‘It was his eyes, they were blank. There was something peculiar about him. He was evil-looking.’
THE little girl was so small she had to clamber on a grave to clean the top of the headstone of her grandfather’s tomb in Melbourne’s sprawling Fawkner Cemetery.
The grave was taller than most in the Roman Catholic section so the ten-year-old was perched above the thousands of concrete and marble memorials that surrounded her.
She was in the perfect position to pick up any sound in the near-silence of the cemetery while her mother, who was bending to place flowers on the grave, remained surrounded by the tall tombstones.
Perhaps that is why Lisa Tinker heard something that her mother didn’t. Or maybe it is that young ears and uncluttered minds pick up what adults can’t. But now, more than eight years later, she knows what she heard.
It was a scream. ‘I can still recall this scream in my mind. I can recall this scream because it sounded frightening and that’s why it has stuck with me.’
She said to her mother, ‘Did you hear that scream?’ But Maria, who wanted to visit other family graves and be home by 5pm, did not want to be distracted. She checked her watch to see if they were running late and saw that it was just before 4pm. She then told her daughter, ‘Don’t worry about it, just hurry up and clean the grave.’
But Lisa Tinker did worry about it and so did the whole family when they saw on television the next day that a young woman had been murdered in the cemetery.
‘I heard that girl scream,’ she reminded her mother, who didn’t need reminding.
That night her father rang Crime Stoppers with the information.
It was one of thousands of tips and tiny pieces of information handed to police over the next eight years as part of the’ complex investigation into the murder of Mersina Halvagis, 25, who was stabbed to death as she tended her grandmother’s grave on November 1, 1997.
It was just one snippet but in a police re-investigation in 2005 it became part of a mosaic of hundreds of fragments of information that points to one man – a predator who chooses to remain silent and refuses to answer questions about the case.
Much of the information was available soon after the murder but some key witnesses also chose to remain silent – not wanting to become involved – until years later they felt compelled to make the calls to police that helped breathe new life into the old case.
Mersina’s father, George, has devoted his life to finding his daughter’s killer. He has lobbied politicians, held vigils, handed out flyers, haunted courts and prodded police.
‘All I have ever wanted was the truth,’ Mr Halvagis says.
Mersina’s sister, Dimitria, told a victims’ conference late in 2005 how it was impossible to move on and how she suffered flashbacks to the recurring image of Mersina desperately fighting for her life.
The reward for information into the murder began at $50, 000, was raised to $100, 000 and was finally increased to $1 million.
The homicide squad initially investigated the case, before it was transferred to a task force. Then in 2005, in one last effort, all information was again re-analysed by Senior Detective Paul Scarlett.
While the case remains complex, the conclusion is remarkably simple.
More than 100 names have been nominated to police as the killer. All but one has been eliminated.
Detectives are convinced that Peter Norris Dupas – a man who has already twice been sentenced to life for the murders of Margaret Maher and Nicole Patterson – killed Mersina Halvagis.
They believe that Dupas, who has attacked women throughout Victoria for 31 years, has killed at least six times – Helen McMahon (February 1985), Renita Brunton (November 1993), Margaret Maher (October 1997), Mersina Halvagis (November 1997), Kathleen Downes (December 1997) and Nicole Patterson (April 1999).
They also know the serial killer will never confess. At least to them.
MERSINA Halvagis’s boyfriend, Angelo Gorgievski, was feeling lazy that Saturday morning and wanted to take a sickie from his job at the Epping branch of Target. But Mersina, who had stayed the previous night at Gorgievski’s parents’ home in Mill Park, came from a family with a strict work ethic and she wouldn’t hear of it. ‘I told her I didn’t want to go to work but she forced me to go.’
The couple had been going out for five years after they first met at the La Trobe University ball in 1992. They’d recently become engaged and bought a block of land in Mill Park where they planned to build their first home.
They had just come through a bad patch when the pressure of wedding arrangements had made them quarrel, but they had decided to relax and, according to Gorgievski, were planning to move in together within weeks.
Once his fiancée persuaded him to go to work, she said she would take the train home to Mentone, but Gorgievski told her to take his car.
She then said she would visit her grandmother’s grave at Fawkner Cemetery on the way home. Later she planned to return to her boyfriend’s parents’ home for dinner.
When All Saints Day falls on a weekend, cemeteries receive more than their usual number of visitors, so it was a busy day for the Fawkner Cemetery Tea Room catering manager Elva Hayden.
