Milat: Inside Australia's Biggest Manhunt, a Detective's Story
352
Milat: Inside Australia's Biggest Manhunt, a Detective's Story
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781743435076 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Allen & Unwin |
| Publication date: | 08/01/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
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Milat
Inside Australia's Biggest Manhunt a Detective's Story
By Clive Small, Tom Gilling
Allen & Unwin
Copyright © 2014 Clive Small and Tom GillingAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74343-507-6
CHAPTER 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 evidence 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.
After visiting Adelaide to spend Christmas 1991 with a friend she had met in Europe, Caroline returned to Kings Cross in early January 1992. In February, Caroline, Joanne and two of their flatmates went to Mildura to pick grapes. They caught a train to Liverpool before splitting into pairs to hitchhike the rest of the way. In a letter to Gill Baker, a close friend from England, Caroline wrote, 'I'm no longer in Sydney, but actually in Victoria in a place called Mildura for 6 to 8 weeks. I'm doing grape picking ... the money's not bad, about 40 pounds a day. I'm not paying rent so it's even better ... [W]e all get on really well and have a good laugh in the evening.'
The girls returned to Kings Cross in late March, but Caroline and Joanne were back only a few days before they and two friends left for Tasmania, hitchhiking from Liverpool to Melbourne and catching the ferry to Tasmania. A fortnight later Caroline and Joanne decided to return to Sydney, but before they did Caroline and Steve Wright, one of their companions, swapped tents. Caroline's was a small one-person tent while Wright's was a three-person tent that she and Joanne could share. The pair made their way back to Kings Cross, where they booked into the Bridge North Apartments. Within weeks they were on the move again, bound for Mildura, but they would never arrive.
By late July 1992 the New South Wales Police Missing Persons Unit had identified six foreign backpackers who had disappeared in broadly similar circumstances: Caroline Clarke and Joanne Walters, Gabor Neugebauer and Anja Habschied, Simone Schmidl and a young woman who had disappeared from the Gold Coast several years earlier. The head of the Missing Persons Unit, Sergeant Peter Marcon, told The Sydney Morning Herald, '[W]e've got nothing at this point to suggest they've been killed, but we've had a massive media campaign and we haven't been able to come up with anything positive.'
It was the first time Simone's name had been mentioned alongside those of Caroline and the others. At this stage the missing Victorians, James Gibson and Deborah Everist, had not been connected with the others.
CHAPTER 2TWO BODIES
People go missing in New South Wales every day, often by choice. The head of the Missing Persons Unit, Sergeant Marcon, told The Sunday Telegraph in July 1992 that 'there were 861 people regarded as long-term missing in New South Wales and about a further 400 more recent cases being investigated'. But media interest both in Australia and England, generated especially by the father of Caroline Clarke, pressured senior police to take seriously the disappearance of the foreign backpackers.
Kings Cross–based Detective Sergeant Neville Scullion was given the job of investigating the disappearances of Caroline Clarke and Joanne Walters. It was an unfortunate choice, as Detective Scullion's main interest was in enriching himself through corruption — a fact revealed some years later by the Royal Commission into the New South Wales Police Service. Nevertheless, growing media attention and speculation of foul play forced Scullion to spend the following weeks chasing leads and, in some cases, taking statements from seemingly credible witnesses who claimed to have seen Caroline and Joanne since their disappearance. Few leads provided results; most fizzled out after a cursory investigation.
After about two months Scullion was convinced that Caroline and Joanne were dead, but he had no idea where, how or why they had been killed, or who had killed them. Police interest in the case began to wane. But Caroline's parents refused to give up and they continued to speak to the newspapers. In August 1992 Joanne's parents, Ray and Gill, came to Sydney. They spoke to Scullion, who told them privately that he believed both girls were dead. Despite Scullion's advice, Joanne's parents continued hunting for information about their daughter in Kings Cross and elsewhere, even travelling to Mildura to visit the vineyard where Joanne and Caroline had picked grapes.
Ray and Gill Walters were still in Sydney on Saturday 19 September when an unidentified body was found in the Belanglo State Forest, about 140 kilometres south of Sydney, near the town of Bowral and about 12 kilometres west of the Hume Highway. Keith Siely and Keith Caldwell had been on an orienteering training exercise in the forest when they noticed a bad smell. It came from a nearby rocky overhang about 95 metres south-west of the Longacre Creek fire trail. Under the overhang and covered by dry sticks and leaves they saw a bone, a boot and some clothing. They had discovered a body.
Two others on the orienteering course soon joined them. They rang Bowral Police who, along with Senior Constable Andrew Grosse of the Goulburn Police Crime Scene Unit, arrived and began an examination that continued into the night. The female body was badly decomposed, but it was soon clear that it had been subjected to extreme violence. There was evidence of at least fourteen stab wounds to the neck, chest and back, cutting ribs, spine and cervical vertebrae. What appeared to be a garrotte lay on the ground near the victim's neck.
The next morning, as police scoured the surrounding bush, another female body was found hidden under branches and other forest debris beneath a fallen tree about 30 metres away from the first. The second was also badly decomposed. An examination revealed ten bullet entry wounds to the skull from five different angles: the back, front, each side and top of the skull. Ten .22 calibre Winchester cartridge cases were found clustered on the ground about 3 metres from the body. A red cloth had been wrapped twice around the head, apparently before the shooting. There were also a number of stab wounds to the upper body and multiple slashings of the clothing.
Except for the clothing and jewellery worn by the victims at the time of the attack, few other personal items were found at either scene or in the surrounding bush.
The first crime scene yielded little additional evidence, but at the second police found six cigarette butts. Five were later identified as being Longbeach, the brand smoked by Caroline Clarke; the sixth was not identifiable. All cigarettes were believed to have been smoked by Caroline. This suggested the killer had spent half an hour or more at the scene before killing Caroline.
Ten fired Winchester cartridge cases were found about 3.5 metres from the head of Caroline Clarke. It was a position where the cartridges would be expected to have landed after being ejected from a rifle used to shoot Caroline Clarke in the head in the area where her body was found. Three bullets were recovered in the ground under the head of Caroline Clarke and seven were later recovered from her skull during the autopsy. It appears that her head was moved at least three times and further shots were fired each time. Sergeant Gerard Dutton of the Forensic Ballistics Unit said that eight of the bullets were consistent with having been fired from a Ruger 10/22 rifle while two of the bullets were too damaged to identify the weapon from which they had been fired.
Dr Peter Bradhurst, a forensic pathologist, and Dr Christopher Griffiths, a forensic odontologist (dental expert), came to the forest to inspect the bodies. The remains were then taken to the morgue at Glebe, where a detailed examination was carried out and the findings photographed and documented. Both girls appeared to have been sexually attacked.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Milat by Clive Small, Tom Gilling. Copyright © 2014 Clive Small and Tom Gilling. Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
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Table of Contents
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,