Steve Rowland still vividly remembers the last time he saw his vivacious big sister, just hours before she was brutally killed in what the family believe may have been serial killer Ivan Milat’s first murder.
“I ran into her for a fleeting minute or two at the Canberra Show and that was the last time I ever saw her,” Steve tells Woman’s Day days after the Australian Federal Police (AFP) announced a $500,000 reward to help find her killer.
He was just 16 when Keren, who was happy and looking forward to becoming a mum, went missing after her car ran out of petrol on Parkes Way, Canberra, on February 26, 1971.
Fight for justice
And Steve, 72, hasn’t stopped campaigning for justice ever since for his 20-year-old sister and her unborn child.
Keren’s body was found nearly three months after she vanished, in a pine plantation between Canberra and Queanbeyan eerily similar to Belanglo Forest where Milat buried other victims.
“We will not stop,” Steve promises.
“We have other family members and people who will continually keep going on this until we can get the best [answers to] what happened. I’ve got some very close cousins who, like me, are hellbent on continuing until we find out.”
Steve says his family’s 55-year fight for justice will continue even after he’s gone, and that he hopes the recently announced reward will provide police with new leads and give his family the answers they desperately need.
“We’d like to see if there is someone out there who may know something that could give us the end result… younger brothers or sisters of the perpetrator or their children even – we are that far down the track now,” says Steve.
“Hopefully one day, someone might have that little bit of conscience or someone passes and they’re prepared now to talk about them, which is probably more likely than anything.”
Earliest victim
With the family alleging flaws in the original investigation and crucial evidence missing, Steve rallied family and friends, including a cousin who was a homicide detective in London, to help in what he calls his “quest” to solve the mystery of Keren’s murder.
“The family – not the police – have come up with a fair amount of circumstantial evidence that points to Ivan Milat, and the one thing that the ACT Police and AFP have not been able to do is rule him out,” says Steve.
“I don’t know that the ACT Police are even actively trying to. We’ve put questions to them time and time again, and for some reason they seem to sidestep [it] when I mention Milat.”
Milat was convicted of killing seven backpackers between 1989 and 1992, and some investigators believe the evil monster may have been responsible for 80 other murders in the 1970s.
But he never confessed to any murders – including the ones he was found guilty of – before he died in prison in 2019.
Steve believes Milat may have killed Keren 23 years before he was arrested in 1994, making her and her unborn child two of Milat’s earliest victims – and raising suspicions that he went undetected for decades.
“We were all looking forward to Keren’s baby, Mum and Dad very much so and, of course, myself and my sister Christine. Keren was absolutely besotted with becoming a mother,” he says.
“My niece or nephew would have been 55 years old this year.
“When you think about it that way there’s a whole life missing there and whatever would have gone along with that.”
Steve says “things were starting to look pretty good” for Keren when she was killed, despite her baby’s father breaking off their engagement, and admits it pains him that his parents Geoffrey and Hazel died without ever knowing what happened to her.
Must find answers
He is calling on police to investigate the circumstantial links to Milat that he and his family have “unearthed” to establish whether the serial killer was in the area at the time, and could have been Keren’s killer.
“We don’t know conclusively [that it was Milat] and there’s a good chance we will never know,” Steve says.
“I don’t feel it would be difficult for ACT Police to investigate the information and tell me ‘Yes, it could have been,’ or ‘No, it definitely couldn’t have been,’ or even ‘We don’t know.’ I can’t get one of the three out of them and I don’t know why.”
When asked what it would mean for his family to finally know who killed Keren, Steve says it would mean everything.
“We may never find out 100 per cent, particularly if Keren’s perpetrator is deceased but if we can at least have the next best guess in finding out, it would mean the world to the family,” he says.
And after 55 years without his sister, Steve is determined to finally get answers.
“We have to keep Keren’s name out there – somebody somewhere will know something, and that tiniest clue could make all the difference,” he says.
“I’m never going to stop trying to find out who killed my sister.”
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