Serial Killer Investigations (46 page)

A special team, known as ‘Task Force Air’, was set up to hunt the Backpacker Killers. When interviewing members of a local gun club, the task force received a strange report. A friend of one of the members had claimed to have witnessed something suspicious in the forest the previous year. When contacted by the police, the man supplied them with a detailed description of two vehicles, one a Ford sedan and the other a four-wheel drive, that he saw driving down one of the trails into the forest. According to him, a man was driving the sedan while in the back seat two other men held between them a female with what appeared to be a gag in her mouth. In the second vehicle, he reported that he saw the same thing—a male driver and a bound female in the back with two males. The observer added descriptions of all the occupants—clothing, hair colour, and approximate ages. He claimed to have noted the license plate number of the four-wheel drive, but had lost it. His official statement to the police was signed, ‘Alex Milat’.

Although the task force methodically pursued the clues they had, they made virtually no progress during the next six months. But following their ‘Milat’ line of inquiry, they finally got their break: a workmate of Croatian-born Richard Milat reported that Milat had been heard saying that ‘killing a woman was like cutting a loaf of bread’. Police checked his work schedule against the presumed dates of the murders. Richard Milat was at work on all of those days, but his brother Ivan was not. And Ivan had a long police record, which included sex offences.

Investigators now turned their attention to the Milat brothers, who were found to own property about 25 miles from Belangalo Once again, the case marked time. Then, in April 1994, the police uncovered a report that a young Englishman named Paul Onions had placed a call to the task force’s hot line five months earlier. Here was the tip they had been hoping for. Onions, a student from Birmingham, had been attacked by a man who corresponded to Milat’s description, near the Belangalo State Forest.

Onions had been hitchhiking from Sydney on 25 January 1990, when he had encountered a short, stocky man with a drooping moustache. He asked the backpacker where he was heading, and offered him a lift in the direction of Melbourne. Onions was impressed by the stranger’s car, an expensive-looking four-wheel drive Nissan. As they climbed into the car, the stranger introduced himself as ‘Bill’, and said that he was Yugoslav.

As they passed the town of Bowral, Onions noticed that Bill kept glancing in the rear view mirror and slowing down. When he asked him why, ‘Bill’ explained that he was trying to find a place where he could park for a while, and retrieve an audiocassette player out of the boot. The lay-by was close to the turn off to the Belangalo State Forest. Some instinct told Onions to get out of the car at the same time as ‘Bill’, which seemed to annoy his companion. ‘What are you doing out of the car?’ he asked. And then, suddenly, he produced a black revolver, and the friendly manner vanished. ‘You know what this is—a robbery.’

Onions tried to calm ‘Bill’ down, then became more alarmed as the man reached into the back seat, and took out a bag containing rope. ‘That was enough,’ said Onions later, ‘I decided to leg it.’ Behind him he heard the man shout, ‘Stop or I’ll shoot,’ and a bullet whizzed past his head. It had the effect of flooding him with adrenalin, and he ran even faster.

The man nonetheless caught up with him, and the two began to wrestle at the side of the highway, while cars drove on past them. Onions managed to break free, and scrambled over the top of the hill. He spotted a van driving towards him, and flung himself on the ground to force it to halt

Behind the wheel was Joanne Berry, who had her sister and four children in the car with her. Onions pleaded: ‘Give me a lift—he’s got a gun.’ Berry, at first frightened by the seemingly crazy man in the road, noticed the true fear in his eyes, and allowed him to clamber into the back of the van through the sliding door.

When he told her what had happened, she drove him straight to the Bowral Police Station. There Onions reported the attack, and Berry told the police that she had also glimpsed the man running away, with his hand held low—obviously to hide the revolver. Incredibly, the Bowral police succeeded in losing the report on the attempted robbery, with the result that ‘Bill’ was free to continue raping and murdering.

Four years later, however, the police lost no time in flying Onions to Sydney. There he identified Milat as the man who had fired his revolver at him. Onions had also left his backpack in Milat’s car when he fled, and he later recognised a blue shirt found in Milat’s garage as his own.

On 22 May 1994, police arrested 50-year-old Ivan Milat in Eaglevale, a Sydney suburb. In Ivan Milat’s garage, police found a bloodstained rope of a type that had been used to bind some of the victims, a sleeping bag that proved to belong to Deborah Everist, and a camera of the make owned by Caroline Clarke. The police also found spent cartridges similar to those found near Caroline in Milat’s garage.

