Afterwards, the thing she could not credit was how normal he had seemed.
Through the trivial chat with the glasses of lemonade, and the roast chicken dinner, and the pancake dessert and him showing her the snaps from a trip to Queensland to visit his mother, through all that his manner had seemed so unremarkable.
Fleetingly, it occurred to her that the scratch on his left cheek might have been left by a fingernail, but she let the thought slip by without comment. But she did ask, the way she always did, whether he had told his live-in girlfriend about his past. He told her he had a new life now and added: ‘Don’t ask me again, please, Sister Clare.’
What Sister Clare meant, was had he told his girlfriend his criminal history, but she did not press him because he seemed upset.
What Peter Dupas had told his girlfriend was that he had been married, which was true, and was now divorced, which was also true, and that his divorce led to a breakdown and time in hospital, which was a sort of half-truth to the extent that he was familiar with the workings of mental hospitals.
The rest of it, the rapes and knives and balaclavas and convictions for loitering and peeping and threatening to do harm to babies if their mothers did not submit to being raped, and attacks on teens and the elderly, he left out.
The failed attempts to suppress his twisted sexual urges by taking the drug Depo Provera, and the teenage engagement that lapsed when he was jailed for rape, and the refusals to admit his attacks on women while privately fantasising over them, and his resistance to psychiatric treatment, all this he left out too.
Had she asked about the scratch on his cheek, and the other one on his neck, he would have told her he scratched himself on a piece of wood in his workshop. That was the story he told his other friend, a former priest called Patrick O’Brien who had commented on it the day before, the Monday, when it was still fresh.
He complained to O’Brien that he had not had a good day. The car alarm was acting up and then he had gone and scratched himself on a piece of wood.
That was a half-truth too: the car alarm had been wailing intermittently all morning while the Toyota four-wheel drive remained undisturbed in the driveway of the rented Pascoe Vale weatherboard in Melbourne’s inner north. No-one was home.
Dupas had gone out shortly after his girlfriend left for work about 8 am, buying petrol in nearby Bell Street soon after. A neighbour saw Dupas return, driving his girlfriend’s other car, a brown Mitsubishi Lancer, about 11.45 am.
O’Brien arrived about an hour later and did not stay long. They had known each other more than 20 years, from the time Dupas was a prisoner at Ararat Prison, where the sex offenders were housed, and O’Brien was the local parish priest. He started to visit Dupas because Dupas’ parents asked him to.
All these years later, and these two are his only real friends, Sister Clare and ex-Father Patrick, professional carers. This day, O’Brien went to Dupas’ place to pick up some camping gear. They had spent the weekend together, camping at Wilsons Promontory with their partners. Dupas and the two women had explored the bush while O’Brien took it easy.
It was the first time they had done anything like it, but Dupas did not want to dwell on it.
O’Brien did not stay long because Dupas seemed keen to get back to working on the half-built bar unit in his workshop. ‘He seemed quite normal,’ O’Brien said later.
O’Brien left Dupas’ home soon after 1 pm on 19 April 1999. Five hours later, while Dupas waited at Pascoe Vale station to escort his girlfriend safely home, a friend of Nicole Patterson arrived, as arranged, at the 28-year-old’s home in Harper Street, Northcote.
Harper Street, Northcote is narrow and lined with single-fronted weatherboard homes – workers’ cottages from the Victorian era when Northcote was a bustling suburb housing workers for the factories of the inner suburbs.
Harper Street lies at the foot of Northcote Hill, the highest point in Melbourne, where the period homes are bigger, grander two-storey terraces. But in Harper Street the houses follow a pattern. The front door opens onto a bowling alley hallway that runs past several rooms before opening into an old sitting room, with the kitchen tacked on at the rear.
When Nicole did not answer the knocking, her friend peered through the front window into the room Nicole used as a lounge. The horror of what she was looking at did not dawn on her at first. Nicole Patterson was lying on her back. Asleep? She was naked from the waist down and the clothing on her upper body was in disarray and looked unfamiliar and odd.
She rapped again but Nicole did not stir, and realisation overcame disbelief as the mutilation of her friend’s body dawned on her.
Dupas and his girlfriend were heading home to share a tuna casserole about the time police investigators began analysing Nicole Patterson’s murder.
She was killed at about nine that morning. She had known, or been expecting her killer, they reasoned, and had left the killer briefly in the front room while she brewed coffee. She returned up the hallway, carrying a coffee plunger, two cups, sugar and milk.
He attacked without warning, flailing at the defenceless Patterson with his knife. Police interviewing neighbours found one who had heard a woman cry out, in an instinctive shout of shock and fright: ‘You fucking cunt.’ Twice.
After the initial shock, Nicole Patterson fought for her life, but repeatedly the knife beat her defensive parries and penetrated her chest and back. Her hands suffered numerous wounds as she tried to defend herself, but 11 knife strikes struck her lungs and heart. In total, she suffered 27 stab wounds.
Things happened in the house after the murder. Nicole Patterson’s clothing was cut away in line with her sternum. Her body was stripped, and her breasts were removed. There was a series of tentative punctures near where the incisions to cut off her breasts began.
Although Nicole Patterson was found lying in the front room where she was killed, her attacker strayed. He had also been in her bedroom. There were bloodstains on the door jamb, and on the pillows, and on the bottom sheet of her bed.
The place had been searched as well, but not well enough. Under some clothing on a couch in the living room was Nicole’s personal diary. On the entry for 19 April was the name Malcolm, with the time 9 am circled, and then there was a mobile telephone number: 0417 037 312.
On Nicole Patterson’s body were two small, yellow pieces of electrical tape.
Jeff Maher, the homicide detective in charge, ordered a check on her telephone records. Who had she been calling lately? Who had been calling her?
The next evening, the Tuesday, Sister Clare – a Franciscan nun from the Victorian Offenders Support Agency – had her dinner with Peter Dupas. On the Wednesday, he would take his car alarm to be repaired.
Some time that week his girlfriend would remark about the scratch on his cheek and he would tell her the story about an accident in the workshop.
Meanwhile, the check of the telephone records revealed 15 calls from a Pascoe Vale number to Patterson’s home between 3 March and 12 April, one week before the murder. The Pascoe Vale number was tied to Peter Norris Dupas, serial rapist and predator. His record made him a suspect. He had been known to police, as they say, for 31 years.
Police prepared to arrest him, obtaining a search warrant for his home, and three days after the murder Dupas was arrested while playing the poker machines, alone, at the Excelsior Hotel in Thomastown.
Searching Dupas’ property, police found several pieces of torn newspaper in the garbage bin with a note scrawled on them. They were lucky. It was bin night that night so had they come a day later the note would have been gone.
