Milat Read online
Other books by
Clive Small and Tom Gilling
Smack Express: How organised crime got hooked on drugs
Blood Money: Bikies, terrorists and Middle Eastern gangs
Betrayed: The shocking story of two undercover cops
First published in 2014
Copyright © Clive Small and Tom Gilling 2014
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.
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Dedicated to the victims
and to the families and friends of the victims
of Ivan Milat, and to the members of Task Force Air,
whose efforts put him in gaol for life
‘Amazing police work. Amazingly painstaking.’
—Mark Tedeschi, Senior Crown Prosecutor,
commenting on the work
of Task Force Air
CONTENTS
Important dates in the backpacker investigation
Acknowledgements
About the authors
Preface
PART 1: THE ROAD TO BELANGLO
1 Missing
2 Two bodies
3 A poisoned chalice
4 Task force
5 Serial killer
6 Too much information
7 Hotline
8 Breakthrough
9 Aladdin’s cave
10 The Milats
11 Committal
12 Trial
13 Paul Gordon
PART 2: BEYOND BELANGLO
14 How many more?
15 Reform
16 Newcastle
17 Cold cases reopened
18 Grief
19 Dreams of escape
20 Copycat
21 It wasn’t me
22 Did Ivan act alone?
Afterword
Appendices
Appendix 1: Summary of circumstances implicating Ivan Milat in the seven backpacker murders and the attempted abduction of Paul Onions
Appendix 2: Ruger .22 calibre self-loading rifle, model 10/22
Appendix 3: Anschutz .22 calibre repeating rifle, model 1441/42, serial number 1053118
Appendix 4: Staff of Task Force Air
Bibliography
IMPORTANT DATES IN THE BACKPACKER INVESTIGATION
1989
30 DECEMBER Deborah Everist and James Gibson last seen
31 DECEMBER James Gibson’s camera found at Galston Gorge, near Hornsby
1990
15 JANUARY Deborah Everist and James Gibson reported missing
25 JANUARY Paul Onions flees from abductor on Hume Highway, near Bowral
13 MARCH James Gibson’s backpack found at Galston Gorge
1991
20 JANUARY Simone Schmidl last seen
25 JANUARY Simone Schmidl reported missing
26 DECEMBER Gabor Neugebauer and Anja Habschied last seen
1992
30 JANUARY Gabor Neugebauer and Anja Habschied reported missing
18 APRIL Joanne Walters and Caroline Clarke last seen
29 MAY Joanne Walters reported missing
EARLY JUNE Caroline Clarke reported missing via Interpol
19 SEPTEMBER Body of Joanne Walters discovered at Belanglo State Forest, near Bowral
20 SEPTEMBER Body of Caroline Clarke discovered at Belanglo
1993
5 OCTOBER Remains of Deborah Everist and James Gibson found at Belanglo
6 OCTOBER Clive Small appointed to head investigation into the Belanglo murders
18 OCTOBER Alex Milat interviewed
1 NOVEMBER Remains of Simone Schmidl found at Belanglo
4 NOVEMBER Remains of Gabor Neugebauer and Anja Habschied found at Belanglo
1994
26 FEBRUARY Ivan Milat placed under surveillance
5 MAY Paul Onions identifies Ivan Milat as his abductor
22 MAY Police raid Milat family properties and Ivan Milat arrested
24 OCTOBER Ivan Milat’s committal—on seven charges of murder, attempted abduction and related charges—begins
1996
11 MARCH Trial of Ivan Milat begins
27 JULY Ivan Milat convicted and sentenced to seven life sentences for murder and six years for ‘detention for advantage’
2010
29 AUGUST Remains of ‘Angel’ found at Belanglo
20 NOVEMBER Matthew Milat and Cohen Klein murder David Auchterlonie at Belanglo
8 JUNE 2012 Matthew sentenced to 43 years and Klein sentenced to 32 years for murder
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Our sincere thanks to those who have helped directly or indirectly with the writing of this book. Thanks also to the journalists who over the decades have contributed to the solving of crimes through their reporting on the backpacker murders, unsolved murders and the ‘disappearance’ of missing persons.
Special gratitude to Tim Everist, Janet Fife-Yeomans, Bob Godden, Frank Goodyer, Olga and Guenther Habschied, Martha Jabour, Frank and Angela Klaassen, John Laycock, Rod Lynch, Robert May, Graham McNeice and Graham McNeice Productions, Neil Mercer, Dr Rod Milton, Manfred and Anke Neugebauer, Alex Pollock, Kim Shipton, Candy Sutton and Ray and Gillian Walters for their support and advice.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
In 2008 Clive Small and Tom Gilling published the bestselling book Smack Express: How organised crime got hooked on drugs, which exposed the growth and transformation of organised crime in Australia since the late 1960s. They followed this up two years later with Blood Money: Bikies, terrorists and Middle Eastern gangs, and later with Betrayed: The shocking story of two undercover cops.
