The Backpacker Murderer, Ivan Milat, and the Forest That Kept Its Secrets

Between 1989 and 1992, seven young backpackers disappeared from the Hume Highway in New South Wales. Their bodies were found in the Belanglo State Forest, buried in the plantation pines of the Southern Highlands, the victims of a man who had been hiding in plain sight for years. Ivan Milat, road worker, hunter, neighbour, was convicted of all seven murders in 1996 and sentenced to seven consecutive life terms. The case was closed. The truth was not.

The Backpacker Murderer is the definitive account of Ivan Milat's predatory career, a career that began long before the Belanglo murders and almost certainly extended far beyond them. Drawing on the trial record, forensic analysis, cold case investigations, and the submissions of the 2026 NSW Parliamentary Inquiry, Carlson Holland reconstructs not only the crimes but the institutional failures that enabled them: the misplaced police report that cost five lives, the 1974 rape trial that should have ended everything, the systemic indifference that left the Newcastle and Wollongong disappearances uninvestigated for decades.

This is a book about a killer, but it is also a book about the world that made him possible, the highway culture he exploited, the corrupted institution that failed to stop him, the families who carried the truth long before the state was willing to hear it. The forest kept its secrets. This book tells them.