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Old February 15th, 2023 #1
jagd messer
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Join Date: Nov 2014
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Default Crime in Australia

Six people killed at Queensland property, including two police officers ambushed by shooters


Tactical police shoot dead three suspects at Wieambilla property after the ‘ruthless, targeted execution’ of two officers from Tara and a member of the public. Three people were shot dead by tactical police late on Monday night, ending a six-hour standoff that followed the apparent ambush-style killings of two uniformed officers and a member of the public on a remote Queensland property.

Four officers from Tara had been sent to the property, at Wieambilla in the Western Downs region, about 270km west of Brisbane, to inquire about a missing person. Two of those officers, aged in their 20s, were shot and killed soon after they arrived, about 4.45pm. The Queensland police union has described the shooting as “a ruthless, calculated and targeted execution of our colleagues”.

Another police officer was injured while the fourth managed to escape the property and was receiving treatment. Another person, believed to be a neighbour, was also killed. Unconfirmed reports have suggested the shooters were wearing camouflage. About six hours later, the incident was ended when three suspects – two men and a woman – were killed by tactical police.

Speaking before the resolution, the Queensland police commissioner, Katarina Carroll, said the deaths of two officers was “devastating news”. “We are an organisation in mourning tonight,” Carroll said. Carroll said the injured officer had suffered a “bullet graze” and was in hospital.

No additional information was provided regarding the member of the public who was shot. “While we are yet to learn the full extent of what has occurred today, we do know this event is extraordinarily distressing on many levels,” Carroll said. “Those officers paid the ultimate sacrifice to keep our community safe. It is, sadly, a reminder of the unpredictable nature of policing and the incredible dangers our officers face while protecting our community.”

The president of the Queensland police union, Ian Leavers, wrote to members overnight saying the killings were “needless” and “senseless”. “We are all in a state of shock and disbelief. To be here tonight and know that two brave police, both under the age of 30, have needlessly lost their lives affects all our emotions,” Leavers said. “To know that she and he are no longer with us in what was a ruthless, calculated and targeted execution of our colleagues and loved ones brings home the very real risks that we face every single day doing our jobs. “These officers’ lives have been cut tragically short for one reason and one reason alone, for simply doing their job, and we Queensland police remember and honour them.”

The Western Downs regional council mayor, Paul McVeigh, said the community was rallying behind police, with the officers who responded from the nearby towns of Tara and Chinchilla. “It’s an absolute tragedy in our community,” McVeigh told Guardian Australia. “A couple of young police officers shot dead is an absolute tragedy.”

Australian P M Anthony Albanese also said it was a heartbreaking loss for the families and friends of the Queensland police officers who lost their lives in the line of duty. “My condolences to all who are grieving tonight – Australia mourns with you,” the prime minister tweeted.

The opposition leader, Peter Dutton, a former Queensland police officer, was also moved by the tragedy. “Deeply distressing news coming out of western Queensland tonight with those police officers who have been murdered,” he wrote. “Police officers face danger every day to keep us from it.”

Annastacia Palaszczuk, Queensland’s premier, said the deaths were a “horrible tragedy”, and the state’s police minister, Mark Ryan, said the hearts of Queenslanders were broken. “This is a traumatic, confronting and devastating event for our community. “The Queensland police service has lost two heroes tonight and I express my sincere condolences to their family, friends and colleagues and the entire police family.”

Australian Associated Press, 12 Dec 2022.
Six people killed at Queensland property, including two police …



Policing is a tough, un envious job. Was this a case of 'no prisoners' which I'd not disagree with?
 
Old February 16th, 2023 #2
jagd messer
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Default Ivan Milat's chilling serial backpacker murders.

Ivan Milat's chilling serial backpacker murders still haunt Australia


The road worker savagely killed seven backpackers in the Belanglo state forest in the early 1990s. His death leaves several other disappearances unsolved

When British backpackers Caroline Clarke and Joanne Walters were found brutally murdered in the Belanglo state forest in September 1992, the Sun ran the headline: “Beast of the bush: Brit girls victims of Oz serial killer.” The newspaper speculated that the killer “could be a fiend responsible for the disappearance of 20 people in the area over 20 years”.

