At about one o'clock on the afternoon of January 25, 1990, a twenty-four-year-old Englishman named Paul Onions came out of a shop at Lombardo's, a shopping center in Casula, on the Hume Highway southwest of Sydney, and accepted a lift from a man who offered one. Onions was on a working holiday and meant to hitchhike to Mildura to pick fruit. The driver said his name was Bill. He said he worked on the roads, that he was on holiday and heading to see friends in Canberra, that his family came from Yugoslavia and that he was divorced. He asked questions that drew out the fact that his passenger had no family or friends in Australia.
South of the city the conversation turned ugly, and about 900 meters short of the turnoff to the Belanglo State Forest the driver pulled over with an explanation Onions did not believe. He produced a revolver and said he was going to rob him. Onions had noticed rope poking out of a bag under the driver's seat. He jumped from the car and ran. The man chased him and fired a shot, and for a moment caught him, but Onions broke loose, ran into the highway and stood in front of an oncoming car until it stopped. The woman driving it turned around and took him to the police station at Bowral. His rucksack stayed behind in the four-wheel drive, and in it was a shirt of the British brand Next.
Constable Nicholson wrote down what Onions told him that afternoon: a man called Bill, about six feet tall and slightly built, with a dark complexion, black hair, black sunglasses and a mustache like the one worn by the cricketer Merv Hughes; mid-thirties; family from Yugoslavia; divorced; working for the roads authority at Liverpool; driving a white or silver four-wheel drive, possibly a Nissan or Toyota; carrying a loaded revolver with a four-inch barrel. The police treated it as an assault with a firearm. None of the bodies had yet been found, and the report was not connected to anything else.
Two backpackers were already dead by then. Deborah Everist and James Gibson, both nineteen and both from Frankston in Victoria, had left Surry Hills in Sydney on the morning of December 30, 1989, to hitchhike to Albury for the ConFest gathering nearby, and were never seen alive again. Within weeks some of Gibson's belongings turned up far to the north of the route they would have taken: a camera found at Galston Gorge on December 31, and a backpack with his name and address on its base found there on March 13, 1990. That December, Ivan Milat had been working on the construction of a roundabout at Dural, not far from the gorge.
Over the next two years five more young travelers set out along the same highway and vanished. Simone Schmidl, twenty-one, from Germany, left Guildford early on January 20, 1991, intending to take a bus to Liverpool and hitchhike to Melbourne. Anja Habschied, twenty, and Gabor Neugebauer, twenty-one, also German, left a backpackers' hostel in Kings Cross on December 26, 1991, planning to travel through Adelaide to Darwin. Joanne Walters, twenty-two, from Maesteg in Wales, and Caroline Clarke, twenty-one, from Northumberland in England, left Kings Cross railway station on April 18, 1992, to take a train out to the Hume Highway and hitchhike to Adelaide. Each of them was traveling in a way that meant no one would miss them for some time.
On September 19, 1992, runners in the Belanglo State Forest found Joanne Walters's body on a rock ledge, with what appeared to be pieces of a gag around her throat, neck and chin. Caroline Clarke was found the next day, thirty meters away. Walters had been stabbed in the neck and chest; ten spent bullets were found in and around Clarke's head, with ten Winchester Winner cartridge cases lying near her body. A year passed before the forest gave up the rest. The remains of Everist and Gibson were found on October 5, 1993, twenty-five meters apart. Schmidl's body was found on November 1, with an elastic band around her skull and what seemed to be a gag at her mouth. Three days later searchers found Habschied and Neugebauer fifty-five meters apart. Habschied had been decapitated. Neugebauer had been gagged with cloth, and five spent bullets were found in his skull.
Each body had been covered with branches and leaf litter. The pathologist, Dr. Bradhurst, found that every victim had been attacked with far more force than was needed to kill, and the appeal court later summarized the forensic evidence as showing the violence was apparently inflicted for some form of psychological gratification. Two had been shot several times in the head. Three had stab wounds that would have paralyzed them, two with their spinal cords completely severed. Two showed signs of strangulation. All but one appeared to have been sexually interfered with before or after death. The trial judge, ruling on the pathology, found that Habschied had been alive when she was decapitated.
The international coverage of the bodies in the forest reached Britain, and Paul Onions, reading about them at home, recognized the road. He contacted the task force and told his story again. The account he had given at Bowral in 1990, with its mustache, its Yugoslav family and its roadworker from Liverpool, pointed at one man. Milat was a road worker in his mid-forties who was often called Bill, whose father came from Yugoslavia, who was divorced, who owned and drove a silver Nissan Patrol, and who had worn exactly that mustache in the photograph on a passport application he had made in 1989. In May 1994, shown a video of thirteen photographs, Onions stopped at the fourth. "That's him," he said. "He is identical to the face I see that approached me at the newsagency."
Police arrested Milat at his house on Cinnabar Street in Eagle Vale on May 22, 1994, and searched it along with his mother's house in Guildford, where he had been living during the killings, and the home of his brother Walter, where he stored some belongings. What they found filled much of the trial. Simone Schmidl's sleeping-bag cover was in his garage with some of her belongings inside it; her sleeping bag was in a bedroom; her water bottle, marked "Simi," was in another room; her backpack was with his sister-in-law, who said he had given it to her. Caroline Clarke's camera was in his kitchen. A sleeping bag said to be Deborah Everist's was in a bedroom. There was a photograph of his girlfriend, Chalinder Hughes, wearing a Benetton top identical to one Clarke had carried. In a pillowcase in the garage were five lengths of sash cord, one of them bloodstained, and DNA testing linked the blood to one of the victims. At his mother's house, among his clothes and lying beside one of his own old shirts, was Paul Onions's Next shirt.
