Where are Ivan Milat's 10 brothers and 4 sisters? Inside horrific incest, murder and 'worst tenant'
Ivan Milat, the notorious 'backpacker murderer', tortured and killed at least seven people in New South Wales, Australia, between 1989 and 1993. Bodies of seven missing young people between the age of 19 and 22, five of whom were foreigners, were discovered partially buried in the Belanglo State Forest. One was found in a fetal position and others looked like they had been used for target practice by the 'gun crazy' serial killer. One was decapitated when she was still alive. Her head was never found. All of the victims were brutally killed. Most did not die right away from their injuries but were left to linger in pain.
But it wasn't just the backpacker killer who was infamous for his evil. The whole Milat family was. Now, icy facts from the Milat case files are ready to be exposed in a new Channel 7 documentary called 'Ivan Milat: Buried Secrets', which is set to talk about 20 other people, including a 20-year-old pregnant woman, who may have been murdered by the same man. And what's more chilling is that he may not have worked alone. Here's what's to know about the 10 brothers and four sisters of the murderous Milat family.
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Olga
Olga was Milat's eldest sister born in 1939. She married Henry Shipsey, had two boys and a girl. Her husband later shot himself dead after his brick cleaning business went bust. When Ivan had been moved from a secure ward at Sydney‘s Prince of Wales hospital back to the Long Bay Jail’s hospital, his nephew Alistair Shipsey was quoted in the Herald Sun as saying: Mum [Olga] says he’s right on the ball, switched on… Mum says he’s going real good, he’s not dying. Mum says he’s just real skinny," adding that Milat "doesn’t want to die. He wants to clear his name.”
The Daily Telegraph reported how Milat got a lot of love from ladies while he was in prison. Alistair Shipsey, who lives in Sydney, had released 94 of the letters in his book, 'The Milat Letters', because he says they show the real Milat, not the monster he is portrayed to be. “He is a good-hearted person. When my father died, Ivan paid for the funeral, we couldn’t afford it,” Shipsey, 55, says. “He has a lot of concern for my mum.” Olga changed her name to Diane Shipsey after Ivan's arrest in 1994.
Alex
Avid firearms collector and gun enthusiast Alex Milat was born in 1940. He married Joan, aged 19, and worked as a miner. The couple, who are now divorced, had two children, daughter Rachel and son Stefan, who died of pneumonia at age 20, following which they moved to Queensland and ran a federal election on a pro-gun policy in 1998. He now lives in the town of Palmwoods in the Sunshine Coast Region of Queensland.
It was Alex Milat's tip to the Bowral police station in NSW's southern highlands in 1992, which kickstarted the investigation that led to the arrest and conviction of his serial killer brother. He was just trying to be a good citizen when he said he saw two vehicles entering the Belanglo State Forest, containing roughly seven men and two women who were bound, gagged and frightened. His 'abnormally vivid description matched that of Caroline Clarke and Joanne Walters, two British backpackers, whose bodies were later found in the forest.
Boris Stanley
Boris is the only member of the Milat family to publicly denounce his brother in both life and death. "He was dead to me a long time ago," he said in a 9 News report. "This man is just an evil serial killer right to the last bone of him."
Boris had a long-running feud with Ivan over Ivan's affair with his wife Marilyn. It was an open family secret that Ivan fathered Marilyn's second daughter Lynise. He changed his name to Steven Miller in 1994 after Ivan's arrest.
The 79-year-old is 'embarrassed' to be a Milat, and said he bears no burden of grief for his late 'monster' brother. "He deserves where he is and he deserves what he's got," he said, adding that Ivan Milat murdered people for the joy of killing and the fact he knew he could get away with it. Boris dabbled in robbery with his brothers when he was a teenager, then straightened out to become a builder. He lives in the Hunter Valley.
