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Final Justice for Mersina Halvagis: Serial Killer Peter Dupas Gets His Just Desserts

In November 2010, there was a favourable conclusion to a development in one of the highest-profile murder cases in Australia’s history.

But let’s start from the beginning.

It’s a strange irony that one of Melbourne’s one-time hotshot defence lawyers would be the undoing of one of Australia’s most evil killers. There was a time when Andrew Fraser would defend the likes of Peter Norris Dupas. But if it wasn’t for Fraser’s testimony in the Melbourne Supreme Court at Dupas’ murder retrial, police admit that Dupas could never have been found guilty of one of Victoria’s most enduring murder mysteries. Without Andrew Fraser’s evidence police had no forensic evidence, no eyewitnesses, no confession and no case, even though they knew Dupas was their man due to a mountain of circumstantial evidence.

There was a time when Andrew Fraser was the Johnny Cochrane – that’s the Johnny Cochrane, who defended OJ Simpson – of the Melbourne courts. His clients included underworld hitmen, disgraced sporting stars, alleged cop-killers and drug dealers. Anyone who had a profile, a lot of money and a problem with the law wound up on Andrew Fraser’s doorstep. And they got their two bob’s worth. Fraser was notoriously ruthless and would stop at nothing to get his clients the best deal. And in doing so he made a million enemies in the courts and throughout the police force. So when Andrew Fraser fell from his five-star perch and crashed and burned in the worst possible way, there were very few tears.

Seems as though apart from the mansion and Mercedes-Benzs, Fraser was sticking about a grand’s worth of cocaine up his nose every day. Apparently he started out having a social snort 10 years earlier, got the taste and eventually couldn’t wait to get out of court quick enough to have a line.

Then, uncharacteristically, Fraser jumped the fence from user to supplier and in December 2001 he was sentenced to a minimum of five years after pleading guilty to trafficking cocaine, being knowingly concerned with its importation and possessing ecstasy. He was struck off and bankrupted, and his wife left him.

Given that he had no previous record and it was a non-violent crime, Fraser expected to do his time in a low-risk prison. But it was payback time, and someone, who Fraser believed was from within the Victorian police force, had decided that Fraser would do it tough. They fed into the system that there was a hefty price on his head and that his time would be best served in protective custody. That’s how he wound up in Sirius East, the maximum-security protection section of Port Phillip Prison that housed only Victoria’s worst of the worst. That’s where Andrew Fraser met convicted murderer Peter Norris Dupas.

Twenty-five-year-old Mersina Halvagis was ambushed from behind and stabbed to death in a maniacal attack on 1 November 1997, as she tended her grandmother’s grave at Melbourne’s Fawkner Cemetery. Police described it as one of the most violent deaths they had ever seen. Her body had almost 100 injuries, which included some horrifically unusual mutilations. Police interviewed hundreds of people and eventually narrowed it down to one man – Peter Norris Dupas.

In November 2005, an inquest into Mersina’s death concluded that while Peter Dupas was the only person of interest, there wasn’t enough evidence to charge him. Police held back the fact that at the time she was murdered Mersina was leaning over her grandmother’s grave. It was something that only investigators and the killer knew. The decision not to charge Dupas with Mersina’s murder was heartbreaking for the Halvagis family, who had set up the gravesite where she was killed as a shrine and had relentlessly hounded the press for publicity so that her memory would never die and the search for her killer would go on.

In the meantime, police found additional new witnesses who put a man answering to Dupas’ description in the cemetery at the time of the murder. Acting on a hunch, Senior Detective Paul Scarlett rang Andrew Fraser, who had been shifted to a minimum-security prison at Sale. Scarlett knew that Fraser had spent a lot of time in the same unit as Dupas and wondered if he could help them. Given the rough time that Fraser had had in prison, he doubted it. Expecting Fraser to hang up in his ear, Detective Scarlett was surprised when Fraser said, ‘What took you so long?’ and arranged an interview for the following day. Jackpot.

It seemed that Fraser and Dupas had formed an odd alliance in jail – the intelligent university graduate and the withdrawn, nerdy serial killer with the basin haircut and glasses. After a while Dupas confided in his new friend, perhaps in the misguided belief that it was lawyer/client privilege – Fraser wasn’t a lawyer and Dupas wasn’t his client – and told Fraser things and even re-enacted the murder of Mersina Halvagis in only a fashion the killer could have known.

Fraser agreed to give evidence against Dupas if he could get a reduction on his sentence. Police knew that despite his shortcomings, Fraser’s testimony would be credible as it was coming from a trained legal professional with 30 years’ experience. It would be Dupas’ undoing. They waited a year and Fraser was released two months short of finishing his time.

At Dupas’ trial, the mountain of circumstantial evidence placed him in the cemetery at the critical time, and the court heard that Dupas’ maternal grandfather was buried just 130 metres from the death scene. To make the jurors aware of the circumstances of Fraser’s testimony, all they were told before the trial was that Dupas had been convicted of two murders. That’s all.

What the jury wasn’t told was that Peter Dupas was among Australia’s most depraved serial killers. Born into a loving home in 1953, at 15 years old, Dupas repeatedly stabbed the lady next door with a knife. From then on his list of convictions included offensive behaviour, housebreaking, stealing, abduction, assault with a deadly weapon, attempted murder, multiple rape and serial murder. Dupas was currently serving two life sentences without the possibility of parole for the murders of two Melbourne women in almost identical circumstances to that of Mersina Halvagis’ murder. The police were also questioning Dupas about three other murders of Melbourne women with similar unusual mutilations.

Andrew Fraser’s chilling re-enactment during the trial of Dupas stabbing Mersina Halvagis to death was the clincher and in August 2007, Dupas was found guilty of her murder. But that wasn’t to be the end of it. Dupas appealed his conviction, arguing that the judge erred in some of his directions during the trial, and in 2009 he was granted a retrial. The Halvagis family was utterly crushed after having tirelessly campaigned for years to have their daughter’s killer brought to justice, only to have it taken away and then have to go through the ordeal of a another trial, looking at a smirking Dupas, all over again.

But they saw it through and a Victorian Supreme Court jury convicted Dupas of murdering Mersina Halvagis near her grandmother’s grave at Fawkner Cemetery in 1997. Ms Halvagis’ family and supporters stomped their feet, clapped and cried when the verdict was read. As Dupas was led away, Mersina’s mother Christina told him to ‘rot in hell’.

He will.