Ivan Milat was convicted in 1996 of murdering seven young travelers who had been hitchhiking out of Sydney between December 1989 and April 1992. Two were from Victoria, three from Germany and two from Britain. Their remains were found in the Belanglo State Forest, a 3,800-hectare pine forest south of Sydney, between September 1992 and November 1993. The same jury found him guilty of an offense against a British backpacker, Paul Onions, who had escaped from a gunman's car near the forest turnoff in January 1990.
Milat was a road worker who lived in Sydney's southwest. He was arrested in May 1994 after one of the largest police investigations in Australian history, and he was sentenced to life imprisonment on each murder count. He never admitted any of the killings. He spent most of his sentence at Goulburn's Supermax prison, wrote letters protesting his innocence, made repeated attempts to reopen his case and died of cancer in the prison hospital at Long Bay in October 2019, aged 74. Questions about other disappearances along the roads where he worked have outlived him. In 2025 the New South Wales government released a list of 58 missing persons cases his investigators had reviewed, and in June 2026 a parliamentary inquiry began hearing from families who believe he was responsible for deaths he was never charged with.
Ivan Robert Marko Milat was born in Sydney on December 27, 1944, according to Australian Associated Press and the ABC; one AAP report gives the date as December 28. The ABC reported that he was born in Guildford, in western Sydney, to a Croatian father, Steven, and an Australian mother, Margaret. He was the fifth of 14 children, and the ABC described the household as violent and short of money.
His record began young. At 17 he was sent to juvenile detention for six months on burglary charges, and he spent much of his adult life in and out of prison for theft, the ABC reported. A Canberra Times account published in 2019 said his first adult prison record dated from 1964. AAP described his early offenses as relatively minor.
He was briefly married in the 1980s, and the marriage ended in divorce amid claims of domestic violence, the ABC reported. His former wife, Karen, described him as "gun crazy," AAP reported, and said he "ran around like a cowboy and called himself Tex." He worked on road gangs, and police later examined the places where he had worked. In the late 1970s he worked on the roads in the Newcastle region, north of Sydney, which later drew him into a coronial inquest there.
In 1971, Milat picked up two young women who were hitchhiking near the same highway where the seven travelers would later disappear. He was accused of abducting them, threatening them with a knife and raping one of them before they got away, the ABC reported. One of the women testified that he had threatened them with knives, according to SBS.
He was acquitted. AAP reported that in 1974 he was cleared of raping one of the hitchhikers, and the ABC reported that he was acquitted in 1974; his lawyer was John Marsden. The acquittal means the allegation was not proved in court, and it is not an offense he was found to have committed. The women have never been publicly named.
The episode returned in later years. Police and families looking at other cases from the early 1970s have pointed to it, and in June 2026 the family of a Canberra woman who died in 1971 told a parliamentary inquiry that police could have linked their relative's death to Milat when he was arrested over the alleged abduction near Goulburn in the weeks after she disappeared. That is the family's claim; no court has ruled on it.
The seven people whose deaths led to Milat's convictions were young, most of them on long trips, and all of them were hitchhiking or planning to hitchhike out of Sydney when they were last seen. Little about their lives beyond their names, ages and plans was reported.
Deborah Everist and James Gibson, both 19, were from Victoria; AAP and SBS described them as a Melbourne couple. They were last seen in inner Sydney on December 30, 1989, planning to hitchhike to Albury, on the border with Victoria.
Simone Schmidl, a German backpacker, disappeared on January 20, 1991, while hitchhiking from Sydney to Melbourne. AAP's 2019 reports give her age as 20 in one place and 21 in another, and SBS gave both figures.
Anja Habschied, 20, and Gabor Neugebauer, 21, were German backpackers, and SBS and AAP described them as a couple. They left Kings Cross on December 26, 1991, planning to hitchhike to Darwin.
Joanne Walters, 22, and Caroline Clarke, 21, were British. They left a backpackers' hostel in Kings Cross on April 18, 1992, and were never seen alive again.
