Case File 01: The Forest Trails
The Belanglo "Backpacker Murders", New South Wales, 1989 to 1992.
Case File 01: the real file
18+ content. This page is for readers of Outback Case Files. It describes a real murder case, factually and without gore. If you have come here from a puzzle, finish your accusation first: this page gives the game away.
Campfire Quests acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the lands on which these stories took place. We pay our respects to Elders past and present, and to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that this page may contain the names, images and stories of people who have died.
The Belanglo "Backpacker Murders", New South Wales, 1989 to 1992 (Ivan Milat)
In the book this case appears as “The Forest Trails”. The names of people and most places were changed to make the puzzle work. Below is what really happened.
Between December 1989 and April 1992, seven young hitch-hikers aged 19 to 22, from Australia, Germany and the United Kingdom, disappeared after leaving Sydney heading south along the Hume Highway. Their remains were found in Belanglo State Forest, near Berrima, between September 1992 and November 1993.
Ivan Robert Marko Milat, a road worker from Eagle Vale, was convicted on 27 July 1996 of all seven murders and of the attempted murder, false imprisonment and robbery of survivor Paul Onions. He received seven life sentences without parole. His appeals failed. He died in custody on 27 October 2019. The victims were Deborah Everist, James Gibson, Simone Schmidl, Gabor Neugebauer, Anja Habschied, Caroline Clarke and Joanne Walters.
How the real detectives cracked it
The real case was broken by the survivor. Paul Onions, a British backpacker, had escaped from a man calling himself "Bill" near the forest turn-off in January 1990 and reported it to police at the time. Years later, reading about the discoveries in Belanglo State Forest, he rang the Australian hotline from England. His call sat in a backlog of thousands. When a detective finally followed it up and flew him out, Onions picked Ivan Milat from a photo board on 5 May 1994.
The raid on 22 May 1994 found the victims' belongings in Milat's house and the parts of a Ruger .22 rifle that matched cartridge cases from the forest. Milat, a road worker, had been off work on every date a backpacker disappeared and had sold his silver Nissan Patrol soon after the first bodies were found. He was convicted of seven murders on 27 July 1996 and died in prison in 2019, never having admitted a thing.
Read more
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A word about respect
These were real people, and the victims had families, many of whom are still here. We have kept to the public record and left out the gore on purpose. If you share this page, please share it the way you would want your own family talked about.
Banner photo: Belanglo State Forest, by Maksym Kozlenko (CC BY-SA 4.0), via Wikimedia Commons.