CHAPTER 3

THE JOHN CANDY KILLER

In the midst of the Melbourne winter of 1993, the southern bayside suburb of Frankston was gripped by terror. A serial killer was on the loose. Women glanced behind them furtively and quickened their steps while walking home from railway stations and bus stops. Many locked themselves in at night. Real estate prices tumbled. The entire district was stricken with fear. The media fueled the hysteria with regular reports as police set up a dragnet to find the killer.

The serial killer had already abducted and slain three young women. An 18-year-old student had been strangled and stabbed, her body discarded in a drain. A 22-year-old mother with a child less than a fortnight old had been brutally murdered and her body secreted in a bush grave. A 17-year-old secondary school student had been slain in the most macabre circumstances, her throat cut from ear to ear for no other reason than the gratification of her killer. And a 41-year-old woman had fallen into the killer’s clutches but managed to escape. When the serial killer was eventually apprehended, he told police that he believed he was destined to commit murder. He had waited all his young life to kill. He had selected his victims at random and for no other reason than that he wanted to kill. Chillingly, he told police: ‘I’ve always wanted to kill, waiting for the right time. Waiting for that silent alarm to trigger me off.’

In a bizarre paradox, due to his 120-kilogram and 180-centimetre build, the killer was known as John Candy after the late funny man who made the world laugh. But, in fact, the ‘Uncle Buck’ look-a-like was a deranged psychopath named Paul Charles Denyer, who was just 21 years of age when he was arrested for multiple murder. And, in stark contradiction to his jovial nickname, Paul Denyer was a vicious sadist who took delight from the pain and suffering of others – especially women. The reason that the self-confessed misogynist ended the lives of 18-year-old Elizabeth Stevens, 22-year-old Deborah Fream and 17-year-old Natalie Russell was because he hated women. When the police asked him why all of his victims were women, Denyer replied: ‘I just hate them.’

Denyer was a monster and it was only a matter of time before he turned to murder. He was just 10 years of age when he killed the family cat, slitting its throat with one of the knives he had in his burgeoning collection of homemade weapons. At 15 years of age he was charged with assault for forcing another boy to masturbate in front of a group of children. Obsessed with violence, Denyer used to watch movies such as Friday the 13th and Halloween again and again, his gaze fixed while the fake blood splattered across the screen. Yet celluloid violence would not ultimately satisfy Denyer. He needed the real thing.

At Denyer’s trial for triple murder, clinical psychologist Ian Joblin provided a detailed profile on Denyer. Joblin had spent long hours interviewing Denyer and reported that he showed no remorse whatever for his crimes. In fact, Joblin recalled that Denyer seemed to get pleasure from recalling the pain he inflicted on his victims. Denyer attempted to explain his actions to Joblin by saying that he was sexually molested as a young child. He made a number of accusations suggesting that his elder brother had interfered with him when he was an infant. He believed that this, combined with a tough upbringing at the hands of his father and long-term unemployment, had made him the wretched fiend he had become.

As Joblin would tell the court, these were circumstances that many normal people endured in their lives, yet they did not resort to multiple murder. Joblin believed that Denyer possessed the most aberrant mind he had encountered. He told the court that the community should fear Denyer. He was a relentless sadist who derived pleasure from killing, and any satisfaction he derived from murder dissipated quickly, impelling him to kill again within increasingly shorter periods of time. He had displayed aggressive and cruel behaviour since childhood. There was no effective psychological treatment for his personality; he had to be isolated from society, for society’s sake.

On 20 December 1993, Mr Justice Frank Vincent sentenced Denyer to life imprisonment. There was no set non-parole period. Justice Vincent’s sentence reflected the community’s desire that Denyer should die in prison.

• • •

Paul Denyer was born on 14 April 1972 in Sydney. His parents, Anthony and Maureen Denyer, immigrated to Australia from northern England in 1965 and established themselves in Campbelltown, 50 kilometres south-west of Sydney. Paul was their third child. The Denyer household would ultimately comprise six children: five boys and a girl. As an infant, Denyer had rolled off a table and sustained a minor head injury. Although he suffered no lasting injury from this incident, it became a running joke among the family. When he made an off-colour remark or behaved oddly, family members would look at one another and remark: ‘That’s because he fell on his head when he was a baby.’ Nonetheless, Paul Denyer led a typical childhood. He experienced some difficulty in socialising with other children in his early years at primary school, but this awkwardness seemed to disappear as his education progressed.

