divorce… and what I know of… he caused it. He started punching [Karen] and the police were called. When Ivan got violent, he got very violent.’
When Karen left Ivan he lost the one person he was able to control utterly, the person who allowed him to walk all over her and vent his frustrations at life. Now, with her gone, there was just the hopeless inadequate Ivan, left once again to his own devices. There was no one to take it all out on any more.
There is a theory about Milat that argues that it was his marital breakdown that caused him to exercise his fantasies about power and domination on the Hume Highway. While this idea is certainly in part valid it is also the case that Ivan already harboured deeply entrenched dreams of depravity, even before his marriage. It is highly unlikely that this single event, as emotionally damaging as it was, was the sole reason Milat finally felt the urge to go out seeking victims to murder. It may have triggered the mechanism that turned him into a killer, but all the ingredients were firmly in place long before.
On 13 July 1989, Karen and Ivan Milat divorced. Six months later the first two of his victims would die, very hard.
As much as guns held his fascination as a boy, as he grew up Ivan’s love for them strengthened even more. Milat had become a man well-accustomed to believing himself above the scrutiny of society and the law. His vast arsenal of weapons reinforced the outlaw image he coveted. Growing up, he and his brothers had even constructed their own shooting range on the family property. Photographs taken of Ivan, from boy to man, show a smiling, triumphant individual, small but well-muscled, cradling his guns the way another man might hold a girlfriend. His weapons were very important to him. So much so that he could not even resist taking some of them to work with him, at his job working on the roads.
Ivan’s boss at the time, Don Borthwick, remembered him well: ‘You have the drinkers and the players. But Ivan had a knife… you could have cut up a horse with that knife.’ Borthwick also remembers that Ivan was never really the sort of man to socialise with his workmates, preferring to sit quietly with a book and a soft drink while his co-workers drank beer and engaged in the usual sort of barroom bravado. Nor did he chase after women, as many of co-workers did. Ivan Milat was content to go straight home after work and lose himself in one of his gun magazines. He was a very private man.
Borthwick also told of the occasions when Milat would proudly display his gun collection for the guys. He would grin broadly as everyone made a fuss over the impressive weapons, just as though he were a father showing off his newborn child. And then there was the large Bowie knife that Milat always carried. He claimed that he used it for cutting up apples, but Borthwick told him he thought it would be better for cutting up animals. Milat merely laughed at this and said something about how you could never be too careful and that you never knew who was watching.
On Thursday, 25 January 1990, when he was sure no one was watching, Ivan Milat went out cruising the Hume Highway, where he picked up Paul Onions, an English backpacker. Unlike Milat’s first two victims, Onions was able to escape before Milat was able to secure him. One can only imagine the fate that would have befallen him had he not. Milat had spotted Paul in a newsagent’s beside the highway and offered him a lift. Paul accepted and the pair hopped into Milat’s truck. As the journey progressed, so did Paul’s perception of the driver alter. As with Caroline Owens, who found herself at the mercy of Fred and Rose West after being picked up by them at the side of the road, Onions felt a pronounced change in atmosphere once he was inside the vehicle. Where Fred West had at this point stopped the car and punched Caroline in the face to subdue her, Ivan Milat pulled over and produced a pistol. Clearly in big trouble, Onions made the split-second decision that saved his life. He leapt from the vehicle and ran.
Zigzagging along the highway, as he had been taught by the navy to avoid gunfire, Onions managed to evade the shots that Milat fired at him. Onions managed to flag down a passing car and Milat jumped back into his vehicle and sped away. While the likes of Ted Bundy would have been back out searching for a victim later that same night, Milat, opportunistic and driven sexual murderer though he was, demonstrated remarkable restraint. It would be another year before he would launch another attack.
Onions, badly shaken by his ordeal, gave a statement to detectives that was dutifully filed away. Though he had obviously had a brush with death, the detectives dealing with Onions’ case did not take things any further. At the time it seemed like a one-off attack; four years – and several murders later – the assault on Paul Onions would take on a grim significance.
As a serial killer, the level of sadism Ivan Milat exhibited in his murders escalated radically as the killings progressed. There is evidence of sexual assaults committed on both his male and female victims, and there was an evident satisfaction in placing them in restraints and molesting one victim before the horrified eyes of another. This high degree of humiliation was vital to Milat’s fantasies of dominance and control. He revelled in placing his victims in tight, inescapable bondage and, as with Fred West, delighted in subjecting them to the most cruel of tortures before finally dispatching them.
Victims would typically be tied up with rope, elaborately gagged with cloth and stabbed in the spine, to paralyse and humble them yet further. The gag was most likely a crucial part of Milat’s signature, as it contributed to his ultimate goal of the complete dehumanisation of his victims. Unable to speak or communicate intelligibly, his victims were rapidly stripped of their personalities. This would have been of prime importance to a control freak such as Milat.
Some victims also had their faces obscured with articles of their own clothing during the attacks. They were blind and muted as their sadistic assailant hacked and stabbed at them. This would have thrilled Milat yet more. He was a killer who experimented with different methods of dispatching his victims. Some were bludgeoned, some were strangled. Others were shot and stabbed. Multiple knife wounds were often inflicted on his prey. These knife wounds were often inflicted in a methodical or detailed pattern. This is a demonstration of the killer’s ‘picquerism’ (a term used to classify a sexually deviant condition in which the offender harbours an unhealthy predilection for using a knife to penetrate or cut a person).
The savagery of these murders was part of a steadily evolving ritual. The more Milat killed, the more ferocious the assaults became. Anja Habschied, her hands lashed behind her, was made to kneel down as if at some public execution, before being beheaded with a sword. Other victims were stabbed and slashed about the face and head. Many cases demonstrated instances of extreme ‘overkill’, demonstrating Milat’s almost unfathomable level of hatred for his victims. Some had been frenziedly stabbed, then shot multiple times in the head. In a number of cases, the head wounds were deliberately arranged to expose different areas of the skull to further attack. The aim was clearly to destroy, and each act was a different phase along an arc of pure sadism, committed out of an intense desire to inflict maximum suffering on a bound and helpless human being. Milat, as with so many other sexually sadistic serial killers, was a compulsive trophy taker, hoarding items of clothing and other personal effects as souvenirs that he could utilise later to relive his horrible deeds.
Seven murders and a forest full of death proved the undoing of Ivan Milat. When it became obvious that a demented serial killer was at work the police went all out to catch their man. It did not take long for the Milat family to come under suspicion. As a family already well known to the police and the authorities it was only a matter of time before the male members of the clan would come under official scrutiny. It was certainly a fact that several Milat brothers matched at least some of the profiles put together to describe the Belanglo Forest murderer. In the event, most turned out to have solid alibis. The exception was Ivan Milat, and he was placed under surveillance. Later examination of his, and other family members’ homes, yielded a wealth of evidence in the form of victims’ personal property. Forensic links were also established.
After months of close surveillance, the police finally secured a search warrant and raided Milat’s home on 22 May 1994. Neil Mercer from The Sunday Telegraph closely followed the case: ‘When the police raided the house, they found a treasure trove of evidence. There were backpacks, there were tents; there were cooking sets that had belonged to some of the backpackers. There were cameras; there were all sorts of things that could be traced