Crime Time: Australians Behaving Badly (14 page)

IVAN MILAT

BACKPACKER MURDERS

B
etween 1989 and 1992, seven young hitchhikers were bashed, strangled, stabbed and shot. Their bodies were dumped in Belanglo State Forest, outside Sydney.

Ivan Milat, their killer, was one of fourteen children. His parents couldn’t handle him. He left school at fourteen, and was soon in trouble with the law, spending a total of about five years in jail by the time he was 25. He married, but his wife left him, suspecting there was something not quite right about him. He frightened her.

Late in 1989, two young university students from Melbourne, Deborah Everist and James Gibson, went to Sydney for a holiday. Deborah rang her mother from Sydney to say they were fine, but that was the last time they ever spoke. She and James went south along the Hume Highway, towards Albury. Then they vanished.

A month later, Paul Onions, a British backpacker, was on his way to Mildura. He accepted a lift. Outside the city, the driver pulled out a gun. Paul escaped from the car, leaving his belongings behind. He stopped a car and urged the driver, Joanne Berry, to drive on. Joanne later identified the 4WD and its driver.

She dropped Paul off at the local police station, where he told his story. He and Joanne were both witnesses in Milat’s trial.

A year later, German tourist Simone Schmidl was on her way to Melbourne to meet her mother. She told friends she was planning to hitchhike. They said it was unsafe and offered to pay her fares. But Simone insisted on hitching.

She disappeared.

On Boxing Day 1991, two German students, Gabor Neugebauer and Anja Habschied, left Sydney and also vanished.

Tourists Joanne Walters and Caroline Clarke left Sydney on 18 April 1992, never to be seen alive again, except by their killer.

In September 1992, two bushwalkers found Joanne Walters’ body. They contacted police, who soon found Caroline Clarke’s remains. Both girls had died horribly. Caroline’s head had been used for target practice. Police also found cartridges from a gun called a 10/22 Ruger.

What was left of university students James and Deborah was discovered in October 1993 in the same region.

Police began to search the Belanglo Forest for other bodies.

Simone Schmidl’s body turned up on 1 November. She had been stabbed several times. Finally, they unearthed the bones of Gabor and Anja. Anja’s skull was missing.

One hundred cartridge cases from bullets used by the killer were found around these bodies. There was also the wrapping from Winchester .22 calibre bullets. It had the batch number on it.

Now, police investigators had to find the murder weapon itself. It wasn’t easy, since there were 55,000 Ruger guns of that model listed in Australia. There were even more bullets from that batch. But somehow the police found the gun shop where Ivan Milat did his shopping.

Information poured in. Especially useful was one woman’s mention of a certain Ivan Milat who liked guns and had a property near the forest. Paul Onions returned to Australia to be a witness. He identified Milat from a photo.

Police investigators watched Milat’s home and questioned his family and workmates. His employers said he’d been off work on the days when the murders happened. Now nervous, Milat asked his brother Wally to hide most of his guns for him.

But when police started raiding properties they suspected might contain evidence, they got enough evidence to arrest Ivan Milat on 22 May 1994. In his house were guns, including a murder weapon, and ammunition matching what they’d found in the forest. They even found some of the victims’ camping equipment. The DNA retrieved from a blood-covered cord matched Caroline’s. At Wally Milat’s home, they found most of Ivan’s guns and literally a tonne of ammunition.

No matter how much evidence was piled up against him, Ivan insisted he had been framed. But 170 witnesses and hundreds of statements and photos said otherwise.

On 20 July 1996, a jury found him guilty of the seven murders and the attempted murder of Paul Onions. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. It is unlikely he will ever be released.

MARK BRANDON ‘CHOPPER’ READ

U
nlike most criminals, Mark ‘Chopper’ Read has become a celebrity. Since leaving prison for the last time in 1998, he has been writing books, doing live stage performances, recording rap songs, acting and being interviewed about other criminals. In 2001, a film of his life was released, starring Eric Bana.

And yet, between the ages of 20 and 38, he was only out of prison for thirteen months!

Born in Melbourne, Chopper had a disturbed childhood. Amongst other things, he was taken from his parents at the age of fourteen.

By the time he turned fifteen, Chopper had his own gang. He robbed drug dealers and other crooks. Years later he explained that he picked on criminals because, after all, they weren’t going to call the police.

In the late 1970s, Chopper actually managed to start a gang war in prison! He was in Pentridge Prison’s high-security H-Division at the time. When he applied to get out of H-Division and was turned down, Chopper decided that he was going to get out of there somehow, even if it was only to hospital.

On request, another prisoner cut Chopper’s ears off. Cutting off ears was no big deal to Chopper; he’d done it to someone else at one stage, though not by request.

Pentridge was not a healthy place to be imprisoned. His own gang attacked him when they felt he was going too far, injuring him badly.

Outside prison, Chopper continued his criminal career. Even some of the criminals involved in Melbourne’s gang wars were frightened of him. One of them, Alphonse Gangitano, even took his family and escaped to Italy when he heard that Chopper was about to finish his latest prison sentence in 1991. Chopper wasn’t free for long and Gangitano came home, although maybe he shouldn’t have. Someone else killed Alphonse in his own home in 1998.

Chopper was now in Tasmania’s Risdon Prison, with a stamp on his file saying, ‘Never to be released’ as he was tagged a ‘dangerous criminal’. He’d been imprisoned for shooting a bikie called Sidney Collins. Chopper had said he didn’t do it, but he went to jail anyway.

