 April 1994, Detective Gordon found the note regarding Onions' call to the hotline five months earlier. Superintendent Clive Small immediately contacted Bowral police for the original report, but it was missing from their files. Fortunately, Constable Janet Nicholson had taken a complete account in her notebook, which provided more details than the original statement.
Paul Onions in 1996
Ivan Milat and the backpacker murders
Based on these reports and other investigative work, police finally zeroed in on a man not called Bill but Ivan Milat. He was of Croatian descent, as his father had emigrated to Australia, but he was very anti-foreigner with forthright views about immigrants.
Ivan Robert Marko Milat was born on December 27, 1944, in Guildford, New South Wales, and was the fifth of fourteen children. He was employed as a road worker.
Police learned he had served prison time and, in 1971, had been charged with the abduction of two women and the rape of one of them.
On Good Friday in April 1971, Ivan Milat picked up two young female hitchhikers near Liverpool train station. He pulled a knife, bound the girls, and told them, “I am going to kill you. You won’t scream when I cut your throats, will you?”
He raped one of the girls, who then managed to convince him to stop for cans of drink at a service area. With the help of men from inside a petrol station cafe, the girls manage to escape, but Milat made his escape by driving off at speed. He was later arrested, but facing both rape charges and two counts of armed robbery, he faked his death by leaving his shoes at the Gap, a renowned Sydney suicide spot and headed out of the area.
Later that year, the police discovered that Milat had fled to New Zealand. Still, he was rearrested in late 1974 when he returned to Australia after his mother was taken to hospital suffering from a heart attack. He managed to avoid the conviction of both the rape charges and also the armed robbery counts through a series of police procedural blunders.
Police learned that both Ivan and his brother Richard Milat worked together on road gangs along the highway between Sydney and Melbourne, that he owned a property in the vicinity of Belanglo, and had sold a Nissan Patrol four-wheel-drive vehicle shortly after the discovery of the bodies of Clarke and Walters. Acquaintances also told police about Milat's obsession with weapons.
When the connection between the Belanglo murders and the Onions' experience was made, Paul Onions flew to Australia to help with the investigation. On 5 May 1994, Onions positively identified Milat as the man who had picked him up, the mysterious “Bill”, and attempted to tie up and murder him.
Milat met 16-year-old Karen Duck in 1983, who was pregnant by his cousin. They married in 1984 and had one daughter, Lynise Milat, who died at 57 in May 2022. Lynise was conceived during an 11-year affair her mother, Marylin Milat-Tempest, had with Milat, despite being in a relationship with his brother Boris. However, Duck left Milat in 1987 due to domestic violence, and they divorced in October 1989. At the later trial, she described Milat as “gun crazy'“ recalling him killing kangaroos on a visit to Belanglo State Forest.
The arrest of Ivan Milat
Ivan Robert Marko Milat was arrested on May 22, 1994, at his home at Cinnabar Street, Eagle Vale. Houses belonging to his brothers Richard, Alex, Boris, Walter and Bill were also searched at the same time by over 300 police.
The search of Ivan Milat's home revealed a cache of weapons, including parts of a .22 caliber rifle that matched the type used in the murders, plus clothing, camping equipment, and cameras belonging to several of the Belanglo forest victims.
Milat appeared in court on robbery and weapon charges on May 23, 1994. On 30 May, following continued police investigations, Milat was also charged with the murders of the seven backpackers. In March 1996, the trial opened and lasted fifteen weeks. His defense argued that, despite the evidence, there was no proof Milat was guilty and attempted to shift the blame to other members of his family, particularly Richard. But on 27 July 1996, a jury found Milat guilty of the murders. He was also convicted of the attempted murder, false imprisonment and robbery of Paul Onions.
Events following Milat's imprisonment
In 2012, Milat's great-nephew Matthew Milat and his friend Cohen Klein (both aged 19 at the time of their sentencing) were sentenced to 43 years and 32 years in prison, respectively, for murdering David Auchterlonie on his 17th birthday with an axe at the Belanglo State Forest in 2010. Matthew Milat struck Auchterlonie with the double-headed axe as Klein recorded the attack with a mobile phone. This was the forest where Ivan Milat had killed and buried his victims.
Detectives had visited Milat over the years and tried to extract confessions for his believed other murders, but he kept his darkest secrets to himself.
Police believe that Milat may have been involved in many more murders than the seven for which he was convicted. In 2001, he was ordered to give evidence at an inquest into the disappearances of three other female backpackers, but no case was brought against him due to lack of evidence. Similar investigations were launched in 2003 about the disappearance of two nurses and again in 2005 relating to the disappearance of hitchhiker Anette Briffa, but no charges resulted.