But she was able to remember the polite young woman who asked for a bunch of the long-stemmed blue and white statice flowers and then, as an afterthought, two bottles of Sprite lemonade.
A check of the cash register roll showed the $9.70 sale was made at 3.47pm. The purchaser was Mersina Halvagis.
She drove her boyfriend’s red Telstar TX5 to a small car park at the Greek Orthodox section of the cemetery then walked about 50 metres and passed 32 graves before reaching the dark grey headstone where her grandmother, Mersina, had been buried the previous year.
On her regular visits she had left flowers on the neglected graves of strangers, hating the thought of anyone being forgotten, but this time she walked straight along the gravel path to the grave without stopping.
Police profilers say the killer probably established a beat and wandered the cemetery for days or weeks looking for the right moment to strike.
He probably went through dry runs, following other women, but chose not to attack, either because he was disturbed or because he was rehearsing his plans until he was ready.
A police reconstruction indicates Mersina was bending over the grave, probably placing the flowers in a vase when she was attacked from behind. She turned and was likely to have been blinded by the sun as she fought for her life. She was struck viciously to the head but although she was tiny – just 155 centimetres and less than 50 kilograms – she continued to fight and scream for help.
Her attacker had a knife and stabbed her repeatedly. Her body was later found in an empty plot three graves from where her grandmother was buried.
Her shoes were either placed or thrown near her so a casual observer who glanced up the path would not have seen anything out of the ordinary.
The killer, who must have been covered in blood, managed to slip out of the cemetery unnoticed using a planned escape route.
When Mersina Halvagis did not return to Mill Park she was reported missing. Her boyfriend tried to retrace her steps, driving from his house to the cemetery and then to the Halvagis’s Mentone home. Eventually he jumped the cemetery fence and found his car. When police arrived, they discovered her body around 4.35am.
An autopsy showed the extent of the injuries. She had a two centimetre wound on the right side of the forehead above the eye. She had been stabbed from the knees to the neck but most of the wounds were concentrated around the breast area.
The wounds were deep and inflicted with great force with a sharp knife. Her top had been pulled over her head onto her chest and two belt loops on her pants broken in the struggle.
NO-ONE can find a pivotal moment that turned Peter Norris Dupas bad. He was an unremarkable child who turned into a lonely teenager self-conscious about his ballooning weight.
Dupas’s brother and sister were much older and his mother and father, who were old enough to be his grandparents, treated him as an only child.
He was shy to the point of timidity. No-one imagined he harboured violent sexual fantasies until, aged fifteen and still at school, he attacked his female neighbour in October 1968.
The neighbour, who had returned from hospital just a few weeks earlier with her new baby, answered a knock at her backdoor. It was Dupas, still in his Waverley High School uniform.
He asked if he could borrow a small knife to peel some vegetables. ‘I remarked to him about him peeling the potatoes for his mother and what a good boy he was.’
Dupas then attacked, slashing her fingers, neck and face. He was put on probation for eighteen months and given psychiatric treatment. It didn’t work. Nothing ever would.
For more than 30 years he continued to commit sex crimes – and he became progressively more violent. Therapy didn’t help and jail delayed rather than stopped the pattern. Each time he was released it would begin again – often within days.
For a few years after his first attack Dupas maintained a pattern of low-level sex-related offences. He was found hiding in the backyard of an Oakleigh house watching a woman undress in March 1972. Two years later, he was caught in the female toilet block at the McCrae Caravan Park watching women shower.
But he had already turned from pest to predator and in 1973 he began to attack strangers in their homes. He would knock on the door, pretend to have car trouble and then ask the woman if he could borrow a screwdriver. In one case, he threatened to harm a woman’s baby if she attempted to fight.
One detective who investigated the crimes felt that Dupas was only completing his apprenticeship in violence.
Senior Detective Ian Armstrong first interviewed Dupas in the Nunawading police station on November 30, 1973.
For all his aggression to women, Dupas was weak and compliant when confronted, and the experienced Armstrong thought a few stern words would make the quivering suspect confess readily. But Dupas had built watertight doors in his brain where he could lock away his secrets.
‘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,’ recalled Armstrong.
Homicide squad detectives 26 years later saw the same pattern during questioning. Shaking, sweating and then just a blank look as the door closed, quarantining his dark soul from the light of his inquisitors’ questions. After that there would be the pointless denials or deathly silence.