The weapons evidence was just as specific. Hidden in a wall cavity at Cinnabar Street were the parts of a Ruger 10/22 rifle, painted in camouflage colors, and ballistics showed that a Ruger 10/22 fitted with that bolt assembly had fired the shots that killed Caroline Clarke and Gabor Neugebauer. Ammunition among his belongings matched, by batch number and head stamp, the cartridge boxes and cases found in a clearing near Neugebauer's body. A gouge on the bullets from Clarke's head suggested a silencer, and there was a handmade one in his garage. About a week after Habschied and Neugebauer disappeared, Milat had asked his neighbor, Mr. El-Hallak, to repair a hole in the door of his Nissan, which he said had been made by a bullet.
He had faced a jury before. Milat was born in Guildford, in western Sydney, on December 27, 1944, the fifth of fourteen children of a Croatian father, Steven, and an Australian mother, Margaret, and grew up in a violent, hard-up household where the boys hunted, kept guns and were often in trouble with the police. At seventeen he was sent to juvenile detention for six months for burglary, and much of his adult life was spent in and out of prison for theft. In 1971 he was accused of picking up two eighteen-year-old women who were hitchhiking, threatening them with a knife and raping one of them before they got away. While awaiting trial he broke his bail and fled to New Zealand, and he was not arrested until three years later; he was acquitted of the charge. When prosecutors raised the episode while opposing bail in 1994, it was reported widely, and the defense later argued that the publicity had made a fair trial impossible. Milat tried to be tried by a judge alone, but the Director of Public Prosecutions refused consent. A magazine that published his photograph before trial, when identification was plainly going to be in issue, was found in contempt of court.
The trial opened before Justice David Hunt, Chief Judge at Common Law, on March 25, 1996, and ran until July 27. There were eight counts: seven murders and a charge of detaining Paul Onions for advantage. Mark Tedeschi prosecuted, and from the start the Crown did not claim it could prove Milat had acted alone; some victims had traveled in pairs, and the way they had been restrained suggested more than one person might have been involved. Milat gave sworn evidence and denied everything, and over three days in June the prosecutor cross-examined him. The defense made much of the discrepancies in his description: he had said six feet, and Milat stood about five feet eight; he had said mid-thirties, and Milat had been in his mid-forties. Onions later described a spare wheel mounted on the rear of the vehicle, and Milat proved that his Nissan had not carried one in January 1990.
In his closing address, Milat's counsel, Terry Martin, made a concession that reshaped the case. He told the jury there could be "absolutely no doubt" that whoever had committed all eight crimes was a member of the Milat family or very closely associated with it. The question, he said, was which member of the family. The defense argument was that it had probably been one of Ivan's brothers, Richard or Walter, acting alone or with others. Near the end of the summing-up, on the sixty-fourth day of the trial, a juror reported that a man had telephoned him overnight with a threat. He said he had told no other juror, and Hunt discharged him and went on with eleven.
The jury convicted Milat on all eight counts on July 27, 1996. He received a life sentence for each murder. For detaining Paul Onions he received six years, according to the Court of Criminal Appeal's later judgment; many accounts give the total as seven life terms plus eighteen years and describe convictions for attempted murder, false imprisonment and robbery, which the appeal court's record does not bear out. Hunt called the case against him overwhelming. "Any other," he said of a different verdict, "would have flown in the face of reality." He also said, according to published accounts of his remarks on sentence, that it was inevitable Milat had not been alone in the enterprise, although the task force's lead detective said he was convinced Milat was the only killer.
Legal aid for an appeal was refused in April 1997. Milat argued part of it himself before the Court of Criminal Appeal in November, contending that Onions's identification should have been excluded and that the publicity had denied him a fair trial. Chief Justice Murray Gleeson, with Justices Meagher and Newman, dismissed the appeal on February 26, 1998. Gleeson noted that nothing could have planted the Merv Hughes mustache in Onions's mind: he had described it to the Bowral police on the afternoon of the attack, four years before anyone showed him a photograph.
Milat spent the rest of his life insisting he had been set up. He was held at Maitland Gaol and then, from 1997, at Goulburn, much of the time in solitary confinement in its Supermax. In May 2019 he was diagnosed with terminal cancer of the esophagus and stomach and began chemotherapy, and from Long Bay he wrote a three-page letter to the Sun-Herald denying the killings and blaming the task force commander, Clive Small: "Framed by Small and co." On October 11 he was taken to Prince of Wales Hospital for pain relief. He died in the hospital wing of Long Bay Correctional Centre at 4:07 on the morning of October 27, 2019, aged seventy-four, and as a death in custody it went to the coroner. His brother Bill, his next of kin, learned of it from a reporter; he and his wife, Carol, still said the police had the wrong man. The state corrections minister, Anthony Roberts, said Milat could rot in hell. Detectives reportedly visited him eight times in his last months without getting any admission, and police have said they suspect him in other disappearances along the highway, but he was never charged with any other killing.
Nine years before he died, the forest had been touched by the family again. In November 2010 his great-nephew, Matthew Milat, seventeen, killed David Auchterlonie there with an axe on the night of Auchterlonie's seventeenth birthday, and in 2012 he was sentenced to forty-three years, with a nonparole period of thirty.