CLIVE SMALL is a 38-year New South Wales Police veteran. Much of his time was spent in criminal investigation. He was awarded several commendations. From 1977 to 1980 he worked as an investigator with the Woodward Royal Commission into Drug Trafficking. During 1987–88 he was an investigator on Strike Force Omega, which reinvestigated the 1984 shooting of Detective Michael Drury. In the early 1990s Small led the backpacker murder investigation, which resulted in the conviction of Ivan Robert Milat for the murder of seven backpackers in the Belanglo State Forest, south of Sydney, between 1989 and 1992. In 2001, as head of the Greater Hume Police Region, he helped dismantle the Vietnamese street gangs that had made Cabramatta Australia’s heroin capital. After retiring from the police he joined the New South Wales Independent Commission Against Corruption as the executive director of operations. Since March 2007 he has been writing full time.
TOM GILLING’s first two novels, The Sooterkin (1999) and Miles McGinty (2001), were both shortlisted for major awards and chosen as notable books of the year by The New York Times. They have been translated into several languages. His third novel, Dreamland (20
08), has been published in Australia, Britain and the United States. As a journalist he has worked for numerous publications including The Sydney Morning Herald, Rolling Stone, The Guardian (UK), and The New York Times. Before Smack Express he co-wrote two non-fiction books, Trial and Error (1991), about the Israeli nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu; and Bagman: The final confessions of Jack Herbert (2005), about the events that led to the Fitzgerald Inquiry into police corruption in Queensland.
PREFACE
On 27 July 1996 a jury found Ivan Milat guilty of murdering seven backpackers and of abducting another, Paul Onions, who would surely have been Milat’s eighth victim had he not managed to escape.
Other books have been written about the groundbreaking investigation that led to the arrest and conviction of Milat. This book will tell the story from a unique perspective, drawing on unpublished sources and operational insights available to me as the original commander of Task Force Air. But the book tells a much broader story.
First, I want to show how the crimes of Ivan Milat have left a profound mark on all of us, so that twenty years after his capture the very words ‘Milat’ and ‘Belanglo’ still cause a collective shudder. Second, by recounting the events that led to Milat’s capture from my own point of view at the head of the investigation, I want to demonstrate how the techniques and systems pioneered by Task Force Air have transformed the investigation of major crime in New South Wales.
As the title suggests, Ivan Milat and the murders he committed (as well as others he may have committed but has never been charged with) are the focus of this book. At a deeper level, however, the book is a study not just of the backpacker murders but of all murders, of how they affect us as individuals and as a society, and of the never-ending challenge faced by the police to bring the killers to justice.
Clive Small
1
MISSING
Between 1989 and 1992 seven backpackers—three couples and one woman travelling alone—were reported missing in Australia. All seven had been last seen in Sydney or its suburbs. These reports would trigger one of Australia’s biggest ever manhunts.
On 15 January 1990 Deborah Phyllis Everist and James Harold Gibson, both nineteen years old, were reported missing by their mothers at the Frankston Police Station in suburban Melbourne. James and Deborah had left Melbourne on 28 December 1989 and hitchhiked to Sydney to visit friends of James in the inner-city suburb of Surry Hills. They then left for Walwa, on the Victorian side of the Murray River, to attend the Confest conservation festival. It was thought they would catch a train to Liverpool, in Sydney’s south-west, before hitchhiking the rest of the way. They never reached Walwa.
James lived with his family in Moorooduc, a Melbourne suburb on the Mornington Peninsula. Deborah lived with her parents in Frankston. She was a green activist and during the late 1980s had travelled the east coast of Australia to take part in anti-logging protests. She planned to start university in 1990. The pair met in mid-1989 at a concert.
On 13 March 1990 Wendy Dellsperger was driving along the narrow and winding Galston Road at Galston Gorge, about 36 kilometres north-west of Sydney, when she saw a red backpack on the side of the road. Thinking it might have been lost, Dellsperger stopped and put the backpack into her car. That night she examined it. The top, where a name might have been expected to be written, had been cut off, but inside she saw the name ‘Gibson’, a Victorian address and a phone number. The next day she called the number. James Gibson’s mother, Peggy, answered. The next morning Dellsperger took the backpack to the Hornsby Police Station and showed police the spot where she had found it, but little more was done. On 27 March the Hornsby Advocate ran a story about the discovery of the backpack and the missing hikers, mentioning James Gibson’s Ricoh camera. The story was seen by Michael James who, while cycling through Galston Gorge early on the morning of 31 December 1989—a day after James and Deborah were last seen—had found a similar camera. He still had the camera and immediately took it to Hornsby Police Station. It was James’s.
In early April 1990 police divers searched the river that runs through the gorge and on 29 April, 140 police and support personnel, including members of the State Emergency Services and Rural Fire Service, began a search that extended for 3 kilometres along the road from the small wooden bridge at the bottom of the gorge. James’s father and brother were present during the search, but nothing belonging to James or Deborah was found.
On 25 January 1991 Erwinea Schmidl reported her 22-year-old daughter, Simone, missing to Russell Street Police Station in Melbourne. Erwinea had flown to Australia from her home in Regensburg, Germany, to catch up with her daughter in Melbourne, but Simone failed to arrive. Erwinea reported Simone as a missing person and appealed to the media for help, but returned to Germany without knowing what had happened to her daughter.
