Petrol Station Horror

The Murder of Nicole Millar

The very routine task of getting petrol became a suburban horror story one Melbourne morning in 2010.

Mother-of-three Nicole Millar and her partner David Hopkins stopped for petrol on 1 June 2010, on their way back from dropping Nicole’s teenage son at school in Bayswater, an outer-eastern suburb of Melbourne.

It was a seemingly average day in the life of the couple, though their relationship was anything but normal. Nicole Millar, 42 and Hopkins, 40, had an extremely volatile relationship, characterised by drug-use and domestic violence. Hopkins lived with Ms Millar and her 15-year-old son in Bayswater North.

Bayswater is a not a particularly affluent area, though property prices have increased a great deal over the past decade. It is almost at the foothills of the picturesque Dandenong Ranges, a popular tourist attraction. Driving east down Mountain Highway, there is a spectacular view of the ranges, colloquially known as ‘the hills’.

The beauty of the surrounds was at odds with the ugliness of Hopkins and Millar’s relationship. Nicole Millar was a woman trapped in a life of relationships with violent men. She had struggled with alcohol and drug use and the general challenges of being a single parent. She tried her best but had often sought the assistance of agencies such as Anglicare to help cope with her violent relationships and parenting issues.

David Hopkins, who has a twin, was one of seven children. He had a history of problematic behaviour, stretching back to year 8 when he was expelled from technical school after abusing the principal. Hopkins worked in a range of unskilled jobs before building up a successful business in shedding. However, this business collapsed due to his drug addictions. Hopkins had three sons of his own, with two previous partners.

Hopkins was a heavy drug user and often assaulted Nicole during their two-year relationship. His anger, especially when under the influence of drugs, was violent and unpredictable. In a 2009 incident, Hopkins rampaged through the house while Nicole’s son was at home, breaking items including a bedroom mirror. In early May 2010, two of Nicole’s three children saw that their mother had a bruised eye and a cut between her eyebrows. She claimed the injuries were a result of her tripping over, but Nicole’s older daughter confronted Hopkins and he admitted that he had hit her mother with a book while he was high on magic mushrooms.

Hopkins had also visited his partner at her workplace and shouted abuse at her from his car parked across the road. She was working at an automotive parts business as a delivery driver. On 25 May 2010, one of Nicole’s work colleagues witnessed an incident between Hopkins and Nicole. The male employee went to confront Hopkins but he drove off. That same employee rang Nicole later that day at her home to check on her welfare and heard a male yelling at her in the background.

On that same day, in the afternoon, Hopkins also menaced Nicole at one of businesses she delivered parts to. The business owner saw Hopkins physically push her onto a display vehicle in the car yard. Hopkins held Nicole down, placed a forearm across her chest and said aggressively, with a pointed finger to her face, ‘Don’t think you’re gonna be safe tonight because I’ll come round and kill you.’ He then repeated, ‘Don’t think you’re gonna be safe tonight.’

Sadly, intervention was not a deterrent for Hopkins to stop his violent abuse of Nicole. Her boss phoned Hopkins to request he leave her alone and let her do her duties. Hopkins replied, ‘I will be chasing her for the rest of her fucking life, she’d better get used to it.’ Ms Millar was visibly shaken and scared. She had told several people she was terrified of what Hopkins could do to her and her teenage son.

On 1 June, one week after Hopkins threatened Nicole at her workplace, the couple seemed to have reconciled. Nicole and Hopkins dropped Nicole’s son at school, and then pulled into the Woolworths on Mountain Highway, Bayswater. Nicole’s red Holden Apollo was parked in the main car park of the supermarket for around five minutes. It is not known what was said between Nicole and Hopkins in that time. Nicole then reversed the car and drove into the service station on the same site.

At 8.22 a.m., Nicole stayed in the car while Hopkins exited to refuel. He was pumping gas into the car for 30 seconds before he did the unthinkable. Hopkins walked around, with the petrol nozzle in hand, to the passenger-side door and sat in the car. He also had a knife with him. With the nozzle in his right hand and the knife in his left, Hopkins started pumping petrol all over Nicole. She hurriedly tried to escape by opening the driver-side door but Hopkins stopped her and started to stab at her neck and throat with the knife. It was a busy time of the day with many witnesses watching the horror unfold. The whole incident was being captured on CCTV too. Nicole was screaming and pounding on the car horn.

Hopkins took a cigarette lighter from his pocket and set his partner alight. The whole inside of the car erupted in flames. Hopkins got out of the car, removed his jacket and shoes and began pacing by the car. All the time, Nicole, on fire, was desperately trying to get out of the car. She fell out of the driver’s door, which was open from her previous attempt to escape and she ended up in a sitting position on the ground.

There were people ringing 000 and trying to aid Nicole but in more unimaginable cruelty, Hopkins began threatening anyone who came near.

‘Fuck off, I’m going to kill you,’ Hopkins snarled. ‘Fuck off or I will stab you,’ he said, brandishing the knife at onlookers.

The witnesses at the petrol station were powerless to help, despite their desperate attempts.

As his partner was screaming in pain and dying, Hopkins walked up to her, close enough so she could hear and yelled ‘burn bitch burn’, ‘I hope you die’, ‘burn, let her burn’ and ‘hurry up and burn’.

Hopkins kept people at bay for three minutes and 21 seconds. The whole time Nicole Millar was screaming for her life.

Bayswater man Darren White was running late for work when he drove past the petrol station and saw Ms Millar on fire. Hopkins was standing close to her. Darren got out of his car to help but then realised that Hopkins was preventing anyone from assisting Ms Millar.