Many believe Milat had been helped in killing his seven victims - with one possible co-conspirator being his sister, Shirley Soire (1946–2003). Judge Justice David Hunt said after Milat's trial, he was convinced the killer could not have done his crimes alone, and a juror on the case made similar claims after the trial. Milat's lawyer pointed out that both Milat's brother and his sister shared a house with Milat at the time of the killings.
One key piece of evidence implicating Milat's sister was some cigarette butts found near the body of Caroline Clarke. Milat was not a smoker, but his sister was. Police interviewed her several times but could not gather any firm evidence that she was directly involved that would stand up in a court of law. On 18 July 2005, John Marsden, Milat's former lawyer, made a deathbed statement in which he claimed that Milat had been assisted by his sister.
In December 2017, Milat unsuccessfully tried to appeal his convictions for the seventh time, and he remained in the supermax prison in New South Wales until he died in 2019.
His history of self-harm incidents believed to be part of escape plans meant that the prison authorities classified him as an Extreme High Risk (EHR) category inmate for most of his prison life. Whenever outside his cell, he was escorted in ankle cuffs at all times by two officers.
The Death of Ivan Milat and his autopsy
Ivan Milat Aged 10
Ivan Milat Aged 74
Ivan Milat, known in his family as 'Mac', died in Long Bay Jail's hospital wing in New South Wales from terminal esophageal and stomach cancer at about 4 am on Sunday, October 27, 2019. He was aged 74 at the time of his death.
In May 2019, he had initially been admitted to the hospital with “fevers”, but then Milat had been X-rayed and found to have a large amount of fluid in his heart sac, the pericardium. He had calcification of one of his coronary arteries and, apart from heart disease, was diagnosed with terminal cancer of the oesophagus. On October 22, 2019, he had been discharged from Prince of Wales Hospital back to Long Bay with an “end-of-life plan”.
Even after his cancer diagnosis, the NSW Serious Offenders Review Council (SORC), continued his EHR status and segregated him from other inmates at Long Bay Hospital. He didn’t mind as Milat didn’t like mixing with other inmates.
The families of some of his victims hoped for a deathbed confession to bring some form of closure, but there was not to be one. Milat "categorically denied" being the backpacker murderer when asked again by his family in his dying days. He said he didn't need a priest because he had nothing to confess. To his dying days, Milat showed no remorse despite overwhelming evidence and several failed appeals.
As soon as Milat was dead, police moved straight in and declared Long Bay Hospital’s MS Unit cell 032 a crime scene. He was lying up with his eyes and mouth open and wearing an adult nappy, a green T-shirt, a green sweatshirt and a hospital tag.
Police searched his body and found no signs of visible injury and did a sweep of his cell, seizing personal papers. Then, a body tag was attached to his corpse, which was placed in a body bag with a red ID label marked “19 74 15 MILAT Ivan”. From there, he was driven in a Coroner’s van from the correctional centre under police guard to the Sydney morgue, where the body was X-rayed and then to the Forensic Medicine & Coroners Court Complex at Lidcombe.
At 9 am on Wednesday, October 30, 2019, the autopsy on Ivan Milat’s body began. By order of Deputy Coroner Derek Lee, there would be no customary internal examination during the autopsy, which usually involves the removal and weighing of organs.
Ivan Milat had weighed 85kg in the years until he became ill but dropped to 66 kg by the time he died.
His corpse showed no rigor mortis, exterior signs of injury, or decomposition but was “cachectic”, meaning it was visibly depleted in fat and muscle mass due to disease. Death had been due to advanced oesophageal cancer, which had metastasised or spread to his bones, liver and lymph glands.
The little finger on his left hand was absent, the result of Milat sawing it off on Australia Day, 2009, with a plastic serrated knife in his cell at Supermax in Goulburn. At the time, Goulburn Hospital staff could not reattach the finger, and Milat’s autopsy notes a healed scar at the base of the finger.
On his skin, Milat had a mole on the left side of his head and inside his left wrist, a 7cm scar on his upper left leg, a 5.5cm scar on his right hip, and a scar on his inner elbow. A statement by Ivan’s brother William said Ivan had injured his hand working for the Department of Main Roads in the late 1960s, and Milat had also broken his arm and collarbone in a motorbike accident, aged 13 to 14 in the late 1950s.
While in prison in 2018, Ivan Milat had begun experiencing dysphagia, or difficulty in swallowing. Prison authorities said he “loved his tucker” to the extent that when he staged his hunger strike protests, they never lasted too long. In his prison cell, he enjoyed black coffee with lots of sugar, specially ordered chocolate biscuits, and used his personal sandwich maker.