Ivan Milat, who has died of cancer aged 74, was convicted in 1996 of the murder of seven people, aged 19 to 22, who disappeared while hitchhiking south of Sydney. But his death means his suspected involvement in several other disappearances may never be resolved.

The backpacker killings became the subject of intense international media scrutiny and speculation after the discovery of seven victims’ bodies in makeshift graves in 1992 and 1993.

In the intervening years, Milat and the cold brutality of his crimes have held an enduring grip on the Australian psyche, and Belanglo has become a byword for horror. As the journalists Mark Whittaker and Les Kennedy wrote in their book about the case, Sins of the Brother, published in 1998, it was “a peculiarly Australian story”. The callous murders by the tanned, muscle-bound Australian with the Dennis Lillee moustache seemed to reveal something uncomfortable about the nation’s character.

With his death comes an unsatisfying sense of things still unresolved. Milat was one of six prime suspects in the cases of three women – Leanne Goodall, Robyn Hickie and Amanda Robinson – who all went missing near Newcastle, north of Sydney, near where he often worked as a road worker, within four months of each other between 1978 and 1979.



In 2002 Milat was called to give evidence at a coronial inquiry into their disappearances but no charges were laid.

The possibility that Milat did not act alone has been the subject of endless speculation. During his trial Milat’s lawyers attempted to place blame on one his brothers, and police actively investigated the possibility of an accomplice. In his sentencing remarks, Justice David Hunt said it was clear that in at least two of the killings two people had been involved.

An avid shooter and hunter

Ivan Robert Marko Milat was born on 27 December 1945, the fifth of 14 siblings and one of 10 brothers. From the outside, the early years of his life were unremarkable in postwar Australia.

His father worked on the wharves in Sydney after migrating from Croatia after the first world war, while his devoted mother cared for the children. His father, a strict disciplinarian, eventually started a tomato plantation at the family property in Moorebank, western Sydney, where his sons were put to work.

Neighbours have described the family as insular, and the young Milat did not stand out among his siblings. But as they grew older, the hold of his parents slipped. Petty theft and troublemaking graduated to break-and-enters and burglary. Seven of the 10 brothers have had run-ins with the law, and the Milat family became well known to police.

Ivan Milat leaned into the lifestyle. In the 1960s, during his late teens and early 20s, he served increasingly long stints in jail for a series of break-and-enters and burglary. A fan of fast cars and Brylcreem, with a quiet charm and fastidious nature, he found time to have affairs with two of his brothers’ girlfriends in the same period.

As Milat got older he was linked to crimes of increasing severity. In the 1970s he was tried but acquitted of raping 18-year-old Margaret Patterson, who had been hitchhiking to Melbourne with a friend.

As Whittaker and Kennedy wrote in their book, Milat often bragged to friends about his capacity for violence. In one instance recounted in the book, he described to an acquaintance how to turn a person into “a head on a stick” by stabbing them in the spine. He was an avid shooter and often hunted in the forest where the bodies of his victims were found.

The crimes for which Milat served his sentence began in December 1989. On the day before New Year’s Eve, Deborah Everist and James Gibson, from Melbourne, set off from Sydney towards Albury, near the border of New South Wales and Victoria, for an alternative lifestyle festival.

They had planned to meet friends, but never arrived. When neither made contact with family in the weeks following, their relatives filed a missing person’s report. Police were not immediately concerned.

The other five victims followed similar paths. Simone Schmidl, 21, from Germany, left Sydney for Melbourne on 20 January 1991. She had been due to meet her mother at Melbourne airport four days later. Gabor Neugebauer, 21, and Anja Habschied, 20, also German, left Sydney on Boxing Day 1991. The couple were supposed to be making the 4,000km trek to Darwin before returning to Munich a month later. They never got on the plane.



Clarke, 21, from Surrey, and Walters, 22, from Maesteg in Wales, met at a backpackers’ hostel in Sydney’s Kings Cross and shared a flat there. They had hitchhiked together a number of times in Australia; to the small town of Mildura in Victoria and on the way to Tasmania to pick fruit. In April 1992 they left Sydney again, with vague plans that seemed to involve heading south towards Victoria, or to Perth in Western Australia.