Pieced together it read ‘Nicci, Northcote 9.00 morning’, ‘Malcolm’ and the middle six digits of Patterson’s phone number.
It was later found to be a page of the Northcote Leader newspaper in which Nicole Patterson advertised psychotherapy services for the practice she was trying to build. The handwriting was identified as that of Dupas.
The mobile phone number in her diary was found on a note on Dupas’ fridge. It belonged to a university student Dupas had hired to do some labouring. In his laundry, police found a newspaper with a story of Patterson’s murder. The front page photograph of her had been slashed across the face.
And then there were the knives. They found seven in an outside storeroom, two in a cabinet in the garage, nine more in a back bedroom and six in kitchen drawers.
Hours into the search, an officer working his way through the garage found some clothing stuffed into a cupboard. There was a green jacket and a black balaclava, one of those ever-present elements of Peter Dupas’ rape kits. The jacket had bloodstains on the right sleeve which, when subjected to forensic testing, were showed to be 6.5 billion times more likely to be Nicole Patterson’s than that of someone chosen at random.
Neither Nicole Patterson’s severed breasts nor her driver’s licence were recovered. Police believe they were taken as trophies.
Dupas proclaimed his innocence, said the police had set him up and he appealed against his conviction.
It was the day after his arrest when Sister Clare told police: ‘That’s the thing I can’t get over. He just seemed so normal on the night.’
Normal is not the usual description for Peter Norris Dupas.
Back at Waverley High School in Melbourne’s east in the 1960s, if there was one word for him, it was loner. Mostly, he kept to himself, recalls Stephen Howell, who was in the same fourth form class.
‘He used to try to hang around with us, but because of his nature no-one wanted much to do with him,’ Howell says. ‘I remember one stage he was at the sick bay. He was urinating in the glasses because he knew the teachers would use them. He would piss in them, empty them and turn them back upside down so they’d appear clean.
‘I really believe that he had problems years back. When I first heard many years ago he was in jail I thought he shouldn’t be in there – he should be in a psychiatric place getting help. He was weird.’
There was another word for him, one borrowed from the after-school TV sitcom ‘The Addams Family’. It was the name of the foolish fat kid, Pugsley, and Dupas did not take to it.
‘I don’t think he was teased more than anyone else, I just don’t think he cottoned on to it very well. He used to really go off in class,’ says Peter Thomas, another Waverley High contemporary student.
‘He used to get razor blades out and take swipes at us – that was in form two. I’d be sitting behind him and have to put the desk lid up. [This happened] every couple of weeks. He would go red in the face. He was a pretty emotional kid. He had no set friends.’
Academically, he was mediocre. In sport, he was a non-participant. Socially, he was almost invisible. He disappeared from the school for two weeks at the end of 1968 while undergoing psychiatric assessment after attacking a female neighbour. Warren Buswell, a classmate who knew him as ‘more or less a friend’, says he did not even realise Dupas was out of the school.
Colin Walkerden, who lived in the next street, barely recalls him at all. ‘What I can remember of him,’ Walkerden says, ‘he used to be a bit of a loner. Short, fat, stumpy.’
A former form teacher, Colin Mathews, remembers an isolated individual. ‘I was warned by a fellow staff member that he had been interviewed by the police about indecent exposure and various sexually related offences,’ Mathews, who is now retired, recalls. ‘I was warned to keep him well away from the girls.’
In any case, he did not seek to sit with anyone. He was sad, lonely, almost friendless, unworthy and self-pitying.
After the attack on the neighbour, he was admitted to Larundel Psychiatric Hospital where he told Dr Julie Jones a pathetic story, about how his best friend, ‘Graham’ had left the neighbourhood without telling him.
Jones described him as immature, passive, dependent, fearful and anxious about his masculinity.
His story about Graham, however, is another half-truth, a sympathy ploy.
Graham, who asked that his last name not be published, says that he told all his classmates he was leaving school to find a job. In any event, he maintained contact with Dupas for a couple of years after leaving school. He might have been Dupas’ choice of closest friend, but was not immune to Dupas’ odd ways. He says Dupas was different.
‘I was one of his better friends,’ Graham says. ‘He was picked on a bit at school because he was overweight. He did have some very strange tempers. I have seen him lose his temper and punch a brick wall until his knuckles would bleed. He got really wound up.
‘In the classroom he would be the one trying to peep up the girls’ dresses to see what colour pants they were wearing. At the time we laughed at it. We thought it was a bit of a joke.
‘I can remember him grabbing one of the young teachers. You know, 500 kids crowding down the hall and he would run down and grab a handful of boob. We stood back and laughed. Well, we were 14 years old.
‘I left school late in year 10. I believe it was a few months after that he attacked a neighbour. I am pretty sure I told him I would not be back to school. I started a job.’
According to Graham, a quiet kid himself, Dupas did not truly fit with anyone at school. But as a visitor to the Dupas home, it was obvious, Graham said, that his parents adored him.
Even at home, however, he was in a sense isolated. Dupas was George and Merle Dupas’ third child, born in July 1953, 11 years younger than his brother and nine years junior to his sister.
A member of the extended Dupas family said the couple had separated for a period, and Peter Dupas was conceived after a reconciliation. According to accounts Peter Dupas has offered, it remained a tense relationship. George Dupas was a hard, demanding man. Self-made and proud of it. His family lived a nomadic existence with Dupas senior buying and selling a series of small businesses.
He ran a poultry farm outside Sydney but years of hand-mixing poultry feed gave him asthma, so they moved to Melbourne. He worked as a greengrocer and built a home and poultry sheds in Potts Road, Langwarrin, and enrolled his young son at Lyndhurst South Primary, a rural school with 34 students when he started.
It was remote then, and even now Potts Road is unmade, topped with loose gravel. Dupas senior was not the only self-made builder. Many families built their own homes there, although ‘shacks’ is a better description for what a former teacher describes as an ‘unfortunate subdivision’ occupied by struggling families.
Despite the low enrolment at the school Dupas left little impression. A former teacher and several fellow students could not recall him. It seems he was unattached even then.
The nomadic lifestyle resumed when the family headed to Queensland for an extended holiday in July 1964. Peter Dupas missed much of his final year of primary schooling but completed some work by correspondence.
During this trip he was an only child. His sister had left home and his elder brother, having fallen out with his father, worked his way up the east coast, occasionally linking up with the family, staying for a few weeks and then finding work elsewhere before reuniting with them farther north.
When they returned to Melbourne, Peter Dupas enrolled at Waverley High and the family moved into Bradstreet Road, Glen Waverley, an unremarkable suburban street in the ever-sprawling eastern suburbs, steadily filling with modest, brick veneer houses.
