The woman who wrote letters to notorious serial killer

Aplastic-sleeve binder sits on Toni Rigby’s dining table, the kind usually bursting with the colourful drawings and class awards of primary school children.

This one is filled with the meticulous cursive of a serial killer. Ivan Milat’s final screeds on cricket, innocence, climate change, good and evil.

Also on Rigby’s shelves, tucked between the family’s English china, are gumnut trinkets carved, painted and gifted by cannibal killer, Katherine Knight.

Their creators, in uncharacteristically human moments, comforted the broken mother after she wound up in a prison unit normally reserved for killers of their stripe.

Now the letters and gifts are puzzles that pull at Rigby, on the other side of her own redemption arc, about what’s left for a person serving decades in jail “without a soul”. Curiosity about Milat has turned into anger at his dishonesty.

“The first letter I wrote to him – months before I got any reply – said ‘you’re the reason I don’t hitchhike – can we talk?’” Rigby says.

“Everyone said, ‘You can’t write that!’ I said what else am I going to say? It’s not like he can get out.”

In jail for selling drugs to an undercover cop, Rigby wrote to Milat using the jail mail system, where prisoners interested in getting letters from other inmates put their prison numbers on a noticeboard. She wrote a second time, no reply, and then a third.

“What’s your problem, mate? You obviously put your [inmate] number out here for a reason,” Rigby recalls writing. “Give me the juicy details!”

Then a prison officer arrived with a piece of “jail mail” addressed to Rigby, in slanted hand, from prisoner 240-140, serving life without parole in the Goulburn Super Max prison. Everyone in Rigby’s unit gathered around.

“Framed by the police, a malicious court trial, the appellate review judiciary protect their system,” Milat wrote on lined paper on March 24, 2018. “Once you think you know what has occurred, then you will accept it as fact.”

Starting every letter with a quote was typical of Milat’s correspondence. As was scrawling a tiny stick figure with an outstretched hand and the word “INNOCENT” at its feet.

Rigby points to a dash above the stick figure’s head. “I always thought they’re little hitchhikers, with halos,” she tells the Herald.

In late February, Rigby posted on social media replying to Legalise Cannabis MP Jeremy Buckingham’s call for information about Milat. The MP is convinced the true number of the serial killer’s victims is yet to be uncovered.

“I was in a women’s prison and Ivan was my pen pal,” Rigby wrote.

Her comment attracted dozens of shocked replies, including from this journalist.

Two weeks later, Rigby lays out the letters from Milat on her dining room table. It is the first time they have been publicly shared since she left prison two years after Milat’s death in October 2019.

The vast majority of Milat’s writing to Rigby is devoted to his innocence, a topic he spilled litres of ink on over the years.

“Prisoners can be impulsively good or evil as any normal person but are, for expedient social and political motives, always defined exclusively by their evil acts,” he wrote in February 2019. “Whether true or not.”

Through months of correspondence, Milat, who was convicted of murdering seven backpackers, railed endlessly against the “injustice imposed” upon him and life inside “The Super Circus”, as he called the Goulburn super max jail.

“Framed by the police, a dodgy trial, the appeal jury covered it up – accept that some days you’re the pigeon, and some days you’re the statue,” he wrote in July 2018.

In another missive, Milat bemoans Legal Aid’s reluctance to write back to his incessant letters requesting another appeal.

“I don’t get abusive, T, no matter what sort of arsehole they are. I’ve near on killed myself dealing with such people, broken bones, lost limbs, two major hospital operations to repair me, my protests on issues.”

Milat, famously, sawed off his little finger with a plastic knife to post to the High Court. He also tried to starve himself to get a Playstation 3.

Rigby was a wayward teenager when people began finding bodies in Belanglo State Forest. She lived south of Sydney and hitchhiked along the Hume Highway in the years Milat used it as a hunting ground.

“Everything was unknown,” Milat wrote in May 2019 of the murders. “Mostly no one knew really when the victims went missing, there was one fairly accurate last sighting of one of them but no one knew.”

Rigby said she never believed Milat’s protests of innocence; his need to convince her seemed strangely fixated. “He talks about the evidence [found in his home] – the tents, the clothing, the rope – he said ‘Belanglo is my backyard and I found all them items’,” Rigby notes. “But then I’m thinking why would you tell a complete bystander these things?”

