Australia, with its sparsely populated and charming scenery, has always been a hot destination for backpackers around the world. Hitchhiking is both money-saving and simple, is one of the most commonly used modes of transportation, but it can kill you.
Between 1989 and 1992, a "zealous" hitchhiker made seven innocent young people clear of the wilderness.
Abductions, knives, shoot, suffocations, beatings, sexual torture, and even beheadings of the living. The cruelty of means makes people shudder! His name is Ivan Milat, the most notorious backpacker in Australian history, killer.
Seven rotten corpses in new state forest park
On September 19, 1992, two joggers smelled a stinging putrefaction in Belanglo Forest Park, New prefecture. With the idea of finding out, they found a mound of dirt in the lush woods, scattered with hair, bones, mutilated clothes and shoes!
The frightened jogger immediately called the police and the police rushed to search, but the next day, just 30 meters from the pile, a second body was found.
Both of the dead were women, but the bodies were highly decayed. After difficult forensics, the police confirmed that they were the British backpackers Caroline Clarke and Joanne Walters. who had been missing nearby.
In April of that year, the British girl Caroline and Joanne left Sydney together for a hitchhiker to visit the new state, and then disappeared strangely.
They were apparently subjected to extreme cruelty:
Caroline was shot several times, with wounds piercing breast and the back, and 10 gunshot wounds to the head! The medical examiner said she might have been forced to kneel when she was killed and that her underwear had been torn open.
Joanne's wounds were even more startling: a full 35, deep into the heart and lungs, even the spine was chopped, paralyzing her completely. Her pants were opened, her underwear and socks were missing, and the police couldn't tell if she had been subjected to sexual invasion. Because the body had rotted so badly.
Such brutal means are almost unheard of! The police tried their best to search for days, too long and no further clues, and the case reached a stalemate.
The terrible news spread quickly, and everyone around the world was shocked to hear it. But even worse, this is just a startling prelude to the murder case.
Six months later, in October 1993, it was still Belanglo State Forest Park. Local man Bruce Pryor accidentally walked to a very remote area, unexpectedly saw the human skull and femur! When the police arrived, they soon found two more bodies and confirmed that they were Year Nineteen Eighty-nine 's missing Australian lovers James Gibson and Deborah Everist..
James still has eight stab wounds on his bones, paralyzed by broken upper spine and punctured by heart and lung; Deborah has two fractures on his head and a knife mark on his body.
A month later, Sheriff Jeff Trichter found another skull in the forest, a female backpacker from Germany, Simone Schmidl..
She was last seen hitchhiking in January 1991 and was never heard from. There were 8 knife wounds on the body, the spine was severed, and the heart and lung were punctured. But strangely enough, the clothes found at the scene were not hers, but the other missing German girl, Anja Habschied..
Then Anja and her boyfriend, Gabor Neugebauer, were found dead in a small grave 50 metres away. They disappeared around Christmas 1991. Anja's head was cut off by the killer and is still missing; Gabor was shot in the head with six bullets.
In a park, seven people were killed, shoot, suffocated with a knife, beaten, tortured sexually, covered with branches, the same way.
The police are desperate, but in the thick forest, searching for evidence is like looking for a needle in a haystack. In the age of underdeveloped network information, even if trying to collect clues from the public, it is still difficult to make progress.
A horrible driver and the only survivor.
It wasn't until November 1993 that a phone call from Britain led to a bloody and eerie series of killings.
On the phone was a British boy named Paul Onions, who had been hiking in Australia on a six-month visa in January 1990.
As he didn't have enough money on him, he said he intended to take a ride to the south of Sydney to do something. A muscular man in silver Nissan pulled up, calling himself "Bill," willing to give him an enthusiastic ride.
It took about an hour to arrive near Belanglo State Forest Park. Paul found that Bill was in a bit of a wrong shape. As he scolded British immigrants, he slowed down and looked back at him from time to time.
After stopping, Bill suddenly pulled the knife, pistol and rope out of the seat! Startled, Paul jumped out of the car and ran out of the car, and the driver was chasing him in the back, crazy shoot!
Fortunately, the bullet missed him, and a van passed by, and the kind-hearted woman driver rescued Paul, and sent him to the nearby police station to report him. But by the time they got back to the crime site, Bill would have disappeared.
At the end of 1993, when Paul heard of the bizarre Australian serial murder in Britain, he realized that he might be the only lucky survivor.
He returned to Australia to help police investigate the case, identifying the driver, "Bill," a serial murderer whose real name is Ivan Milat, from dozens of suspects.
He was a road worker and had been imprisoned for kidnapping and forcing jian women.
Under the finger of Paul, more than 300 police officers searched the homes of Ivan Milat and his brothers at the same time and found pistol, the victims' clothing, cameras, camping gear, etc., that matched the murder.
Over the years, he has been pretending to be a "warm-hearted driver", taking innocent backpackers to that forest park on the grounds of letting people ride the wind, not only brutally killing them, but also displaying the clothes of the victims as if they were collecting trophies!
After nearly two years of investigation and charges, Ivan Milat was sentenced to seven life imprisonment without parole in July 1996 on several counts such as murder.
The bizarre murder was finally solved, but seven innocent young lives died. At the same time, Ivan Milat's bad deeds are far more than that.
A complex environment and a violent life
Born in 1944 to a Yugoslav immigrant and an Australian mother, Ivan Milat is the fifth of the family's 14 children. His family was not harmonious, his father drank alcohol and often beat his wife; his mother was violent and even stabbed his parents to give birth to their children.
Growing up in this environment, Ivan Milat was addicted to violence and weapons. He used shotguns and knives to kill animals at the age of eight, and at the age of 27 abducted two hitchhikers at the age of 27.
In 2015, on Channel 7's Sunday Night program, Ivan Milat's brother admitted that his brother had tried to kill before the serial backpacker murder. He regretted that he was trying to protect Ivan Milat, for 50 years.
West Sydney, March 1962. Under the age of 18, Ivan Milat, 's in the back seat of the car, shoot. Taxi driver, Neville Knight.. The bullet pierced Neville's spine and paralyzed him for life. Afterwards, he went home to show off to his brother: "the taxi driver shouted, 'you ruined me' four or five times!"
Nor did, Ivan Milat stop after being sentenced to life imprisonment. He was beaten by another prisoner and then tried to escape with his cellmate, so he was transferred to the highest security prison in the new state of Goulburn.
He then mutilated himself in prison, severed his little finger with a plastic knife, swallowed blades, stapled books and other metal objects, and went on a hunger strike for the reason that the prison did not treat him favourably.
He also wrote to his nephew, Matthew Milat, complaining that he was "wronged" and that prison conditions were "too poor".
Perhaps influenced by him, in 2012, his nephew, together with a friend, slashed 17-year-old David Auchterlonie, to death with an axe in the Belanglo forest where Ivan Milat committed an evil act. David Auchterlonie, was sentenced to 43 years in prison.
Police suspect that, Matthew Milat has committed far more than seven people found guilty, but because there is no evidence, they can only fail to do so. There was no death penalty in Australia, and the devil lived in prison, but young lives never came back.
Hitchhiker, really don't sit casually.