Ivan Milat, the "Backpacker Murderer"

The victims

Between December 1989 and April 1992, seven young travellers disappeared after setting out to hitchhike from Sydney. James Gibson and Deborah Everist, both 19 and from Melbourne, were last seen in inner Sydney on 30 December 1989, planning to head for Albury. German backpacker Simone Schmidl, aged 20 (some reports give 21), vanished on 20 January 1991 while hitchhiking towards Melbourne. Fellow Germans Gabor Neugebauer, 21, and Anja Habschied, 20, disappeared from Kings Cross on 26 December 1991 on their way to Darwin. British travellers Caroline Clarke, 21, and Joanne Walters, 22, left a Kings Cross hostel on 18 April 1992. Their families spent months, and in some cases years, not knowing what had happened to them.

Discoveries in Belanglo State Forest

In September 1992 the bodies of Caroline Clarke and Joanne Walters were found in Belanglo State Forest in New South Wales. Just over a year later, on 5 October 1993, the remains of James Gibson and Deborah Everist were found in the same forest, less than a kilometre away. Within days police said the deaths were probably the work of the same offender or offenders. In early November 1993 searchers found Simone Schmidl, and then Gabor Neugebauer and Anja Habschied, a few kilometres from the earlier sites. The finds confirmed that a serial killer had been targeting young people travelling by road.

Task Force Air and the survivor

NSW Police set up Task Force Air in October 1993 under Superintendent Clive Small, and the reward for information was raised from $100,000 to $500,000 in November. A breakthrough came through Paul Onions, a 24-year-old British hitchhiker who had escaped from a driver armed with a gun near Belanglo on 25 January 1990. He had described his attacker to police on the day, and after contacting NSW investigators he identified Ivan Milat, a man born in Sydney in 1944, from a set of 13 photographs. On 22 May 1994 police raided homes linked to Milat, including one at Eagle Vale, and arrested him over the attack on Onions. On 31 May 1994 he was charged with the murders of all seven backpackers.

Trial and verdict

After a committal hearing that lasted 28 days, Milat stood trial before a jury in the NSW Supreme Court from March 1996. The prosecution, led by Mark Tedeschi QC, relied heavily on Onions' evidence, saying that up to 40 details matched his description of the man who had attacked him, and on items found when homes linked to Milat were searched. The defence suggested that another member of his family could have been responsible and that evidence had been planted, arguments the jury rejected. On 27 July 1996 Milat was found guilty of seven murders and of kidnapping Onions. Justice David Hunt sentenced him to seven consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole.

Appeals and death in custody

The NSW Court of Criminal Appeal dismissed his appeal in February 1998, the High Court refused him special leave to appeal in May 2004, and in December 2006 he lost a bid for an inquiry into his convictions. Milat never admitted any of the killings. He was diagnosed with oesophageal and stomach cancer in May 2019 and died in custody at Long Bay on 27 October 2019, aged 74. Because it was a death in custody, his case was referred to the NSW State Coroner, as the law requires even when a prisoner dies of natural causes. Relatives of the victims said they still hoped for a confession that might help other families.

Suspicions of other victims

Investigators long suspected that Milat may have been responsible for other unsolved crimes, but he was convicted only of the backpacker case, and those suspicions remain unproven. In October 2025 the NSW Legislative Council set up an inquiry into unsolved murders and long-term missing persons cases in the state between 1965 and 2010, including possible clusters of cases in areas such as the Southern Highlands and inner Sydney. Milat is not named in its terms of reference, but at hearings in June 2026 relatives of several missing or murdered people, including those of Keren Rowland, who disappeared after the Canberra Show in February 1971, and Kay Docherty, who vanished from the Illawarra, told the committee they believed their relatives could be connected to him and criticised past police handling of their cases. The state's top homicide officer, Detective Superintendent Joe Doueihi, told the inquiry that three unsolved homicides may involve Milat, without giving details.

Significance for New South Wales

The backpacker murders remain one of Australia's most notorious criminal cases, and the targeting of young hitchhikers, many of them visitors from overseas, made it a story followed far beyond New South Wales. The whole-of-life sentence ensured Milat would never be released, and the evidence of a lone survivor proved decisive in a case built years after the first disappearances. Three decades on, the case is again shaping public policy: the parliamentary inquiry is examining whether weaknesses in the justice system denied answers to families, the resources available for cold cases, and how new forensic technology might help, with the Unsolved Homicide Unit telling MPs that 36 officers were handling around 700 cases.