Milat had a long police record. Born in December 1944 to an Australian mother and Croatian father, he had been a member of a large family that had been repeatedly in trouble with the law. In his twenties he had been incarcerated several times for car theft and burglary.

In 1971, he had picked up two female hitchhikers, and had suddenly turned off the highway, produced a knife, and announced that he intended to have sex with them, or would kill them both. One of the girls, who was 18, allowed him to have sex with her on the front seat. Milat had then driven on to a petrol station, and she had taken the opportunity to run inside and tell the attendant that she had been raped, and that the driver was holding her friend. When several employees ran towards the car, Milat pushed the other girl out and drove off at high speed.

Later on, he was pulled over by police, but there were no knives or rope in the car. Milat agreed that he had had sex with the girl, but insisted that it was with her consent. In any case, he said, both the girls were ‘screwy’.

After this brush with the law, Milat had fled to New Zealand, to escape the rape charge, and also two charges of armed robbery. He was brought back and tried three years later, in 1974, but was cleared of all charges and freed. (One of his brothers went to prison for a bank robbery.)

In 1979, he again gave a lift to two women near the Belangalo State Forest, and suddenly pulled off the road. When he told them he intended to have sex with both of them, the women managed to jump out of the car, and hid in a ditch. Although Milat searched for them, cursing and swearing, for nearly two hours, he did not succeed in finding them. Unfortunately, neither of the women reported this attempted rape until years later, when the Backpacker Task Force was set up.

Milat’s trial began in the New South Wales Supreme Court in Sydney on 25 March 1996. By that time, the press had dubbed him ‘Ivan the Terrible’.

What emerged clearly during the trial was that Milat was a ‘control freak’, whose chief pleasure was seeing his victims terrified and helpless. It also became apparent that with every killing, he became more sadistic, and relished taking his time over it. At one murder site, half a dozen cigarette butts were found. He paralyzed some of these female victims by stabbing them in the spine, so he could sexually attack them at his leisure. The injuries found on the victims were so appalling that the presiding judge refused to give details during the trial, in order to spare the relatives.

A friend of Milat’s ex-wife, Karen, gave evidence that suggested that Milat was another Right Man, who demanded total obedience and submission. Milat was obsessive about keeping the house neat and tidy, and when Karen went shopping with a list, she had to stick to every item on it, or risk him flying into a violent rage. She had to ask him for every penny she spent, account for every minute of her time, and bring back receipts for every purchase. Milat’s younger brother George reports that Milat would become enraged with his wife on the smallest provocation. When Karen finally walked out on him, and he could not find her, he burned down her parent’s garage. And it was shortly after Karen left him in 1989 that Milat began his series of murders.

Milat’s barrister suggested in court that the murders must have been committed by Milat’s brothers Walter and Richard, and in a television interview on the day after the trial, the two brothers were accused on camera of being accomplices in the murders. Understandably, both men denied the allegations.

Milat was found guilty on 27 July 1996, and sentenced to life imprisonment on seven counts of murder. In the maximum-security wing of Goulburn jail, only a short distance from Belangalo, where he eventually was transferred, he was placed in solitary confinement after a hacksaw blade was detected in a packet of cigarettes. He declared that he would continue to make every effort to escape.

His brother Boris, tracked down to a secret location by reporters, told them, All my brothers are capable of extreme violence. The things I could tell you are much worse than Ivan is supposed to have done. Everywhere he’s worked, people have disappeared.’

Asked if he thought Ivan was guilty he replied: ‘I reckon he’s done a hell of a lot more.’ Pressed to put a figure on it, Boris Milat replied ‘Twenty-eight.’

Chapter Seventeen

In July 1960, I was in Leningrad—formerly Saint Petersburg—at an official reception at the Astoria Hotel, together with Patricia Pitman, my collaborator on
An Encyclopedia of Murder.
The guests were Russian writers and literary bureaucrats, and at one point I overheard Pat asking a stern-faced lady who spoke excellent English whether there were any important Soviet murder cases we ought to include. The lady snorted contemptuously that such crimes were symptomatic of Western decadence, and were virtually unknown under communism.