‘Everybody got on well together. It was one of those nice little areas where everyone got along,’ recalls a neighbour, Valda Renshaw. ‘Peter had everything there was to have. I think Peter had the best of everything. He was learning the organ. He had a Gerry Gee doll and a wonderful Scalextric set of cars. All the kids used to go in to play with them.
‘He used to walk awkwardly. I would not say he was handicapped. He was quite a heavy boy, but not like you see fat kids now.’
His brother urged his parents to involve the kid in football and cricket, and tried himself to develop his sporting skills but the boy known as Pugsley had neither natural talent or inclination. His brother complained to relatives that the kid seemed unwilling to give up model cars and marbles.
Mrs Renshaw remembers how Dupas appalled the amiable little community. ‘We were there when he first started being peculiar. It was such a shock when he attacked “Barbara”. It just happened.’
It was early October 1968. Five weeks earlier Barbara had returned from hospital after giving birth to her first child.
‘What he did was totally unexpected,’ Barbara recalls now. ‘We were young marrieds, new to the area. We were good neighbours [with the Dupases]. We used to visit their place to play cards on Saturday nights.’
Peter knocked at the back door of the house and asked for a knife to peel potatoes. She congratulated him on helping his mother, but he behaved oddly. When Barbara offered him a vegetable peeler, he refused to take it, yet said nothing. She then gave him a vegetable knife, and also offered to show him the baby.
Barbara left him in the nursery. Shortly after he returned to the kitchen. He announced: ‘Oh well, I better go now.’ He said it twice more, pausing between each sentence.
She was puzzled. Without warning, as he was about to leave, he knocked Barbara to the floor, falling on her and jabbing at her with the knife. She put her hands up to fend him off. She grabbed the blade but he kept at her. He slashed her hands and face.
When he could not get a clear lunge at her with the knife he grabbed her hair and banged her head on the floor. She screamed. He put his hand over her mouth and he told her: ‘I can’t stop now, they’ll lock me up.’
She resisted, fighting, literally for her life. And he did stop. Suddenly it was over.
She was breathless and shocked. He was crying and docile. Harmless and pathetic.
Barbara rang Dupas’ brother, who, she says, later complained about the incident being reported to police. ‘I was lucky to survive,’ she says now.
Mrs Renshaw recalls what happened next: ‘[Barbara’s husband] came down and warned us what had happened. The [Dupas] family effectively did not believe it. They said there must have been some mistake. His family seemed to be such nice, normal people apart from the fact they tried to blot that out. Right from the beginning they tried to cover it up, which we thought was the wrong way.
‘He seemed to have a thing about young married women with babies.’
Almost opposite the Dupas house was Amesbury Court with a handful of houses. A woman there told Mrs Renshaw he hung about, watching her. ‘She was convinced he rang her a few times,’ Mrs Renshaw said. No-one spoke on the phone, but she was sure the breathing she could hear was a young male.
But if he was intent on young married women with babies, he was more comfortable with maternal figures generally. In his late teens, when the Dupases had a beach house on the Mornington Peninsula, they spent time with another family.
Odd for an older teenager, but when he and his parents stayed at the holiday house in McCrae and mixed with a second family, Peter Dupas did not share their fishing expeditions. He remained behind, spending his time with the middle-aged mother of the second family. Just the two of them.
After the attack on Barbara, Dupas was admitted to Larundel where Dr Julie Jones was the first of many psychiatrists and psychologists to examine him. She observed that he ‘appears to have been over protected by his mother and thus developed a rather timid approach to people. He fears sudden disturbances, car crashes and explosions.’ He also had difficulty meeting his father’s perfectionist standards.
So began his rush into an ever-deepening depravity. In March 1972 he was caught peeping at a woman through her bedroom window. In November 1973, feigning car trouble, he knocked on the door of a house in Mitcham and asked the woman who answered for a screwdriver.
She had her 18-month-old baby in her arms when she returned. He produced a knife, threatened to harm her baby, bound her feet and hands, slapped her, bit her breast and raped her.
Twice more he faked car trouble. Once, he stole $7 while a woman looked for a screwdriver to help him. An hour later, in another suburb he tried again but left quickly when the woman who answered said her husband had all the tools, but would be home soon.
And he was observed watching a woman with a pusher and two small children. He walked up to the driveway of the house they had just left and stood, looking after them, but returned to his car once he realised he was being observed.
While waiting to face court on the rape charge, he was caught watching women shower at the McCrae foreshore caravan park. For this, he was again admitted to Larundel for six weeks where a psychiatrist, Dr PJ Shannon, said Dupas was defensive and unable to discuss intimate aspects of his life. ‘We kept Peter in hospital with a view to trying to assist him to talk about himself but really made no progress along these lines,’ Shannon wrote. ‘He persistently denied he had any problems.’
Just as persistently and despite being identified by his victims, he denied the rape as well as the other intrusions on women he had made under the guise of car trouble.
Underlying our penal system is the happy presumption that wrong-doers can be reformed. And from this we conclude the punishment that is meted out to prisoners should not be so onerous that it destroys all hope.
So the promise of parole, or early release, is held out, although in truth it probably is as much a prison management tool to foster a compliant prison population as it is a reward for good behaviour.
Through human error and the presumption of reform, Peter Dupas made the most of this capacity for generosity.
Following his first rape conviction, in July 1974, he was jailed for nine years, with a minimum of five years to serve before becoming eligible for parole. He was released in September 1979, just two years after finally admitting his guilt.
In July 1977, a prison officer at Ararat observed that while he no longer denied the rape, he ‘still seems to have no understanding or insight into his emotions and psychological processes which precipitated the offence’.
The report went on: ‘Due to his lack of insight and his belief that psychological treatment is unnecessary, it is very likely that such treatment will be ineffective.’
Yet two years later he was out. His release was a mistake, a parole officer conceded after Dupas had raped again within months of his release.
Dupas’ parole officer then was Wal Soloweij, already with seven years’ experience. Dupas was 26 but appeared to Soloweij as ‘a scared little boy’. Usually you can look at a prisoner and see them doing the thing for which they were convicted, but not Dupas, recalls Soloweij, who has left the parole service after 27 years.
Dupas was deferential, and appeared harmless. ‘At all times he was highly anxious, to the point that he shakes,’ says Soloweij.
‘My general approach has always been, if the situation seems to warrant it, to give the person a chance … and of course he was, as most of them always are, insisting “I will try very hard”.
‘If you made it a blanket statement that they are all liars, you wouldn’t give anyone a chance. It seemed he was worth taking a chance on.’
By the time of Dupas’ release, his parents had moved to Frankston. They had Peter back home, but not for long. Within two months he had accosted a woman on the Nepean Highway and raped her. Armed with a knife and disguised with a balaclava he attacked three other women.
