Clive Small - Milat. Inside Australias Biggest Manhunt - a Detectives Story

Other books by
Clive Small and Tom Gilling

Smack Express: How organised crime got hooked on drugs
Blood Money: Bikies, terrorists and Middle Eastern gangs
Betrayed: The shocking story of two undercover cops

First published in 2014

Copyright Clive Small and Tom Gilling 2014

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

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Dedicated to the victims
and to the families and friends of the victims
of Ivan Milat, and to the members of Task Force Air,
whose efforts put him in gaol for life

Amazing police work. Amazingly painstaking.

Mark Tedeschi, Senior Crown Prosecutor,
commenting on the work
of Task Force Air

CONTENTS

Our sincere thanks to those who have helped directly or indirectly with the writing of this book. Thanks also to the journalists who over the decades have contributed to the solving of crimes through their reporting on the backpacker murders, unsolved murders and the disappearance of missing persons.

Special gratitude to Tim Everist, Janet Fife-Yeomans, Bob Godden, Frank Goodyer, Olga and Guenther Habschied, Martha Jabour, Frank and Angela Klaassen, John Laycock, Rod Lynch, Robert May, Graham McNeice and Graham McNeice Productions, Neil Mercer, Dr Rod Milton, Manfred and Anke Neugebauer, Alex Pollock, Kim Shipton, Candy Sutton and Ray and Gillian Walters for their support and advice.

In 2008 Clive Small and Tom Gilling published the bestselling book Smack Express: How organised crime got hooked on drugs, which exposed the growth and transformation of organised crime in Australia since the late 1960s. They followed this up two years later with Blood Money: Bikies, terrorists and Middle Eastern gangs, and later with Betrayed: The shocking story of two undercover cops.

CLIVE SMALL is a 38-year New South Wales Police veteran. Much of his time was spent in criminal investigation. He was awarded several commendations. From 1977 to 1980 he worked as an investigator with the Woodward Royal Commission into Drug Trafficking. During 198788 he was an investigator on Strike Force Omega, which reinvestigated the 1984 shooting of Detective Michael Drury. In the early 1990s Small led the backpacker murder investigation, which resulted in the conviction of Ivan Robert Milat for the murder of seven backpackers in the Belanglo State Forest, south of Sydney, between 1989 and 1992. In 2001, as head of the Greater Hume Police Region, he helped dismantle the Vietnamese street gangs that had made Cabramatta Australias heroin capital. After retiring from the police he joined the New South Wales Independent Commission Against Corruption as the executive director of operations. Since March 2007 he has been writing full time.

TOM GILLINGs first two novels, The Sooterkin (1999) and Miles McGinty (2001), were both shortlisted for major awards and chosen as notable books of the year by The New York Times. They have been translated into several languages. His third novel, Dreamland (2008), has been published in Australia, Britain and the United States. As a journalist he has worked for numerous publications including The Sydney Morning Herald, Rolling Stone, The Guardian (UK), and The New York Times. Before Smack Express he co-wrote two non-fiction books, Trial and Error (1991), about the Israeli nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu; and Bagman: The final confessions of Jack Herbert (2005), about the events that led to the Fitzgerald Inquiry into police corruption in Queensland.

On 27 July 1996 a jury found Ivan Milat guilty of murdering seven backpackers and of abducting another, Paul Onions, who would surely have been Milats eighth victim had he not managed to escape.

Other books have been written about the groundbreaking investigation that led to the arrest and conviction of Milat. This book will tell the story from a unique perspective, drawing on unpublished sources and operational insights available to me as the original commander of Task Force Air. But the book tells a much broader story.