Once, he appeared at the point of tears and then his eyes went dead – as did the line of questioning. It may have been a way of avoiding police questions or, more likely, his way of refusing to admit to himself what he had done and what he had become.
Would you look in the mirror if you knew a monster would stare back?
According to Armstrong, ‘He stood out. To me the guy was just pure evil. He committed a rape in Mitcham and would have committed more given the opportunity. He looked so innocuous but he was a cold, calculating liar.
‘His attacks were all carefully planned and he showed no remorse. We could see where he was going. I remember thinking, “This guy could go all the way” (to murder).’
So convinced was the experienced detective, that he wrote on Dupas’s file: ‘He is an unmitigated liar … he is a very dangerous young person who will continue to offend where females are concerned and will possibly cause the death of one of his victims if he is not straightened out.’
Police can be harsh judges, but legendary prison psychiatrist Dr Allen Bartholomew, was just as alarmed. He noted that Dupas refused to admit his problems. ‘I am reasonably certain that this youth has a serious psycho-sexual problem, that he is using the technique of denial as a coping device and that he is to be seen as potentially dangerous. The denial technique makes for huge difficulty in treatment.’
Despite Bartholomew’s warnings that Dupas was ‘a danger to female society’, he was released from prison in September 1979. Two months later, he attacked four women in just ten days.
This time Bartholomew had no hesitation in declaring that Dupas was a potential killer.
Bartholomew could not resist an ‘I-told-you-so’ report, pointing out that his view had been ignored. ‘The present offences are exactly what might have been predicted,’ he wrote when Dupas was again charged with rape and assault.
He concluded that Dupas was unlikely to change. The trained psychiatrist and the experienced detective, Ian Armstrong, both saw something in this harmless-looking man that compelled them to commit to paper their fears that he was a potential killer. Bartholomew warned that Dupas’s increasingly violent rapes and knife attacks ‘could have fatal consequences’.
Even parole officers who had believed Dupas could change began to give up hope.
‘There is little that can be said in Dupas’s favour. He remains an extremely disturbed, immature and dangerous man. His release on parole was a mistake,’ a parole officer wrote in a report added to Dupas’s file in September 1980.
He was released again on February 27, 1985 and within a week raped a 21-year-old woman who was sunbathing at Rye Back Beach. It was not far from where he was found to have spied on women showering at a caravan park more than a decade earlier when he was just learning his trade.
The beach rape was also near the spot where a woman sunbather was murdered in remarkably similar circumstances only weeks before.
Helen McMahon was bashed to death on the Rye Back Beach on February 13, 1985. Her body was found naked, covered only by a towel, and her murder was never solved.
Dupas would have been a prime suspect except he had an airtight alibi that immediately discounted him from the initial investigation. He was not due for prison release until two weeks after the murder. But years later investigators would check the files and find that Dupas was on pre-release leave and living in the Rye area when Helen McMahon was killed.
She was bashed on the right side of her head, above her eye, a trademark injury of Dupas’s victims. She was also sunbathing topless and police say female breasts have been a key trigger point for Dupas’s violent attacks. Detectives now have little doubt that she was his first known murder victim.
While in jail, Dupas met and married a female nurse, sixteen years his senior. They married in Castlemaine Jail in 1988 while he was still a prisoner.
He told parole officers his marriage to a ‘beautiful person’ would help him stop sexually offending. It didn’t.
He was released in 1992 and his wife, Grace McConnell, was already asking herself why she had married – a question that must have struck everyone who knew her. While still in jail, Dupas engineered a transfer to a new prison, forcing his new wife to move away from her established social circle. He wanted her to treat him as the centre of her universe.
It was a sign of things to come. When he was released, she found him self-obsessed, a snob, lazy and needy. She said if she spoke to anyone for more than twenty minutes on any subject of interest to her, he would interrupt and ask why they were not talking about him. ‘Dupas was a possessive, quietly domineering man. He was immaturely jealous of all my friends and anything I did that did not include him as the focus.
‘A conversation with him was like talking to a parrot,’ she said. Parrots would be justified in being offended at the comparison.
‘Our sex life was very basic, almost non-existent. I would go along with it out of a sense of responsibility … It got to the stage where I could not bear him touching me,’ she told police.
She was working as an assistant at a special accommodation residence in Woodend and Dupas started ‘whining about how much I had to do at the lodge’.
On New Year’s Eve 1993, Dupas’s wife agreed to sleep overnight at work to look after the residents. But Dupas wanted’ her to go to a local party with him. Like a spoilt child, he followed her around the home complaining that she should be with him rather than caring for the sick.
