.png)
8 hours ago
7
Hugh Hughes, a retired UK detective with the Metropolitan police, has spent three decades travelling back and forth between his home in Wales and Canberra, trying to solve the murder of Keren Rowland, a cousin of his Australian wife, Andrea.
Hughes is convinced that Rowland, who went missing from Canberra on 26 February 1971, was the first victim of the notorious serial killer Ivan Milat.
In 1994, Milat was jailed for life for the murder of seven backpackers, whose bodies were discovered in the remote Belanglo state forest in the NSW Southern Highlands. Milat died in jail in 2019, aged 74.
But the Legalise Cannabis party’s NSW MLC, Jeremy Buckingham, is convinced Milat killed many more.
Buckingham has lobbied successfully for the establishment of a parliamentary inquiry into unsolved murders and long-term missing cases from 1965 to 2010, which will call for submissions on Monday.
He believes Milat could have murdered more than 80 people.
Sign up: AU Breaking News email
The NSW premier, Chris Minns, agreed to the inquiry after Buckingham presented him with the 1965 identikit picture of the man believed responsible for the notorious Wanda Beach murders of two young girls, Christine Sharrock and Marianne Schmidt, and another of a young Ivan Milat. There is certainly a resemblance.
But Buckingham wants the inquiry to go much further and investigate “impediments in the justice system that impacted the delivery of justice”.
In March he told parliament: “I believe it is possible that Milat’s long‑term relationships with powerful and corrupt interests protected him from investigation, prosecution and justice for many decades before he was convicted for the Belanglo murders.”
Milat’s first victim?
“My interest is solely in Keren,” Hughes says, when asked about the possibility that Milat was a serial killer of monstrous proportions.
“If he did kill Keren, and I am 95-98% certain he did, then she was his first victim.”
Rowland was 20, and five months pregnant, when she went missing on 26 February 1971, the night of the Royal Canberra Show.
She travelled to Civic, Canberra’s city centre, to pick up her sister and go to a party, but it was decided her sister would get a lift with her fiance and Rowland would follow in her car.
Rowland never arrived. She was reported missing by family members about midnight.
Her car was later found on Parkes Way in the suburb of Campbell.
Her remains were discovered three months later in a pine plantation outside the city.
Together with Rowland’s brother, Steve, Hughes has made it his mission to review the investigation by the ACT and NSW police. He says efforts to gain information using freedom of information laws have been stymied by the ACT police, who say the investigation is still open.
Hughes says Milat was identified as a suspect in 1971, though this is not on the public record.
He says Milat was working at the Queanbeyan depot of the NSW Waste and Water board, which is not far from where Rowland’s body was found.
The NSW government has confirmed to Hughes that Milat worked for the water board at that time, though without specifying his location.
In April 1971, just a few weeks after Rowland’s disappearance, Milat was charged with abducting and raping an 18-year-old woman, Margaret Patterson, and her friend Greta whom he had picked up as they were hitchhiking from the Sydney suburb of Liverpool.
Milat had offered to take them to Canberra but pulled off the highway at Goulburn and took them down a secluded dirt road. There he allegedly threatened them with two hunting knives and raped them. Later Patterson told Milat she was ill and he pulled in to a petrol station in Goulburn where the women found help.
Milat took off but was detained at a police roadblock. He was arrested and charged but fled to New Zealand while on bail.
He was finally brought to trial in 1974, but acquitted after his lawyer, John Marsden, raised the girls’ psychiatric history and claimed they were lesbians.
No one has ever been charged with Rowland’s murder.
An obsession
An entire wall of Buckingham’s office in the NSW parliament is covered in pictures of missing and murdered young women and men from the 1960s to the 1990s, interspersed with pictures of Milat.
It seems a little incongruous for a man who was elected on a platform to legalise cannabis.
“I believe that the war on drugs has been a misallocation of resources in that we pursue so many people for low-level personal drug use to no real benefit to society,” Buckingham says.
“I believe that the police would be much better off, and society would be much better off, if those resources were used to pursue domestic, sexual and other violent crimes, ones that have a much bigger impact.”
Buckingham’s obsession with Milat and unsolved cases began when looking at a missing person case in Bellingen, where he lives.
“I thought to myself, ‘Well, if you’ve got a proclivity for extreme violence against strangers, picking them up and torturing them and sexually assaulting them and murdering them, and you start killing in 1971, you probably keep killing’,” Buckingham claims.
As part of the investigation into the murders of the seven backpackers found at Belanglo, NSW police drew up a list of missing and murdered young people whose circumstances fitted a similar profile.
Taskforce Air looked at 58 cases, searching for links to Milat.
Some had disappeared while hitchhiking. Some whose bodies were found had been raped after being tortured and stabbed like the backpackers found in Belanglo. There was a preponderance of young white women, often with long brunette hair. The victims’ bodies were often found covered with leaves in state forests.
The list included Australians and people from the US, the UK, Germany, Italy and New Zealand.
Taskforce commander Clive Small, who recently died, identified three unsolved murders as having a high possibility of being Milat’s victims because of the similarities in the modus operandi of the killer.
They were Rowland; 18-year-old Peter Letcher, who was hitchhiking near Bathurst in 1987 and whose body was found near the Jenolan Caves; and Dianne Pennacchio, who in 1991 had hitched from a hotel in Bungendore towards Queanbeyan. Her body was found in the Tallaganda state forest and had similar knife wounds to those of the backpackers.
Milat died without revealing whether there were other victims and still protesting his innocence, even though many of the Belanglo victims’ possessions were found at his house and he was identified by Paul Onions, a British backpacker who escaped from his car about the same time.
Buckingham points to other disappearances and unsolved murders in the 1970s and 1980s he believes may be related to Milat, and questions whether they were adequately investigated by police.
“These were people that had been picked up on the highway, walking home and had been abducted. Where bodies were found there had been a rape and a very violent death – and that alarmed me,” he says.
The Greens MLC Sue Higginson, in supporting the inquiry, said in parliament: “Victim testimony from unsolved cases has detailed how the police did not follow up on certain leads and how they had issues gathering evidence. The police force at the time of the Milat killings was not what it is now.”
Hughes says he has had cooperation from the NSW police, including the former commissioner, Karen Webb, and hopes the renewed focus on Milat will finally provide closure to his sister-in-law’s family.
A spokesperson for the NSW police said the force would cooperate with the inquiry: “However, as the matter is now subject to that inquiry, it would be inappropriate to provide further comment.”
The police minister, Yasmin Catley, said “police continue to review every unsolved case, relentlessly pursuing justice for victims and their families”.
“The inquiry will shine a spotlight on the extraordinary work of the unsolved homicide squad, the missing persons unit, forensic evidence and technical services command, whose work has solved crimes some once believed were unsolvable.”
The inquiry plans to start hearings in mid-2026.
