Hugh 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.
But the Legalise Cannabis party’s NSW MLC, Jeremy Buckingham, is convinced Milat killed many more.
Buckingham has lobbied successfully for the establishment of a parliamentary inquiry into unsolved murders and long-term missing cases from 1965 to 2010, which will call for submissions on Monday.
He believes Milat could have murdered more than 80 people.
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The NSW premier, Chris Minns, agreed to the inquiry after Buckingham presented him with the 1965 identikit picture of the man believed responsible for the notorious Wanda Beach murders of two young girls, Christine Sharrock and Marianne Schmidt, and another of a young Ivan Milat.
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