The Evil Within - A Top Murder Squad Detective Reveals The Chilling True Stories of The World's Most Notorious Killers (3 page)

He decided to leave the city. He caught a train to Brisbane, where he took up lodgings in a boarding house. He changed his features by dyeing his greying hair black, growing a moustache and assuming the name of Allan MacDonald. Every day, he bought the Sydney newspapers expecting to read of the murder of Hackett and how police were looking for a man named Brennan in connection with the Mutilator Murders.

Shortly after he left, the police received a complaint of rancid odour emanating from the shop premises. Enquiries revealed that the owner had not been seen since 4 November. They entered the premises and found the naked and butchered Hackett concealed beneath the shop. At the time, the police believed that this victim was the new tenant, Brennan (MacDonald). The press reported that this victim was Allan Brennan (William MacDonald) and, on
that basis, the police enquiry continued. However, that assumption later turned out to be false.

In April 1963, MacDonald returned to Sydney, a move that was to be his undoing. On 22 April 1963, a former co-worker of MacDonald spoke to him in the street. He told MacDonald about what the papers had reported and that he was supposed to have been murdered. The police were notified and a month later MacDonald was arrested while working under the name of David Allen. When interviewed, he confessed his identity and confessed to the murders, giving his motive as having being raped by homosexuals in his teenage years and having formed a hatred of them since then.

William MacDonald confessed to all the murders. He was charged with four counts of murder and he pleaded not guilty on the grounds of insanity. His trial, held in September 1963, was one of the most sensational the country had ever seen. When he gave evidence, the public hung onto every word of horror that he spoke. At one point, when he was describing how he cut off one of the victim’s testicles and penis, a woman juror fainted. The jury found him guilty of four counts of murder.

There was one final twist to the tale. Despite MacDonald’s insanity plea, the jury found him to have been sane at the time of the murders. He was sentenced to life imprisonment but was later transferred to a home for the criminally insane. He spent the next 16 years in that institution. In 1980, he was deemed sane enough to be sent back to a mainstream prison, where he volunteered to be isolated from the other prisoners. He is Australia’s
second-longest
serving prisoner. In 2000, he declined a parole date hearing. He was quoted as saying, ‘I am institutionalised now and I have no desire to go and live outside, I would not last five minutes. I have everything I could want in here.’ He is, however, taken on the occasional day trip out.

Between 1989 and 1992, on the Australian highway stretching
from Sydney to Melbourne, seven hitchhikers mysteriously disappeared. Two were Australian teenagers and five were European tourists in their early twenties, of whom two were British. The latter two’s disappearances would lead to the discovery of Ivan Milat’s murderous activities and his subsequent apprehension.

On 19 September 1992, a walker in the Belanglo State Forest just outside Sydney came across the remains of a grave containing two bodies, which were later identified as two missing British women, Joanne Walters and Caroline Clarke. Both had been savagely stabbed and shot and had probably been tied up prior to their deaths.

In October 1993, two further bodies were discovered. These were the young Australian couple, James Gibson and Deborah Everist. They were found buried in undergrowth in a forested area. Both had been brutally murdered. Further searches in that location revealed the body of one of the missing German backpackers, Simone Schmidl. A further search in the same location revealed the bodies of two more missing European backpackers, 21-year-old Gabor Kurt Neugebauer and his 20-year-old girlfriend, Anja Susanne Habschied. Both had vanished two years previously. Police revealed that both victims had been killed by multiple stab wounds. Habschied had been decapitated and her head used for target practice with a rifle. At this location, the police found spent cartridge cases, which were later connected to a weapon that they found. The investigation team deduced that the killer, or killers, spent more time with each victim as the crimes progressed. This fact indicated that, apart from being cruel and sadistic, the perpetrators were also cool, calculating and confident individuals.