Caroline Clarke's parents, Ian and Jacqueline, live in Northumberland, in northern England. Speaking to AAP from his home in October 2019, her father said that finding her and being able to bury her had been "in its way a form of closure, that we'd found her and we were able to lay her to rest properly." "We still think of Caroline every day," he said, "but it doesn't mean to say we have to think of Milat every day."
At sentencing, the trial judge said of all seven that they "were at the threshold of their lives, with everything to look forward to."
Between the first disappearance and the second, another hitchhiker survived. On January 25, 1990, Paul Thomas Onions, a 24-year-old British backpacker, was picked up at Casula, near Liverpool on Sydney's southwestern edge. The driver introduced himself as "Bill," according to the ABC. Near the turnoff to the Belanglo State Forest the driver pulled a gun on him. Onions escaped. AAP reported that the man fired at him and that Onions was so frightened he ran into oncoming traffic. He flagged down a passing motorist and reported the attack to local police the same day, according to the description of a Seven News report held by the National Film and Sound Archive.
He gave police a description of his attacker that day, AAP reported. The ABC reported that police did not follow up his account at the time. Clive Small, the detective who later led the murder investigation, said in 2019 that during the attack the driver had been seen "reaching under the seat, which is where he kept the weapon," SBS reported.
Onions's report would become the center of the prosecution case. At trial the prosecutor told the jury that up to 40 features of Milat matched what Onions had described, and that there was "only one person in the whole of Australia who matches all of those descriptions," AAP reported.
On September 19 and 20, 1992, the bodies of Caroline Clarke and Joanne Walters were found in the Belanglo State Forest, according to AAP.
Just over a year later, on October 5, 1993, the skeletal remains of James Gibson and Deborah Everist were found in the forest, less than a kilometer from where the British women had been found. Police searched the area intensively over the following days but did not at first formally link the four deaths. On October 8, forensic examinations indicated that all four had probably been killed by the same person or people and that all had been stabbed, AAP reported. That day a task force, Task Force Air, was formed under Superintendent Clive Small.
On November 1, 1993, a fifth body was found about five kilometers from the others. It was later identified as Simone Schmidl. On November 4 the bodies of Gabor Neugebauer and Anja Habschied were found about a kilometer east of hers. The next day the reward offered for information was raised from 100,000 dollars to 500,000 dollars, matching the highest previous New South Wales reward for major crimes.
All seven had been left in shallow graves. Later reports, citing the forensic evidence, said that some of the victims had been shot and others stabbed, and the AAP account published in 2014 described them as shot, stabbed and blindfolded. The search of the forest covered 78 kilometers of fire trails and involved 300 police officers, according to Small's account to AAP in 2014.
The task force had a large volume of information to sort. Small said in 2014 that rumors about the Milat family surfaced early in the investigation. The breakthrough, he said, came from Paul Onions. In 1993 Onions, back in Britain, reported to the investigators that he had escaped an abduction attempt years earlier by a man matching Milat's description. Small called it "a tremendous step forward," and Milat became the prime suspect.
Task Force Air also reviewed other missing persons cases for any link. In 1993 it looked at 58 cases of missing young people from every state and territory, a list the government released in 2025.
The investigation had internal difficulties. Small told AAP in 2014 that a detective, Paul Gordon, was removed from the task force in 1994 for leaking information to the press, and that he feared the leak could give Milat grounds to claim he had not had a fair trial. Gordon later criticized the investigation publicly. Small said he considered suing a current affairs program over its coverage but decided to "grin and bear it" rather than give Milat grounds for appeal.
Police kept Milat under surveillance for about two months before they moved, according to AP and AAP.
On May 22, 1994, police raided Milat's home on Cinnabar Street in Eagle Vale, in Sydney's southwest, and arrested him. He was 49. AAP's timeline records that police searched his homes that day and charged him with the armed robbery of Paul Onions. The next day, May 23, he appeared in court on robbery and weapons charges, according to the National Film and Sound Archive's description of a Seven News bulletin.
