Sadistic Killers: Profiles of Pathological Predators (26 page)

The eighth murder

Realising that Dawnette could tell police about the vehicle he was driving, Wilder decided to steal another car. Spotting a Firebird that he liked the look of in a shopping mall car park, he carjacked the owner, 33-year-old Sunday School teacher Beth Dodge. He bundled her into her own vehicle whilst Tina followed in his car, obeying his instructions to keep close behind. When they got to the woods, Wilder marched Beth behind some trees and shot her dead then he and Tina took off in her car.

Tina is freed

Wilder knew that the net was closing in – and he told Tina he didn’t want her to be with him when he was killed by the authorities. On 13 April he drove her to a Boston airport and gave her money for her flight home plus generous spending money. The distressed teenager walked towards the departure lounge, half expecting him to shoot her in the back. She boarded the plane and disembarked at Los Angeles, but, unable to face the thought of police and distraught relatives in her unkempt state, took a taxi to her favourite lingerie store. The press would 216

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later suggest that this was proof of her extreme disturbance but the truth was more prosaic: the poor teenager felt unclean, having been unable to change her underwear for the past nine days. After buying several items she shakily admitted to the manageress that she was the missing girl everyone was anxious about.

Another victim escapes

Within hours of saying goodbye to Tina, Christopher Wilder was ready to abduct another victim. Driving through Massachusetts, he saw a 19-year-old female driver standing by the roadside and she explained to him that her car had broken down. Wilder offered her a lift to buy petrol, but when she got into the passenger seat he pointed his gun at her and told her to keep quiet. She obeyed him, but when he slowed for a red light, she jumped out of the car and rolled across the road before making her escape. The teenager immediately contacted the police.

Death by cop

Later that day, Wilder pulled into a service station in New Hampshire – just 12 miles from the Canadian border where he had friends – and was recognised by two state troopers.

The sadist reached for his pistol, and one of the troopers threw himself on top of Wilder to push the barrel in the other direction and prevent being killed. The gun went off, the first bullet hitting Christopher Wilder then coming out of his body and lodging in the officer’s ribs. The second round entered Wilder’s heart, killing him instantly.

An autopsy showed that his brain was perfectly normal, and, after a Catholic ceremony in Boynton Beach, his body was cremated.

Several of his victims’ relatives subsequently sued his estate.

Wilder’s ashes were eventually returned to his family in Australia, the country where his sexual offending had begun.

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CHAPTER FIFTEEN

IVAN ROBERT MARKO

MILAT

After a lifetime of criminality which included rape,
Ivan Milat graduated to murder in 1989. Over the
next three years he tortured and killed seven hitch-hikers in Australia’s Belango State Forest and
attempted to kill another who thankfully survived
to identify him.

Formative in uences

Ivan was born on 27 December 1944 to Margaret and Stiphan Milat. Stiphan was from Croatia but had moved to Australia with his family in his twenties. He was 34 when he married Margaret, then only 16.

Ivan already had two brothers and two sisters, and when he was two, his parents presented him with another sister.

Desperately poor, the family were living in a large shed. A year later the family moved to Liverpool, near Sydney, and Margaret gave birth to her seventh child, a boy, and two years later she produced another son.

By now Stiphan was drinking heavily and had begun to beat Margaret and the children. She too sometimes beat the 218

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children, stabbing one of her sons in the arm and scarring him for life.

Unable to cope, the Milats talked about sending some of the children to a Catholic children’s home. As a result, one boy began to stab his own throat glands in order to make his face swell so that he wouldn’t be sent away.

From the time that he was little, Ivan joined his older siblings in fixing up his father’s market garden. The man would stand behind them with a belt, beating them if they tired. He also stood on Ivan and his brothers and thrashed them with a piece of wood. The neighbours called Stiphan ‘The Gestapo’ and found him terrifying.

Meanwhile, Ivan’s parents continued to produce more brothers and sisters till 12 children were crammed into their impoverished home, and more were pending. He was put in charge of his younger siblings and was so busy with his chores that he never had time to play with his friends after school.

Further cruelty

Not that Ivan was safe from cruelty at school – the teachers at St Mary’s primary and the Patrician Brothers who ran his Liverpool secondary were strict disciplinarians. He truanted frequently and at age 13 was sent to a home for delinquents, where he became an altar boy. His ten-year-old brother Bill, by now becoming equally distressed and out of control, was also sent to the same local authority home.

Ivan drew lots of houses whilst he was in care – abused and neglected children often spend hours drawing attractive and friendly looking houses, the kind of calm environment they long for. He also read comics, not being academically inclined.

Sent home at 14, Ivan arrived back to find his mother heavily pregnant with her thirteenth child, another son. It was vital that he bring in some money, so Ivan now became a roadworker 219

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like his father. He worked alongside the older man and was an equally hard worker and increasingly strong. After a long day at work he’d come home and help his mother with the younger children and the numerous chores.

Early crimes

Like many teenagers from impoverished and brutalising homes, he eventually turned to burglary. In January 1962 the 17-year-old was arrested. By now his 41-year-old mother – grossly overweight and almost toothless from so many pregnancies

– was expecting her fourteenth child. (It would be another son, her tenth.) The magistrates took his mother’s condition, and the fact that it was Ivan’s first known offence, into consideration and let him off on a good behaviour bond.

But Ivan was incapable of good behaviour, and within weeks he broke into a garage. This time he was sentenced to six months’ hard labour in a juvenile institution, a place where violence was the norm.

Released at age 18, he found labouring work but had so much money that it was obvious he was still thieving. By 20

he’d been charged with various offences, including attempted safe cracking and motor vehicle theft, for which he served time in Grafton Maximum Security Prison, New South Wales.