William Milat, a year younger than Ivan, was the brother of Ivan’s thirteen siblings who remained the closest to him. In his statement to police, he summarised Ivan’s childhood as happy, saying he had left school after eighth grade and got his first job welding chicken cages for a Bill Ryan in Austral, near Liverpool. William said Ivan “enjoyed camping, target shooting, motorbike riding and reading in his spare time”.
He had been financially responsible, and his relationship with brother Boris Milat’s wife, Marilyn, “did not cause an issue with the rest of the family”.
Ivan Milat’s remains were cremated, but no funeral ceremony was held. His brother and sister-in-law Bill and Carolynne Milat scattered the ashes at an undisclosed location in the Illawarra region south of Sydney.
Possible additional murders committed by Ivan Milat
Police have always been convinced that Milat could have been involved in more murders than the seven for which he was convicted, especially as serial killers generally start killing before they reach their 40s when he committed the backpacker murders. Milat's brother Richard once said that there would be "heaps more bodies" out there waiting to be discovered.
Australian State and territory-wide investigations into the unsolved deaths and disappearances of fifty-eight young people were started in 1993 by Task Force Air by comparing Milat's known criminal and victim profile along with his known modus operandi to cold cases. Task force commander Clive Small honed in on three unsolved murder victims with a higher probability of being Milat's victims.
Milat was considered to be a potential suspect in several of these cases, especially as he tended to travel far and wide across Australia as he started working as a truck driver in the mid-1970s, transporting tyres via Adelaide, Melbourne and Brisbane to Goulburn, Yass, Canberra and Perth.
Although Milat worked in the area coinciding with the timing of many unsolved crimes, no case was brought against him due to a lack of evidence.
Keren Rowland
Keren Rowland
On February 26, 1971, 20-year-old Keren Rowland, pregnant at the time, and her sister were traveling in separate vehicles to a motel in Canberra, Australia’s capital. However, Keren never arrived, and her abandoned car was later found with an empty petrol tank on Parkes Way, which, back in 1971, was in rugged country in the undeveloped outskirts of the city.
The next day at work in Liverpool, Milat allegedly boasted to his co-workers about having murdered someone and buried the body under bushland. Milat was 26 years old and worked at the Department of Main Roads, frequently driving between Liverpool and Canberra.
On May 3, 1971, at the Air Disaster Memorial in the Fairburn Pine Plantation near Canberra, Keren's remains were discovered 15 metres off a footpath by an elderly woman out walking near the National Air Disaster Memorial when she came across a handbag in the forest. Following a trail of clothing four metres away, she found Keren's decomposing body.
The spot where her remains were found was in the Fairburn Pine Plantation, about 10.5 miles (17km) from the location of her abandoned car.
Keren's body was found face up, with her legs straight out and her arms encircling her head. Her clothing had been pulled down, indicating sexual assault, and a beer bottle was nearby on the ground.
Her cause of death was not established at the time, but witnesses later said they had heard screams and seen a woman running on the night Keren vanished.
It was believed that Keren's fractured hyoid bone indicates her death was by strangulation,
A documentary about Milat's other victims, Buried Secrets, said a post-mortem had identified half of Keren's hyoid or neck bone missing, which might indicate she had been strangled.
Milat is also believed to have driven a gold-coloured Ford Fairmont similar to one seen by eyewitnesses chasing a woman matching Rowland's description in Canberra on the night of her disappearance. The murder was never solved.
Peter Letcher
Peter Letcher
On November 13, 1987, 18-year-old Peter Letcher, an unemployed sawmiller, left the southwestern Sydney suburb of Busby to hitchhike back to his home in Bathurst. But he never arrived. He planned to propose to his 15-year-old girlfriend, who told him she was too young to get married.Peter was broke and somewhat of a drifter since losing his job two years earlier,
Bushwalkers found his bones on a woodland track close to the Jenolan Caves tourist site on January 21, 1988. Letcher's body was found lying face down in a small ditch full of leaves and branches, similar to the bodies found years later in the Belanglo forest.
His badly decomposed remains were wearing jeans, football socks and running shoes. Alongside the body were his shirt and jumper, riddled with bullet holes, and an empty whisky bottle. He had been handcuffed, shot five times in the head with a .22 calibre gun, repeatedly stabbed in the back, and possibly sexually assaulted.
According to Milat's estranged wife, in the days preceding Letcher's disappearance, Milat took her once to the Jenolan State Forest to see a dirt track and a pine plantation since Milat was working in the area. Letcher's murder took place shortly after Milat's wife left him.