After Onions identified him, the bulletin reported, large-scale searches of Milat's home and the homes of members of his family turned up a great deal of evidence. Police found items belonging to the dead backpackers, along with camping equipment, weapons and ammunition, the ABC reported. A Ten News report in 1994, describing the first court details linking him to the travelers, said police had found "weapons used in some of the murders," together with clothing, camping equipment and other belongings of the victims.
Onions identified Milat from 13 photographs shown to him four years after the attack, AAP reported.
At the end of May, Milat was charged with the seven murders. AAP dates the murder charges to May 31, 1994; a Seven News bulletin broadcast on May 30 already reported them.
The committal hearing took 28 days. On December 12, 1994, a magistrate committed Milat for trial on eight charges, AAP reported: the seven murders and the offense against Paul Onions.
The trial was held in the Supreme Court of New South Wales before Justice David Hunt, the Chief Judge at Common Law. A jury was empanelled on March 25, 1996, and the trial began the next day. The prosecutor was Mark Tedeschi QC; Milat was defended by Terry Martin.
Both sides agreed on one thing. The Crown and the defense told the jury that the killer was a member of the Milat family, AAP reported, and when Milat later took his case to the High Court, the Crown pointed out that his counsel had conceded at trial that a member of the family or an associate must have committed the murders.
Tedeschi argued that the evidence pointed to Ivan Milat as the killer, though in his view Milat had probably not acted alone. He accused Milat of "incredible arrogance and unbelievable self-confidence," AAP reported. Martin argued that it was reasonably possible that one of Milat's brothers had been responsible, perhaps helped by another brother or by a friend. He suggested that one or two of Milat's brothers could have planted items in his house, including gun parts linked to some of the murders. "Do you think a person capable of these most brutal of crimes would give two hoots about planting gear on a brother?" he asked the jury. This was the defense case in a criminal trial; the jury rejected it, and neither brother was reported to have been charged with any of the killings.
The Crown's position on whether others were involved mattered later. When Milat applied in 2008 for an inquiry into his convictions, the Chief Judge at Common Law, Peter McClellan, noted that "It was no part of the Crown case that others may have been involved."
On July 27, 1996, the jury found Milat guilty on all eight counts: seven counts of murder and one count of detaining for advantage, the offense against Paul Onions. News reports have usually described that count as kidnapping or abduction; the High Court's 2004 judgment uses the legal name, detaining for advantage.
Justice Hunt sentenced Milat the same day. He was sentenced to life imprisonment on each murder count, and news reports describe the sentence as seven consecutive life sentences with no possibility of parole. The judge said of the victims that "These seven young persons were at the threshold of their lives, with everything to look forward to."
Milat appealed against his convictions to the New South Wales Court of Criminal Appeal, which dismissed the appeal on February 26, 1998, according to the High Court's later judgment and AAP.
He then sought special leave to appeal to the High Court of Australia. His application was filed on June 24, 2002, about four and a quarter years after the deadline under the court's rules, so it needed an extension of time. He argued that the trial had miscarried over the identification evidence; that the Crown had put a case inconsistent with the evidence of its own witnesses without cross-examining them as hostile or suggesting they were mistaken; and that the trial judge had put alternative cases to the jury, one of them not relied on by the Crown, which might have led the jury to use the detaining count to convict on the murder counts. The Crown answered that the evidence in question was not essential, that there was no legal error, and that the murder convictions did not depend on the detaining count.
In December 2003 Milat asked the High Court to order that he be brought before the court to argue his application in person, or else that he appear by video link from Goulburn Correctional Centre. On February 24, 2004, Justice Michael McHugh dismissed that request, holding that the court had no power or ground to order his attendance and that written submissions were adequate. He observed that "an application, brought so long out of time, faces a formidable hurdle in obtaining the grant of special leave to appeal." The special leave application itself failed in May 2004, AAP reported.