Finally she could take no more and told him to ‘piss off, get out of my sight, go to the party, go do anything, just don’t come near me’. He quickly apologised but the damage was done. The marriage was over and he began to sulk. Rejection triggered his evil alter-ego and within 48 hours he burst into a women’s toilet at Lake Eppalock near Bendigo and attempted to abduct a woman at knifepoint.
This was no impulse attack. Like most of his offences it was coldly planned. He was wearing a balaclava when he followed the victim into the toilet block, where he threatened her and cut her with a knife. Police later found handcuffs, knives and a shovel in the boot of his car.
She almost certainly would have been murdered if her boyfriend, a federal policeman, hadn’t been close enough to hear her screams.
After a short car chase the boyfriend calmly held him until local police arrived. When he spotted the uniformed police, Dupas yelled, ‘They’re hurting me,’ as if he were the victim.
EVERYONE knew that Dupas was a hopeless case – a man who would continue to offend until he was dead or too old to attack. The State Government had introduced a law that enabled courts to sentence serious repeat sex offenders to indefinite jail terms. It could have been called the Dupas Law as it seemed to fit him so perfectly.
But Dupas’s lawyers and the prosecution cut a deal where the sex offender would plead to downgraded charges and the victim would be able to avoid the trauma of giving evidence. He agreed to plead guilty to false imprisonment and in return the prosecution dropped the more serious charges of kidnap, assault with a weapon and indecent assault.
The reduced charges placed him just under the level where he could be sentenced to an indefinite term.
The decision, however seemingly logical at the time, made it inevitable he would be freed to offend again.
But two months before the Lake Eppalock assault there was a murder in the area that police say has all the hallmarks of a Dupas attack.
Renita Brunton, 31, had been married a second time for just six months when she was stabbed to death on November 5, 1993.
She was a part-time religious instruction teacher and the mother of a three-year-old boy. She had owned the recycled clothes shop, Exclusive Pre-Loved Clothing, in Link Arcade, Sunbury, for a year but had recently put the business on the market.
Customers found the shop locked at 2pm with a sign on the door: ‘Back in five minutes’.
A neighbouring shopkeeper entered the store through the unlocked back door and found the body about 5pm. Renita Brunton had died of multiple stab wounds to the upper chest and neck.
One suspect seen in the area was described as 173–175cm tall, of chubby build with a fat stomach, short grey-brown hair, bald on top, oval-shaped face and wearing glasses.
In May 1993 Renita had married her husband, Robert, and they lived in Woodend where the couple became members of the local Anglican Church.
They bought a home in East Street and Dupas lived in a rented brick veneer house in South Road, just over a kilometre away.
But Sunbury is more than twenty kilometres from Woodend. How would Dupas know where the woman worked?
Dupas’s wife tried to keep order in her house despite the needy nature of her spoilt husband. Once a month, the day after pension day, she would do the household shopping and her husband would always go for the drive – to Sunbury.
The coroner was told Renita Brunton had been last seen in the Sunbury shopping centre between 1pm and 1.15. It was her habit to close the shop around this time to do a few chores, including doing the banking for her small business.
She was found fully clothed and had been stabbed 106 times. She also suffered a fractured skull from a severe blow. The head wound was similar – but not identical – to those suffered by many women attacked by Dupas. The frenzied stabbing was also typical of his methods.
The murder remains officially unsolved although Dupas is the main suspect.
Nobody knows how many women he stalked over the years but experts believe there would be hundreds. Most times he would pull out if he thought he could be caught or if he felt there were males in the area. But if he felt he was in control, he would attack – and kill.
He was released over the Lake Eppalock assault on September 29, 1996, just over a year before the murder of Mersina Halvagis.
On release, he moved into a rented home in Pascoe Vale and eventually established a de facto relationship with a confident South African woman who was unaware of her new boyfriend’s hidden side.
She felt the relationship was normal, but privately he brooded that she dominated him. Too self-centred to see her point of view and too weak to confront her, he grew increasingly bitter. When she returned to South Africa for four months from September 21, 1997, until January the next year, Dupas was alone.
And the cycle began again. Rejection, self-pity, brooding and then murder.
‘TAYLOR’ was a single mother in her late 30s, with a son and a daughter, who wanted to raise a deposit to buy her own home.
So after ‘chickening out’ a few times, she finally built up the courage to contact a phone sex line to offer her services.
