Paperback: Milat - the serial killer who preyed on young hitchhikers.
The backpackers - the innocent victims of a brutal murderer.
Belanglo - a place that became synonymous with pure evil.
It was the biggest and most complex manhunt in Australian history, an investigation that gripped a nation. Behind the many false leads and dead ends, precious clues emerged that pointed to one man.
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 Milat's 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 This book will tell the story from a unique perspective, drawing on unpublished sources and operational insights available to the author, Clive Small, as the original commander of Task Force Air. The book also tells a much broader story.
"First, I want to show how the crimes of Ivan Milat have left a profound mark on all of us, so that twenty years after his capture the very words 'Milat' and 'Belanglo' still cause a collective shudder. Second, by recounting the events that led to Milat's capture from my own point of view at the head of the investigation, I want to demonstrate how the techniques and systems pioneered by Task Force Air have transformed the investigation of major crime in New South Wales...At a deeper level, however, the book is a study not just of the backpacker murders but of all murders, of how they affect us as individuals and as a society, and of the never-ending challenge faced by the police to bring the killers to justice," wrote Clive Small in the Preface.
Questions remain. Did he act alone? Where there other victims? How much did his family know? And what of his great-nephew, who brutally killed a young man in 2010?
Chilling, forensic, compassionate - this is the definitive story that could only be told by someone at the centre of the police operation. It is also a powerful argument for the investigation of more than a hundred unsolved murders.
Milat (2014) is 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.
About the authors: Clive Small is a 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 1987-88 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 Australia's 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 Gilling's 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.
In 2008, Clive Small and Tom Gilling published the best-selling 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.