Dupas was convicted of rape again in June 1980. In a report to the County Court’s Judge Lazarus, the pre-eminent forensic psychiatrist of the time Dr Allen Bartholomew said Dupas’ condition would be very hard to treat even if he was co-operative. ‘In this case the condition may well be highly resistant to any presently used forms of treatment,’ Bartholomew wrote.
He added: ‘I feel that when he realised that his hopes for parole might be jeopardised by his denials, he began to admit his guilt.’ He concluded that the outlook for Dupas was poor. He was likely to remain a danger to women.
This second conviction for rape was accompanied by convictions for assault with intent to rape, malicious wounding and indecent assault. Judge Lazarus sentenced him to a maximum of six-and-a-half years, with a minimum of five years.
From Gunnamatta to Cheviot, there are kilometres of wild, occasionally treacherous, unspoiled beaches on the Mornington Peninsula’s southern flank. Along here, Helen McMahon, a 48-year-old swimming instructor, used to sunbathe in seclusion among the windswept sand dunes.
On 13 February 1985 she was found battered to death, naked but for a towel that was placed over her.
According to prison records, that was two weeks before Dupas was released from jail. With credit for time served while awaiting trial on his second rape charge, he was released on 27 February 1985 – four years and eight months after sentencing.
Five days later he was back in custody, having this time stalked and raped a young woman at knifepoint on a beach at Rye. He was caught by friends of the victim and later told police: ‘I thought I was OK. Everyone was saying I am OK now.’
This attack, at Dimmicks Beach, was 4.6 kilometres from where Helen McMahon was killed. Dupas was still serving a jail sentence, which seemed to rule him out as a possible suspect.
But a closer check of prison records revealed that he was granted pre-release leave from 6 February until 14 February, the day after the murder. A police taskforce regards him as a prime suspect in Mrs McMahon’s murder.
In June 1985, following Dupas’ third rape conviction, Judge Leckie remarked that Judge Lazarus had previously passed an apparently light sentence having accepted psychiatric evidence from Dr Myers that suggested Dupas might be rehabilitated (despite Dr Bartholomew’s opinion). Myers indicated that without treatment there was a very high chance of Dupas reoffending, and urged he be treated with the drug Depo Provera.
Judge Leckie gave Dupas a 10-year minimum term. A mental health report the next year said he was an immature 32-year-old acting out sadistic rape fantasies when he felt rejected. If he offered a bland acceptance that he had a problem, there was no evidence he wanted to do anything about it. Dupas admitted fantasising about his crimes.
He attempted suicide in May 1987 and was treated at Mont Park Hospital. He was prescribed Melleril and Depo Provera to quell his sex drive, while undergoing treatment at Mont Park. Melleril is an anti-psychotic drug used to treat abnormal thoughts and hallucinations. Depo Provera is an injectable contraceptive which, in men, lowers testosterone and sex drives. Its use is sometimes referred to as ‘chemical castration’. When discharged, a hospital report noted that his dominant trait was ‘an underlying anger directed towards those around him whom he sees as failing to fulfil his needs’.
He was out in March 1992, less than seven years after sentencing. At the time, prisoners were automatically granted remissions of one-third off their minimum term as an inducement to good behaviour. Yet Dupas’ luck would not stop there. The system had one more indulgence for him.
From the time of his first rape conviction in 1974, until his release in March 1992 after his third rape conviction, Dupas was assessed at Larundel, Mont Park – which housed the criminally insane – and held in Pentridge Prison’s G Division for mentally disturbed prisoners. He was admitted into a group for recidivist sex offenders – where he was disruptive and inattentive. Soloweij recalls that the psychotherapist, the late Margaret Hobbs, concluded Dupas did not take therapy seriously.
Dupas also had individual psychotherapy. But in 1994, after he attacked a woman at Lake Eppalock, near Bendigo, forensic psychologist Ian Joblin said Dupas was really only ever hospitalised as a suicide risk, and it was for depression rather than any disorder that he was treated. Bartholomew had observed in 1990 that: ‘[Dupas] really has had little or nothing to be termed treatment.’
Dupas is a timid, uncertain creature who does his prison time hard, but because he lapses into what Bartholomew called ‘a reactive depression’ in jail, it is for that he has been treated.
The woman who later would become Dupas’ wife initiated one of his moves from G Division to hospital: ‘I was very concerned about him. It was after a visit from his parents I noticed his personal hygiene had become very slack. I realised when I was talking to him he was very depressed and we had him admitted to Mont Park.’
The clinical director of the Victorian Institute of Forensic Mental Health, Professor Paul Mullen, said he doubted that Dupas was ever treated for his underlying disorder.
‘Dupas in prison is self-damaging, suicidal, depressed,’ Prof Mullen said. ‘Any treatment he has had usually has been for depression – no-one has ever, when he has come before the courts, sent him for treatment. No-one has ever said this is the sort of man who should be treated rather than incarcerated.
‘If a Mr Dupas appeared tomorrow, you can’t be confident that he would be managed with any more effective intervention than the real Dupas was 20 years ago.
‘Depo Provera has to be used with some therapy that changes the way they live and think about their victims.’
Joblin said in his 1994 report that Dupas attacked women to compensate for his inadequacies, to fulfil fantasies of conquest, to express mastery, strength and control. ‘For Dupas the actual assault has not lived up to the fantasy which preceded the assault, and is seen at times as disappointing,’ Joblin wrote. ‘He does not feel reassured by either his performance or his victim’s response and must find another victim, this time “the right one”.
‘Thus, his offences become repetitive.’
Soloweij says that prisoners with a hatred of women often had problems with their mother, but in Dupas’ case the big issue was his domineering father.
‘He might blame his mother for not protecting him from his father,’ Soloweij speculates. ‘Offenders like him, as long as they have somebody to blame, they think they don’t have to change.’
Prof Mullen said that Dupas is typical of a type of sex offender who is insecure and who forms very dependent relationships. They are angry and vindictive and easily offended. They alternate between being clinging and demanding and are always likely to lose control if they feel rejected or excluded.
Seeking to understand her errant son, Dupas’ mother wondered whether a childhood accident might be responsible. When he was 10 he was knocked unconscious for several hours after riding a pushbike into a tree. Tests have since shown no evidence of brain damage, but do indicate mediocre intelligence.
Yet to those who dealt with him he seemed inoffensive in the extreme. Ingratiating, excessively polite, utterly harmless, self-effacing, keen to evoke sympathy, weak, downtrodden, humble, incapable of his crimes and fantasies.
In short, he is a loathsome mixture of self-pitying and predatory instincts, aggressive and violent, cowardly and obsequious.
