Woman Says She Escaped Ivan Milat in Newcastle in 1993
A woman told a parliamentary inquiry she escaped ivan milat in Newcastle in 1993 after accepting a lift from him. She said she got out of his car when he stopped to buy drugs, then hid behind bins at a unit block in Cooks Hill while he searched for her.
The woman’s account was among dozens of submissions to the inquiry into unsolved murders and long-term missing persons cases. Milat was convicted in 1996 of the murders of seven backpackers and died in jail in 2019 while serving seven life sentences.
Newcastle lift in 1993
The woman said she realised something was wrong and left the vehicle quietly. She described the moment in her submission: “Suddenly, a number of things made me think 'get out of the car',” and, “I realised he had done a U-turn for no reason and the vehicle was now facing in the opposite direction.”
She said the man then looked around for her and called out, “you want to play, come out.” The account places the encounter in Newcastle in 1993 and ties it to Milat by name in evidence given to the inquiry.
Union Street and Cooks Hill
Another woman from the Hunter said she had an interaction with a man she later realised was Milat when she hitchhiked into Newcastle to go to a pub in June 1993. She said she was picked up in Union Street by a man wearing a cowboy hat and driving a very big gold car that looked like a Cadillac.
She said, “We had only gone about 200 metres when he said do you smoke pot,” and, “I said yes and he drove to a unit block.” She described the vehicle as “immaculately clean and smelt like a chemical.”
Milat cases in the inquiry
The inquiry submissions also referred to Milat’s links to three women who went missing in the Newcastle area in 1978 and 1979: Leanne Goodall, Robyn Hickie and Amanda Robinson. Those names added to a record already built around Milat’s convicted case and earlier disappearances in the region.
Milat was arrested in 1994 after seven bodies were discovered in shallow graves in the Belanglo State Forest between 1992 and 1993. His victims were hitchhikers travelling south along the Hume Highway near Liverpool in western Sydney who disappeared between 1989 and 1992. He never admitted to the murders.
The inquiry now has two separate Hunter-area accounts, each describing a brief encounter with a man later believed to be Milat, alongside older missing-person links already attached to his name. Those submissions extend the historical record the inquiry is compiling and keep the focus on whether more cases may belong in the same file.