At nine years of age, however, Paul’s life was thrown into turmoil. His father had found employment as a restaurant manager in Melbourne and the family was forced to relocate. The Denyer family set up house in Mulgrave on the eastern fringes of Melbourne. All the children struggled in the new environment initially, but it was Paul who experienced the greatest difficulty in adjusting to the family’s changed circumstances. He became withdrawn and isolated. At his new school, Northvale Primary School, he displayed learning difficulties and lacked the self-confidence to establish new friendships. He was changing physically too, growing taller and heavier by the day. He was bigger than most of his peers and his size became the subject of both derision and fear as the large youngster learnt how to use his size to intimidate others.

An unmotivated loner, Denyer drifted into a world of his own, a fantasy land in which he wielded knives and guns. He began to make and collect dangerous weapons. By his 10th birthday, he owned a substantial assortment of homemade knives, shanghais and clubs. His sister often had to endure her brother decapitating her teddy bears and dolls with a knife. Many of her toys showed the bewildering signs of knife attacks. In 1982, Paul stabbed the family pet, killing the kitten and hanging it from a tree. Three years later, he was charged with car theft, but the matter was kept from the courts and police let the chubby boy off with a caution. His luck ran out with the police shortly afterwards when he was charged with theft, wilful damage and making a false report to the Metropolitan Fire Brigade. This time he was charged. Denyer, not yet 14, made his first court appearance and was given a suspended sentence.

A student at Clayton Technical School, Denyer was bigger and heavier than most of his classmates. He became a bully, throwing his considerable weight around in the schoolyard. Most of his peers gave him a wide berth and with good reason. When he was 15, he was charged with assault after forcing another boy to masturbate in the presence of a group of school children. Denyer left school shortly afterwards and entered an adult world where his bullying would not be tolerated.

For a time Denyer worked at a suburban supermarket, stacking shelves and carting grocery stock around the store. At this time he met a woman called Sharon Johnston and fell in love with her. It was the only relationship Denyer ever had with a woman that could conceivably be described as positive. Johnston was unaware of his propensity for violence, and seemed to be attracted to the large young man. The pair became close, and when Denyer was 20 years old, they began to share a flat in the Frankston district. Denyer’s stay as an employee at the supermarket was, however, short-lived. He was dismissed after he knocked down a female customer and her child with a shopping trolley. He found other jobs but, due to laziness or incompetence, either left them or was fired. His last paid job was at a marine workshop where he was dismissed after two goats were found slaughtered in a nearby paddock. Denyer, who spent most of his time making and using homemade knives instead of attending to his work, was the obvious culprit. His workmates found his violent obsessions disturbing and they were pleased to see him go.

Denyer then applied to join the Victoria Police Force but was rejected at an early stage due to his weight and low level of fitness. Thereafter, he joined the queues of the unemployed. He felt rejected by society, and this rejection clearly acted as a powerful trigger. He became isolated, spending much of his waking hours watching videos of horror movies and fashioning homemade knives. Meanwhile, Sharon worked two jobs, having found a part-time job as a telemarketer to add to her duties as a customer service assistant at the supermarket, to help pay the bills. With his board and keep subsidised by the labours of his girlfriend, Denyer made no serious attempt to find employment. He was idle for much of the day, and it was just a matter of time before he turned to crime.

• • •

Denyer and Sharon were living in a block of flats at 186 Frankston-Dandenong Road in Frankston. With plenty of time on his hands, Denyer began to give his neighbours unwelcome attention. They did not suspect the stocky unemployed man of anything untoward. It was not until after Denyer was arrested for the murders of three young Frankston women that the truth was revealed.

One female resident returned home from work one evening to find that an intruder had broken into her flat. Nothing had been stolen but the place had been ransacked and her clothes ripped to shreds. Photographs of her had been slashed with a sharp knife. A number of residents became aware of a ‘peeping Tom’ skulking about at night and peering in through their windows. One woman caught a glimpse of a large man looking at her through a window. She called the police, but as she was unable to provide a description of the man, an arrest could not be made.

