Missing Ivan Milat file could be buried in 400 unexamined police archive boxes

Hundreds of unexamined boxes in police storage could hold the key to whether Ivan Milat had an accomplice and unearth a missing brief of evidence linking him to a 1987 murder.

A NSW inquiry this month heard state police cannot locate a task force brief delivered to the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) in the 1990s that names Milat as the prime suspect in the killing of 18-year-old Peter David Letcher.

Letcher, from Bathurst, a regional centre about 200 kilometres west-northwest of Sydney, disappeared in November 1987 while hitchhiking home from Liverpool.

Two months later, in January 1988, his body was found in the Jenolan State Forest, west of Sydney.

Task Force Air, a specialised NSW police investigative unit formed in 1993 to capture Milat and examine the Belanglo State Forest backpacker murders, reviewed a number of missing persons cases, Letcher’s among them, to identify any connection to Milat.

According to a submission to the NSW parliamentary inquiry into unsolved murders and long-term missing persons from Kris Illingsworth, a former police officer and Task Force Air member, Letcher’s murder was the only additional case the task force was certain Milat had committed. 

Illingsworth said a brief of evidence was sent to the DPP, which the independent agency declined to proceed with, citing insufficient ballistic evidence.

NSW Upper House MP Jeremy Buckingham, who is chairing the inquiry, queried the existence of the brief with a senior police official during a public hearing in Sydney on September 10.

“We have searched our records and we can’t find that,” Detective Superintendent Joe Doueihi, the commander of the NSW Police Force Homicide Squad, told the inquiry.

“We’ve reached out to the DPP and the DPP have told us that they don’t have any record of that.”

Doueihi noted “there were 400 boxes of archived material”, which he said have not been examined.

“There may be something in there, but from our inquiries we’ve made so far, we can’t find any documentation,” he said.

This was not the first time the inquiry touched on the missing Milat file.

Earlier in the day’s hearing, former lead Crown prosecutor Mark Tedeschi KC told the committee he was never provided with a brief on Letcher.

Tedeschi served as a Crown prosecutor in NSW from 1983 until 2018. 

“Whilst I was made aware by the police that they were suspicious that Ivan may have committed other murders because of the similarity of the area where he was working, I was never presented with any evidence that would have linked them and made them potentially admissible in the trial,” he said.

Tedeschi noted that if a brief is forwarded to the DPP and there's consideration by the DPP whether the matter should go to trial, it goes to "the very upper echelons" of the DPP office.   

"It's either the director himself or herself or one of the deputy directors who makes the actual decision," he said.

“That was the system when I was senior Crown [prosecutor]. I don’t know if it’s still the system today.”

Milat was arrested in 1994 and sentenced in 1996 to seven consecutive life sentences for murdering seven backpackers whose bodies were found in makeshift graves in NSW’s Belanglo State Forest. 

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Tip-offs lead NSW inquiry to Milat properties allegedly overlooked in 1994 searches

Tedeschi also told the inquiry it was “probable” Milat did not act alone in the backpacker killings.

“I have the same view as Justice Hunt: that it's probable that, in some of those cases, there was someone else with Ivan Milat,” Tedeschi told the committee, pointing to crime scenes where multiple weapons were used.

In sentencing Milat to seven life terms, the late Justice David Hunt shared his view that “it is inevitable that the prisoner was not alone in that criminal enterprise”.

The hearing also pressed police on long-standing rumours about unsearched properties linked to the Milat family, including 360 acres of land at Wingecarribee in the Southern Highlands of NSW.

“The reason they were not searched is because it was not a searchable area,” Doueihi said.

“It was not an area that you could walk in. It was dense bush. It was mountainous.

“That was the reasons why. It was just deemed unable to be searched.”

Buckingham previously told nine.com.au homes in Sydney’s south-west and southern suburbs linked to Milat were not included in the major police operation that led to Milat’s serial murder conviction.

Buckingham claimed a tip-off to the inquiry identified two properties in Leppington that have been owned by the Milat family over the decades.He wrote to the NSW police commissioner to query whether state officials had searched the properties and also raised his concerns with Doueihi.

“As a result of your inquiry, we identified the owners, or the previous owners, and reached out to them, and they have confirmed that they have no relationship at all with Ivan Milat,” Doueihi said.

“Someone had contacted Crime Stoppers and gave information that they'd been in the property and seen some bones. Police attended, located the bones.

“They were examined and found to be animal bones.”

Milat, a former road worker, died from terminal oesophagus and stomach cancer at Long Bay Hospital in 2019, aged 74.

He remains Australia’s most notorious serial killer.  

The NSW parliamentary inquiry into historical cold cases continues to hear evidence and is set to report its final findings to parliament in February 2027.