‘I originally thought he was helping her but then I saw he was fending people away with a weapon so I ran back to my car, a Jeep four-wheel drive, and thought if I could hit him or make him run away we could help her,’ Mr White told the Knox Leader.

Darren’s quick-thinking forced Hopkins to run from the scene. Once Hopkins had fled, Darren and several other men rushed to Nicole’s aid, gently moving her ‘charred and incredibly damaged body’ (the words of Supreme Court Justice Betty King who would later sentence Hopkins) away from the car and covering her with wet clothes and water until the ambulance arrived.

Croydon man Dean Filmer was filling his car with petrol as Nicole was set alight. He was one of the men who desperately tried to help Ms Millar. He told the Knox Leader it was Ms Millar’s screams that stayed with him.

Nicole was taken to the Alfred Hospital where heartbreakingly, she pleaded with an anaesthetist, ‘Please don’t let me die.’ Nicole could not have survived her injuries – all of her body was burned. She was placed in an induced sleep and died later that day.

What happened between Hopkins and Nicole in the minutes from 8.16 a.m. to 8.22 a.m. in the Woolworths’ car park is unknown. Was there an argument? Hopkins has never explained, claiming he can’t remember the events. He had a cocktail of drugs in his system: cannabis, methamphetamine, Viagra, speed and alcohol.

Leader Community Newspapers journalist Adrian Bernecich was the first reporter to the scene and arrived just after 9 a.m. From the Knox Leader office in Boronia, less than 10 minutes away from the petrol station, Mr Bernecich raced to meet photographer Lawrence Pinder, who was already there.

Mr Bernecich recalled:

We weren’t allowed anywhere near the car with witnesses still talking to investigators. But I can still remember the smell that wafted over the car park carrying a strange eeriness with it. Every instinct told me to look for the body, but there was also a part of me that didn’t want to see. I tried to talk to some of the witnesses including one man who we later found out tried to intervene while the man was attacking the woman. Police were running about relaying messages on the whereabouts of the suspect, doing their best not to let me hear anything.

My first instinct was to talk to as many people as possible but there was no way there was going to be anything ‘on the record’ until the police figured out what was going on. But I continued on, and walked from police officer to police officer trying to get some sort of reaction.

All of a sudden, we heard shouts as police and the dog squad began running west down Mountain Highway … someone had spotted him. The mini-sprint ended at a nearby church where police and a slowly growing contingent of reporters and spectators began milling as officers tried to calm the man down from two separate sides of the corner block.

I kept trying to find the best angle to see if I could get a view but police were ushering people to the footpath on Mountain Highway. It must have been two or three hours because a number of those looking on were confused as to why it was taking so long. Different units kept coming into the property with different apparatus. It was like they were trying everything in the book to coax this man out. But as we later found out, it wasn’t that simple given his state of mind.

After a two-hour standoff at the nearby Bayswater Church of Christ, Hopkins was arrested by police. Vision taken by Channel Nine and published in The Age shows Hopkins in a blood-soaked T-shirt and surrounded by police. Witnesses told police that Hopkins was pacing and growling like an animal.

Hopkins was charged with murder at a hospital bedside hearing on 4 June 2010. He pleaded guilty to the crime but later asked Justice King to let him change his plea to not guilty, on the basis of mental impairment or a dissociative state at the time of the murder.

Justice King would have none of it. She rejected Hopkins’s attempt to put his blame for the crime elsewhere.

‘Mental impairment relates to a disease of the mind. He does not have a disease of the mind,’ Justice King said. Hopkins had consumed a cocktail of drugs in the 24 hours prior to Nicole’s murder, but the fact that he had been calm and lucid leading up to the incident led experts and the court to believe that he had not been in a psychotic state during the murder.

In sentencing Hopkins on 19 October 2011, Justice Betty King said:

What you did to this woman on this day was unspeakable. You had demonstrated animosity towards her previously, you had threatened her life previously, but nothing would have prepared her or anyone else for a scenario such as you unveiled on this day and in the most public of manners … Nicole Millar died a horrendous death at your hands.

Hopkins’s evil crime had a devastating effect on the people who had tried to help Ms Millar, especially Dean Filmer.

‘It’s a good reason my head’s not working quite like it used to. It was something pretty incredible,’ Mr Filmer told Ten News outside the Supreme Court after Hopkins’s sentencing hearing.

Dean Filmer, Darren White and four other men who tried to save Ms Millar – Clinton Anderson, Beau Fleming, Christopher Murphy and Matthew Stylianou – received bravery awards in 2011.

Mr Filmer, a massage therapist who had his own business, could not work after Ms Millar’s death and spent six months in a psychiatric hospital with post-traumatic stress.

‘It’s just there all the time. It’s there when I’m asleep in my dreams, or if I have a shower or a wash. It is always on my mind,’ Mr Filmer told the Knox Leader. ‘I’m not the same and I’ll never be the same.’

Mr Stylianou said in his witness statement: ‘It has remained etched in my mind, her on the ground burning and asking for help. You see her burning, you try to get there, but you can’t.’

Nicole’s daughter Ashlea, who was 19 when her mother died, said her depression had been exacerbated by the trauma of the crime. Ashlea’s victim impact statement was read to the court and in it, she had written of Hopkins: ‘I thought that mum had finally found someone who loved her … I feel that my heart has been ripped out … how could he do that to mum?’

Justice King said to Hopkins, ‘The behaviour you exhibited that day is an example of the worst kind of viciousness and sadistic behaviour that this court is ever likely to see.’

Hopkins was sentenced to a minimum of 30 years before being eligible for parole. By then he will be 72 years old.