It is interesting they released another identikit of the Falconio suspect with hair/ moustache altered. However, I wonder if this was released AFTER Murdoch was in the sights of Police. The reason is that when you compare this to the original, the forehead height has been reduced, the hair colour has been lightened (including eyebrows), prominent ears put on him (even though Joanne said the guy had scraggly hair covering them).... All of these changes make the identikit look more like Murdoch because the original doesn't look anything like Murdoch. What I find interesting is that in the original Joanne must have made a point of saying the guy had a nose deviated to the right ... It looks like RH's nose. It does NOT look like Murdoch's nose IMO.
I'm replying to this thread seriously late (so late that I forgot I'd ever posted here to begin with :blushing
but I often wonder about this case & just wanted to add some thoughts.
The identikit resemblances, weapons pix & historical cases I referred to in my first post have all been posted in the thread since which is good, because now I know they're not off-limits for discussion so ...
Re the post I'm replying to - I didn't follow the Falconio case that closely & I missed the identikit changes - but damn, they were pretty extreme changes??
hwow:
I
did follow the Backpacker case
very closely though - I was the same age group as the victims & living in the middle of his hunting ground. I had friends regularly hitching up & down the Hume back then & when the arrest finally came it turned out I was living minutes from Milat's home.
So I do remember the change in Paul Onions description of his attacker (though it's hard to find links verifying it these days). He originally described someone much taller than Ivan Milat. The discrepancy was explained away by saying that Milat simply "appeared" taller than he actually was because he was wielding a handgun & behaving in a menacing way. In other words, Paul Onion's fear gave him a grossly exaggerated perception of his attacker's height. It seemed reasonable enough at the time & this explanation wasn't ever really questioned by anyone besides Milat's family & his defence counsel.
Paul Onions also described his attacker as a man with a "Merv Hughes moustache" & an extremely broad Australian accent - & in my experience you find few broader "Aussie" accents than in first-generation Australian kids of German immigrants (I'm basing that on a pretty small test sample though so it may not be the experience of others)
Re the "Merv Hughes moustache" description, see below for pix of what Merv Hughes looked like back then. Again, the resemblence could be completely coincidental, but if people had to choose between RH & Milat back in the 90s, I'm really not sure Milat would be top of the list.
Also, not sure if anyone remembers the great emphasis Taskforce Air put on the Ruger .22 rifle in the Backpacker case, but they really pushed the idea that it proved Milat's guilt beyond all doubt because they argued it was a relatively rare weapon in Australia (they used gun registration statistics to support this argument, from memory there were around 400 Australia-wide at the time - will have to check this though, it's been 2 decades since I read those stats)
Lo & behold though, the rifle in RH's weapon pix looks an awful lot like a Ruger .22 (see RH's pic of weapons on a coffee table posted a little way back in the thread for comparison)
This too could mean nothing at all. Maybe RH first bought a Ruger .22 decades after the Backpacker murders. It's yet another coincidence though that Ivan Milat has always maintained that he never owned a Ruger rifle. He continues to insist that police planted the rifle parts they said they found in his wall cavity.
For over 20yrs I never considered for one minute that Milat might be telling the truth. I still don't know what to think. All I can say is that RH is lucky none of this came to public attention in the early 90s because he'd have made as good a candidate as Milat. Maybe even better.
