Inquest Details the Final Years of Australia’s Most Notorious Serial Killer

An inquest into the death of Australia’s most notorious serial killer, Ivan Milat, was held at the New South Wales Coroners Court on Tuesday. The so-called Backpacker Killer, who was convicted of murdering seven people between 1989 and 1993, died in prison on October 27, 2019, after spending 25 years behind bars. He was 74 years old.

Deputy State Coroner Derek Lee determined that Milat died of natural causes from metastatic gastroesophageal adenocarcinoma: that is, a cancer that originates in the junction between the oesophagus and the stomach before spreading to other parts of the body. This was hardly a surprising development: Milat was diagnosed with stomach and throat cancer in the final years of his life. But the inquest also heard other details about how the serial killer spent his life sentence inside the state’s highest security prisons.

Milat was serving seven consecutive life sentences for the murders of seven people: Melbourne couple Deborah Everist, 19, and James Gibson, 19; German traveller Simone Schmidl, 21; German couple Anja Habschied, 20, and Gabor Neugebauer, 21; and British travellers Joanne Walters, 22, and Caroline Clarke, 21.

All of the victims were hitchhikers who died under horrific circumstances—one shot 10 times in the head; another decapitated; several bound or gagged—and all of their bodies were found buried in makeshift graves in NSW’s Belanglo State Forest throughout the early 90s. In 1996, Milat was finally arrested following a police raid on his house in the south-west Sydney suburb of Eagle Vale.

Milat was known to suffer from depression and inflict self-harm, the inquest heard this week, meaning he spent the majority of his sentence in high risk management at Goulburn Correctional Centre. In 2001 he swallowed razor blades, paper staples, a tiny metal chain and the flushing mechanism from the toilet in his cell. In 2009 he sawed off his pinky with a plastic knife and mailed it to the High Court of Australia in one of many unsuccessful bids for an appeal. And in 2011 he went on a nine-day hunger strike, losing 25 kilograms, in an equally unsuccessful attempt to be given a PlayStation.

It was October 2018 that Milat started having issues with his upper gastrointestinal tract, and despite receiving treatment in December of that year his symptoms gradually worsened. He suffered severe pain, struggled to eat and swallow and began to rapidly shed weight. In January 2019 he refused to attend a specialist appointment, against medical advice, in what became a pattern of defiant behaviour. He refused a soft food diet, and by the time he finally agreed to see a doctor and undergo specialist pathology tests in May 2019, he had lost 20 kilograms.

After he arrived at hospital, CT scans detected moderate hardening of Milat’s stomach and oesophagus, and he was shortly thereafter he was diagnosed with cancer in his oesophagus and stomach, as well as a form of mouth and throat cancer above and below his diaphragm. Following this diagnosis, Milat agreed to a palliative oesophageal implant and later consented for palliative chemotherapy in June of that year—whereupon he was given just a few months to live.

In August 2019, Milat signed a “do-not-resuscitate order”, thus prohibiting doctors from intervening in the event that his heart stopped and requesting that he be allowed to die a natural death. On the night of October 26 he was given pain and anxiety medication, and at about 4AM on October 27 he was found dead in his bed. He never confessed to the seven murders for which he was convicted.

In the lead-up to his death, Milat wrote a letter to his family asking that his funeral be paid for by the NSW Government—a request that was denied by Correctional Services. Instead his body was cremated, with the full reimbursement of costs paid from his prison account.

The inquest heard that Milat’s family had no concerns about the medical treatment he received in his final months—although his brother Bill was reportedly furious that he first heard of Ivan’s death from a journalist, who called him some two hours before Corrective Services showed up at his door. 

Corrective Services NSW admitted to the inquest that the media had been told about Milat’s death before NSW Police had contacted the family.

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