There he was badly beaten by the guards with rubber batons, which resulted in him passing bloody urine for days. Moved to a minimum security camp, he began to lift weights in earnest, determined not to be the underdog again.

Arson

This time when he was released he became an arsonist, a crime which often has a sexual component. He would set fire to cars for kicks and to see how wildly they’d explode. Later, along 220

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with equally lawless friends, he gravitated to making pipe bombs and blowing up trees.

Family mayhem

Unsurprisingly Ivan wasn’t the only violently parented Milat to turn to crime. One brother, Mick, was arrested for beating up a soldier and would later go to prison for most of his twenties, serving time for a series of armed robberies. Another, Richard, got into trouble with the authorities for possessing drugs and would later tell astonished workmates – who feared him – that stabbing a woman was like cutting a loaf of bread. Meanwhile Boris regularly beat up his wife, though she eventually persuaded him to seek psychiatric help.

The family was further devastated when 16-year-old Margaret

– Ivan’s favourite sister – was killed in a car crash which also injured one of her brothers, Wally. He would eventually be charged with drug and firearm crimes. Another brother, David, was left with limited movement in one arm and shoulder after coming off his motorbike. Later this same brother sustained brain damage in another road accident.

Rape

Ivan remained troubled by the suffering he’d experienced at home, at school and in the prison system. It would also later be rumoured that he’d been sexually molested by a woman who’d babysat him during his chaotic childhood. What’s certain is that his experiences had left him with an overwhelming need to be in control and he partly achieved this by working on his physique and by cleaning his car until it shone, but it wasn’t enough.

Out driving one day in 1971, he picked up two teenage girls who were receiving treatment at a psychiatric hospital.

Suddenly he pulled over to the side of a dirt track and told 221

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them that if they didn’t meet his sexual demands he would murder them. He continued to talk, clearly building himself up to act, and eventually produced two knives and two pieces of rope. He raped one of the girls before driving them both to a garage for soft drinks, talking as if they were all best of friends and suggesting they go on holiday together. The raped girl told the garage owner what had happened and Milat fled.

He went on the run to avoid the police and faked his own death, abandoning his car at a notorious suicide spot and leaving his shoes at the top of the cliff. As a result, his mother, who’d put up her house as surety that he wouldn’t skip bail, faced homelessness.

Ivan was eventually captured and stood trial. But on the stand one of the girls said that she always refused intercourse but sometimes wanted it deep down, explaining, ‘My mother is very religious and she never accepts the fact that I have sex with anyone.’ She added that her friend had been flirtatious and had enjoyed the sex. Unsurprisingly, given her lukewarm testimony, the jury returned in record time to proclaim Ivan Milat not guilty and he walked free.

Marriage

Still aroused by forced sex, Ivan often raped his 16-year-old girlfriend, Karen, who was pregnant when he met her. She had desperately low self-esteem so married him on 20 February 1983. Thereafter the sex included sodomy, something he’d been introduced to in prison (though it’s unclear if he was on the giving or the receiving end) and was now desperate to repeat. He was also cruel to animals, taking Karen into the forest where he wounded two kangaroos by shooting them, then tied one to a tree and slit its throat. Two months later his father, already weakened through bowel cancer, died of pneumonia. Karen noticed that Ivan became even more aggressive after the old man’s death.

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profoundly jealous. She also had to produce receipts to account for exactly how she’d spent the housekeeping money, and he regularly criticised the choices she made.

Within three years his marriage was on the rocks, his badly beaten wife close to a breakdown. When she left him, he wept copiously then sold the house for far less than its market value so that she wouldn’t get any cash. Though 40, he had the emotional maturity of a little child, a syndrome explained in the last chapter of this book.

He’d often threatened to burn his in-laws’ house down, and a year after Karen left him, her parents’ house was torched and Ivan was questioned. But, though everyone knew he was responsible, the police couldn’t prove it and had to let him go.

Cruelty to animals

At work, he became increasingly strange, always carrying a foot-long Bowie knife in his rucksack. He stabbed a snake to death and cut it into chunks in front of his surprised workmates, and at weekends he went hunting, wounding sheep, goats and birds then slowly tracking them down. His sister-in-law Marilyn, whom he was having an affair with (and whom he had a daughter with) noticed that he seemed to like causing suffering. In 1989 she left him because he wouldn’t commit to a serious relationship.

27 December of that year was Ivan Milat’s forty-fifth birthday, but he had little to celebrate. His wife and his lover had left him and he hadn’t even attempted to deal with the horrors of his childhood. Now he was back home living with his mother and it was time to pass the horror onto someone else…

Two murders

On Saturday 30 December 1989, students Deborah Everist and James Gibson set off from Liverpool in Australia to travel to a new age festival held on the New South Wales/Victoria border.

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The 19-year-olds began to hitch-hike and were never seen alive again, except by their killer.

The teenagers were doubtless picked up by Ivan Milat, possibly acting in conjunction with another male. At some stage of the journey, a vicious and sustained assault took place.

James was stabbed in the spine, a wound deliberately made to paralyse him. There may have been a sexual aspect to this assault, as when he was found, his jeans were unzipped. He was also stabbed in the back and several times in the chest, breaking one of his ribs. He may eventually have been strangled as, when his corpse was found, the hyoid bone in his throat was gone.

Deborah Everist met an equally cruel fate. She was tied up and stabbed in the chest and through the ribs, and slashed across the forehead. Blows with a heavy object to her head had led to unconsciousness and, along with a stab wound to her heart, would have caused her death.