When weeks passed without any contact with their parents, the two families sprang into action, alerting police in the UK and Australia and using the media to drum up interest in the case.

It didn’t take long for journalists to start linking their disappearance with other cases. In April 1992 an Australian television program followed Neugebauer’s parents as they searched for their son, pointing to other missing backpackers.

But it wasn’t until September 1992, when two runners discovered the first of the bodies – Clarke and Walters – that the severity of the crimes began to emerge. Walters had been stabbed 21 times in the back and 14 times in the chest. Her spine had been severed by one vicious blow. Lying in scrub 10 metres away, Clarke had been shot 10 times in the head while blindfolded and stabbed in the chest.

The grisly discoveries didn’t end there. A year later, in October 1993, a bushman collecting firewood found another body – it was James Gibson. Police found Everist nearby. A month later the three Germans were discovered. Like Clarke and Walters, all had been viciously murdered.

‘That’s what the Milats do’

After an intensive investigation, police narrowed down the list of suspects to a few dozen, but it was another Briton, Paul Onions, who provided the crucial piece of evidence.

Onions had managed to escape from Milat’s vehicle in early 1990, and flew back to Australia during the investigation into the murders to identify him.

In January 1990, three weeks after Everist and Gibson disappeared, Onions had hitched a ride to Canberra with a moustachioed man he would later describe as looking like the Australian cricketer Dennis Lillee.

The trip began uneventfully but, as they made their way down the highway, Onions became unsettled by the questions the man, who gave his name as Bill, was asking: Did anyone know where he was headed? Was anyone waiting for him in Canberra? Had he done any special forces training in the navy?

As the car approached the Belanglo state forest, the driver pulled to the side of the road saying he wanted to find some cassettes to play. Instead, he produced a gun and a length of rope, telling Onions: “This is a robbery.” The backpacker made a run for it. The two fought and the man fired a shot before Onions managed to flag down a car and escape.

He filed a report with police, who told him it was unlikely they would find the man responsible. But six years later Onions’ testimony would be crucial to Milat’s conviction. When police searched Milat’s house in south-western Sydney in connection with the Onions robbery, they found items belonging to his victims. More belongings were discovered with his relatives.

Milat was arrested in 1994 and convicted in 1996 after an 18-week trial. He was held in a high-security unit at Goulburn Supermax – home to Australia’s most dangerous criminals. In May he was transferred to Long Bay in Sydney after he was diagnosed with terminal oesophagus and stomach cancer. During his time in solitary confinement at Goulburn, he had been on several hunger strikes and sometimes swallowed sharp objects if guards did not meet his demands.

The legacy of the Milat murders has endured. In 2012 Milat’s great-nephew, Matthew Milat, was sentenced to at least 30 years in prison for the axe murder of a friend in the same forest. The court heard he had later gloated about the murder, saying: “That’s what the Milats do.”

Many of those linked to the backpacker murders had held out hope that Ivan Milat would reveal more about his crimes before his death. In October, Caroline’s Clarke’s father, Ian Clarke, told a reporter he still hoped for a deathbed confession. “We still think of Caroline every day but it doesn’t mean to say we have to think of Milat every day,” Clarke told the Australian Associated Press from his home in Northumberland.

“If he was to finally face up to the fact and admit to any others that he has done, if indeed he has, then I think that would be a wonderful thing for those parents, because for the short time that we didn’t know, I know just how they must be feeling.”

It was not to be.

Ivan Milat's chilling serial backpacker murders still …
Ivan Milat, Australia’s most notorious serial killer, dies aged 74

by Michael McGowan
Sat 26 Oct 2019 23.54 BST


16 II 2023.

Big empty distances of hundreds of miles between towns means its easy to hide evidence of these types of crimes.
 
Old February 2nd, 2024 #3
jagd messer
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Join Date: Nov 2014
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Posts: 1,352
Default Ivan Milat

Australia’s worst serial killer Ivan Milat died aged 74



Serial killer Ivan Milat — infamous for a series of backpacker murders — is dead aged 74. Before he died, police exacted their final revenge.


