Chapter 8
Mersina Halvagis: Evil Knows
No Bounds

You present the awful, threatening and unanswerable question: how did you come to be as you are?

– HIS HONOUR MR JUSTICE FRANK VINCENT ON SENTENCING
DUPAS FOR THE MURDER OF NICOLE PATTERSON

Things were heating up for Dupas, particularly in relation to Margaret Maher. But also hanging over him was the ever-present question of the murder of Mersina Halvagis. It was clear that the police and the prosecuting authorities had one suspect for this murder and one suspect only. It was a matter of constant speculation in the media but the police were careful not to release all aspects of their investigation because they clearly wanted to keep back some matters that only the killer would have known.

The Halvagis murder was an old case but certainly not a cold case. In an attempt to try and flush additional evidence out of the woodwork, on 17 December 2004 the then police minister for the state of Victoria, Andre Hairmeyer, announced a reward of one million dollars payable to anybody who gave evidence that led to the conviction of the murderer of Mersina Halvagis. The offering of this reward did nothing to reveal any fresh evidence.

I hate writing about this period of my life because it takes me back into the depths of despair that was life at Port Phillip Prison. I was in jail with a murdering sex monster who wanted to tell me about his crimes and who wanted to use me as essentially free, in-house counsel. I was stuck, there was nothing I could do: damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

I have already mentioned that you can’t write anything down in jail, but you also can’t talk confidentially to anybody from outside and more importantly you can’t privately ring anybody. Therefore, the old adage “Loose lips sink ships” applies. If I had been on the phone and spoken to the coppers about this matter, the fact of that conversation would have almost certainly found its way back to Dupas and I would have been a dead duck, literally. In jail, if you lag, then the twisted morals that apply come into play: as a lagger you will most likely be killed. It never seems to occur to anybody to assess who the lagging has been done about or why. You are grouped into the most despicable and despised of categories: that of police informer. I was not prepared to place myself in that position but I was certainly caught in a dilemma because now, through no fault of my own, I had become involved to some degree with Peter Dupas. I now knew things that I didn’t want to know and I had a feeling of dread that this would come back to haunt me at some stage in the future. However, I was not prepared to place my life on the line and say anything while I was still in custody.

On the day that Dupas first raised the Halvagis matter with me in his cell and told me how he had left no forensics at Fawkner, I noticed his body language change. He was sitting bolt upright. I noticed what I have detailed before: he started to sweat and shake, his hands clasped in front of him. Then, the more we discussed Halvagis, the more agitated he became. His clasped hands were placed between his knees and forced together. He then started to rock backwards and forwards. Dupas was sitting on his bed near his pillow. He was on my right. On his right was a panic button on the wall. It is a jail myth that this is also used by the police as a listening device in investigating matters but even if the cells were bugged it was of no concern to me.

While Dupas had already made oral admissions to me that he had left no DNA, what followed next surprised and shocked me just about more than anything in my life. Dupas, rocking backwards and forwards, suddenly stopped, looked at me, his eyes staring madly. He pointed at the panic button on the wall, which has a little microphone behind a stainless steel plate. He put his right forefinger to his mouth in a motion indicating that he didn’t want to say anything and he didn’t want me to say anything. Then he suddenly leapt off his bed, turned and faced me. He opened his arms in an expansive movement to indicate another person. He knelt down, despite his crook knees, on one knee, indicating that one person was on their knees or kneeling down or bending over. Then, without warning, he stood up and brought his two hands in to his chest, indicating himself. He then commenced flailing uncontrollably in a downward stabbing motion, clearly indicating to me that he was stabbing someone who was kneeling down. I was terrified. From what I knew, I was convinced I had just witnessed a re-enactment of a cold-blooded, frenzied murder and I didn’t want to have anything to do with this. Dupas stopped, looked at me, then sat back down on his bed in a relaxed state. The blinds had come down yet again and there was nothing else to say. Conversation over.

I knew from that point on that, at some stage in the future, I would have to get involved in a prosecution of Dupas. This man, who has denied and denied every offence that he has ever committed, had now provided me with proof positive that he was the murderer. Why do I say that? The one thing that the police had been very careful not to release to the media was that Mersina had been kneeling down when she was attacked. They also hadn’t released the fact that she was attacked from behind. Only one person could have known those two ingredients of the crime. And that was the killer.