At first it seemed like easy money and over months she trained herself to be non-judgmental when she received phone calls from the lonely to the loopy.
Most of those calls didn’t worry her, but now – years later – there is one caller she cannot forget.
He was desperate to talk to an older woman so Taylor bumped her age up fourteen years and instantly became a broad-minded 55-year-old for the caller who had pre-paid her agency for a 30-minute chat.
She still wishes she had not been so obliging and had just hung up.
He started, ‘Do you know what I did to the bitch?’
He muttered of pressing down on the neck of a woman and cutting around a breast. ‘He liked blood. You could tell that he liked it. When he spoke of the blood, he breathed differently and sounded excited.’
Taylor told police four years later that as his ramblings became more graphic, her mood changed from revulsion to fear: ‘I was petrified’. She hung up but the man immediately rang back and said, ‘Don’t hang up. I know where you live’.
She said he became increasingly excited as he described in vivid detail stabbing a woman. Taylor didn’t believe the man was living out a twisted fantasy. ‘(He) made her seem like a real person.
‘He never said the word “knife”. He either used the word “steel” or “blade”.
‘I called him a “sick prick” and hung up. I picked the receiver up and he was still there … I pulled the plug out of the wall and went to see my children.’
Police say the detailed description of stabbing and mutilating a woman almost perfectly described the wounds inflicted on a prostitute whose body had been dumped on the outskirts of Melbourne.
Margaret Maher was a streetwalker whose mutilated body was discovered in Somerton on October 3, 1997. The wounds were grouped in the breast area in what was a trademark Dupas attack.
He was later convicted of her murder and sentenced to life with no minimum.
Coincidence?
Police checks of telephone lines have identified two calls between Taylor and Dupas. Both were made on November 1, 1997, the day of Mersina’s murder – one at 12.45am and the second at 5.14pm, less than an hour after the killing.
IT WAS the tragic case of Nicole Patterson that proved – too late – that the experts were right and it had been in evitable that Dupas would progress to murder.
Nicole was a popular psychotherapist who tried to help young people battle drug addiction.
In early 1999, Ms Patterson, then 28, decided to broaden her client base and converted the front bedroom of her house in Harper Street, Westgarth, into a consulting room.
She advertised in local newspapers and on March 3 a man calling himself ‘Malcolm’ telephoned. Over the next five weeks he rang her fifteen times before finally making an appointment for 9am on April 19, claiming he needed treatment for depression.
Police believe Dupas knocked on the door at 9am and was ushered into the consulting room.
Nicole made plunger coffee and entered the room with cups, sugar and milk. Then, without warning, he attacked, stabbing her at least 27 times.
She managed to scratch his face and was heard yelling before she was overpowered.
After the murder, he searched the house for any evidence that he had been there. He missed her diary, which was under clothing on the couch in the living room. It had details of the 9am appointment and a phone number.
It would lead police to Dupas.
When police raided his home three days later, they found the newspaper advertisement for Nicole’s psychotherapy sessions with her name handwritten by Dupas on the border.
They also found a blood-splattered jacket. DNA tests established the blood was 6.53 billion times more likely to have come from Nicole Patterson ‘than from an individual female chosen at random from the Victorian Caucasian population’.
They discovered a black balaclava and a front page of the Herald Sun report on the murder. The picture of Nicole had been slashed with a knife.
The head of the investigation, Detective Senior Sergeant Jeff Maher, (no relation to previous victim Margaret Maher) said of Dupas, ‘He was pure evil. He was not physically intimidating but he really sent shivers up your spine’.
Maher said Dupas refused to talk of the crime or co-operate with the investigation in any way. ‘Nothing he did was on impulse. Everything was planned in the most calculating manner.’
FBI expert John Douglas says each serial killer has a ‘signature’ that links his murder victims. Nicole Patterson and Margaret Maher were killed in almost identical ways.
In another bizarre coincidence, the Patterson and Halvagis families had long been associated. Nicole’s father Bill and George Halvagis are old mates. They watched their children grow up together when they lived in Warracknabeal in country Victoria in the 1970s, but they lost touch over the years. Now they are linked by a shared grief and one killer.
There is yet another murder where Dupas remains the only viable suspect, that of 95-year-old Kathleen Downes, stabbed to death in a Brunswick nursing home on December 31, 1997.