Australia’s worst serial killer Ivan Milat has died in jail, aged 74. The terminally ill Milat had been under heavy guard in the intensive care unit of Prince of Wales Hospital but was returned to jail on Tuesday after it became clear death was imminent. New South Wales Minister for Counter Terrorism and Corrections Anthony Roberts told The Daily Telegraph Milat had shown no remorse for his crimes and deserved no mercy on his deathbed, adding he could “rot in hell”. “He was sentenced to die in jail and he was going to die in jail,” Mr Roberts said this morning. “I wasn’t going to have him take up a public hospital bed. Both the commissioner and I were of that opinion. “We had him removed from a hospital and sent back to Long Bay Jail. He can rot in hell. “He showed no remorse. We ensured the sentence was carried out.”


Milat had been in prison since his 1994 arrest for the murders of seven backpackers whose remains were found in the Belanglo State Forest, an hour’s drive north of Goulburn. He was convicted in 1996 and given seven consecutive life sentences but detectives always feared his murder tally was much higher, with up to six more victims whose bodies have never been found. Despite pleas from police and families of his suspected victims, Milat took his secrets to the grave.


A Corrective Services spokesperson told news.com.au the serial killer was “found dead in his cell” just after 4am. Milat was diagnosed with oesophagus and stomach cancer and given three months to live back in May. He had been in and out of hospital this year and was moved to a secure annex at the Prince of Wales Hospital in Randwick on October 11. He reportedly took a turn for the worse on October 14 and was moved to the ICU where he was under heavy guard.


Ivan Milat was last seen when he left a Sydney hospital in May.

Milat made his first public appearance in years in May when he was admitted to hospital for treatment. He looked gaunt as he sat handcuffed in a wheelchair, pushed by armed prison guards as they transferred him from the hospital to Long Bay jail. He was often ferried between the Sydney hospital and Long Bay to undergo chemotherapy. The hospital wing at Long Bay does not provide chemotherapy, making his heavily guarded trips to Prince of Wales necessary. The killer, who had not been seen in public for a decade, reportedly shed more than 20kg from his once stocky frame. Up until his diagnosis with cancer, Milat had been housed in the High Risk Management prison, known as Supermax, in the regional city of Goulburn in the NSW Southern Highlands.


Despite overwhelming evidence of his guilt, Milat continued to claim his innocence in the vicious torture murders he committed between 1989 and 1992. Milat kidnapped, raped, shot, and stabbed three German, two British and two Australian victims whose remains were found in Belanglo. Police believed Milat’s killing spree did not start and end in Belanglo, and that for decades he had roamed NSW highways and selected victims whose names remain on the State’s missing or unsolved murder files.


But every attempt by detectives to elicit any information or a confession from Milat failed. His decades of incarceration were littered with protestations of innocence and appeal claims to politicians, and the High Court of Australia, as well as escape attempts. Milat’s continual hunger strikes and self-harm episodes, most famously severing his finger with a plastic knife in Supermax in 2009, were largely viewed as bids to get out of prison and potentially escape. When he finally did leave Supermax, he weighed about 44kg and was significantly weakened by advancing cancer.


Bombshell claim that Milat didn’t act alone






Milat was a road worker, which allowed him to haunt the highways where he picked up his victims.

MILAT’S CHILDHOOD

Ivan Robert Marko Milat was the fifth of 14 children of Croatian-born Stjepan Milat and his Australian wife, Margaret. An intelligent child dubbed the “professor” by a teacher, Milat was subjected to beatings by his father with a piece of four-by-two as he held him down with a boot in his back in the driveway of the Milat family home. Milat began wagging school and after the age of about 14 never returned. Known in his family as “Mac”, Ivan developed a gun obsession and began knocking off milk money from houses and committing burglaries. He faced Liverpool Children’s Court in 1962 for his first offence, stealing in a dwelling, and was let off before being jailed for the first time just months later. He turned 18 inside Mount Penang Juvenile Institution and, once freed, became a car thief.