I can remember almost staggering with shock back to my cell, closing my door and snibbing it for the remainder of the night because I felt sick – sick to my stomach that I had witnessed this appalling act. I must say I also felt some self pity in finding myself in circumstances where I had to interact with such people. But not just interact, actually live with them and spend every moment that my cell was unlocked having to deal with these people and frankly living in fear of what might become of me.

The pantomime in the cell had come out of the blue but it left me in no doubt as to Dupas’s actions and the fact that he was the real killer. The final crunch came for me not long after the pantomime when we were in the garden together. As prison gardener you find all sorts of contraband hidden in the garden – usually drugs, often shivs and even on one occasion the precursor of an incendiary device. On this particular day I didn’t find any drugs but I can remember I was facing the wall of Sirius West, which looks down over the vegie garden. Along that wall is a garden bed with some large shrubs growing in it. It is here that often you find the contraband. Most of it has been thrown out the window during searches; the screws are too stupid to have somebody outside watching what comes out of the windows while the searches are on.

I could see that some soil had been disturbed right hard up against the wall and then some mulch had been flicked over the disturbed soil. I scratched around and I located a large shiv. It would have been about ten inches long and looked like it had been made from a steel brace from a table tennis table which the prisoners in Sirius West constructed in the work area of the jail. It was long and had been sharpened along one side to a very long point. It was extremely sharp and had a little bit of towelling wrapped around the non sharpened end as a handle. I looked at this weapon. It was easily the most lethal weapon I had seen in jail. I was standing there looking at it with my back facing into the garden and to this day I don’t know what made me do it but I said to Dupas, “Hey Pete, come and have a look at what I found.”

I was still standing up against the wall and obscured by the bushes. Dupas walked over and I can still see the scene as clearly as if it was yesterday. I had the knife in my left hand and he came up to me on my left. I handed the weapon to him and he didn’t say anything but I could read all the signs from his body language. Dupas started to shake, he became sweaty and he looked rather excited in a psychotic sort of way. He took the knife from me very gently and he held it in the palm of his open hand, almost as if he was weighing it up. He started moving the knife up and down in this weighing up motion, then, to my amazement, he started reciting, almost chanting in a trance-like state, the words “Mersina, Mersina, Mersina.” I couldn’t believe my ears. This man had completely lost the plot. I was in the immediate vicinity of a psychopath holding a large knife. More importantly a psychopath who was admitting that he was the one who had killed Mersina Halvagis and had used a knife to do so.

The only time in jail I was genuinely in fear for my life was this moment. I thought, by the look on Dupas’s face and the manner in which he was behaving, that he was more than capable of killing me there and then. I tried to keep my act together and said to him “Pete, just give me the knife back, we’ll chuck it in the bin.”

We always used to throw any contraband we found in a waste bin which was emptied most days and so the contraband left the unit. I took the knife from him very quietly and gently and slowly walked to the rubbish bin. I threw the knife in and slammed the lid down, then walked away. By the time I got back to where Dupas had been standing, he was gone. He was back in the vegie patch, weeding away as if nothing had happened. The frightening thing about all of this was that he never once mentioned the knife after this and he seemed to shut the whole thing out of his mind yet again. But it was clear to me that he had made another admission that he killed Mersina Halvagis.

That night I hardly slept because I was concerned that this extremely dangerous weapon had been put in the rubbish bin. I went back first thing the next morning to make sure the bin had been emptied. It had been, and the knife was gone.

It was only later, after Dupas was convicted and I was able to speak to the police about this matter, that I learned of one of the things that had impressed them about my discussions with them regarding Dupas: I had noted precisely the same behaviour as they had when questioning him or dealing with him. That is, he would sweat, shake, even on occasions become a little teary, and you’d think he was about to blurt out an admission, hands clasped tightly between his knees pressed together, rocking backwards and forwards. But then it was almost as if a blind or a curtain came down across his entire face. He would suddenly change. He would look at you as if wondering who you were and what you were doing there, and all of a sudden the conversation was over. It was as if the preceding conversation had never taken place and he had never mentioned anything. It was lucky that I was able to take him further down the track in terms of admissions than the police had ever been able to. This was probably because of my background, my closeness to him and the fact that he may – and this is speculation – have thought that I would be subject to some sort of professional privilege, which of course I wasn’t.