Phone records show someone rang the nursing home from Dupas’s house in the weeks leading up to the murder. Police say the elderly woman was the victim of Dupas’s simmering rage over his older wife’s rejection exactly four years earlier, when she’d been working at a nursing home.
Dupas also had a prior conviction for attacking an elderly woman. On November 18, 1979, he dragged an elderly woman into a vacant block and stabbed her.
NO-ONE can doubt that Dupas is a serial killer but the question that police want put to a jury is: did he kill Mersina Halvagis?
With no eyewitness and no compelling DNA the police case is largely built on similar-fact evidence that the wounds to Halvagis, Patterson and Maher were so similar that they must have been committed by the same offender.
It was this type of evidence that helped convict him of the Margaret Maher murder after a Supreme Court jury was told the wounds to her were virtually identical to the injuries found on Nicole Patterson.
Pathologist Professor David Ranson has found a series of similarities in the fatal wounds inflicted on Margaret Maher, Nicole Patterson and Mersina Halvagis. In each case, the attack was concentrated on the breast area and each victim suffered a severe blow near the right eye.
Some police believe Dupas was reliving his first murder – Helen McMahon on the Rye Back Beach in February 1985.
But there was another case where similar wounds were inflicted. In October 1969, someone broke into the mortuary of the Austin Hospital and mutilated the bodies of two elderly women using a razor-sharp pathologist’s knife.
There was also a strange slash wound to one thigh. The same wound was found on Nicole Patterson 30 years later. Mersina also suffered similar wounds to her right thigh and a slash near the left knee.
Weeks before the Nicole Patterson murder in April 1999, Dupas finally decided to buy his own home and placed a deposit on a house a few streets from the Austin Hospital and a short walk from where the bodies were mutilated.
An analysis of the damage to the clothing worn by Mersina Halvagis and Nicole Patterson shows the knives used in the attacks were similar although it is impossible to say if they were identical.
Forensic scientist Jane Taupin concluded: ‘There were multiple stab-type cuts detected in the clothing of Mersina Halvagis. These cuts were similar in profile to the multiple stab-type cuts detected in the clothing of Nicole Patterson.’
Professor Donald Thomson is a psychologist and barrister considered an expert in profiling. He found clear patterns in Dupas’s behaviour and in the way he stalked and attacked women.
He said a feature of his attacks was that ‘Most were calculated and planned, they were not opportunistic offences. Dupas staked out either a place or a victim.’ Thomson found that he did not continue his carefully-planned sex attacks if he thought there was a risk of being confronted by another man.
He said the crimes were invariably ‘located in proximity to places where Dupas had lived, went to school or had worked.’
He said Dupas always used the same method, used a knife, and selected his victims when they were at their most vulnerable.
‘An analysis of the deaths of Helen McMahon, Renita Brunton, Margaret Maher and Mersina Halvagis suggests that these deaths are consistent with the features identified in the offences for which Dupas was convicted.’
Police had long known that Dupas would establish a beat where he would wait for the opportunity to attack, as he had at Rye years earlier.
But they needed to find if he visited the cemetery for any reason before the murder.
When he was interviewed, he told police he had never been to the cemetery as he had no relatives or friends buried there. But he lied.
Once, when driving past the memorial park with one of his few friends Dupas had said, ‘My grandfather’s buried in the cemetery somewhere’.
Police found that his grandfather was buried there about 100 metres from the Halvagis grave.
He lived about a kilometre away in Pascoe Vale, drank at the First and Last Hotel, across the road from the cemetery and almost certainly drove past the memorial park each weekday on his way to work in Thomastown.
Detectives have established that the wounds inflicted on Mersina Halvagis were similar to those found on other Dupas victims, that he lived in the area and had a reason to visit the cemetery.
But to fit the 30-year pattern of Dupas’s sex crimes, police would have to find that he haunted the area planning his attack.
IT took Stefanie Pawluk more than seven years to finally buildup the courage to phone the police and tell them the reason she no longer went to Fawkner Cemetery alone.
She was at her mother’s grave in the Ukraine section when she saw a man walking fast and looking around as if to see if anyone was watching. She thought, ‘This is very strange, he is coming straight towards me.’
She was so concerned that she left the grave, hopped in her car and locked the door. I looked up and saw that he had followed me to the driver’s door of my car. He stood very close to my car and just looked at me. I was very frightened.’
The man had blond hair and wore glasses. Years later, she saw Dupas’s picture on the television news. I said out loud, “Oh my God, I think that’s him”.’