On the street, he was a danger to female society. In prison, he was fearful and tremulous. It was extraordinary then, that in Pentridge Prison’s G Division, a psychiatric nurse 16 years older, a mother and grandmother, would decide that she loved him, and would marry him.
Sex offenders are usually condemned by their label. Dupas, however, was one of those men who brought out the mothering side of staff, male or female, a staff member recalls. So capable of manipulation is he that it almost seems a gift.
‘There is something about him which is so pathetic in the way he presents … he produced strong divisions among the staff, some finding him obnoxious and others thinking he needed care.’
The woman he married in old Castlemaine Jail thought she detected a ‘beautiful nature’ in him. He was co-operative, helpful, depressed and needy.
He finally moved in with his wife at Woodend, and later Kyneton, after his release in 1992. Even in hindsight, his wife struggled to explain their relationship.
‘Bart [Allen Bartholomew] always said that I was his second mother,’ Dupas’ wife ‘Mary’, who has since remarried, recalls. ‘I always respected everything Bart said. He was one of the best. I was a lot older than Peter, 16 years older than Peter, so what was the attraction, apart from psychiatry-wise I could relate to him? In years I was far too old to be even considering marrying him.’
While they lived at Kyneton, Dupas was reported to police for harassing a teenage horse rider. He drove alongside her and said her horse was bleeding from the leg.
After she dismounted, he got out of the car, put his arm around her and said: ‘Now you’re off your horse and I’m out of the car, we can have some fun.’
The girl manoeuvred the horse between them and was able to ride off.
When Mary read of the incident in the local paper she said to him: ‘It’s lucky they’re looking for a blue sedan and not a station wagon, or they’d be looking for you.’
‘He was very dependent on me. He was more or less sooky, and always around,’ Mary says. Late in 1993 she resumed work, and he began to sulk. ‘I was not his own personal kind of property any more,’ she says. ‘I had to be shared around. My work took me away, and undermined his confidence a bit, and perhaps his self-esteem.’
A visit from his parents seemed to deepen his distress. ‘He had been upset,’ she says. ‘He had had a visit from his parents. His parents were very upright, good people. Best house. Best car. Best this. Best that. I think Peter struggled a lot to get best results from his exams right from the point where he was changing Es to As on his report card. His parents came down for Christmas 1993. He found them very hard to handle. I was not there to instigate conversation or to try to entertain them. When they left he said: “Thank goodness they’ve gone.” They had not reached home when he had re-offended.’
In fact, they had barely left for home before he was planning his next attack. Not who it would be or where. Just that it would be.
He loaded their station wagon with knives and a balaclava. He added a plastic sheet. A shovel. In his pockets, he stuffed masking tape and handcuffs. He told Mary he was going fishing.
Ballee Bay is a generous title for the clearing on the western flank of Lake Eppalock in central Victoria. From the highway an unsealed road runs through eucalypt forest before it disappears into the hard reddish earth of the shoreline.
The bay is popular with water skiers and anglers, the packed, flinty soil offering good purchase for boat-laden trailers. The clearing is both nominally a bay and nominally a picnic area. A pair of sad, concrete tables, each with its setting of uninviting fixed stools, stands amongst the bush.
The lake seems to be on a plateau, so standing on the cleared space at its edge there is just the water, the gum trees marking the opposite shore and the big, broad blue above. More than 150 metres away, half-hidden in the native scrub, is a toilet block of dingy, grey bricks.
It was 3 January 1994. A group picnicking at Ballee Bay – two engaged couples and another young bloke, all in their 20s – ignored the middle-aged stranger who parked near the toilets and then came over and spoke to them. He said ‘Gidday’ and ‘It’s a nice day’. Nobody responded. They let the silence speak for them. They didn’t acknowledge his intrusion or encourage him to stay.
He hung around briefly. He said ‘See ya’, as if they’d had a real conversation, returned to his car and drove away. Had he known one of the men was a Federal copper he might have stayed away. But about an hour later, on her way to the toilets, one of the women noticed the station wagon was back, parked on the dirt track.
As she was sitting on the toilet the cubicle door pushed open. A hand and a knife appeared followed by a man, his face hidden with a balaclava.
They struggled, he waving the knife, telling her to turn around, she saying she was frightened, resisting being turned, fearing she was to be raped and feeling her hand slashed and bleeding.
Six times he told her to turn and each time she refused while fending off the knife and feeling her hand grow wet and sticky with blood.
He took her right arm and dragged her from the cubicle but finally, seeming to tire of the struggle, left the woman and returned to his car.
When they realised what had happened her friends chased Dupas 15 kilometres, catching him when he lost control turning onto a dirt track. The cop subdued him easily. Dupas was scared they might hurt him.
The year before, tougher sentencing laws had been introduced for sex crimes. Serious sexual offenders, those with more than one conviction for a sex offence resulting in a jail term, faced harsher sentencing, including: the abolition of concurrent sentences, the abolition of remissions and the possibility of indefinite sentences. Public safety was to take a higher priority than rehabilitation of serious offenders, as was the long-standing principle that penalties be proportional to crimes.
Yet despite his history, despite the handcuffs and tape in his pockets, despite the shovel in his car, the new laws were not applied to Dupas because within the Office of Public Prosecutions it was decided only the relatively minor offence of false imprisonment – not attempted rape and not kidnapping – could be sustained.
While his motive seems obvious given his history, the prosecution decided there was nothing overtly sexual in the attack and did not press sex charges. False imprisonment was a comparatively easy charge to sustain since he had clearly detained his victim in the toilet block.
Dupas pleaded guilty to false imprisonment. It was an easy out compared to the alternative of being declared a serious sex offender.
This evidently concerned Judge Hart of the County Court, who asked whether the new sentencing rules applied. He was told no, they did not, but during legal discussion Judge Hart asked: ‘Is it not a proper question for a sentencing court to ask itself: clearly, why did he do this? Unless I know why it is being done, I am in a vacuum … I have got to evaluate the crime and I am looking for whatever it is that will help me do that, and one of the matters that occurred to me [which] might be of assistance … [is] to know why he did it. And if that’s proper, whether it’s proper to take that into account, and the discussion that we have had so far indicates that it’s not.’
Despite this invitation to seek to apply the tough new rules to Dupas, the system cut him still more slack. The prosecutor, Tom Gyorffy, said that while it was possible to infer the motive behind Dupas’ attack, it could not be inferred beyond reasonable doubt. This was an extraordinary break for Dupas, and it tied the judge’s hands.
Judge Hart told Dupas his criminal history was ‘breathtaking’ and said he believed that Dupas intended to commit a sexual offence, but he was able only to sentence him for false imprisonment. Dupas received a minimum two years and nine months, of which almost a year had already been served in custody awaiting trial.
