The first police report into Bennett’s murder, completed within five hours of the hit. More than twenty years later the courtroom killing remains unsolved.
‘It’s too late, Pam, I can’t stop now. They will lock me up.’
THE old bluestone court house in Bendigo is one of the most imposing in Victoria. On the first floor is the main court room, with a large oil painting of an English lord hanging on the rear wall and a huge chandelier over the bar table.
But on this day the case did not fit the majesty of the surroundings. Standing in the dock was a plump, nondescript man facing the relatively minor charge of false imprisonment.
The accused wasn’t even going to fight, having earlier agreed to plead guilty to the solitary charge. This would save court time and public money, allow the female victim to avoid the trauma of giving evidence and enable the justice system to move on to the next, and seemingly more important, case.
But the accused was not motivated by remorse. He had a powerful incentive to plead guilty to this one charge. In return the prosecution had agreed to drop more serious charges, including kidnap, assault with a weapon and indecent assault.
The man in the dock was Peter Norris Dupas. And, for all his mild looks, he had a history of committing increasingly violent sexual crimes over four decades. At least one policeman and an experienced psychiatrist warned years earlier he was a potential killer, but that didn’t stop Dupas being allowed to plead to the least significant charge of those laid against him.
The year before his trial, the Victorian Government had passed a controversial law that enabled courts to sentence criminals such as Dupas to indefinite jail terms. The law was to protect the community from serial sex offenders – and if there was a stereotype of the man the Act was designed to catch, it was Dupas. But for the law to be activated the offender had to found guilty of a so-called ‘serious offence’. Unlawful imprisonment fell just short – it was considered too minor for the draconian legislation.
It would have not seemed a minor offence to the twenty-six year old woman Dupas had attacked and slashed in the public toilets at Lake Eppalock in January, 1994. Dupas was wearing a balaclava when he followed the woman into the toilet block, where he threatened her and cut her with a knife. He clearly intended to rape her before he was frightened off. In the boot of his car were handcuffs, knives … and, chillingly, a shovel. A weapon might conceivably be used only to frighten someone – but a shovel has only one use for a violent abductor. To bury a body.
Defence and prosecution lawyers do deals all the time. In this case Dupas’s lawyer made it clear his client would plead to ‘appropriate’ charges. Perhaps the evidence would not support the more serious charges, and jury trials are always a risk, but there can be no doubt the defence lawyer did well to cut a deal for his client. He was aware that a guilty plea to unlawful imprisonment would save Dupas from the risk of going to jail forever.
In the Bendigo Court on 18 August, 1994, Judge Leo Hart was also interested in whether he could deal with Dupas under the indefinite sentence rules. He asked: ‘Is the offence for which he has pleaded guilty, an offence which, together with his prior convictions, brings into play …’
Defence lawyer: ‘No.’
Judge Hart: ‘The provisions introduced by the Sentencing (Amendment) Act 1993?’
Defence lawyer: ‘No, it is not, Your Honour.’
With his record Dupas was going to go to jail, anyway. The trouble was, it wouldn’t be for long enough. He was sentenced to three years and nine months with a minimum of two.
He was released from jail on 29 September, 1996, and would go on to kill one and possibly three women. He was convicted in August 2000 of the murder of psychotherapist Nicole Patterson, who was stabbed to death in her Westgarth home on 19 April, 1999.
He is is also strongly suspected of killing Margaret Maher, who was killed in October, 1997, and Mersina Halvagis, who was stabbed to death in the Fawkner Cemetery while tending her grandmother’s grave in November, 1997.
PETER Norris Dupas was just fifteen and still in school uniform when he first attacked a woman with a knife. Now, more than thirty years later, police believe he might be one of Australia’s worst serial killers.
Dupas is a criminal oddity that the criminal justice system could not handle. A man considered sufficiently mentally twisted to need treatment, yet too ‘sane’ to be institutionalised for life.
The police, prison officers and many of the psychiatrists who knew Dupas wrote reports suggesting he would re-offend, yet he was released from jail to do just that.
An insignificant little man, who was once a fat, lonely schoolboy, he has carried a knife since he was a teenager, and attacked women whenever he has had the opportunity.
And, like many serial offenders, his crimes have become progressively more violent, despite medical and psychiatric treatment since the 1960s.
Dupas was born in Sydney and his family moved to Melbourne when he was a baby. His brother and sister were years older than him and he was effectively treated as an only child by his mother and father, who were old enough to be his grandparents.
