but what happened to them afterwards. He would play with the corpses of his victims, posing them in positions that held some secret meaning for him and then secreting the bodies in places and in a manner that would signify something intensely personal to him. In this he was following his own inner signature, lost in the compulsive pleasure that it lent him. Once he was sated, Milat would strip the corpses of any jewellery or possessions he wished to retain and then, almost carelessly, hide the bodies beneath a makeshift blanket of branches and leaves.
There is something about Australia’s serial killers that seems to separate them from the often-diverse backgrounds of repetitive murderers from other countries. Australia’s serial killers are almost exclusively from underprivileged backgrounds. They have poor work histories and nomadic tendencies. It is almost as if they are born outlaws who believe from the very beginning that they can and will do as they please. According to Paul Kidd, author of Australian Serial Killers, Milat exemplifies this attitude. He writes: ‘Milat was an extremely clever serial killer. I mean this within the Australian genre. By that I mean, it is a lonely place, it’s in the bush, he is abducting strangers, people he doesn’t know. He’s taking them to a place of absolute isolation where he’s committing his crimes… he is secreting the bodies, hiding the bodies, in a place where they are unlikely to be found. Ninety per cent, or more probably, of Australia’s serial killers, are pure opportunists.’
Ivan was born on 27 December 1944, the fifth child in a family of fourteen. The Milat family lived in a very rural area and as such were a close-knit group. Suspicious of outsiders, they turned inwards and were bound together only by their loyalty to one another and their fierce family privacy. It is not difficult to imagine the Milat family as a hillbilly clan at large in the countryside.
One of the Milat family’s favourite activities was gunplay. Ivan and his many brothers loved to mess around with guns – they even manufactured their own rifles and revolvers. Taking their weaponry, they would disappear into the forest to hunt rabbits and birds. Their father, Stephan, a Croatian immigrant, was a ruthless disciplinarian who thought nothing of beating his boys for any unruly behaviour. The Milat children had an absolute fear of their father, and when they weren’t working alongside him on the family’s tomato crops they would generally try to escape his attentions altogether.
Stephen Milat was, of course, a product of a different time and culture. His neighbours recall one particularly disturbing incident of abuse involving Stephen standing upon the backs of two of his prone sons and bludgeoning them mercilessly with a piece of wood. Stephen’s propensity for violence is well documented, and his sons regularly experienced it first hand. However, rather than instil discipline, Stephan’s punishments only created a bitter resentment in Ivan, who would grow to loathe authority in all its forms.
A significant point in Ivan’s young life, and his first encounter with death, came when his sister Margaret was killed in a car accident. The accident happened close to the Milat family home and Ivan was able to race to the scene, where he found his own horribly injured sister in deep distress. Margaret was rushed to hospital where she managed to hold on for two weeks before finally succumbing to her injuries, having never regained consciousness. The close-knit Milat family was devastated by its loss and Ivan, having witnessed some terrible scenes at the roadside, was hit the hardest.
The first effects of this trauma appeared when Ivan became a teenager. He began to retreat into an inner world and became obsessed with his own body. He would spend hours exercising and toning himself with weights. He dressed himself as expensively as his parents could afford and would pose with guns, as if living out some inner fantasy. This all far exceeded normal teenage vanity. Ivan was transfixed by his own appearance and his self-image assumed prime importance over everything else in his life. And, beneath the rugged image he had created, the cauldron simmered. Ivan Milat was very angry at life. Perhaps he sensed that he was a born loser, too weak to break away from the family pack. Only his guns and bad boy behaviour seemed to give him some measure of relief.
Ivan would go shooting on his own sometimes, but more often than not he would spend time with some of his brothers. Although they were a solid unit, at least one of Ivan’s brothers began to harbour doubts about his behaviour, especially his liking for guns. His younger brother George claimed: ‘Everybody in the family, a few of my brothers said “well maybe there’s something wrong with Ivan – there’s definitely something wrong with him! Never leave a gun loaded, no matter what!”’ As he slowly disengaged himself from the family unit, Milat became a petty criminal. Like Ian Brady, Ivan began to develop an idea of himself as a renegade and an outlaw.
Although Ivan wanted to join the big-time criminal league he never quite made it. But at the same time, his obsession with guns and his self-image as a renegade moved him away from the constraints of a society he had elected to go to war with. Neither professional criminal nor ordinary member of the public, Ivan existed in a kind of limbo. This made him a difficult person to be around, especially as he grew into a tough young man with a fiery temper when provoked and a highly developed bent toward violence. ‘I didn’t get on with Ivan because he was quite wild. Maybe because I stayed out of trouble. He would fly off the handle at any chance, to the point I would tell him nothing anymore,’ says his brother George.
When he ventured outside of the family unit and tried to form human relationships with others Ivan struggled. Peter Cantarella, who employed Ivan for one year at his fruit market, recalls that he initially saw Milat as a decent, hardworking young man. However, this impression did not last. Problems surfaced when Ivan asked Peter to become guarantor for a vehicle he wished to purchase. Cantarella agreed, on the understanding that the loan Ivan needed to buy the car would be repaid. Ivan bought the car and then defaulted on the loan, leaving Cantarella liable for it. At first, Ivan went to ground but when he did finally resurface it wasn’t to ask Cantarella for forgiveness. Instead, with his brothers in tow, Ivan began to harass Cantarella and his wife. The situation steadily worsened as the Milats stole guns and jewellery from Cantarella and his wife then would turn up at the Cantarella family home and pelt it with stones. A no-nonsense character himself, Cantarella eventually decided to take matters in hand when Ivan and his family turned up one day, brandishing their weapons and threatening robbery. He remembers: ‘Milat walked into my shop, with his brothers and guns, and took the jewellery off my first wife, and I thumped him in the head. He was just getting in the wrong crowd and was getting bad.’
Ivan’s car trouble marked the beginning of his life outside the law. Along with some of his brothers Ivan embarked on a crime spree, robbing and vandalising his way through town. The Milat boys were troublemakers but were hardly master criminals. Although they were always in trouble with the law, the Milats’ crimes were not the sort to bring them national notoriety. Ivan seems to have been an especially inept villain. He began with stealing cars and burglary and graduated on to one day breaking into an army barracks and making off with a safe.
But Milat was not what one could call an effective criminal. More often than not he was caught and incarcerated. Once in prison he was able to mix with other criminals, as well as with men who were truly evil and psychopathic. The type of men who, like Ivan, held a grudge against society and who at the same time felt they were being persecuted by it.
In 1971, not long being discharged from his latest stint in jail, Ivan Milat committed an act which instantly took him from the ranks of small-time crooks and put him into a much higher league. He decided to abduct two female hitchhikers who were on their way to Melbourne. In what would become his hallmark, Milat picked up the two young women in an initially friendly manner and quickly metamorphosed in a monster once he had them under his control. When the girls had appraised themselves of the danger they were in, they played a successful psychological game with Milat. He had made it clear that he intended to kill both women, so one of them struck a bargain with Milat – that he should let them live if she agreed to have sex with him. Shortly after Milat released his two captives he found himself arrested and charged with rape (the charge was later dropped when one of the victims changed her testimony).