Dianne Pennacchio
Dianne Pennacchio
On Friday, September 6, 1991, Dianne Pennacchio, a 29-year-old mother of a 2.5-year-old boy called Jack, rang her husband Carmen from Queanbeyan’s Kangaroo Club and told him she was going to the Lake George Hotel in nearby Bungendore, which her brother ran. When she arrived, she rang her husband to say she had arrived and would be home later. Friends last saw Dianne leaving the hotel for home at 11 pm, and she told a friend she planned to hitchhike back to Queanbeyan. She left the motel and walked toward the Kings Highway.
Carmen said if Dianne had hitchhiked, it would have been for the first time, but “if someone walked up and needed a hand, she wouldn’t think twice”. The following day, Carmen tried to ring Dianne’s brother, expecting her to stay at his place, and then rang the police. Dianne was listed as missing, but Carmen knew she would never have left, “Her son was her life and mine too. It was out of character … I was out of my mind.”
On 13 November 1991, two employees of the forestry commission in the Tallaganda State Forest, forty kilometres south of Bungendore and southwest of Canberra, discovered a body wrapped in pine branches lying face-down next to a fallen tree trunk 200 meters off a track. She was wearing only her underwear and trousers, and the way her clothes were arranged implied that she had been sexually assaulted.
Crucially, her seventh thoracic vertebra had been stabbed around the middle of her back, which would have caused immediate paralysis and incapacitation, similar to Milat’s other victim, Joanne Walter.
A beer bottle and a can were at the scene. Dianne’s gold chain, earrings, and car keys were missing.
Other cases linked to Ivan Milat from the 1970s-1990s
On 30 December 1978, Leanne Goodall, 20, was left off by her brother at the Muswellbrook railway station. She travelled to Newcastle to meet her parents before leaving for Sydney. She was last seen at Newcastle's Star Hote at 3.30 pm and was reported missing in February 1979. Milat was a road worker in the area in late 1978 and early 1979 and was known to drink at the Star Hotel.
Robyn Hickie, 18, went missing four months after Leanne Goodall disappeared on April 7, 1979. She was last seen at 7.15 pm at a bus stop opposite her home on the Pacific Highway at Belmont North. Police closed their investigation quickly on the assumption she had voluntarily left to start a new life. A later witness claimed to have seen Milat at the Belmont Hotel the night before Robyn disappeared.
14-year-old Amanda Robinson disappeared on April 21, 1979, while returning home to Swansea following a high school dance in Gateshead. She got off a bus and was last seen walking along Lake Road. Police started a thorough investigation, but Amanda’s case was never solved.
Amanda Zolis, 16, was last seen on October 12, 1979, when a neighbour walked her to a bus stop on Tudor Street in Hamilton at 6.30 pm. She was heading to Newcastle's Christian Coffee Shop on Hunter Street. At 10.15 pm, Amanda called her father from Hamilton South, Newcastle, saying she needed clothing since she planned to visit Queensland. She was never heard from again.
Annette Briffa, 18, was last seen in Asquith, a neighbourhood in northern Sydney, on January 10, 1980. She was living on the Central Coast as well as in the neighbourhood. She was last seen hitchhiking on the Pacific Highway between Mount Colah and Asquith, in the direction of Hornsby. According to one eyewitness, she entered an orange Mazda car or a similar vehicle.
Susan Isenhood, 22, disappeared from the Mayfield neighbourhood of Newcastle after being dropped off by her brother close to the Stag and Hunter Hotel before she hitchhiked to Taree. Her skeletal remains were found in 1986 in rainforest scrub at Possum Brush in the Kiwarrak State Forest, south of Taree. Milat has been considered a possible suspect because investigators obtained RTA accommodation records that showed he was repairing sections of the Pacific Highway near Taree at the time of Susan’s disappearance and was staying in a Taree hotel.
On July 4, 1972, Anita Cunningham, 18, and Robyn Hoinville-Bartram, 19, both student nurses who shared an apartment, left Melbourne intending to hitchhike to Queensland. Eighty kilometres west of Charters Towers, Hoinville-Bartram's half-nude body was discovered beneath a bridge. She had been shot in the head with the same type of .22 calibre rifle that Milat used. Cunningham's remains were never discovered. Although authorities looked into Milat's actions around the time of the disappearances, they never were able to make an official connection.
On October 5, 1973, Gabrielle Jahnke, 18, and Michelle Riley, 16, hitchhiked from Brisbane to the Gold Coast. Jahnke's corpse was discovered at the foot of a steep slope on the Pacific Highway, midway between the two locations, a week after they vanished. Ten days later, Riley's body was discovered in isolated bushland. Her dress had been pushed up, and she was not wearing underwear. Over her body, branches had been placed.