Milat kept trying. In December 2006 he lost a bid for an inquiry into his convictions, according to AAP. In September 2008, in what the Illawarra Mercury reported was his third official request for an inquiry, he relied on a television program in which Clive Small said there was no police evidence of an accomplice. He argued that the trial judge's ruling that the Crown did not have to prove whether he acted alone was partly wrong. Justice McClellan refused the application and rejected his claim that he had been denied procedural fairness. "The material provided by the applicant does not raise a doubt or question about his guilt," he said.
In a six-page letter from his cell at Goulburn published in 2010, Milat called himself the victim of a "miscarriage of justice." He argued that none of the DNA evidence police found at the scenes matched him and that the court's findings were inconsistent about whether he had acted alone or with help. AAP reported at the time that he had exhausted all avenues of appeal.
After his conviction, Milat spent most of his sentence at the Supermax prison at Goulburn, in southern New South Wales; the ABC reported in 2019 that he had been held there for the previous 22 years. He attempted to escape in 1997, after which he was moved to solitary confinement, AP reported, and he repeatedly went on hunger strike and harmed himself.
In 2001 he swallowed razor blades, staples and a metal chain, and later that year swallowed part of the flushing mechanism of a toilet, AAP reported. In January 2009 he cut off the little finger of his left hand and sent it to the Chief Justice of the High Court, Robert French; AAP's timeline says he used a plastic knife. He ended a hunger strike a few days later.
He wrote many letters. One of his nephews, Alistair Shipsey, who said he spoke to Milat almost every week, published a book of letters from his uncle in 2014. Shipsey told The Canberra Times in 2019 that he believed Milat was innocent.
Small told AAP in 2014 that he had met Milat in prison in 2005, and described one exchange as a "gotcha moment." When Milat died in 2019, Small said he had "absolutely no respect for him at all."
In May 2019 Milat was taken from prison to the Prince of Wales Hospital in Randwick, in eastern Sydney, where several lumps were found in his stomach and throat. He was diagnosed with terminal cancer of the oesophagus and stomach. After about two weeks in hospital he was taken back to the hospital at Long Bay prison, handcuffed at the hands and ankles, the ABC reported. Corrective Services said there were no plans to return him to Goulburn.
The Corrective Services Commissioner, Peter Severin, said he would facilitate any police request to speak to Milat. "I personally would be very keen for Mr Milat to come forward," he said, expressing the hope that Milat would share what he knew about other possible crimes.
In a three-page handwritten letter dated July 11, 2019, sent from the Long Bay prison hospital and published in August, Milat again said he was innocent. His life since his arrest and conviction, he wrote, "has been devoted wholly to prove my innocence." He described the diagnosis as "a grim finding," AAP reported.
On October 11, 2019, he was moved back to the Prince of Wales Hospital for pain relief, according to the ABC. He was returned to Long Bay once he could be moved; the corrections minister, Anthony Roberts, said that he and the commissioner had agreed Milat should not occupy a public hospital bed.
Police visited him eight times in prison and hospital in his final days but received no new information, CNN reported. He died at 4:07 a.m. on Sunday, October 27, 2019, in the hospital at Long Bay, aged 74. Corrective Services said his body would be transferred to the State Coroner. "All deaths in custody are subject to a coronial inquest, including deaths resulting from natural causes," a spokesperson said. The outcome of that inquest was not reported.
Roberts said Milat had been "sentenced to die in jail and he was going to die in jail." He added: "He can rot in hell. He showed no remorse." Small said that "a lot of people are going to be very satisfied with the current outcome." Milat's brother Bill told The Daily Telegraph, as AAP reported, that the family was not told of the death until about three hours afterward, and called the notification "crap."
Caroline Clarke's father said that sympathy "isn't high on the list, I'm afraid." He hoped there would have been a confession that might lead to other burial sites: "It's these other parents who don't have the luxury of being able to do that," he said.
Milat left a letter with relatives asking the state to pay for his funeral. On November 10, 2019, Roberts announced that the request had been refused. Milat's body had been cremated without a funeral, and the cost was to be repaid from his prison account. "His last wish has been emphatically denied," Roberts said.