Justice failed. Here was a man irredeemably evil. He had destroyed or diminished every life he had touched by what he did or what he tried to do. He left his victims living with deep insecurity and choking fear. His brother and sister had disowned him. His parents despaired of him.
He was, in the words of a cop who knew him as a teenager, ‘an unmitigated liar’. Fresh faced and fair. A bit of a Johnny Farnham look-alike, one family friend thought, but a liar all the same.
And in September 1996 Soloweij saw him again, after Dupas served the sentence Judge Hart had handed down. Soloweij was supervising his parole this time, which Dupas dutifully completed. He was a veteran of counselling courses. ‘By now he would know what anybody would want to ask him. He would have the answers,’ Soloweij says.
‘What still puzzles me is that extreme anxiety. What is that about? You would think someone with that anxiety, that they would crack eventually.’
Middle-aged now, he remained a timid little boy. Essentially, he was unchanged.
He did not come to police attention until the check of Nicole Patterson’s telephone records two-and-a-half years later. It is the longest period in which he is not known to have committed some form of sex-related offence since, as a 15-year-old schoolboy, he attacked his neighbour, Barbara.
Alone again, he lived in the northern suburbs in a flat in Brunswick. He became friendly with a South African woman who lived in the same block of flats, and together they moved into the weatherboard house in Coane Street, Pascoe Vale.
He found work, through the CES, as a general hand in a Thomastown furniture factory up the Hume Highway from home. Apart from his girlfriend, his only contacts were with Patrick O’Brien, Sister Clare and his mother.
Did he really resist his urges for two-and-a-half years? He had usually offended close to home. When his family lived in Glen Waverley his offences were in the eastern or southeastern suburbs of Oakleigh, Mitcham, Ringwood, Endeavour Hills and Doveton.
His arrest while spying on women in the caravan park showers was over summer at McCrae, near his family’s holiday house. In 1979, when his parents had moved to Frankston, he attacked women alongside the Nepean Highway. Nicole Patterson’s house was a 20-minute drive along Bell Street and St Georges Road from Dupas’ house in Pascoe Vale.
When released previously he attacked women within days or weeks and he was detected just as quickly. He was caught near the scene of the rape at Dimmicks Beach, Rye, as well as at Lake Eppalock. Four women identified him when he used the ruse of car trouble to approach them.
Perhaps he had decided he would not be so easily caught again.
At 4.30 on the morning of Sunday, 2 November 1997, the Greek Orthodox section of Fawkner Cemetery, on Sydney Road heading north out of Melbourne, was dark and forbidding. Thick cloud meant there were no stars or moon to provide light.
But Angelo Gorgievski took off at a run, finding his way between the graves with the faint beam of a tiny flashlight he kept in his car’s cigarette lighter. It was the second time that morning that 25-year-old Gorgievski had searched the cemetery. Earlier, he and his father Nikola had climbed the fence and found, locked inside the car park, the red Ford Telstar Gorgievski had lent to his fiancée, Mersina Halvagis.
Without a torch the men had then tried to find their way to plot M33, the grave of Ms Halvagis’ grandmother, calling out the young woman’s name. Something had compelled Mr Gorgievski to go there, he told the Supreme Court in July 2007. ‘That was a spur of the moment thing, I just wanted – something was dragging me there, something made me go there.’
But their search was in vain. They left the grounds, crossed Sydney Road to a service station and called the police. When two police cars arrived and the cemetery gates were unlocked, Mr Gorgievski led the officers to the Telstar. To the policemen’s surprise, he grabbed the little flashlight and began running towards the grave. ‘I … didn’t even talk to anybody. I just started running through aisles,’ he testified. ‘It didn’t look right … something looked wrong, and basically it just happened so quickly … I didn’t expect to see anything, but as soon as I got there I just – from turning right to turning left it was just – she was just there. I just stumbled across her.’
Constable Andrew Garbutt, one of the officers who’d followed Gorgievski, recalled his reaction: ‘It was a bone-chilling scream.’
Ms Halvagis, 25, was lying on her back, twisted slightly, at a grave site near her grandmother’s. Her clothes were in disarray, Steven Reynolds, then an acting sergeant at Craigieburn, said. Her light-coloured pants were stained with blood. Her top had been pulled over her head from the back and was bunched across her chest. Sergeant Reynolds could see holes, like stab marks, in her jumper. ‘Her stomach was exposed and I could see stab marks there,’ he recalled. ‘I shone the torch on her face and her eyes were just open and staring.’
Forensic pathologist Dr David Ranson gave evidence that Ms Halvagis suffered more than 85 separate injuries – 33 of them stab wounds and more than 20 other cutting injuries – to the chest, head and abdomen. There were a number of cuts on both breasts. Her heart and lungs had been punctured and there was a stab wound through her neck.
Sergeant Reynolds recalled Mr Gorgievski’s response when he reached her body. ‘He’d been nervous through the whole thing but he just became hysterical and he jumped back, he didn’t touch anything. He suddenly said, “Oh my God, it’s her. Who could do such a thing? Oh my God. Oh my God.”’
Who? Fawkner Cemetery is within three kilometres of Dupas’ house. The grave of Mersina Halvagis’ grandmother was exactly 128 metres from the grave of Dupas’ grandfather. And 12 kilometres south of where another woman’s body, similarly mutilated, had been found a month before.
Cliffords Road, Somerton is a narrow, sealed road hardly worthy of the name. It runs by sprawling industrial sites – a steel fabricating plant and a concrete manufacturer – on one side while on the other is a desolate view of open paddocks, a railway siding and rusting rolling stock. Even during working hours there is a sense of abandonment.
The body of Margaret Maher, a drug-addicted truck-stop prostitute, was found here one Saturday afternoon in October by scroungers looking for scrap metal. She had been dumped alongside some discarded computer parts. She was lying on her side, her black leggings rolled down over her thighs, exposing her buttocks. A piece of cardboard had been thrown over her stomach. Her purple track top and sweatshirt were bunched under her left armpit and her left breast was cut off and placed in her mouth.
Maher, 40, was well known around the truck stops and servos on the main route out of Melbourne. When she wasn’t seeing men in her one-bedroom flat in Campbellfield, she would see to interstate truckies’ needs in the cabs of their prime movers. She was on a methadone program supplemented with amphetamines and sedatives.
When she wasn’t working to feed her habit, Maher would wander the shopping strip at Cumberland Road and Gaffney Street, Pascoe Vale. Peter Dupas used the same shops. Coane Street, where he lived, runs off Cumberland Road, five blocks away. Forensic tests found Dupas’ DNA on a glove near Maher’s body.
Geographic coincidences aside, police also found evidence placing Dupas in the cemetery a month later – a likeness later drawn from the recollections of another visitor to the cemetery bore a striking resemblance to Dupas.