German, Lydia Notz, 21, was last seen at a friend's address in Chapel Hill, Queensland, on 31 October 1976. She left a note saying she would return in about a week but vanished. In 2021, criminal psychologist Tim Watson-Munro and forensic anthropologist Dr Xanthé Mallett included Notz as a possible victim of Milat in the television program Ivan Milat: Backpacker Murderer.
On July 20, 1977, Narelle Mary Cox, 21, disappeared on a visit to Noosa, Queensland, to see a school friend. She is believed to have gone missing in the Brunswick Heads area of New South Wales, where Milat was known to work. Narelle's sister called the Milat task force in 1994, but he was ultimately ruled out as a suspect due to conflicting dates in his work schedule. However, this conclusion has been criticised since Milat used to get people to sign in for him when he was absent from work.
American Barbara Carol Brown, 22, was last seen in New South Wales on May 17, 1978. Barbara set off from the Beecroft home of the brother and wife of her Melbourne boyfriend, intending to hitchhike to Queensland and then on to Perth in Western Australia. She was never heard from again. In 2021, Brown was included as a possible victim of Milat in the program Ivan Milat: Backpacker Murderer.
On August 25, 1978, Stephen Lapthorne, 20, and Michelle Pope, 18, were last seen in a car travelling from Steve’s home in West Pymble to Michelle’s home in Berowra. Lapthorne's lime-green Bedford was never found. Although they have not ruled out death by accident, investigators believe they were killed and that their remains were buried in the Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park. Deputy State Coroner Carl Milovanovich conducted an inquiry into the couple's disappearance in August 2005 and certified both of their deaths. Although Milat was identified as the individual who was most likely to have killed the couple, the coroner handed down an open finding.
On January 11, 1979, Alan Martin Fox, 22, and his girlfriend Anneke Adriaansen, 17, left Berowra Heights to hitchhike to Kempsey and Byron Bay. They were last seen on Byron Bay's Main Street in the late afternoon of January 12. Police considered the disappearance suspicious, and Milat was mentioned as a potential suspect since he could have been on the northern New South Wales coast at the time.
On July 27, 1979, around 7.30 p.m., Toni Maree Cavanagh, 15, and Kay Docherty, 16, were last seen at a bus stop heading to a disco in Wollongong. A letter from the pair dated August 1 bearing a Darlinghurst postmark arrived a week later saying they were in Sydney, but they were never seen or heard from again. Milat was investigated as a potential suspect during an inquest in 2013.
Kim Cherie Teer, 17, disappeared in East Melbourne around September 1979 with her black and white border collie while she was attempting to travel to Adelaide. She had been travelling across the country, and in her final letter to her mother, Kim said she was scared of hitchhiking and asked for her birth certificate to get her driver's licence. Victorian Homicide Squad detectives believe that Kim may have met with foul play while trying to hitchhike.
On February 1, 1980, Elaine Johnson, 17, and Kerry Anne Joel, 18, were last seen in Cronulla. They are believed to have been hitchhiking to Wyong. Milat, who had been employed in the region they are thought to have been travelling to at the time of their disappearance, is the prime suspect.
On June 12, 1980, trainee nurses Deborah Balken and Gillian Jamieson, 20, were last seen talking with a man wearing a wide-brimmed cowboy hat in a Parramatta tavern. Later, Debbie contacted her flatmate to say they were taking a ride to a party in Wollongong. Milat, who had been employed in western Sydney in 1980, is known to have been questioned about their disappearances and was mentioned as a person of interest in the women's wrongful death inquiry.
Joanne Lacey and Lesley David Toshak, both 20, were reported as missing on April 20, 1981, after leaving Sydney to hitchhike to Byron Bay on a surfing trip in northern New South Wales. In 2012, a coroner ruled that both had died under suspicious circumstances.
On March 10, 1991, Carmen Verheyden, 22, was last seen at 12.30 am hitchhiking on the Hume Highway in Casula, close to Liverpool. After leaving a party, she was seen sitting outside the Crossroads Hotel to return to her Westmead home. She has not been seen since. Some believe that Milat might have abducted and murdered Carmen because she disappeared from the exact location of the backpacker abductions. In November 1993, Task Force Air detectives investigating Milat's crimes looked at the possibility that Verheyden was one of his victims but were unable to find sufficient evidence.
On November 23, 1992, Melony Merrille Sutton, 14, and Chad Everett Sutton, 16, were last seen by their mother in Inala, Queensland, at 8. 35 am, when they walked to school. They later discovered that they had intended to hitchhike to Perth to find their father. It is believed they passed via the Belanglo State Forest. They are still classified as missing.
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