The best documented of the other cases linked to Milat are three disappearances in the Eastlakes area near Newcastle. Leanne Goodall, 20, was last seen at the Star Hotel in Newcastle on December 30, 1978, after her brother had dropped her at Muswellbrook to catch a train. Robyn Hickie, 18, a dental nurse, left home on April 7, 1979, and was last seen at a bus stop on the Pacific Highway at Belmont North. Amanda Robinson, 14, was last seen on April 21, 1979, walking along Lake Road in Swansea, about 400 meters from her home, after a school dance at Gateshead. The three had never met.
A police unit, Strike Force Fenwick, was set up in the late 1990s, and the cases came to be linked. At an inquest at Toronto in 2001, the State Coroner, John Abernethy, ruled that the three young women had been murdered by persons unknown. He named Milat as one of six persons of interest, and said he was of major interest and had "definite links to the Hunter Region" in the late 1970s, when he worked as a road worker. The Newcastle Herald reported that Milat had stayed in several places in the Eastlakes area and at the Star Hotel.
Milat gave evidence at the inquest. He denied knowing the missing young women and then declined to answer further questions. In a letter later sent to the families through the Newcastle Legal Centre, after he agreed to answer written questions, he wrote that he "still would not have been able to assist you." The letter, first published by the Newcastle Herald in 2009, also blamed the families for not taking more care and criticized the police. Amanda Robinson's mother, Anne Robinson, told the paper: "I just don't want it to be him."
In April 2019 Lake Macquarie detectives set up Strike Force Arapaima to re-examine the Hickie and Robinson cases, and two rewards of one million dollars each were offered for information about the suspected murders. Milat was never charged in connection with any of the three cases.
Small believed that Milat acted alone in the seven murders but suspected that there were more victims, AP reported, including three people whose bodies were found in other forests from 1971. AAP put the police view the same way: that Milat may be linked to other murders with similar features, including three people whose bodies were found in other forests between 1971 and 1991. He was never charged with any of them.
One of those cases is the death of a young man named Letcher, who was last seen hitchhiking in 1987; his body was found nine weeks later near the Jenolan Caves. Small told AAP in 2014 that the bullets in that case were certainly fired from the same gun used in the Belanglo murders, but that this was not enough for a court.
In August 2025 the police minister, Yasmin Catley, released the list of 58 missing persons cases that Task Force Air had reviewed in 1993 for possible links to Milat. The cases came from every state and territory. Detectives had explored possible links, AAP reported, and Milat refused to cooperate with police until he died. Among the cases named in the coverage were those of Robyn Hickie and Amanda Robinson; Anna Liva, 30, an Italian backpacker missing in Coober Pedy in 1991; Lorraine Kessey, 21, and Pauline Walter, 22, who disappeared in Western Australia in 1977 and 1980; and Nancy Grunwaldt, a German backpacker who disappeared from Tasmania's east coast in 1993. Inclusion on a list reviewed by police is not a finding that Milat was involved.
The list was released after Jeremy Buckingham, a Legalise Cannabis member of the state's upper house, moved in March 2025 for the release of government documents about Milat. In parliament he cited two former detectives, Neville Scullion and the late Paul Gordon, who have claimed that Milat may have been responsible for up to 80 killings going back to the 1960s, and he set out a list of unsolved cases he linked to Milat. Those are the claims of an MP and former officers, not findings by any court or coroner. A formal order for papers relating to Milat, made in the upper house on March 19, 2025, was answered on April 30, 2025, with the governor, on the advice of the Executive Council, declining to produce the documents sought.
Individual members of the public have also come forward. In 2019 a man told the Bay Post-Moruya Examiner that, as a 15-year-old hitchhiker, he had been picked up and then put out of a car by two men, and that he was certain the driver was Milat. The paper reported his account as his own; no police finding on it was reported.