Mary
Born in the same year as Boris, Mary married a man of Yugoslavian descent. The couple live in Moorebank, Syndey, with a son and a daughter. She had visited the dying serial murderer at a secure annex of the Randwick hospital in May 2019.
Shirley Soire
A staunch defender of Ivan, Shirley Marjorie Elizabeth, born two years after Ivan (in 1946), visited her brother in jail. She married Gerry Soire in 1964. The couple had two children and later divorced. She bought a house at Eagle Vale with Ivan in 1992 and lived with him until he was arrested. She introduced Ivan to his last girlfriend, Chalinder Hughes, in 1992. In 1996, pleaded guilty to the charge of possessing an unlicensed .45 caliber pistol buried in grounds of the Eagle Vale home, where they carved their initials on a path. It reads "I & S - 31.12.93".
In 2019, a dying Milat confessed to his mother that he had committed the Belanglo backpack murders and that his little sister was also aware of his crimes and even helped 'get rid of' his gun. Relatives acknowledged Milat had a close, if not sexual, relationship with Shirley, who he lived with in southwest Sydney when he was arrested in 1994. Of the incest, another Milat brother, Richard, said about Shirley and Ivan: "What's the difference, one or the other, if you're doing it with your sister or your mate up the road?" Shirley died in February 2003. She was cremated.
William 'Bill' Allan
William 'Bill' Allan, born in 1947, was jailed for car theft in 1965, following which he decided to go clean. He worked at the Water Board for many years and married Carol Pritchard in 1972. The couple lives in Bargo, a small town of the Macarthur Region, New South Wales with their daughter, Debbie, and son Christopher. He mortgaged his Bargo house to pay for Ivan's legal fighting fund, after pleading with sister Shirley.
Following a tense stand-off with prison minister Anthony Roberts over who will pay up for the backpacker murderer's funeral, Bill was adamant to stick to his guns and follow his 74-year-old brother's dying wish that the family not pay a cent for the funeral. He also didn't mind what happened to his brother — whether he is left on ice in the morgue indefinitely or chucked back in jail. "He was given seven life sentences, he did one, so that means there's six (sentences of) 74 years to go. Which is what, 440 years?" he said, adding that the family will not claim the body.
Michael 'Mick' Gordon
Five years younger than Ivan, Michael looked up to his big brother and followed him into crime. He was jailed for car theft, age 18, and then served time for seven years for armed robbery and wounding, at the age of 23. He took his nephew Stefan's widow Sherie, under his wing and adopted her son Daniel. He later married Sherie. Les Kennedy in his book, 'Sins of the Brother', describes Mick as a pot smoker and grower. He died in 2000 at the age of 50 of a heart attack on his property in Nanango. He was buried in Nanango Cemetery.
Walter 'Wally' Francis
Born in 1952, Wally's teenage girlfriend Maureen Parsons was also seeing Ivan. Wally married Maureen in 1972 but was paranoid she was having an affair with Ivan, which they did have on and off for about a year. They had two children, Robert and Susan but divorced in 1982. Maureen said, in an interview with the Daily Mail, that Milat died to her "20 or so years ago". She said she believed Milat was far from innocent and struggled to understand how the Milat family deny the murders. "They all stick together... they're a strong group, strong family," she said.
Wally is now married to his second wife Lisa. The couple has two sons, Jamie and Terry. A gyprock by trade, Wally loves to hunt and shoot. He lives on Hill Top, near Belanglo.
George Peter
Obsessed with cars, George Peter was married with six children. While Wally remembers the crowded home in working-class Guildford fondly, George, who was nine years Ivan’s junior, recalls a different household — one dominated by a violent older brother. “To me Ivan was bloody cranky,” George told, Neil Mercer, author of 'Fate: Inside the Backpacker Murders Investigation'. “I did not get on with him. He treated some of us quite badly and had a go at us. He’d belt you one or bash you one." Ivan would take George out to the backyard and teach him how to fight, and constantly emphasized the need for his little brother to be able to look after himself.