To all outward appearances, Denyer was a caring and friendly fellow. When he was told about the peeping Tom, he told his neighbours that he would keep an eye out for the voyeur and give him a hiding if he caught him.

Both Denyer and Sharon had become friendly with a number of the other residents in the block, including a young woman named Tricia. Denyer used to chat idly with Tricia when he saw her or would give her a wave as they passed on the street. Tricia had a sister named Donna, and Donna and her fiancé, Les, and their newborn child lived in a block of flats nearby.

In February 1993, Donna and Les returned home late at night after Les had finished his part-time job as a pizza delivery man. They opened the front door of their home and, within seconds, sensed that something was wrong. Walking into the lounge room with their baby asleep in a bassinette, Donna and Les took in the scene with mouths agape. Their cat, Buffy, was lying in the middle of the floor, dead. The cat had been disembowelled and a picture of a semi-naked woman had been placed over its body. The words ‘Dead Don’ had been scrawled in blood on the television screen.

Incredulous, Donna and Les followed the blood trail throughout their home. The cat’s intestines and organs had been strewn around the kitchen and smeared on the walls. On one of the kitchen walls, a cryptic message had been written in blood: ‘Donna and Robyn – You’re Dead’. Neither Donna nor Les knew anyone named Robyn. The laundry, too, was like a scene from a horror movie. Blood had been sprayed on the walls, ceiling and floor and all over a basket filled with soiled baby clothes. In the bathroom, the couple found two of Buffy’s kittens lying in a pool of bloody water in the bath with their throats cut. There was more carnage in the bedroom. Cupboards and a chest of drawers had been smashed, and virtually every item of clothing that Donna owned had been slashed with a knife and left in tatters on the floor. The baby’s clothing had also been cut to shreds, and a tattered photograph of a woman in a bikini had been placed in the cot where the baby slept. The intruder had written the names ‘Donna and Robyn’ in shaving cream on the dressing-table mirror.

Donna, Les and their tiny baby left the flat that night. They would never spend another night there. While they searched for alternative accommodation, they moved in with Donna’s sister, Tricia. Tricia had a neighbour, a large man named Paul, who made all sorts of sympathetic noises when Donna told him her story. The big fellow had told Donna that he would take matters into his own hands if he came across the man who had wrecked their home and caused them such distress. However, the friendly next-door neighbour harboured a grim secret. It was he who had taken to trawling the streets with his homemade knives, peering in through windows, searching for a home where he could create mayhem. The psychopath was emerging, and it was just a matter of time before he spilt human blood.

• • •

An 18-year-old student, Elizabeth Stevens, became Denyer’s first victim. On Saturday, 12 June 1993, Elizabeth’s body was found in Lloyd Park on Cranbourne Road in Langwarrin. She had multiple stab wounds to her chest. It looked like a frenzied attack. She also had a series of abrasions on her face and hands. Her nose had been broken, indicating that she had put up a mighty struggle before being overwhelmed by her assailant. The girl’s clothing had been removed from her upper body. Her bra was pulled up around her neck. Along her chest and torso there was a series of four cuts running from her breastbone to her navel. Four more deep cuts had been made across her chest in the other direction.

The young student was a popular and friendly girl. She had died in a senseless attack, and initially police thought that Elizabeth had been the victim of a mugging but, for some reason, her attacker had lost control. She had been reported missing the previous evening by her uncle and aunt with whom she had been staying. A bright girl, she was known to study in municipal libraries from time to time. Police investigated all possible leads, conducting house-to-house inquiries within the Frankston district. A roadblock was established near the bus stop where Elizabeth had last been seen alive. Police dressed a shop dummy in the same clothes she had been wearing the evening she disappeared in the hope that a motorist would recall seeing her and possibly identify anyone she was with. But, there were no leads, and police were left mystified.