It was precisely this attitude that would cost dozen of lives in southern Russia in the 1980s, when Andrei Chikatilo, Russia’s worst serial killer, was operating.

In the autumn of 1990, a year before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Ukrainian police were hunting a serial murderer who had been killing for at least ten years, and who was one of the worst sadists and a sexual perverts in human history.

One of the main reasons the police found him so difficult to track down was the Soviet policy of giving little or no publicity to murder. While a wave of serial killings was taking place around Rostov-on-Don, the Soviet press continued to insist that Russia’s crime rate was virtually nil. So Russian women or children who might otherwise have thought twice about accompanying a strange man to some lonely spot had no idea that they might be in danger.

To the police, the Rostov Ripper was known as the
lesopolosa
killer, or Forest Path Killer, because so many of the victims had been found in woodland. He killed children just as readily as adults, and boys as readily as girls. He preferred to pick up his victims on trains, or in public places such as bus stations, and then take them to some quiet place, where he strangled or stabbed them to death, performed horrific mutilations, and sometimes cooked and ate parts of the body.

As far as Major Mikhail Fetisov, the head of the Rostov CID, was concerned, the murders had begun on 12 June 1982, when 13-year-old girl Lyubov Biryuk disappeared on her way home from an errand in the village of Donskoi. Thirteen days later, her body—reduced to little more than a skeleton by the heat—had been found behind some bushes. She had been stabbed 22 times, and chips of bone missing from around the sockets suggested that the killer had even stabbed at her eyes. Her state of undress indicated a sex crime. Because Lyubov was the niece of a police lieutenant, the case aroused more attention than it might otherwise have done, and Fetisov investigated it personally. From the fact that the killer had taken such a risk—the main road was a few yards away—Fetisov deduced that he was driven by an overpowering sex urge, while the number of stab wounds indicated a sadist for whom stabbing was a form of sexual penetration.

Thirty-four-year-old Vladimir Pecheritsa, a convicted rapist, was hauled in for questioning—he had been at a nearby venereal clinic on the day of the murder. Russian interrogation techniques, developed by the secret police, were designed to extract a confession in the shortest possible time. But instead of confessing, Pecheritsa went away and hanged himself, the first of five men who would end their lives after becoming suspects.

With Pecheritsa’s death, Fetisov hoped that the case was closed. But before 1982 was over, two adult female bodies—reduced to unidentifiable skeletons—were discovered lying in woodland near Rostov. Both victims had been stabbed repeatedly, and stab marks around the eyes made it clear that these killings were the work of the same person as the others—the Forest Path Killer. Fetisov organised a special squad of ten detectives to hunt the maniac. It would later develop that the Forest Path Killer had killed another four victims that year: Lyuba Volubuyeva, 14; Oleg Pozhidayev, nine; Olga Kuprina, 16; and Olga Stalmachenok, ten.

Many of the murders took place near the town of Shakhty, not far from Rostov. The newly formed ‘Red Ripper’ unit therefore began by dispersing police over a wide area, hoping to come upon the murderer by chance.

During 1983, the Forest Path Killer kept up a steady pace of slaughter: 18 June, Laura Sarkisyan, 15; 8 August, Igor Gudkov, seven; 8 August, Irina Dunenkova, 13; and 27 December, Sergei Markov, 14. By the next year, however, the killer seemed to be butchering in a frenzy. On 9 January he killed 17-year-old Natalya Shalapinia. On 22 February he killed a 44-year-old vagrant named Marta Ryabyenko, in Rostov’s Aviator Park. Ten-year-old Dmitri Ptashnikov was found near Novoshakhtinsk on 27 March. In early July, police found evidence of a double murder in woods near Shakhty—a woman whose skull had been smashed in, and a ten-year-old girl who had been beheaded. In late July, another woman’s body as found in woods near Shakhty. On 3 August, it was a 16-year-old girl named Natalia Golosovskaya, found in Aviator Park; on 10 August, 17-year-old Lyudmila Alekseyeva, in woods near the Rostov beach; on 12 August, a 13-year-old boy named Dmitri Illaryonov, who had been castrated; on 26 August, an unidentified woman in woods 30 miles east of Rostov; on 2 September, 11-year-old Aleksandr Chepel; on 7 September, 25-year-old Irina Luchinskaya, again in Aviator Park. Twelve murders in eight months.