The following month, Kathleen Downes, a 95-year-old woman who had suffered two strokes, relied on a walking frame and had difficulty speaking, was stabbed to death in the Brunswick nursing home where she had lived for eight years.
She was one of 21 residents at Brunswick Lodge, a well-run, bright and cheery place in Loyola Avenue. On 30 December 1997, she left her door open, as always. At 12.30 am, staff observed Mrs Downes asleep. But at 6.30 am, a staff member found her body on the floor beside her bed. A window had been forced, and police found signs indicating that someone had placed themselves in a position where they could watch the nursing home undetected.
Dupas knew the area, having lived nearby in Rose Street, Brunswick from late 1996 until May 1997 when he moved into Pascoe Vale. Although he was a violent sex offender he was not considered a suspect, yet police later found a direct, unexplained link between Dupas and the nursing home. A phone call, asking about placing an elderly female in the Lodge, was traced to his home.
This followed the work, three years later, of a taskforce of seven detectives which had examined Dupas in connection with 17 unsolved murders in Victoria and Adelaide. The Mikado Taskforce had been set up in February 2001. Their sparse, 10th-floor office in Melbourne’s St Kilda Road police complex held more than 50 folders concerning the murders of Helen McMahon, Margaret Maher, Mersina Halvagis and Kathleen Downes. There were eye witnesses, forensic evidence and geographical links in each case.
Lobbying by George Halvagis, Mersina’s father, had resulted in the law being changed to permit police to seek a court order enabling them to question a person in custody. Police delayed approaching Dupas, however. He had recently appealed against his conviction for the murder of Nicole Patterson and, based on a psychological profile of Dupas, they were advised to wait. It was thought that if his appeal failed, and he believed he would not be released, he would be at his most vulnerable.
Often when dealing with serial sex offenders police work on the principle that the offender is burdened with guilt and that if they could choose, they would be different. ‘They want to confide in someone and you just have to help them find a way to confess,’ an investigator said.
Dupas is different.
Senior Detective Ian Armstrong had interviewed Dupas on 30 November 1973. ‘We tried everything and he would get to the point where he was about to talk. Then something would snap and he would go blank, then deny everything,’ Armstrong later said.
Dr Bartholomew had warned that Dupas used denial as a coping device. ‘He is to be seen as potentially dangerous. The denial technique makes for huge difficulty in treatment.’
The person who best knows Dupas, Patrick O’Brien, had thought during the period after his 1996 release that Dupas was rebuilding his life. He had formed a relationship, he had worked for a year, and was talking about starting his own furniture business from home. The 1999 killing of Nicole Patterson ended that illusion.
‘I really saw him the day before, and the day of the crime, and he really did not seem any different to me, and that’s the mystery,’ O’Brien says.
‘I just can’t understand, assuming he did it, that he could be so normal. I believe that he believes himself innocent. That’s how he can function the way he does, because he does not believe these things happened.’
Prof Mullen says that despite the period of unconsciousness after the childhood bike accident, there is no evidence of brain damage or mental illness, nothing at all to explain Dupas.
‘His parents appear to have done their best,’ Mullen says. ‘They did not abuse him. They didn’t throw him out. They didn’t abandon him at the first sight of trouble.’
The ideal outcome, Mullen says, would be that some identifiable part of Dupas’ brain could be shown to be awry, miswired in some way: ‘It would be nice if it were that simple,’ he says. ‘It never is one thing. It is always a complex combination of genetic, social, psychiatric and most awful of all, chance.’
Soloweij says that Dupas is one of the most deceptive people he has met, comparable only to the child-killer Derek Percy who has been in jail since 1969. ‘Speaking to [Percy] … is like looking into a fish’s eyes: there is nothing there. Dupas is deceptively pleasant. You don’t want to push him too far in case he falls apart.
‘The other one is just a blank wall. Both are equally impenetrable.’
Despite the uncontrolled outbursts of rage in his school years, and the attention generated by his 1968 assault on his neighbour ‘Barbara’, the adult Peter Dupas had become sophisticated enough to contrive to disguise himself.
Initially he presented a front of vehemently proclaimed innocence, and later, following his arrest for rape soon after his release in 1985, a sort of bemused regret: ‘Everyone was saying I was OK now.’
In the late ‘70s, his modest manner had lulled at least one parole officer, Soloweij, into supporting his release. Dupas had spent enough time with mental health professionals to act out a role in his telephone conversations with Nicole Patterson, telling her he needed to discuss ‘family of origin issues’, concerning relationships with his mother and with women.
Patterson’s supervisor in psychotherapy, Andrew Cargill, said a consultation normally would be arranged with one or two telephone calls and the 15 made by Dupas would have aroused concern. Police believe Dupas made so many calls to check on her movements and the possibility of someone else being in the house when he visited.
In ordinary life, he could blend in. Among the furniture factory crew at Thomastown he was just one quiet unskilled worker. He rarely missed work, just got on with his menial chores without drawing attention to himself. In the street, he would not warrant a second glance.
His girlfriend at Pascoe Vale was utterly unprepared for the discovery of what she was living with and is understood to have left Victoria. Hers is one more life diminished by Peter Dupas.
The father of his ex-fiancée, the girl who ended their engagement after his first conviction for rape all those years ago, said his daughter had nothing to say. He remarked: ‘Peter Dupas was two people. When he was here he was a fine young fellow. When he was away, he was something else.’
In August 2004, almost seven years after the killing of Margaret Maher, Dupas was convicted of her murder. The peculiar mutilation of her body, in similar fashion to that inflicted on Patterson, along with a similar cutting pattern seen in both the victims’ upper clothing, were central to the case against him.
The jury needed only five hours’ deliberation to reach its decision. Dupas was given another life sentence, on top of the one he was already serving for murder. Before he was led away he complained from the dock that it had been a ‘kangaroo court’.
In November 2005, eight years after her death, the Victorian Coroner held an inquest into the murder of Mersina Halvagis. With circumstantial evidence, and numerous witnesses who were at the cemetery the day of Mersina Halvagis’ slaying having identified Dupas, there was strong speculation he would also be charged over that crime. But the Director of Public Prosecutions, Paul Coghlan, told the coroner’s inquiry into the killing that there was not enough evidence to mount a sufficiently strong case to justify a trial.
Dupas did not testify at either the Margaret Maher trial, or the Mersina Halvagis inquest. He never has liked to talk about his crimes. He has always liked to keep things close.
But then he spoke to a lawyer. The wrong lawyer.
Solicitor Andrew Fraser was a pugnacious courtroom operator known for his fierce, police-unfriendly cross-examinations. His clients included Alan Bond and fallen AFL star Jimmy Krakouer, as well as a number of permanently fallen participants in Melbourne’s gangland wars. He has been variously described as compassionate and an ‘arrogant ratbag’ – the latter as a piece of character evidence, but only after he had fallen foul of a $1000-a-day cocaine habit.