• • •

Less than a month later, on Thursday, 8 July 1993, a 41-year-old bank teller, Roszsa Toth, was attacked by a large man while she was returning to her Seaford home after work. Later, Toth told police that the man appeared to be carrying a gun in his jacket pocket and that he had held the gun to her head. Ordering her to comply or be shot, her attacker attempted to drag her off the footpath and into nearby parklands. She refused to comply and fought for her life. The man dragged her by her hair for a distance before she managed to bite his hand, removing herself from his clutches. She had bitten the man’s fingers to the bone. He continued in his attempt to abduct her and pulled out clumps of her hair in desperation, but she maintained her strong resistance. Finally, she fought the man off, and with her clothing torn, she managed to get back to the road and flag down a passing car. She contacted police immediately, who attended the scene of her attempted abduction. However, Toth’s attacker had fled. The extraordinary violence of the attack left her with the clear impression that she was lucky to escape with her life.

Later the same evening, police received more chilling news. Twenty-two-year-old Deborah Fream had gone missing while travelling to a shop near her home at Seaford to purchase milk and eggs. Debbie had given birth to a son, Jake, less than a fortnight earlier. Now, she had disappeared without a trace. The police believed that the murder of Elizabeth Stevens, the attempted abduction of Roszsa Toth and the disappearance of Debbie Fream were linked. Four days later, this belief was confirmed when the body of the young mother was found in a paddock in the nearby suburb of Carrum Downs. Debbie had been stabbed repeatedly about the neck, head, chest and arms. Her body bore witness to 24 separate knife wounds. She had been manually strangled. Although Debbie’s jumper had been lifted up, there was no indication that she had been sexually assaulted.

The Frankston community now realised that a madman was on the loose. Instantly, the district was filled with fear. A serial killer who preyed on women was operating in this usually quiet area. Women locked themselves indoors at night, and the friendly, bustling suburban streets turned eerily quiet after dusk. Police established a support centre to provide women with assistance. The centre offered basic self-defence courses and instructed women about what to do in the event that they encountered the serial killer. They continued to pursue every lead and, with the local community in a vigilant mood, hoped that the psychopath might go to ground. At least then the killing might stop. But the target of the search had developed an appetite for murder. He would kill again. And soon.

• • •

On Friday, 30 July 1993, a 17-year-old Higher School Certificate student, Natalie Russell, went missing while walking home early from school. The young student from John Paul College in Frankston was reported missing by her parents. Eight hours later, Natalie’s parents had their worst fears confirmed. Police had found her body in a park adjacent to the Peninsula Golf Club. She had been stabbed repeatedly in the face, neck and chest. Her throat had been cut. Forensic specialists quickly determined that the attack on Natalie had been extremely vicious, and more calculating and frenzied than those in the previous instances. The killer was escalating the violence. Again the post-mortem showed no evidence of sexual assault.

Forensic analysis proved to be crucial in the hunt for the killer. In the course of his attack on Natalie, he had cut himself with his knife, leaving a large piece of his own flesh at the scene. Now, police had a vital piece of physical evidence. Another lead was a car. A yellow Toyota Corona had been seen near the park around the time Natalie was murdered. A passing squad car had noticed the car and written down the registration number. A car fitting the description of the Corona had also been sighted around the scene of Elizabeth Stevens’s murder. The car was registered to a Paul Charles Denyer.

• • •

Detectives Michael Hughes and Charles Bezzine paid a visit to Denyer’s home, but he was nowhere to be found. They left a card under the door, instructing Denyer to contact them urgently. His girlfriend, Sharon Johnston, was the first one home that day, and she saw the card and telephoned police to see what the problem was. She was told that it was a routine inquiry. The police asked her when her boyfriend was expected home. She replied that she expected Denyer home at any time.

Police converged on the flat. A team of detectives knocked on the door, and Paul Denyer opened it and let them in. They told the obese young man that his vehicle had been sighted near the scene of the recent murders in Frankston. Denyer told them that his car had broken down near the scene of Natalie Russell’s murder. On this occasion, he explained, he had driven to the railway station to pick up his girlfriend, Sharon. The detectives noticed cuts all over his hands, including a large chunk of skin missing from his right hand. Asked what had happened to his hands, Denyer told the detectives that he got his hand caught in the fanbelt of his car while he was doing some mechanical work.