Janet Morton is not the sort of woman who scares easily. She says she has only been truly frightened twice in her life. The first time was when she was nearly hit by a train. The second was when a man in the Fawkner Cemetery stalked her.
Around August 1997, her husband dropped her at the cemetery where she was researching her family tree.
She saw a podgy man staring at her and she smiled, but felt foolish when he ignored her greeting. She moved to another section of the cemetery and saw him again. When she moved a further 50 metres, he followed her. Mrs Morton moved to another section of the memorial and had her head down reading the graves when she heard a noise and looked to her left. ‘I saw the same man coming straight at me with a look in his eyes that really frightened me.’
She put up her left hand, started to walk backwards and might have yelled or screamed. Mrs Morton said he stopped and had a ‘rabbit in the spotlight look’ then moved and hid in some nearby bushes.
‘I could see his feet below the two bushes that he was standing behind. I turned and ran as fast as I could and I recall I even jumped over one of the gravestones.’
She ran down the middle of the road inside the cemetery only slowing when she ran out of puff and saw people in the distance.
‘This man frightened me so much that it took me about six years to return to that spot to complete my research.’
Years after the incident she was flicking through the paper when she saw a photo of Dupas. Her response was instantaneous. She turned to her husband Ross and said, ‘That’s the bastard that day in Fawkner’.
On October 5, 1997, Seval Latif was sitting at her father’s grave and crying when she felt ‘a horrible sense of danger’.
She looked up and saw an overweight man four metres from her on the left ‘striding along the road purposely and I felt he was trying to get me with my head down’.
She stood up and he appeared intimidated and moved a short distance away. She headed back to her car but the man followed and stopped to stare through the car window.
In August 2000, she contacted the homicide squad after she saw Dupas’s picture in a newspaper. ‘I knew he was the man in the cemetery.’
A week before Mersina Halvagis was murdered, Enza Romanella was visiting her husband’s grave when she was approached by a man who wanted help to find the spot where a relative’s ashes were kept.
At first she tried to help but something about the man made her scared and she cut the conversation short. In 2000 she saw Dupas’s picture on television. She says it was the man who approached her at Fawkner.
Patricia Nemeth was another mourner who saw a stranger heading towards her at the cemetery. ‘I immediately felt he was going to hurt me.’ It was not his mousy brown hair or his gold-framed glasses that made him stand out. ‘It was his eyes, they were blank. There was something peculiar about him. He was evil-looking.’
She stopped going to the cemetery – ‘I am terrified to go back’ – and when much later she saw Dupas’s picture in the paper she told her family, ‘I know this man. I’ve seen him, he’s the one from the cemetery’.
She was so sickened she could not bring herself to read the article.
HOURS before the Halvagis murder, Laima Burman was working as a volunteer at the Latvian section of the cemetery when she was approached by a man who said he had just found his adoptive mother’s grave.
She later helped produce a computer image of the man. It has a striking resemblance to Dupas. Later she was shown a photo board and asked to identify the suspect who spoke to her on November 1. She picked three – shots numbers six, seven and twelve – as being similar. Number seven was Dupas.
In August 2000, when on holiday in Echuca, she picked up a paper and saw his picture staring back. ‘I immediately kept saying to myself, “That’s him, that’s him”.’
Katica Melink may have seen Dupas just minutes before he attacked Mersina Halvagis. She was with two other women when she noticed a man wearing glasses within metres of the Halvagis grave on November 1 just before 4pm.
When she looked at him, she noticed he immediately turned his head away.
Years later she saw Dupas’s picture on the news and felt he looked familiar. About an hour later it dawned on her. ‘He was the man I saw at Fawkner Cemetery.’
She remained silent until the Halvagis family made a last appeal for help in late 2004. ‘Now I just want to get this off my chest and tell the police what I saw.’
One glance and a sixth sense of danger may have saved Angela Baran’s life when she visited her uncle and aunty’s grave on All Saints Day.
She was sitting on the grave in Row M around 3.50pm when she felt someone watching her. It was a man with dyed blond hair, glasses and blotchy skin. He was walking slowly and did not appear to be looking at the graves. It was only twenty metres and a few minutes from where Mersina would be murdered.
Mrs Baran looked away and seconds later glanced back to see he was gone.
Instantly she decided to leave. Police say the decision probably saved her life as he was probably hiding, waiting to strike.
‘I felt something was not right. He just vanished. I didn’t hear him walking on the gravel and there was no where near enough time for him to have walked down the end of the path.’