Around the time of the disappearances, a young British backpacker by the name of Paul Onions was involved in an encounter with a passing motorist who picked him up while he was hitchhiking north. Onions stated that he had been picked up by an Australian male, who introduced himself as Bill and then pulled a gun on him. However, Onions managed to escape from
the car and flag down another motorist, telling that motorist of the incident. The young backpacker was taken to a local police station where he gave his account. However, due to the fact that he had been unable to obtain the registration number of the vehicle in question, the police filed the report and apparently took no further action as they were unable to trace the vehicle or the man in question.

Several years later, still troubled by his experience and now aware of the bodies being found in the Australian outback, Onions called the Australian High Commission and was put in touch with the taskforce conducting the investigation in Australia. On 13 November 1993, he told the officer who answered the telephone the details of his attack in 1990 and was asked why he had not reported it then. When he replied that he had, he expected the officer to ask him where and when and the name of the officer he spoke to. Instead, he was thanked for the information and the call was terminated. When he didn’t hear any more, he assumed that his report was of no value and did his best to forget about it.

The official search of the forest was suspended on 17 November 1993. No more bodies or additional evidence had been found. During the course of the ongoing police investigation, the motorist who had taken Mr Onions to the police station had been seen and re-interviewed. A further witness had mentioned the name of Ivan Milat as being a possible suspect; he was known to have a mania for guns. The police decided to visit the work premises of Ivan Milat, whose brother Richard coincidentally worked with him. Timesheets were requested for both men for the dates and times of the murders. Richard was found to have been working on every occasion. However, his brother Ivan had been away from work around the dates of the disappearances of the victims.

From this point on, Ivan Milat (b. 1943) was looked on as a suspect but the police did not have any evidence. A criminal record check revealed that Milat had previous convictions – in
1971 he had picked up two girls hitchhiking from Liverpool to Melbourne and had allegedly raped one of them. Both girls testified that he was armed with a large knife and carried a length of rope. He was later acquitted when the prosecution case was dismissed as unproven. As a result, the police closely scrutinised Milat’s past history and his more recent lifestyle right through until 1994.

The search for evidence continued. Officers obtained records of all premises and vehicles that the Milat brothers had owned in the past. They found that three of the Milats owned a small property on the Wombeyan Caves road, 25 miles from Belanglo. In addition, one vehicle found was a silver Nissan Patrol
four-wheel
-drive that had been owned by Ivan Milat. The new owner was interviewed and showed police a bullet that he had found under the driver’s seat. It was a .22 calibre and was later analysed and found to be consistent with cartridge cases found at one of the grave sites. Milat had sold the vehicle two months after the bodies of the two English girls had been discovered.

The police were still aware of Mr Onions’ incident and statement. At the end of April, Paul Onions received an important telephone call from the Australian police asking him if he could fly to Sydney as soon as possible. He was totally confused. Why had it taken them so long? He was subsequently shown a video identification parade, which contained an image of Milat. Onions was left alone to view the images as many times as he liked. He was told to take his time. He felt strange. Four years had passed since the attack and here he was looking for the man who did it. He looked through the tape again and again. He then made a positive identification of Milat.

This identification gave the police sufficient grounds to arrest Milat on suspicion of the assault on Mr Onions and thereby give them the opportunity to execute search warrants at Milat’s home address, where he was subsequently arrested along with his girlfriend. He remained at their house, having been handcuffed while the search commenced. The first item found in Ivan’s house
was a postcard. He was asked whom it was from. He replied that it was from a friend in New Zealand. It began with the words ‘Hi Bill’. Ivan was asked if he was also known as ‘Bill’. He replied, ‘No, it must have been a mistake.’ When a bullet was found in one of the bedrooms, police asked Ivan if he owned any firearms. He said that he didn’t. When asked about the bullet, he said it was left from when he went shooting with his brother. The rooms were searched one at a time. In the second bedroom, two sleeping bags were found in a wardrobe. They were later identified as belonging to Simone Schmidl and Deborah Everist, two of the murder victims.