The detectives arrested Denyer on suspicion of murdering Natalie Russell and took him to Frankston Police Station for further questioning. Police interviewed him for several hours. He had no alibi for the times when the three young women had been murdered, but he continued to deny any knowledge of the murders. However, it was the piece of skin he had left at the scene of Natalie Russell’s murder that sealed his fate. Police asked him for a blood sample and told him that they needed the sample to conduct a DNA analysis of the piece of skin found at the scene. They could prove it was his, and Denyer knew it. He asked how long it would take for the results of the DNA analysis to be confirmed and was told that it was a matter of a few days. He looked at Detective Darren O’Loughlin, weighing up his options. Suddenly, he told the detective: ‘Okay, I killed all three of them.’

• • •

In painstaking detail, Denyer confessed to his crimes. What shocked police was his studied indifference to the suffering of his victims. He had killed the three young women callously, and now he coolly recalled the circumstances of their deaths in much the same manner as a person might describe a journey to a local shopping centre. What was clear to police, however, was that Denyer became excited and aroused when he told them how he had committed the murders.

Denyer confessed that on 11 June 1993, he had waited behind a bush while the bus stopped and let out several passengers in Cranbourne Road, Langwarrin. It was a cold, rainy evening, and the passengers had scuttled from the bus quickly, eager to get home and out of the rain. Elizabeth Stevens had walked by Denyer, and he had known that he was going to kill her. He did not know the girl and had never met her before, but a silent alarm had gone off and the sadist was turning to murder for the first time. He had followed Elizabeth as she walked through the rain. He had then grabbed her from behind, telling her that he had a gun and if she screamed or attempted to escape he would shoot her. Denyer did not possess a gun but had joined a piece of metal pipe to a wooden handle. He had held the fake pistol in his jacket and led the young woman to nearby Lloyd Park.

In his statement to police, Denyer told how he committed his first murder:

I started choking her with my hands and she passed out after a while. You know the oxygen got cut off to her head and she just stopped. And then I pulled out the knife and stabbed her many times in the throat, and she was still alive. And then she stood up and then we walked around and all that, just walking a few steps and then I threw her on the ground and stuck my foot over her neck to finish her off.

Denyer demonstrated how he had pushed his thumb into Elizabeth’s throat to strangle her, then he motioned wildly with his hands to show how he had stabbed the young woman. Later, he stood up and began shaking and jittering his entire body to show how Elizabeth had died. The murder was like theatre for Denyer; it seemed he thought he had the lead role in the drama. He continued to delight in his performance, without a moment of remorse for his victim or any apparent self-consciousness. He then told police how he had dragged Elizabeth’s body to a drain where he left it. His attack on the young woman had been so violent that the homemade weapon he used had broken. He had disposed of the murder weapon on a roadside near where his victim lay.

Asked why he killed the young woman, Denyer told police: ‘Just wanted … just wanted to kill. Just wanted to take a life because I thought my life had been taken many times.’

Denyer then recalled the events of 8 July 1993, the night he attempted to abduct Roszsa Toth and how he had later murdered Debbie Fream. He told police he had been loitering around Seaford Railway Station when he saw a woman walk from the platform. He had gone up to her from behind and put his hand across her mouth. With his other hand he had produced his fake gun and held it to the woman’s head. Toth had struggled and bitten his hand while he attempted to muffle her cries for help. They wrestled on the ground before the woman broke free and ran onto the road to try to flag down a passing car. None of the cars stopped, and Denyer told the woman to stop or he would shoot her. She seemed reconciled to her fate and stopped running. As he approached her again, she took off and made it back to the road where a car stopped to help her. Denyer ran from the scene, knowing that police would be there within minutes. When asked by police what he planned to do with the woman, he replied: ‘I was just going to drag her in the park and kill her. That’s all.’

Roszsa Toth’s near miss left Denyer’s urge to kill unsatisfied. He jumped onto the train at Seaford Railway Station and got off at Kananook, the next station on the Frankston line. He walked across the pedestrian bridge over the railway lines and spotted his next victim. Debbie Fream had just gotten out of her car and walked into a milk bar to make her purchases. Denyer walked up to Debbie’s Pulsar sedan and got into the back seat, waiting for her to return from the shop. He could hear her footsteps as she approached. She got into the car, placed a shopping bag on the passenger seat next to her, and then started the engine. Denyer told police:

I waited for her to start up the car so no one would hear her scream. She put it into gear and she went to do a U-turn. I startled her just as she was doing that turn and she kept going into the wall of the milk bar, which caused a dent in the bonnet. I told her to, you know, shut up or I’d blow her head off and all that shit.