She believes had they met while she was hitchhiking, she could easily have become another victim.

In October, Buckingham set up a parliamentary inquiry into unsolved murders and missing persons between 1965 and 2010 which, as part of its remit, will examine Milat’s link to any of these cases.

“The atrocious crimes for which Milat served his sentence began in 1989,” Buckingham told NSW Parliament. “But how many more are there, that we have failed to look at comprehensively?”

Hearings will begin in June in the Southern Highlands and then move to the North Coast in July.

Among the missing women Buckingham has zeroed in on as potential Milat victims were Leanne Goodall, 20, Amanda Robinson, 14, Amanda Zolis, 16, and Robyn Hickie, 18.

All went missing around Newcastle, near pubs or bus stops Milat was known to have frequented or passed by, when he worked in the area on a road repair gang.

Milat, in his letters to Rigby, spoke dismissively of the claims he was responsible for the disappearance of women in Newcastle, and of Detective Clive Small, the man who headed the taskforce investigating the deaths of Belanglo Forest backpackers.

“Framed by Small and Co,” Milat wrote. “The appeal and review court, judiciary, protect the verdict, and their system. The government authorities do not wish to revisit doubtful convictions. It destroys the police work. The heroes in this case – the police have no heroes.”

Small, who died late last year, always believed Milat was behind at least one other murder. But Milat to his deathbed refused entreaties by detectives to provide answers about any killings.

Milat ranted about the Newcastle cases in a multipage letter at the end of 2018 (pivoting between that topic, the quality of India’s batsmen and his hopes for 2019).

Attempts to pin the disappearance of at least 10 “missing females around Newcastle” on him began the day after his conviction in 1996, he said.

“The Newcastle Police commander said I was their suspect, apparently, [in] the disappearances [which] started in mid-70s and onwards – but I [was] responsible for the seventies to 1994 ones!” Milat wrote.

“[The] allegations went on for years, that I abduct/murder these girls (none have ever been seen since, no bodies etc), the police never attempt to re-question me, yet still made their allegations in the media.”

“The pricks just kept at it.”

Milat rattled off details about two particular cases to Rigby; a missing daughter who went to a party and never came home and a young woman last seen on Christmas morning by her family.

In the same letter, Milat describes being driven up to Newcastle to give evidence in the 2001 inquest into Goodall, Hickie and Robinson.

“A really large sign at the turn-off, refers ‘Belanglo State forest’, we basically came to a stop, crawl past that big sign,” Milat wrote. “A whole heap of media people, cameras etc there, so that was the morning news, I [was] on the way to the Coroner inquiry.”

“It was plain that the Police when they put all those disappearances on to me following my Belanglo convictions, they simply thought, we will let the public think that I did it all, those cases solved so to speak.”

The coroner, in 2002, ruled the three women were killed by an unknown murderer, and police had botched the investigation.

In his letters to Rigby, Milat pointed his sawn-off finger at the grieving families, suggesting police should have “dug up” their backyards.

One afternoon, Rigby sat at a prison table writing when she was tapped on the shoulder. She turned around and was clubbed in the face with a can of tuna inside a sock.

A newcomer, trying to make a name for herself, concluded Rigby must have been a snitch because she had sold drugs to a cop.

Inmates who are marked as targets in the general population are often moved to more secure high-risk units. That put Rigby eye-to-eye with a very different type of prisoner.

“Protection unit has all the killers,” Rigby says. “I told [Milat] about getting bashed – really badly – Ivan was pretty concerned about me. Told me to take care.”

In her new digs, Rigby befriended an older woman named Katherine.

“I was friends with her before I heard what she’d done,” Rigby says. “Then someone said, ‘don’t you know who she is?’”

Katherine Knight made headlines when she killed and skinned her husband John Price in 2000. She stabbed Price dozens of times with a butcher knife, hung his skin from a meat hook in the home, then cooked his head and body parts intending to feed them to his children.

Knight’s life, inside the prison, had become one of rituals. She always asked for her chicken to come with the skin on, always shooting a grin to other inmates as she said it. “I’ll take it off myself,” she would say.

The inmates would go to church every week, and they’d discuss forgiveness, Rigby says. “She said the only thing she felt sorry about was that her victim’s family was still grieving his death – and she was still celebrating it,” Rigby says. “She didn’t even really care about what she did, but she wanted forgiveness in church for celebrating it.”