Fraser has said he was introduced to cocaine at a party in the early-1990s. At first his use was recreational, just another trapping of success. But by the end of that decade, according to the Australian Financial Review in 2004, Fraser was a member of the so-called ‘Negroni Commission’ (named after the cocktail), a fast-moving social group of about 20 people, mostly lawyers, who allegedly had Friday lunches involving cocaine and call-girls.
In 1999, police recorded Fraser giving advice to his then drug dealer, Werner Paul Roberts, 54, over a scheme to smuggle 5.5 kilograms of cocaine from Benin, Africa inside eight wooden wall plaques. In December 2001, he was sentenced to a minimum of five years for cocaine importation and trafficking and possession of ecstasy. Allegedly in need of protection, he was taken to Sirius East, the maximum security protection unit of Port Phillip Prison.
There he met Peter Dupas and the pair became the division’s gardeners and unlikely ‘friends’. They took horticultural classes and watched gardening shows on TV together. Perhaps six months after Fraser arrived in the unit, he and Dupas were in the fenced-off exercise yard known as the Chook Pen. A young prisoner, possibly of Greek extraction, came up to the other side of the wire and asked Dupas, Are you Peter Dupas?’ Dupas answered ‘Yes’.
‘And with that, the young bloke began to really serve it up to him verbally,’ Fraser recalled six years later. He told Dupas he was a cousin of Mersina Halvagis and that he knew Dupas had killed her.
‘Abuse like that isn’t all that unusual in jail but Dupas was really rocked by this, you could tell just from his body language. He almost stopped as if someone had hit him, you know, and sort of was stuck for words.’
The prisoner told Dupas that if he ever got a chance, he would knock him – meaning kill him – then walked away. Fraser was struck by Dupas’ response. He said, ‘How does that cunt know I did it?’
‘And just the whole body language, the way he uttered that word, I took that as an admission,’ said the former lawyer. ‘He didn’t say it as a question, he said it as a statement.’
A week later Dupas told Fraser he had learnt which cell the cousin lived in. He said he had learnt the prisoner had a doctor’s appointment and he would use the opportunity to kill him. He secreted a garden fork behind some bushes to do the job. Fraser quietly alerted authorities and the medical appointment was cancelled.
But in September 2002, police interviewed Dupas in relation to the Margaret Maher murder and told him they had DNA evidence – from the glove found at the scene – that linked him to the killing. Dupas was ‘rattled’, said Fraser, and began breaking the closed-mouth habits of a lifetime. He told the lawyer he had left no forensic evidence at Fawkner, nor ‘with the old sheila down the road’ – Kathleen Downes.
After Dupas was charged with Margaret Maher’s murder, he showed Fraser the police brief of evidence. The lawyer had already noticed similarities with the ‘fact evidence’ between the crimes. As he later told police, they involved ‘a frenzied knife attack and subsequent mutilation, the same modus operandi applied to Halvagis’.
Then he said: ‘Dupas repeated he left no forensics at the scene and no-one, not even the deceased, would have seen him as he attacked her from behind as she was either kneeling at or bending over her grandmother’s grave.’ This was a dangerous admission. Police had never released the detail that Mersina Halvagis was attacked as she knelt at the grave. Only her killer could have known.
And then Dupas did something that appalled and scared Fraser. He performed ‘a little pantomime’ of how he’d killed her. ‘I was just stunned,’ Fraser later told police. ‘I just put it to the back of my mind. I just wanted to survive.’
But when the homicide squad called three years later, Andrew Fraser said, ‘What took you so long?’
Detectives who’d been reinvestigating the Halvagis case had uncovered several witnesses who could place a man closely fitting Dupas’ description inside Fawkner Cemetery on 1 November 1997, the day Mersina Halvagis was murdered.
One was a volunteer who was approached by a man seeking details on what he said was his adoptive mother’s grave. In 1998 the woman helped police produce a photofit image that bore a striking resemblance to Dupas. In 2000, while on holidays at Kyabram, the woman saw a newspaper photograph of Dupas and recognised him as the man she had seen at the cemetery. Two others had contacted police after similar experiences.
In 2003 Fraser had been transferred to Fulham Prison near Sale, in East Gippsland. Senior Detective Paul Scarlett had learnt Fraser had spent more than a year with Dupas, during which time he had acted as his jailhouse lawyer. He rang Fraser who surprised him by suggesting that he should visit and agreed to be interviewed.
When Dupas went on trial for Mersina Halvagis’ murder in July 2007, Fraser was the star witness. At the opening, prosecutor Colin Hillman, SC, told the jury that Dupas’ conversations with Fraser ‘amount to a clear, unequivocal confession to the murder of Mersina Halvagis and provide compelling evidence that Peter Dupas was the person who murdered [her]’.
Nonsense, asserted defence barrister David Drake. He told the jury that it was not until a $1 million reward was offered that Fraser, ‘a disgraced, imprisoned, bankrupt and struck-off solicitor, stepped forward’. Later, he put it to Fraser that he had invented the admissions in an effort to ‘go for the gold’.
But even after six years’ absence, Andrew Fraser knew how to sway a jury. Earlier that day he had re-enacted Dupas’ ‘little pantomime’ of how he murdered Halvagis. He stepped out of the witness box and described Dupas’ prison cell, where they had been sitting on the bed. He could tell Dupas was anxious, he said, because he started to fidget, clamping his hands between his legs and rocking backwards and forwards.
Dupas pointed at the intercom button on the cell wall where he believed police had planted a listening device, and put his finger to his lips. Suddenly, Fraser said, Dupas jumped up and dropped into a kneeling position, like a victim. ‘Now he didn’t go right down on his knees, but indicated that somebody was kneeling or bent over. And then he went …’
Fraser, facing the jury from the bar table, dropped to a crouch and lifted his arm. He plunged it down suddenly, raised it and struck again. And again.
Mersina Halvagis’ family, sitting behind him, all dressed in black, bore this latest horror in stony silence.
‘And then he just sat down on the bed as if nothing had happened.’
On Thursday, 11 August 2007, a third jury found Peter Dupas guilty of murder. Again he was sentenced to life with no minimum.
Many have tried to unravel the twisted mystery that is Peter Norris Dupas. That Thursday, Justice Philip Cummins stared hard at the murderer from the bench and chose to do it with crystal economy. Just two short sentences to sum him up: ‘You do not suffer from any mental illness. Rather, you are a psychopath driven by a hatred of women.
‘I refuse to set any minimum term,’ he added. ‘Life means life.’
With John Silvester