Denyer directed the young mother to the paddocks at Carrum Downs. He said: ‘I told her when we got there that if she gave any signals to anyone, I’d blow her head off. I’d decorate the car with her brains.’ Debbie was told to park her car near some trees. She was then ordered out of the car. Denyer came up behind her with a length of rope. He continued:

I popped it over her eyes real quickly, so she didn’t see it. I didn’t want her to see the cord first. I lifted the cord up and said: 'Can you see this?' And she just put her hand up to grab it, to feel it and when she did that I just yanked on it real quickly around her neck. And then I was struggling with her for about five minutes.

Debbie lost consciousness and fell to the ground. Denyer pounced on her and drew his knife. He stabbed her repeatedly in the chest and neck. He continued to stab her in the neck, and then stabbed her once in the stomach. ‘She started breathing out of her neck, just like Elizabeth Stevens,’ Denyer stated. ‘I could just hear bubbling noises.’ He told the appalled detectives that he had lifted up Debbie’s jumper to ‘see how big her boobs were’. Once he caught sight of her naked flesh, he lashed out again with his knife, stabbing her in the chest. With his second victim lying dead before him, he felt nothing. He said: ‘I felt the same way I did when I killed Elizabeth Stevens.’ He could offer no reason for the murder: ‘I just wanted to.’

Denyer then dragged Debbie’s body to a row of trees and covered it with several branches. He took the murder weapon with him when he left the scene. He drove off in Debbie’s car and parked it near his home. He must have noticed the child restraint in the back seat of the car. It is mandatory for children under the age of five to be belted into an approved child restraint. Denyer would have realised that Debbie was a mother, but it made no difference to him. After Debbie’s murder, he calmly drove his own car to the railway station to collect Sharon, his girlfriend. The next day, after Sharon had left for work, Denyer went back to Debbie’s car and took out the shopping items and Debbie’s purse. He tipped Debbie’s milk and eggs down his kitchen sink, and disposed of the cartons by burning them at home. He buried the woman’s purse at a nearby golf course.

Now more than six hours into his confession, Denyer turned his attention to the murder of Natalie Russell. While his victim was selected at random, it transpired that he had coldly calculated his next killing. He had chosen a bicycle track that runs the length of a municipal park. He decided to wait there, concealing himself behind trees. He had planned every moment of the abduction. Two days before he snatched Natalie and took her life, he had cut two holes through a metal fence with a pair of bolt cutters. Armed with a razor-sharp homemade knife with an aluminium blade and a leather strap to strangle his victim, Denyer planned to lie there in wait and grab the first young woman who walked past along the bicycle track.

At 2.30 p.m. on 30 July 1993, Denyer drove back to the park and took up his hiding place in the thicket behind the fence. The holes he had cut were big enough for him to drag his victim through and into the relative seclusion of the parklands. After a wait of about half an hour, he saw a young woman – Natalie Russell – entering the bicycle track. She was in school uniform. He followed her. As Natalie approached the second hole that Denyer had made in the fence, he struck, grabbing her from behind. He held the knife to her throat but managed to slash himself, slicing a big chunk from his right hand. He told her that if she moved or resisted in any way he would cut her throat. He dragged her through the hole in the cyclone fence and continued to hold her at knife point. Natalie may have realised she was face to face with the Frankston serial killer. She tried to negotiate her release, pleading to be spared.

‘She said, “You can have all my money, have sex with me” and things,’ Denyer told detectives. ‘Just said disgusting things like that really.’ Denyer was not tempted by sex. He wanted only to inflict pain and commit murder. He forced Natalie to kneel in front of him while he menaced her with the knife, easing it up to her eyeballs. He then slashed her face. Trying to escape, Natalie struggled to her feet and screamed for help. He told the detectives: ‘And I just said, “Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.” And, “If you don’t shut up, I’ll kill you.”’

Denyer forced Natalie back to the ground in a kneeling position. The young woman was sobbing and terrified. He then tried to strangle her. He said:

I put the strap around her neck to strangle her and it broke in half. And then she started violently struggling for about a minute until I pushed – got her on her back again – and pushed her head back like this and cut her throat.