In September 2025 state MPs were due to vote on an inquiry into evidence that might connect Milat to other unsolved killings. An inquiry into unsolved murders and missing persons in New South Wales, chaired by Buckingham, was set up with terms of reference listing 18 cases, including whether impediments in the criminal justice system had affected the delivery of justice to victims and their families. Submissions closed on April 1, 2026. Its first hearing was held in Bowral, in the Southern Highlands, on June 11, 2026.
Not all of the cases before it concern Milat. Families gave evidence that day about the 1970 disappearance of Cheryl Grimmer and the 1979 disappearance of Kay Docherty, 16, and her friend Toni Cavanagh from Warilla, as well as the death of Keren Rowland. Kay Docherty's twin brother, Kevin, said a detective had told him that Milat had worked on a road gang at Kiama around the time of her disappearance, and other witnesses said they had seen Milat in the area in the 1970s. Rumors have linked Milat to the Docherty and Cavanagh case, the Illawarra Mercury reported, and he has been named as a key suspect in the 1980 murders of Deborah Balken and Gillian Jamieson, whom the Deputy State Coroner has found to be dead.
Keren Rowland was 20 and five months pregnant when she disappeared after an evening at the Canberra Show on February 26, 1971. Her car was found abandoned that night, and about three months later a dog walker found her body in a pine plantation outside Canberra. Her family believes she may have been Milat's first victim. A relative by marriage, a retired British police officer, told the inquiry that Milat had been the only suspect of the Australian Federal Police and had been working near Queanbeyan shortly before she disappeared; he also said that exhibits and forensic material had been lost. Milat was never charged in connection with her death, and no coroner's or police finding naming him was reported.
Buckingham said he believed there was a "building body of evidence" that Milat was responsible for many more killings than those he was convicted of. In June 2026 the inquiry was still continuing and had not reported.
The Belanglo State Forest became the scene of another killing in 2010. On November 20 of that year, Milat's great-nephew Matthew Milat, then 17, killed his friend David Auchterlonie with an axe in the forest on Auchterlonie's 17th birthday. A co-offender, Cohen Klein, recorded the attack on his phone. Both pleaded guilty in the Supreme Court, and in June 2012 Justice Jane Mathews sentenced Matthew Milat to 43 years with a nonparole period of 30 years. The High Court refused him special leave to appeal in September 2014. Ivan Milat had no part in that killing; it is recalled because of where it happened, and reporting on it has always returned to the earlier case.
The killings damaged Australia's reputation as a safe place for budget travelers, AAP reported in 2019. They also inspired the 2005 Australian horror film Wolf Creek, CNN noted. Small, who retired as an assistant commissioner of the New South Wales Police, wrote a book about the investigation, titled Milat.
For the families of the seven, the case closed in 1996 but did not end. In 2019 Caroline Clarke's father said that, nearly three decades on, the family still thought of her every day. Milat never told anyone what happened in the forest, and families of people still missing from the roads he worked continue to ask whether he could have answered their questions too.
Proven by final judgment: the murders of Deborah Everist, James Gibson, Simone Schmidl, Anja Habschied, Gabor Neugebauer, Joanne Walters and Caroline Clarke, and the offense of detaining Paul Onions for advantage (jury verdict, July 27, 1996; appeal dismissed February 26, 1998; High Court special leave application failed 2004).
Not proven: the 1971 rape allegation, of which Milat was acquitted in 1974. He was never charged in connection with any other death or disappearance. The 2001 coronial finding on Leanne Goodall, Robyn Hickie and Amanda Robinson was that they were murdered by persons unknown; Milat was one of six persons of interest. Every other link, including the Letcher case, the death of Keren Rowland, the 58 cases reviewed by Task Force Air and the cases before the 2026 parliamentary inquiry, remains a matter of suspicion, belief or allegation.
Whether he acted alone: the prosecutor at trial said Milat probably did not act alone, though the evidence pointed to him as the killer; the Chief Judge at Common Law said in 2008 that it was no part of the Crown case that others were involved; Small has said he believed Milat acted alone. Milat's defense argued that a brother could have been responsible. No one else has been charged.