As she left she noticed a red Telstar in the car park. Mersina Halvagis had just arrived.
Sometime later she saw a colour picture of Dupas in a newspaper. She told a friend, ‘Oh my God, that looks like him, he’s got the same skin.’
But she said she was not sure because the man she saw had blond hair while in the picture Dupas’s hair was brown.
Even when hypnotised by a police expert to pick up any memories hidden in her subconscious she was adamant his hair was ‘peroxide blond’.
She could not have known that less than two weeks before the murder Dupas had a hairdresser’s appointment where he had his hair blonded.
DOMENICA D’Alberto was a young hairdresser who ran her own mobile styling business in the northern suburbs. She had a loyal and largely female client base, so when a man rang and asked her to come to his home she was hesitant.
But the man was ‘very convincing over the telephone that it would be all right for me to go to his house. I think he told me that he worked long hours, therefore he couldn’t go to a hairdresser.’
It was Dupas, who was well-practised at sounding convincing to women on the telephone.
From February 18, 1997, Ms D’Alberto cut and styled his hair, visiting Dupas every six weeks and giving him bleached blond tips on every third visit.
‘I used to think that Peter was always a bit odd.’ She was going out with a policeman and Dupas kept asking questions about him. ‘Peter often told me that I was pretty and this made me feel uncomfortable. Peter seemed to take a great interest in my personal life but he never said anything about his own.’
On October 21, 1997 – eighteen days after Margaret Maher’s body was discovered – Ms D’Alberto visited Dupas to bleach his hair.
For ten months Dupas had been happy with the style of his hair, but around the time of the Maher and Halvagis murders, he started to pester his stylist to change his appearance.
‘It was around this time that Peter one day asked me to change his hairstyle … He became quite irate that I couldn’t do anything with his hair. I recall thinking that I was feeling uncomfortable with his aggressive attitude and I had to say something to try and calm him down … Peter was just so determined to change his hairstyle.’
Jack Sgourakis is an experienced spectacle maker who owns his own business in Campbellfield. He’s had hundreds of clients. One was Peter Dupas.
On November 7, 1997 Dupas went to an optometrist in Mahoneys Road, Campbellfield, and ordered a new style of plain bifocals to replace his long-distance and reading glasses.
During the visit he was examined by Isabella La Rocca. It was a routine examination except she noticed that he had a fresh cut to his left cheek. When she mentioned the cut, he said it had happened at work.
He also told friends who noticed the new glasses that his old pair were damaged in an accident at work.
Dupas was employed at the Blue Diamond Furniture Company as a factory hand. He was one of six men who applied for the job in August 1997 and after the first choice was found to be unsatisfactory, Dupas was given the chance.
On the outside he was a qualified fitter and turner and in prison he was a natural handyman often called on to fix small problems.
He soon settled in at the factory as the man who cut the timber to size before it was sent to the furniture craftsmen.
Like all sixteen staff members, Dupas was instructed that any injury that occurred at work or any damage to private property was to be immediately reported.
All injuries, even down to a splinter, were recorded in the company’s injury book and the firm had a standard practice of compensating workers for property damage.
A partner and production manager at Blue Diamond, Mr John Kazakis said, ‘The staff are told to report the smallest injury’.
But despite the scratch to his face there was no note of an injury in the company record or of damaged spectacles.
So what happened to the glasses?
A damaged pair was found next to Mersina’s body but they probably belonged to her.
Detectives believe his glasses were damaged in the struggle and he later threw them away, making up the story that they were damaged at work as a cover.
But only Dupas knows and he isn’t talking.
POLICE say Dupas probably stalked women in the cemetery for three months, waiting until he found one alone and vulnerable.
It could have been anyone – but it was Mersina Halvagis.
One of Australia’s most experienced homicide investigators has a surprisingly sympathetic view of offenders such as Dupas. He does not see them as truly evil, rather he believes they are driven by demons they cannot control.
‘Does anyone think they want to be like that? They would do anything to be normal. The real bad ones are hit men who will kill anyone for a price. They kill for money because it is easier than working for a living. They choose who they are. Dupas never had a choice.’
And his victims never had a chance.
Police had built a solid case against Dupas but were shattered in late 2005 when prosecutors told them they were still short. Without a fresh breakthrough Dupas would never be charged with the murder detectives were convinced he committed in the Fawkner Cemetery.
And that breakthrough would eventually come from the most unlikely source.