Reliving the Horrors of the Ivan Milat Case

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Reliving the horrors of the Ivan Milat case John Thompson | ABC, The Drum | Updated 31st August, 2010 "Police are investigating the discovery of human remains found in the Belanglo State Forest". Seven times I said those words as a former police reporter. Twice I broke the news to the world that another body had been discovered. But that was the second half of 1993. This week's news of one more discovery has brought the horror of the backpacker serial killings back to the present. I remember driving into the Belanglo State Forest for the first time. I nearly missed the turn- off. There's only a small sign on the right side of the Hume Highway, heading south from Sydney just past Mittagong. It's a rough dirt track that goes past a homestead. I remember trying to imagine what it must have been like to have been one of the backpackers: Deborah Everist, James Gibson, Simone Schmidl, Anja Habschied, Gabor Neugebauer, Joanne Walters and Caroline Clarke. The sheer terror each of them must have felt when this seemingly pleasant man with small eyes and a beard, who had offered them a lift, suddenly turned off the highway, pulled out a gun and drove into bush far far away from civilisation and any possible help. Knowing that this track, this bush, were some of the last images each of the young backpackers saw gave me more than a slight chill - to this day it still makes me feel sick. What gives someone the compulsion to kill like this? And to do it over and over again? How do they live with themselves? The man who knows most about Ivan Milat and what he did to each of his seven victims is cautioning the public not to draw too many links with the weekend discovery by trail bike riders. But 18 years ago, there had been much speculation that Milat had killed others and that there could be more bodies in the Belanglo Forest. Indeed, in 2001 the serial killer was named by the New South Wales Coroner as a person of interest in three missing persons cases. And police questioned Milat three years later about the disappearances of two Sydney nurses in 1980. But the State Forest covers a huge area, and while at the time, up to 1,000 police looked for more victims, they couldn't possibly scour the entire bush. I remember seeing Milat for the first time, at his bail hearing at Campbelltown Court. It was surreal and disturbing. I recall when he turned around and smiled at the public gallery - almost nonchalantly, as if it were all a joke. Thank God he was finally behind bars. I imagine he's sitting in his cell in solitary confinement at Goulburn's super max prison, with that same evil Joker indifference about another life lost - whether or not these latest remains belong to one more of his victims. John Thompson is a senior Sydney-based radio and television news journalist who has twice been a finalist in the Walkley Awards. .

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