Ivan Robert Marko Milat was born at Guildford, New South Wales on December 27, 1944, one of fourteen children of a Croatian immigrant father. The family had a reputation in the district and Ivan had convictions from his teens. He worked as a road labourer for the Department of Main Roads and was a keen shooter who knew the bush around Bowral intimately.
Between December 1989 and April 1992 he picked up seven young backpackers hitchhiking on the Hume Highway south of Sydney and killed them in the Belanglo State Forest: the British travellers Caroline Clarke and Joanne Walters, the Germans Gabor Neugebauer, Anja Habschied and Simone Schmidl, and the Australians Deborah Everist and James Gibson.
They were shot, stabbed and in one case decapitated, and each body was covered with branches in a way that became a recognisable arrangement. Two orienteers found the first two in September 1992. The Australian press called him the Backpacker Killer.
The case became the biggest investigation in New South Wales history and produced a national anxiety about backpacking that lasted years.
It was broken by a survivor. Paul Onions, a British traveller, was picked up on the Hume in January 1990, had a gun pulled on him, and ran into the road to flag down a passing car. He reported it at the time.
Nothing was done with the report for four years. In 1994, seeing coverage in Britain, Onions telephoned the task force again, and this time it was followed up.
Milat was arrested in May 1994. Searches of his house and those of his relatives produced camping gear, clothing, a sleeping bag and a camera belonging to the victims, and parts of a Ruger rifle matching the ballistics.
He was convicted of all seven murders on July 27, 1996 and given seven consecutive life sentences plus eighteen years. He never admitted any of it, swallowed razor blades and staples over the years, and cut off his own little finger in 2009. He died of oesophageal cancer at Long Bay on October 27, 2019.
Onions was attacked in January 1990. Five of the seven died after that. He had described the man, the vehicle and the road, and the description was on file the whole time. Which is why the survivor who got away is the most important figure in this case, and why it took him ringing twice.