George now lives alone at Douglas Park, in the Southern Highlands. He is the black sheep of the family.
Margaret Maria
Margaret was 11 years younger than Ivan. She died in a car accident at the age of 16. Wally was driving. The car crashed head-on with another car near the family home. “He took it rough but he helped everyone get through it,” recalls Wally in The Ivan Milat Files. “Ivan was good in keeping things together."
Ivan was one of the first to see her at the accident scene and was scarred by her death.
Richard James
Richard had unwittingly got his brother caught when he boasted "I know who killed those Germans", when Gabor Neugebauer and Anja Habschied's bodies were found in Belanglo. "I always thought he was a great fella," he told 9News at his Hill Top home, an hour south of Sydney.
When asked what life had been like being the brother of Australia's worst serial killer he said, "I never thought I was the brother of a serial killer so I was laughin'(sic)", adding that he did not believe his brother was guilty of the murders. When the newspapers announced that Caroline Clarke and Joanne Walters bodies were found, Richard had remarked, “There’s more bodies out there. They haven’t found the two Germans yet.” The Germans were found over a year later. He was also said to have aided his brother in the killings.
David John 'Bodge'
Born in 1958, David was charged with trying to extort $500,000 from Qantas in a telephone hoax at the age of 15. He was let off with a bond. The weatherboard and brick home where Margaret Milat lived until her death in 2001 is now occupied by him.
He suffered severe brain damage in a 1990 car accident and family members were furious that he was alone when police staged their raid. Boris is his guardian.
Paul Thomas
Divorced with two teenage children, Paul Thomas, the youngest of the Milats, born in 1962, has distanced himself from the Milat clan. Weekly Times Now described him as Australia's 'worst tenant', someone who trashed properties and didn't pay rent.
"At the start, he's just a normal guy. And then he turns into this monster," said his landlord. As for Paul, he believes he is entitled to free rent and government welfare because of his surname. "the world f*****g owes me," he said to Nine Network.
An Australian horror story
Of all the other Milat relatives that made quite the murderous mark, Matthew Milat's was probably the chilliest. Seventeen years after Ivan Milat's final murder in 1993, his nephew Matthew returned to the scene of his uncle's crimes to kill his friend with an ax. On November 10, 2010, 18-year-old Matthew and his friend Cohen Klein, 19, lured their friend David Auchterlonie, whose birthday was on that same day, into the Belanglio State Forest, on a promise of a day of drinking and smoking cannabis. The murder, and the 15 minutes leading up to it, was hauntingly captured on an audio recording from Klein's mobile phone.
In it, Milat can be heard saying to David "tell people my f****** business and you wind up hurt". Justice Jane Mathews said that to describe the recording as "chilling...is an understatement", adding that the crime was done for personal enjoyment and that Auchterlonie's final 10 minutes alive were filled with "horror" and "unimaginable torment".
"The sound of David crying out in agony is chilling in the extreme," she added. Matthew is the grandson of Bill Milat, through his daughter Deb.
According to Murderpedia, here's a particularly chilling poem, one of many, that Matthew Milat wrote more than nine months after the murder:
'your last day'
Click-clack
hear that,
stopping in the, middle of the track,
Are you Getting Nervous in the back,
Should be C--- your getting wAcked,
talk s--- here, talk s--- there,
No-one'z really gunna care,
but talk s--- with every breath,
You just signed away your health,
I can see you start to sweat,
Wanderin what your gunna get,
hopin 4-1 in the head,
C--- ILL Put it in Your Leg,
tell me, ARE YA HAVIN FUN,
get up C---, And start to run,
how fAr are ya gunna get,
Your Match C--- you have just Met,
stumblin all OVA the place,
Hear the crunch of leaves and feet,
feel your heart, skip a beat,
Are ya gunna get away,
No hope kid this is your day,
The day that you wont be found,
Six feet under Neath the ground.
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