Milat then became a road worker for the Department of Main Roads, a job that would take him across the highways of NSW and back.


Ivan Milat (blue shirt) in 1954, aged 10, with siblings (from left) Michael, William, Shirley, Mary and Alex holding Walter at their Moorebank home.



Milat in 1983 holding a WWI machine gun at his brother’s Buxton home.

MILAT’S HORRIFYING CRIMES

Milat developed a reputation as a “scary bloke”, a big drinker and a cannabis smoker. In 1971, he kidnapped two female hitchhikers and raped one in chillingly similar circumstances to the Belanglo abductions and boasted to his victims that he’d “done it before … a number of times”.


Two teenagers hitchhiking on the Hume Highway near Liverpool on the Easter weekend of 1971 accepted a lift with Milat who produced knives and a rope. He drove them to a secluded field in the Southern Highlands, near Goulburn, and raped one after saying if neither girl would have sex with him he was going to kill them. At his 1974 trial, Milat got off the rape charge and thereafter swore off alcohol and cannabis and became a workaholic and married a young teenage girl.


After the marriage broke down in 1989, the Belanglo backpacker murders began. Five months after his divorce, in December 1989, Milat abducted Victorians Deborah Everist and James Gibson, both 19, and stabbed them to death in Belanglo. For almost four years, the parents of the two young backpackers lived in hope their missing children would turn up.


In 1990, Milat attempted to kidnap at gunpoint British ex-army soldier Paul Onions, who had hitched a ride in Milat’s vehicle on the Hume Highway south of Liverpool. When Milat, who called himself Bill, pulled out ropes and a pistol, Mr Onions leapt from the car and escaped, only identifying Milat years later after bodies were found in Belanglo.


In January 1991, Milat abducted and murdered German Simon Schmidl, 20, who was hitchhiking alone on the Hume to meet up with her mother in Melbourne. Milat stabbed her at least eight times and severing her spinal cord. A year later, Milat abducted German couple Gabor Neugebauer, 21, and Anja Habschied, 20, shooting Gabor six times in the head and decapitating Habschied, whose head has never been found.


In April 1992, Britons Caroline Clarke, 21, and Joanne Walters, 22, were abducted, shot and stabbed and theirs were the first of the Belanglo victims found, by orienteers, five months later. In October 1993, the remains of Deborah Everist and James Gibson were found, followed by the bodies of the three German backpackers. All the victims had been placed face down with their hands behind their backs and covered with a pyramid of twigs and ferns; campsites with shell casings, cigarette butts and bottles lay near some of the bodies.



Detective Superintendent Clive Small declared the murders the work of a serial killer and set up Task Force Air to find the culprit. Supt Small established a suspect list and narrowed it down to 32 names, which included Milat.


In November 1993, Mr Onions called NSW Police from the UK to report his attempted abduction by a man called “Bill” with a distinctive moustache driving on the Hume Highway out of Sydney. On May 5, 1994, Mr Onions flew to Australia and identified Milat from a photograph. On the morning of May 22, 1994, 50 police officers surrounded Milat’s Eagle Vale home in western Sydney and he was arrested without incident. Items and a cache of weapons were found in the walls and roof of Milat’s house and at the homes of his brothers, including camping equipment and clothing belonging to the Belanglo victims.


His trial for seven murders and attempted murder, false imprisonment and robbery began in March 1996 and ended 15 weeks later with Milat’s conviction on all counts. While locked up at Maitland prison in 1997, Milat made a failed attempt to escape with drug baron George Savvas. Milat was immediately transferred to Goulburn maximum security prison. In 2001, after the High Risk Management Correctional Centre (Supermax) opened, Milat was placed in one of its units. He remained in Supermax, apart from a short sojourn in January 2009 to Goulburn Hospital after cutting off his finger, until his hospitalisation for cancer.


His death means some of NSW’s unsolved murders remain a mystery.



Ivan Milat dead: Serial killer dies of cancer at 74
. 02 I 2024.



Australia is a very big country, very sparsely populated and because of that there were many like him who were never caught.
 
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