The remote Australian highways where murderers have hunted their victims
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- Category: Tennant Creek
- Created: Friday, 23 October 2015 04:01
- Written by News Corp Australia
Some of Australia’s most notorious killers have taken advantage of the anonymity of the open road. AUSTRALIA seems to have more things that will kill you than anywhere else. Our beaches are stalked by razor-fanged sharks, blue-ringed octopuses and box jellyfish. Backyards are filled with funnel web spiders and deadly spiders. The outback is filled venomous snakes, poisonous plants and crocodile-infested rivers.
It’s a dangerous country. And isolated Australian roads are no place to break down.
Home to teeth-rattling corrugations, wild flies and punishing weather, these highways are also where unlucky travellers have met their fate.
Flinders Highway
Blood-red iron ranges, open plains, dry riverbeds, and spinifex country stand as silent witness to some chilling killings.
The Flinders Highway that turns into the Barkly Highway is an isolated, remote 800km stretch of bitumen between Townsville and Mount Isa.
Ex-abattoir worker Andy Albury was named as the prime suspect in a string of unsolved murders on the lonely stretch of road known as the “highway of death”.
The spectre of a thrill killer hangs over a series of unsolved cold cases on the Flinders Highway — including the 1982 disappearance of hitchhiker Tony Jones.
Albury, dubbed Australia’s Hannibal Lecter, was jailed after using a broken bottle to murder and mutilate a woman in Darwin in 1983.
When asked by police why he killed her, he said: “It doesn’t worry me what I kill — they’re all blood and guts inside.”
He is serving life — never to be released — in a Darwin maximum security prison.
The entrance to Belanglo State Forest where Ivan Milat’s victims were found.
Hume Highway
The sign at the entrance to Belanglo State Forest warns visitors to “please be careful”.
The dense pine forest off the Hume Highway south-west of Sydney became synonymous with murder as the bodies of serial killer Ivan Milat’s seven victims were found between September 1992 and November 1993.
The young backpackers had been stabbed, shot, probably sexually assaulted and one of them decapitated with a single blow to the back of her neck. Her head was never found.
There was evidence that some of them had been allowed to try to run so they could be hunted down. Some had been gagged or hogtied. Two were stabbed through the top of the spine, paralysing them before they were killed.
Milat was jailed for life for the seven murders and for the abduction of an eighth backpacker who got away.
Murder in the outback
Stuart Highway
Peter Falconio and his girlfriend Joanne Lees were just another backpacking couple driving through the vast and empty Australian outback.
But their lives changed in July 2001 when, driving slowly up the Stuart Highway in the Northern Territory on a moonless night, the Yorkshire couple stopped because a stranger signalled for them to pull over.
Falconio got out of his beloved old orange VW Kombi van, a shot rang out and Lees would never see or hear from her boyfriend again.
The gunman bound her hands behind her back and forced her into his vehicle.
She feared that she would be killed or raped but miraculously escaped.
Broome mechanic Bradley John Murdoch was sentenced to life imprisonment after being found guilty of killing Falconio plus abducting and assaulting Lees.
Falconio’s body has never been found.
Some of Australia’s most notorious killers have taken advantage of the anonymity of the open road.
Source : http://www.news.com.au/national/the-remote-australian-highways-where-murderers-have-hunted-their-victims/news-story/817aeb3e7ae69a374cf9c4a645e6a665