I cut a small cut at first and then she was bleeding. And then I stuck my fingers into her throat … and grabbed her chords and I twisted them.

Denyer told the horrified detectives that he had plunged his hand into the young woman’s throat in an attempt to kill her. ‘My whole fingers – like, that much of my hand inside her throat,’ Denyer told them indicating a line up to his knuckles. He continued: ‘She sort of started to faint and then when she was weak, a bit weaker, I grabbed the opportunity of throwing her head back and one big, large cut which sort of cut almost her whole head off. And then she slowly died.’

The detectives asked again what motive Denyer had for killing the young woman. He said: ‘Just the same reason as before, just everything came back through my mind again. I kicked her before I left.’ Denyer also told the detectives that he had slashed the young woman’s face one more time. He then walked back along the bike path with his blood-soaked hands thrust deeply into his pockets. As he got back to his car, he saw two uniformed policemen looking closely at his vehicle, jotting down the registration details. He turned around and walked home the other way.

When he got home, Denyer showered, washing the blood from his hands. He concealed the knife he had used to kill Natalie Russell at the back of his flat. Later, he collected Sharon from the railway station and spent the night dining with Sharon at her mother’s home.

Denyer’s stunning confessions had taken more than seven hours. He revelled in telling police every sordid, despicable detail. The only time he showed any emotional response to the crimes was when he expressed contempt for Natalie Russell for offering him sex in a desperate attempt to avoid death. But, he hadn’t finished. Later that day, he told police that he was responsible for breaking into Les and Donna’s home and torturing and killing their three cats, smearing blood on the walls and threatening to kill Donna. He revealed that he had gone to the flat for the sole purpose of killing the young mother. When he arrived there to find no one home, he broke in regardless and vented his psychopathic fury on the hapless felines.

Later, Denyer explained to detectives why all of his victims were women: he detested women. He told Detective Darren O’Loughlin: ‘I just hate them.’

‘I beg your pardon,’ replied O’Loughlin.

‘I just hate them,’ Denyer repeated.

‘Those particular girls or women in general?’ O’Loughlin asked.

‘General.’

Denyer’s girlfriend, Sharon Johnston, had no idea of the type of man she was living with. She was stunned and shocked when police informed her that Denyer had confessed to the murders. She simply had not seen that side of him. Denyer had treated her well. Clearly, he did not see his girlfriend as an enemy. He told the detectives: ‘Sharon’s not like anyone else I know. I’d never hurt her. She’s a kindred spirit.’ It was the only positive remark he made throughout the course of his confession.

• • •

Paul Denyer was charged with the murders of Elizabeth Stevens, Deborah Fream and Natalie Russell. He was also charged with the attempted murder of Roszsa Toth. Later this charge was reduced to abduction.

At his trial on 15 December 1993 in the Victorian Supreme Court, Denyer pleaded guilty to all charges. Five days later, Mr Justice Vincent delivered the sentence: Denyer was to serve three terms of life imprisonment with no fixed non-parole period. He received a further eight years for the abduction of Roszsa Toth. One of the most experienced judges of the Victorian Supreme Court, Mr Justice Vincent could not conceal his revulsion for Denyer’s crimes. He told the convicted murderer:

The apprehension you have caused to thousands of women in the community will be felt for a long time. For many, you are the fear that quickens their step as they walk home, or causes a parent to look anxiously at the clock when a child is late.

Denyer appealed his sentence to the Victorian Supreme Court. On 29 July 1994, the Full Bench of the Supreme Court determined that Denyer might one day be released. He was granted a 30-year non-parole period. Theoretically, he may walk free from jail in 2023. When the sentence was announced, the families of his victims and victim support groups were outraged. There had been no mercy granted to Denyer’s victims. It did not seem right that leniency should be ascribed to Paul Charles Denyer. His psychological profile concluded that he was, and remains, a threat to society. While he continues to be deemed a risk, he will remain behind bars.

Paul Charles Denyer will be 51 when he becomes eligible for parole. By then, chances are that John Candy will be long forgotten. Hopefully, the crimes of the ‘John Candy Killer’ will not be, and the families and loved ones of the young women he callously murdered will petition the authorities to see that he never breathes the air outside prison walls as long as he lives.