A KILLER who kidnapped and murdered two Brit tourists has been linked to 31 more mystery deaths three decades after he was convicted.
Ivan Milat, , was sentenced to life behind bars in 1996 over the deaths of seven hikers whose bodies were found in a forest.
The sicko has now been linked by an Australian parliamentary inquiry to dozens of unsolved murders and disappearances.
He could be responsible for 17 murders or long-term missing persons cases, as well as another 14 missing persons cases, news.com.au reported .
Jeremy Buckingham, chair of the New South Wales parliamentary inquiry, said: “That’s another 30 potential murders that Ivan Milat is linked to.
“Milat should have gone to jail for 20 years or 15 years in 1975.
“And instead, wherever he went, men and women in very similar circumstances to Belanglo ended up dead.”
It has not been confirmed whether Milat committed the recently suspected crimes.
He was arrested in 1994 and in 1996 handed seven consecutive life sentences for the murders of the backpackers who were found in Belanglo State Forest.
Former senior Crown prosecutor Mark Tedeschi KC, who led the 1996, told the inquiry there may have been a chance to lock him up for good much earlier.
This claim was linked to Milat being charged with one count of rape and two of armed robbery in 1971.
He escaped to New Zealand shortly after but was later rearrested in 1974 and put on trial – but acquitted.
Tedeschi claimed he had been led to believe that Milat’s solicitor, John Marsden, visited one of the victims the night before the trial.
When she gave evidence in court, she was asked whether she had consented to sexual intercourse.
But she gave an ambigious answer, Tedeschi said.
This ultimately led to the acquittal, he added.
Tedeschi said it was important not to speculate too much on the victim’s answer.
But Buckingham claimed it may have been a case of corruption.
He said: “He [Tedeschi] said that he believed Milat’s lawyer, the late John Marsden, had approached the complainant in the rape case the night before the trial.
“That’s an assertion there, essentially, an implication that Milat beat a rape charge through intimidation of a witness or interfering with the witness.”
Buckingham also said the case of the robberies deserved further attention.
Three other suspects charged with the robberies were jailed for 12, 16 and 18 years – while Milat was acquitted.
There is no transcript from these proceedings, a fact that Buckingham said is concerning and confusing.
He questioned how such serious proceedings could not be available in the public record.
Tedeschi said he remained “deeply suspicious” Milat may have been responsible for some other deaths but emphasised suspicion was not enough to prosecute him.
He stressed that he had never been given evidence capable of establishing the other murders beyond reasonable doubt.
“It created grave suspicion, but I never saw any cogent evidence that would be sufficient to even charge him with those offences, let alone take him to trial,” Tedeschi said.
One of the cases now linked to Milat is the 1987 murder of Peter David Letcher, 18.
He disappeared while hitchhiking home from Liverpool in November 1987.
His body was found two months later in Jenolan State Forest.
Letcher’s murder was the only case police were sure Milat had committed, former Task Force Air member Kris Illingsworth said.
Fears are also mounting that Milat may have worked with someone else, Tedeschi said.
He explained: “It’s probable that, in some of those cases, there was someone else with Ivan Milat.”
The former prosecutor pointed to crime scenes involving multiple weapons, including one case where two separate guns had seemingly been used.
He said: “I was never provided with a brief in those cases or any sort of similar fact evidence that we might have been able to use in the trial.”
Justice David Hunt, who handed Milat seven life sentences, also concluded it was “inevitable” he had not acted alone.
Buckingham said: “If that’s the opinion of Mark Tedeschi, who had to literally get inside the mind of Ivan Milat in the 1990s to put him away…
“What are the police doing? Why are we not having the unsolved homicide unit try clear this up? The more we learn, the more questions there are.”
The inquiry is examining whether suspicion was ever properly pursued, and whether the answers could still be sitting inside hundreds of boxes of forgotten police records.
Milat died from cancer at Long Bay Hospital in 2019, aged 74.
