A WOMAN who says she accepted a lift from Australia's most notorious serial killer, Ivan Milat, in Newcastle in 1993 has told an inquiry into cold-case murders that she realised something was wrong and quietly slipped out of his car when he stopped to buy drugs.
The woman, who was 21 at the time, said she hid behind some bins at a unit block in Cooks Hill, while the man who picked her up looked around for her and said: "you want to play, come out."
The woman's claim of escaping Milat is among dozens of submissions made to a parliamentary inquiry into unsolved murders and long-term missing persons cases.
Milat was serving seven life sentences for the murder of seven backpackers when he died in jail in 2019.
He was arrested in 1994 following one of the biggest police investigations in Australian history, after seven bodies were discovered in shallow graves in the Belanglo State Forest, south-west of Sydney, between 1992 and 1993.
His victims were all hitchhikers travelling south along the Hume Highway near Liverpool in western Sydney, who disappeared between 1989 and 1992.
They were Deborah Everist and James Gibson, both 19, from Victoria, Simone Schmidl, 21, from Germany, Anja Habschied, 20, and Gabor Neugebauer, 21, a couple also from Germany, and Caroline Clarke, 21, and Joanne Walters, 22, from Britain.
Milat, who was convicted in 1996, never admitted to the murders.
He has previously been linked to other possible homicide victims or missing persons, including three women, Leanne Goodall, Robyn Hickie and Amanda Robinson, who all went missing in the Newcastle area within four months of each other, between 1978-79.
A number of submissions to the cold-case inquiry relate to brushes with Milat, including two women from the Hunter who say they had interactions with a man they realised later was the notorious killer.
One woman said she was hitchhiking into Newcastle to go to a pub in June 1993 when 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".
"We had only gone about 200 metres when he said do you smoke pot," the woman says in her submission.
"I said yes and he drove to a unit block."
The woman says she watched as the man got out of the car, walked upstairs and greeted someone.
"Suddenly, a number of things made me think 'get out of the car'," the woman says.
"I realised he had done a U-turn for no reason and the vehicle was now facing in the opposite direction.
"The vehicle was immaculately clean and smelt like a chemical."
The woman says she carefully opened the car door, got out and left it ajar so she didn't make a sound.
"There were netball courts and a big sports field across the road that I could run towards, or try to head to the pub, but he knew I intended to go there.
"Instead, I hid behind wheelie bins at the unit block.
"He came out, realised I wasn't in the car and was walking around looking for me, saying 'come, you want to play, come out'."
The woman said eventually the man drove off, but she stayed hidden for a long time, concerned the man who had greeted Milat was waiting to grab her.
Eventually, she made her escape and says when she saw Milat on television after being arrested for the backpacker murders, she knew he was the man who had picked her up.
Another woman told the inquiry of an encounter with a man near a golf course at Argenton in 1979.
The woman says she was seven and playing with a friend when a car pulled up and the driver offered them a lift.
She says the pair screamed and ran home, where their parents called the police.
There were stranger danger talks at school and the woman never forgot the encounter.
"Years later, I saw a picture of a younger Ivan Milat in a book my mother was reading and I instantly knew the face was the person in that car that day in the golf course," the woman says.
The woman said decades later, when there was renewed publicity about the missing person cases from the late 1970s, she phoned Crime Stoppers or called the strike force to report the incident.