Somehow, all that crime and prison time hadn’t stopped him from writing books. His books even got him a wife. Mary-Anne Hodge, who worked for the Australian Tax Office, enjoyed his books so much that she went to visit him in jail in 1993. They married in 1995, when he was still never to be released, but in 1998 his ‘dangerous criminal’ tag was overturned and he was set free.

Chopper and Mary-Anne settled on a farm in Tasmania, where they had a son, Charlie.

By 2001, though, the marriage was over and Chopper returned to Melbourne, where he moved in with a new girlfriend, Margaret. Since he wasn’t going back to his life of crime, Chopper made his living from being a celebrity who had been a criminal. His books sold in the hundreds of thousands. People were always interested in hearing what he had to say about life, the universe and everything.

Still, he has upset a lot of people. He turned up drunk for a TV interview. He wrote a children’s book with a hero who committed murder. He said that his politics were somewhere to the right of Genghis Khan – in other words, very conservative. Many people don’t think he should be allowed to make money, even indirectly, out of his life of crime.

Australians are still arguing over whether he is a likeable character or just another crook, and a violent one at that. Some have compared him to Ned Kelly.

Since people are still arguing about Ned Kelly after more than 100 years, perhaps it’s not too bad a comparison.

DID YOU KNOW…?

In 1925, Perth girl Audrey Jacob shot her fiancé, Cyril, in front of witnesses. One night, when Cyril was supposed to be somewhere else, Audrey went to a ball. There was Cyril, dancing with another woman. Audrey went home, but returned, carrying a gun. When Cyril pretended not to recognise her, she shot him. The jury took two days to find her not guilty.

THE SNOWTOWN MURDERS

S
nowtown is a tiny town north of the South Australian capital, Adelaide. Nobody would have expected the gruesome discovery that was made there in a disused bank vault in 1999.

The bodies of eight victims were found in plastic barrels of acid, along with the various tools that had been used to torture the victims. The final murder had been committed right in the building. The dead man was David Johnson, half-brother of James Vlassakis, one of the four to be tried for murder. Vlassakis had lured him there. The killers thought it would be a nice, quiet place where no one would ever notice. As it turned out, the fact that Snowtown was so quiet was why the bodies were found.

Three days later, two more bodies turned up in a backyard in the Adelaide suburb of Salisbury North. Altogether, there were eleven murders. Only four of the six people involved were alive to stand trial. One, Elizabeth Harvey, died of cancer. Another, Thomas Trevilyan, who had helped with one murder, became a victim himself.

The leader of the group was John Justin Bunting. Bunting didn’t care why he killed. You could offend him by being fat, gay, a drug user – almost anything. When he was a child, his favourite hobby was burning insects in acid. Later, he used acid to try dissolving human bodies. Nearly all of the victims were people who knew their killers. The murderers made nearly $95,000 by claiming their victims’ pension money, but Bunting simply liked killing. Worse, he enjoyed torturing his victims before he killed them.

The others who were tried for murder were Robert Wagner, Mark Haydon and James Vlassakis, whose mother, Elizabeth Harvey, had helped with one of the murders. Haydon wasn’t convicted of any of the murders, as the evidence was uncertain, but he did plead guilty to helping to get rid of the bodies.

The bodies in the yard of Bunting’s house in Salisbury North were those of Suzanne Allen, a friend of Bunting’s, and Ray Davies, a mentally disabled man who lived in a caravan behind her yard. The killers later insisted that Allen had died of a heart attack.

In 1998, Bunting and Wagner killed Mark Haydon’s wife, Elizabeth, in her home while her husband was out. Killing her was a mistake. Her brother wouldn’t believe Mark Haydon’s excuses for her disappearance. She would never have left without her two children. The police found it strange that her own husband hadn’t reported her disappearance. They started to keep an eye on the suspects. They even bugged Mark Haydon’s house.

The barrels were moved around to different places before finally being taken to the Snowtown vault that Haydon had rented under the name of Mark Lawrence.

Snowtown was not a good place to hide something you didn’t want anyone to notice. Any stranger bringing barrels there to stash away in a vault was asking to have it checked out.

The police who found the bodies later described the place as something out of a nightmare. During the trials, three members of the jury were so sickened that they dropped out.

The trials went from 2001 to 2004, with some appeals happening in 2005. Vlassakis pleaded guilty to four murders and received a life sentence. In September 2003, Bunting was convicted of eleven murders and Wagner of seven. The judge sentenced them to imprisonment for life, never to be released.

After the discovery of the barrels, there was some sickening tourism. People wanted to go to Snowtown to see where the bodies had been kept. Some wanted to take a sniff at the bank vault, hoping to catch the stink of the bodies. Others took photos.

Someone suggested the town’s name be changed to Rosetown, to get away from the embarrassing and unpleasant press the town’s people had had to put up with. That suggestion was never taken up.

The house in Salisbury North was knocked down. Who, after all, could live there after what had happened?

DID YOU KNOW…?

In May 1931, 10,000 pounds sent by the Commonwealth Bank went missing between Queanbeyan and Canberra. When the mailbag was opened in Canberra, it contained only phone books. A thief called Harold Ryan was charged with the robbery, but no one was ever convicted. The jury simply couldn’t agree because of lack of evidence.