Milat was taken from the house to Campbelltown police station where he was questioned. During the interview, Milat was evasive and uncooperative. Following the interview, he was charged with the robbery and attempted murder of Paul Onions as a holding charge.

The search of Milat’s house continued. Camping and cooking equipment that belonged to Simone Schmidl was found in the kitchen pantry. The police had hoped that they would find some evidence linking Milat to the murders, but were not prepared for the amount of identifiable property that was found. As the search continued, more identifiable items were found, such as a camera, which was later identified as belonging to one of the victims. A fully loaded Browning automatic pistol was found wedged under the washing machine.

At other locations connected to Milat, more evidence was found: rifles, shotguns, knives and crossbows, together with ammunition. Most of the camping gear belonging to the victims was found in these raids. Also found in a locked cupboard in the house of Ivan’s mother was a long curved cavalry sword. To add more weight to the case, ballistics experts matched the spent cartridges found at some of the crime scenes to the Ruger .22 rifle that was found in Ivan Milat’s home.

Ivan Milat was charged with the murders of the seven backpackers. It was almost a year before the case came to court. The
sheer volume of evidence and the long list of witnesses meant it took weeks for the prosecution to present their case. During cross-examination of the prosecution witnesses, the defence tactics unfolded. Milat would be trying to convince the jury that he was not responsible for the murders but instead implied that his brothers, Richard and Walter, had committed the crimes and implicated him by planting the evidence at his house. Twelve weeks and 145 witnesses later, the prosecution closed their case. After Milat had presented his defence, the jury, after deliberating for three days, found him guilty on 27 July 1996.

For the attack on Paul Onions, he was sentenced to six years’ imprisonment. For the remaining seven counts of wilful murder, he received a life sentence for each. The judge recommended that Ivan Milat remain in prison for the rest of his natural life. Milat is suspected of committing numerous other murders in which people have disappeared in similar circumstances but where no bodies have yet been discovered. He has still continued to protest his innocence in relation to his conviction for the seven aforementioned victims. However, it is hoped that one day Milat may choose to unburden his conscience. The search for clues to the missing victims and their bodies will continue in the hope that further evidence may then connect Milat to these horrendous crimes. This would at least give the families some consolation and the chance to grieve and to bury their loved ones.

Ivan Milat appealed against his convictions on the grounds that the quality of legal representation he had received was too poor, and therefore constituted a breach of his common law right to legal representation. The Appeal Court found that this was not the case and dismissed the appeal.

Since being imprisoned, Milat cut off his little finger with a plastic knife in January 2009, intending to send the severed digit to the High Court. Following this incident he was taken to hospital under high security, but later returned to prison after doctors decided it would not be possible to reattach the finger. This was not the first time Milat had injured himself while in
prison, having swallowed various metal objects including razor blades and staples. He also went on hunger strike in 2011.

Between December 1976 and January 1977, seven young women in Adelaide were abducted and murdered during a 51-day period. All of the young women had previously been reported missing. Then, over a 12-month period between 1978 and 1979, the bodies were discovered in shallow graves in the bush.

James Miller (b. 1938) and Christopher Worrell (b. 1954) had been friends for many years. Both were petty criminals in their own right, and even served a term of imprisonment together. Miller was a homosexual and became infatuated with Worrell, who it would seem was the dominant force and also bisexual; his yearning for women seemed to overtake his male sexual desires according to the events that followed.

On the night of Thursday, 23 December 1976, Miller and Worrell were cruising around the city in their car. There were many young women about that night and Worrell told Miller to drive around the main block of the city centre while he went for a walk. Miller drove around for a short time and then he picked up Worrell and 18-year-old Veronica Knight at the front of the Majestic Hotel. Veronica had accepted the offer of a lift home. She lived at the nearby Salvation Army Hostel in Angus Street and had become separated from her friend while shopping at the City Cross Arcade.