Ivan Milat was convicted of murdering seven people. Could he have killed scores more?

Retired UK detective believes family member was serial killer’s first unacknowledged victim, as NSW inquiry into unsolved murders calls for submissions

H

ugh Hughes, a retired UK detective with the Metropolitan police, has spent three decades travelling back and forth between his home in Wales and Canberra, trying to solve the murder of Keren Rowland, a cousin of his Australian wife, Andrea.

Hughes is convinced that Rowland, who went missing from Canberra on 26 February 1971, was the first victim of the notorious serial killer Ivan Milat.

In 1994, Milat was jailed for life for the murder of seven backpackers, whose bodies were discovered in the remote Belanglo state forest in the NSW Southern Highlands. Milat died in jail in 2019, aged 74.