[ Caroline Jane Clarke & Joanne Lesley Walters ]


Although both came from different backgrounds, the two British girls became the best of friends after meeting 'on the road' in Australia.  Caroline (pictured above), aged 21 was the daughter of a senior Bank of England executive whose family lived in a large country house in Northumberland.  Joanne (pictured below), aged 22 was the only daughter of a paper mill worker and union convenor from a terraced house in the Welsh village of Maesteg.


Both girls were described as confident, outgoing and sensible.  They intended winding up their Australian holiday by going to Queensland and Darwin and then flying to Indonesia.  Both phoned their parents on 16th April 1992 and told them they were going fruit picking, but the last confirmed sighting of the girls was at a travellers' rest area at Mittagong, just 20 minutes drive from the Belanglo State Forest.  They were the last of the backpackers to go missing and, several months later, the first to be found dead.

[ The Search ]


Police searchers comb the dense undergrowth of the Belanglo State Forest near the area where Simone Schmidl's body was discovered.  The last two bodies would be found three days later.

[ Father Stephen Gray ]


Late in 1992, Father Stephen Gray conducted a memorial service deep in the forest to commemorate the two British girls.  It would be some months before the forest yielded still more bodies.

[ Deborah Everist & James Gibson ]


Everist (pictured left) and Gibson (pictured below) both aged 19, set out from Melbourne on December 28th 1989 to make a quick stop in Sydney before attending a conservation rally near Albury.  James tried to cheer up Deborah's mother Peggy, who wasn't happy at the prospect of her daughter hitchhiking for the very first time.  'Don't worry,' he told her.  'You read too many newspapers and watch too much television.  Everyone does it - it's quite all right.'


At 7am on New Year's Day, just 24 hours after they were last seen at a hostel, a man found James's camera by the side of a road at Galston Gorge, just north of Sydney.


Deborah's family formally reported her missing to the police on January 15th.  Two months later a woman found a backpack bearing the name Gibson and containing a tin of sardines in the gorge.  It contained pine needles but there were no such trees in the area.  Work records later revealed Milat was fixing roads nearby when the items were discovered.


When Deborah's body was found at 1.30pm on October 5th 1993, police were unable to determine an exact cause of death.  Pathologist Peter Bradhurst said it appeared her hands and feet had been tied together before she had been killed.  James suffered multiple stab wounds.

[ Anja Habschied & Gabor Kurt Neugebauer ]


The two German students from Munich had been together for 18 months.  They were on the last leg of a 2 month trip around Asia and Australia when they arrived in Sydney for Christmas 1991.


Anja (pictured left), aged 20, had written to her parents, to whom she was especially close at the same time saying that although she like Australia she was homesick.  Gabor (pictured below), aged 21, called his mother and said he wanted to come home at once.  'I would like to leave this land as soon as possible and as fast as possible,'  he told her.  On Boxing Day, the pair checked out of their hostel and headed south for Adelaide, heading ultimately for Darwin and a flight home.  But they never made it.


Nothing more was heard of either of the young Germans, although Gabor's parents and Anja's brother Norbert came to Australia to conduct a fruitless search.  Finally on 4th November 1993, Anja's decapitated body was discovered.  Gabor whose body was found nearby, had been gagged and shot six times in the head.

[ Milat's Aliases ]


Ivan Milat lived more than a double life as a fastidious road worker who was also a cruel serial killer.  He liked to fool officialdom and had not owned a driver's license in his own name since 1971.  He also adopted a number of aliases.


Many of Milat's nicknames reflected his obsessions with Westerns.  Most of his family called him 'Mac' but he was also known as Texas, Joe Spanner and Bargo Bill.


Paul Onions, an English tourist who nearly became a victim, said that the man who tried to kill him called himself Bill.  Milat denied to police that he had ever used the name.


Milat's ex-wife Karen said her 'gun-crazy' husband often 'ran around like a cowboy and called himself Tex'.  He certainly enjoyed dressing up at home, donning a sheriff's badge and playing with his revolver in a home made holster.


Milat told the jury, 'I was trying to make up some cowboy pictures just to put in my album.'


Another of Milat's fantasies is to view himself as a dashing figure from 1960's television.  he ends his letters from jail with a familiar stick figure with a halo over its head, known to millions as 'The Saint'.


Ivan Milat's obsession with guns led to a suspicious workmate tipping off the police.  Milat's fantasies extended to dressing as a cowboy and photographing himself in this outfit at home.

[ Milat's Trial ]


Following initial committal proceedings, the long-running trial lasted for some four months.  The prosecution solicitors took three months to deliver their detailed case, including two key witness statements.


Milat's trial was one of the longest in Australian legal history.  Its complication turned mainly on the lack of hard facts among a wealth of circumstantial evidence.