Croat Milat Is Most Brutal Killer in Australia

He killed seven people and ended up serving life in prison. But his atrocities made him a media star and a film was made about him.

Ivan Milat is one of the most brutal killers Australia has ever seen. The Australian of Croatian origin, is one of fourteen children. He displayed criminal tendencies ever since he was a young boy. His tendencies finally got their climax in the form of serial murders which he committed in the period from 1989 through 1994. 

The court proved that he killed seven people. He was also suspected of having killed thirty other people, he was never proven to have committed the murders. Still, the seven people he killed were enough to get him life in prison.

Milat was born on January 27, 1944 as Ivan Robert Marko Milat, into a family of immigrants from the Croatian island of Korcula. His first run-in with the law was in 1971 when he was charged of raping two hikers who testified that he had been armed with a knife. However, this crime was never proven and he avoided punishment.

Versatile serial killer – he cut throats, strangled, shot to death, cut heads off… 

During the 1990’s, in the Belanglo woods, the bodies of hikers and picnickers were found whom he killed after they stopped him on the road hitchhiking. He would take them into his car, saying his name was “Bill”, or, “Texas”, as he liked to call himself. The bodies would in the woods did not made the job for the police easy because many of the people were killed in completely different ways. One of the hikers was shot in the head several times and stabbed after she was dead, while the other two were just stabbed to death.

German hikers he killed had strangulation marks on their bodies, as well as signs of struggle. Milat even cut off the head of one of the victims. So, the police even suspected the murders were done by more than one person.

Milat was found and arrested in 1994 after Paul Onions, another hitchhiker who stopped Milat, identified him. Onions stopped Milat’s car in 1990. He became suspicious when Milat became increasingly nervous and started spewing xenophobic statements. When he took out his gun, Onions managed to escape and stopped a couple of passing motorists who called the police. But by then Milat had gone.

Only four years later, when Onions saw the news about the murders on the news, he called the police who found Milat and arrested him.

He became a columnist in jail, but they fired him for plagiarism 

But even in jail, the criminal continued to lead an interesting life. He started writing a column for an Australian daily, which kept him close to the eye of the public, but that did not last for long. In one of his columns, Milat wrote:

- When working alone in the open, a medium sized backpacker can be restrained easily by using a clove-hitch around the neck, running the rope along side the flank and forming a double loop tie-off under the left foot. The backpacker can then be easily brought to ground for subsequent sadistic rituals by pulling on the rope at a 45 degree angle.

This was published, but a veterinarian wrote to the daily saying that Milat had copied that part of his column from a horse surgery handbook from 1936. He was fired from the newspaper for plagiarism, with a comment from the chief editor saying:

- Considering recent events surrounding Mr Milat, the offer of a regular column would have been an ideal opportunity to redeem himself in the eyes of the Australian public. He has let me down personally and he has let our readers down. It's dishonest, but worse than that, it's lazy.

But for Milat, Australia’s face of evil, his spotlight did not end there. Although in jail, he inspired a low-budget horror film “Wolf Creek”, which made its way to the Sundance Film Festival.

Also, Milat is rather popular with groups of Australians who evidently do not mind the fact that he killed and decapitated, so he managed to found several groups who are fighting to get him released. Milat’s latest incident was cutting off his finger and trying to mail it to a judge. The motive for this is still unknown.

Serial Killer Cuts Off Finger, Sends It to Judge