Mostly, Knight would sit in front of Rigby in the pews and compulsively rub the back of her bald head.

“You’re so annoying with that,” Rigby told her.

“I like the feeling of skin,” Knight replied with a smirk.

Like Milat, Knight had a life sentence without parole. “Once you’re inside you think about nothing other than time,” Rigby says. “If you’re not coming out, I can’t imagine what could be left to think about.”

Instead, every Christmas, Knight picks gum nuts off trees to turn into tiny dolls and necklaces with cord stripped from her own bedding.

They are gifts for other inmates and their families. Rigby’s daughter is one lucky recipient.

Not only did Milat write to Rigby but, at her request, he sent letters to her mother. “I often correspond with Toni and pleased to do so, we engage in general chit-chat, mainly about prison life, the weather and, of course, the cricket,” Milat wrote to her in February 2019. “We survive, but in reality are slaves to the system, well, not literally of course, but overall its rather ordinary.”

Much of Milat’s life behind bars centred around Big Bash and Test match cricket and carrying on his life in “dignity and style”.

But he was an avid follower of newspaper and television stories about his case, and frequently blasted the media for failing to entertain his denials.

The imprisoned mass murderer also spent time thinking about politics.

In January one year he spoke about “Australia Day/Invasion Day” and how he had made himself sick barbecuing food on a sandwich press in his cell.

“So you vote, Federal elections on 18 May, I see all the stuff on the news about various parties, good to see you think about it, so go with who you think is deserving your vote,” Milat told Rigby in another letter. “Climate issues should be a concern!”

Milat referenced some kind of mysterious “food disorder” in the same May 2019 letter to Rigby.

“Knock me around a bit now, lose weight, not a good feeling, I’m hopeful they find the problem soon,” Milat wrote.

Five months later Milat would die of stomach and esophageal cancer.

Milat told Rigby he suspected the cause was eating razor blades, paperclips and pieces of metal in his prison protests.

Rigby says it was a complex feeling when Milat died in October 2019. She had grown to enjoy his letters in the monotony of prison life. “I know who he is, but in his letters he always sounded almost decent,” she says. “I wanted him and Katherine to open up, to show compassion but I just never really got it from them.

“It makes me wonder now – did they have souls to begin with? It’s hard to picture them.”

Rigby’s weatherboard home in Cessnock, bustling with her adult kids, mother Lyn, sausage dog Eddie and infinite cats, seems very far from Milat’s cold cell in Goulburn.

Strangely, one of the killer’s brothers lives nearby and Rigby was taken aback when she saw him at the shops.

Doubly strange is that the home where Knight hung her husband’s skin is just a few minutes drive down the road, in the tiny village of Aberdeen.

Now, Rigby is a testament to rehabilitation and support programs for prisoners re-entering society. “I was on ice heavily for 20 years, speed, alcohol, and pot, it was a big part of my life from a young age,” she says. “I started at about 16.”

Photographs on Rigby’s walls show her wearing prison greens and velcro Dunlops, arm-in-arm with her son and daughter as they pass from teenagers into adulthood.

Rigby walked out of prison in 2021, on parole. She had spent years sanitising Qantas headphones for a few dollars an hour and had $20,000 to her name.

“Going to jail was probably the best thing in my life: I gave up drugs, I don’t even smoke, and I work at a smoke shop now,” Rigby says smiling.

Milat remains the subject of speculation. Many believe he acted alone, others believe he had help, Buckingham is not alone in suspecting he killed far more than seven people.

A growing number, in the age of conspiracy, believe he was framed. One theory suggests police needed a scapegoat for missing foreign tourists to secure the 2000 Olympic bid.

Rigby had been intrigued by Milat when she reached out to him, but now she is angry.

“Was he trying to fool himself, or just everyone else by saying how innocent he was?” Rigby wonders aloud.

“It makes me cranky a bit. I wish he had been a bit honest, just once with me.”

“He was a very cruel man to leave the world like that, with so many victim’s families begging for some insight.”

“Did he have compassion at all? If he didn’t, could he just be honest and say ‘I killed them, I’m a monster?’.”

Anyone needing support can contact Lifeline 13 11 14 or NSW Mental Health Line 1800 011 511.

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