Accounts differ on his date of birth (December 27, 1944, in most AAP and ABC reports; December 28 in one AAP report); Simone Schmidl's age (20 or 21); whether Everist and Gibson were from Melbourne or more generally from Victoria; whether the Onions count is described as detaining for advantage (High Court), kidnapping or abduction (news reports); the first name of Letcher (given as Paul by AAP in 2014 and as Peter in 2025 reports of the MP's list) and the year Leanne Goodall disappeared (1978 in the Newcastle Herald; 1987 in 2025 reports of the MP's list); the method he used to cut off his finger in 2009 (a plastic knife, according to AAP's timeline; another AAP report says he gnawed it); and the date when the murder charges were laid (May 31, 1994, per AAP; a bulletin of May 30 already reported them). A CNN report in 2019 said the remains were found between 1992 and 1996; every other account puts the discoveries in 1992 and 1993.
December 27, 1944: Ivan Robert Marko Milat is born in Sydney, the fifth of 14 children.
At 17: sent to juvenile detention for six months on burglary charges.
1971: accused of abducting two young women hitchhikers and raping one of them.
1974: acquitted of the rape charge.
Late 1970s: works on the roads in the Newcastle region.
December 30, 1978: Leanne Goodall is last seen in Newcastle.
April 7 and April 21, 1979: Robyn Hickie and Amanda Robinson disappear near Newcastle.
December 30, 1989: Deborah Everist and James Gibson are last seen in inner Sydney.
January 25, 1990: Paul Onions escapes from a gunman's car near the Belanglo turnoff and reports it to police.
January 20, 1991: Simone Schmidl disappears.
December 26, 1991: Anja Habschied and Gabor Neugebauer leave Kings Cross.
April 18, 1992: Joanne Walters and Caroline Clarke leave a Kings Cross hostel.
September 19 and 20, 1992: the bodies of Caroline Clarke and Joanne Walters are found in the Belanglo State Forest.
October 5, 1993: the remains of James Gibson and Deborah Everist are found.
October 8, 1993: Task Force Air is formed under Superintendent Clive Small.
November 1, 1993: Simone Schmidl's body is found.
November 4, 1993: the bodies of Gabor Neugebauer and Anja Habschied are found.
November 5, 1993: reward raised to 500,000 dollars.
1993: Paul Onions contacts the investigators; Task Force Air reviews 58 missing persons cases.
May 22, 1994: Milat is arrested at Eagle Vale and charged over the attack on Paul Onions.
May 31, 1994: charged with the seven murders.
December 12, 1994: committed for trial on eight charges.
March 25, 1996: jury empanelled before Justice David Hunt.
July 27, 1996: found guilty on all eight counts and sentenced to life on each murder count.
1997: escape attempt; moved to solitary confinement.
February 26, 1998: Court of Criminal Appeal dismisses his appeal.
2001: Toronto inquest finds Goodall, Hickie and Robinson were murdered by persons unknown and names Milat as one of six persons of interest.
June 24, 2002: files a High Court special leave application, years out of time.
February 24, 2004: Justice McHugh refuses to order that he be brought to court or heard by video link.
May 2004: High Court special leave application fails.
December 2006: loses a bid for an inquiry into his convictions.
September 2008: Justice McClellan refuses a further application for an inquiry.
January 2009: cuts off his little finger and sends it to the High Court.
November 20, 2010: his great-nephew Matthew Milat kills David Auchterlonie in the Belanglo State Forest.
April 2019: Strike Force Arapaima set up to review the Hickie and Robinson cases.
May 2019: diagnosed with terminal oesophageal and stomach cancer.
October 11, 2019: moved to the Prince of Wales Hospital for pain relief.
October 27, 2019: dies at 4:07 a.m. in the hospital at Long Bay, aged 74.
November 10, 2019: the state refuses to pay for his funeral; he is cremated.
March and April 2025: motion and order for papers on Milat in the NSW upper house.
August 2025: list of 58 missing persons cases reviewed in 1993 is released.
June 11, 2026: first hearing of the parliamentary inquiry into unsolved murders and missing persons, at Bowral.