Simone Loretta Schmidl was born in 1969 in Regensburg, at the confluence of the Danube and Regen rivers. She began her travels in 1987 when she visited Yugoslavia. Two years later she travelled to Canada and Alaska. Simone arrived in Australia on 1 October 1990 and stayed in Sydney before hitchhiking with a friend to Melbourne and then travelling to Queensland. Always on the move, Simone and her friend returned to Sydney and again visited Melbourne before returning to Sydney and leaving for New Zealand on 20 November 1990. They travelled around the country for two months before returning to Sydney on 19 January 1991.
That night Simone and her companion slept at a friend’s place at Guildford in Sydney’s west. The next morning Simone left with the intention of catching a bus to nearby Liverpool, from where she intended to hitchhike to Melbourne. She was never seen again.
On 30 January 1992, 22-year-old Gabor Kurt Neugebauer and 21-year-old Anja Susanne Habschied were reported missing to the Special Branch, Australian Federal Police, by the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany. They had been due to return to Germany on 24 January 1992. Anja’s father, Guenther, had gone to Munich Airport to meet them, but after they failed to arrive he checked and found they were not on the plane. There was no record of them having boarded it. Guenther rang the Neugebauers and told them Gabor and Anja had not arrived, and over the next few days the parents made unsuccessful efforts to contact their children before reporting them missing.
Gabor was born in 1970 near Stuttgart, Germany, but the family moved several times because of his father’s position in the West German Air Force, before settling in Heimerzheim, about 20 kilometres west of Bonn. During 1991 Gabor and his girlfriend, Anja, who was born in 1971 in the town of Sulz on the Neckar River, visited several countries in Europe. Later that year they visited Indonesia, staying only a few weeks before flying to Darwin in November 1991. From Darwin they travelled to the North Queensland coast and made their way to Sydney, arriving a few days before Christmas and staying at the Original Backpackers Hostel in Kings Cross. On the morning of 26 December they left by road for Adelaide en route to Darwin, where they had pre-booked a flight to Indonesia on 1 January 1992. It was the last time they were seen alive.
Two months after reporting their son missing, Manfred and Anke Neugebauer were in Kings Cross searching for answers. They stayed in Sydney’s eastern suburbs with Frank and Angela Klaassen, a Dutch family they had known for several years. The Klaassens asked their long-time friend, German-born Rita O’Malley, to assist the Neugebauers with translation and later observed, ‘Rita became invaluable in helping the police with translating documents and making phone calls to Germany.’ With the Sydney inquiries exhausted, the Neugebauers hired a campervan and spent three weeks travelling up the east coast to Queensland, across to Darwin, down to Alice Springs, Port Augusta and Broken Hill, contacting backpacker hostels and other places where Gabor and Anja might have stayed. Recalling the trip, the Klaassens observed, ‘Unfortunately the trip was to no avail, but we must say it was an incredible feat; having to adjust to driving on the other side of the road, acclimatising to the extreme temperatures and coping with the desperation of not finding any evide
nce of Gabor and Anja.’ A reported sighting of the two backpackers in South Australia gave the Neugebauers a sense of hope, but that hope was dashed when the sighting was found to be false.
On 29 May 1992 Joanne Lesley Walters, a 22-year-old British backpacker, was reported missing to North Sydney Police Station by a former employer for whom Joanne had worked as a nanny at Kirribilli on Sydney’s lower north shore. The report had been prompted by Joanne’s worried parents in the United Kingdom. A short time later, Joanne’s travelling companion, 22-year-old Caroline Jane Clarke, was reported missing to the New South Wales Police Missing Persons Unit, via Interpol. Caroline’s parents, Ian and Jacquie, in England, made the report.
Joanne’s parents, Ray and Gill, had been concerned about their daughter’s safety within weeks of her leaving Kings Cross. She had not contacted them for a while and, unusually, had missed Father’s Day. Ray made inquiries of a number of his daughter’s friends in Australia, only to be told they had not heard from her either. Ray and Gill knew their daughter was travelling with Caroline Clarke and from information their daughter had given them, they were able to track down Caroline’s parents. The Clarkes hadn’t heard from their daughter since early April. Both families agreed to contact the police.
Joanne Walters was born in 1970 in the small town of Maesteg, South Wales. In 1990 she visited and worked in Greece, Italy and Sardinia, before flying to Australia in June 1991 with a friend she had met during her travels. After spending a short time in Sydney the pair made their way up the Queensland coast, picking up part-time work as they went, before returning to Sydney and settling in Kings Cross.
Caroline Clarke was born in 1970 and raised in Surrey, England. In August 1991 she left to explore the world with a friend, 23-year-old Noel Goldthorpe. They travelled around Europe before Goldthorpe returned to England, leaving Caroline to fly on alone to Australia. Arriving in Sydney on 19 September, she found accommodation at the Original Backpackers Hostel at Kings Cross where, about two months later, she met Joanne Walters.