He was later to say he was spoiled when he was growing up. He went to Waverley High School, repeated year seven and was seen as a slow learner with no friends and an unhealthy array of complexes.
‘He did not participate in sports and describes himself as having been very obese and the subject of ridicule by his school mates,’ concluded a psychiatrist who examined him in 1990.
It was in October, 1968, that Peter Dupas first showed his dark side.
A female neighbour had returned home a few weeks earlier after having a baby when she heard a knock on her back door. It was Dupas, wearing his Waverley High School uniform.
‘Young Peter Dupas got on very well with my husband and he used to call in to our house and talk with us,’ she would later tell police.
The boy 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.’
Then Dupas suddenly attacked her, slashing her fingers, neck and face. As he tried to stab her he said: ‘It’s too late, Pam, I can’t stop now. They will lock me up.’
Finally, he stopped and began to cry. When asked by police why he had attacked the woman he said, ‘I must have been trying to kill her or something. I didn’t know why I was trying to do this, as far as I am concerned there is no reason for me to do anything to Pam but I could not help myself.’ He was put on probation for eighteen months and given psychiatric treatment.
Like many loners who turn into sex offenders, the nerdish and spoiled Dupas craved power, and like many serial killers he applied and was rejected from the police force. He was one centimetre too short.
According to a former FBI crime profiler, John Douglas, ‘frequently serial offenders had failed in their efforts to join police departments … one of their main fantasy occupations is police officers.’
In the next few years Dupas began a pattern of low level sexrelated crimes. He was found hiding in the back yard of an Oakleigh house as he watched 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.
He was seen to follow women and young girls and his behaviour became increasingly aggressive.
In 1973 he began to attack women in their own homes. He would knock on the door, pretend to have car trouble and then ask to borrow a screwdriver. In one case he threatened to hurt a woman’s baby if she attempted to struggle against him.
It was during this investigation that police started to believe Dupas was in a league of his own. It was not the crime he committed – violent as it was – nor his looks, as he appeared quite harmless.
It was the way he answered or, more accurately, didn’t answer questions, that worried detectives.
Senior Detective Ian Armstrong interviewed him at the Nunawading police station on 30 November, 1973. Dupas was twenty-one and looked younger. He had a pudgy, baby face and the manner of a person who lacked resolve.
To Armstrong he looked the sort of suspect who would easily crack under questioning. But as everyone who was to deal with Dupas over the next twenty-seven years would find, looks can deceive.
Many experienced criminals know how to lie their way through a police interview but a frightened young man usually confesses quickly. Dupas was different – dangerously so.
‘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, a senior sergeant at Warrnambool when Dupas was found guilty of murder.
‘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).’
Dupas was being interviewed over the Mitcham rape, which had happened six days earlier. ‘It wasn’t me, I didn’t do it … I don’t know anything about the incident … She must have been mixed up with someone else,’ were his answers. Nobody believed him.
He was convicted in 1974 over rape and burglary charges and sentenced to nine years with a minimum of five.
Ian Armstrong felt worried enough about the young offender to write a report which said in part: ‘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.’
In his first few months in custody Dupas was examined by one of Australia’s most experienced psychiatrists, Dr Allen Bartholomew. 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.’
Late in 1977, a group of parents who lived near the Dupas family in Mount Waverley contacted the Parole Board and urged that he not be released, as they believed he was still dangerous.
But Dupas started to learn how to play the system. According to Bartholomew, he began to talk about his crimes, not because he wanted to be treated but because he wanted to get out of jail to re-offend. ‘I feel that when he realised that his hopes for parole might be jeopardised by his denials, he began to admit his guilt.’
Despite a warning by Bartholomew in September, 1978, that Dupas ‘was a danger to female society’ he was released from prison on 4 September, 1979. Within two months he attacked four women in just ten days.
On 9 November, 1979, he forced his way into a toilet block in Frankston and raped a woman. Two days later he chased a woman and threatened her with a knife. On 18 November he dragged an elderly woman into a vacant block and stabbed her, and the following day he attacked another woman in the same area. In each attack he wore a balaclava and carried a knife.
He told police, ‘I’ve had this problem for about six years. I’m glad I got caught.’
Bartholomew could not resist 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’ favour. He remains an extremely disturbed, immature and dangerous man. His release on parole was a mistake,’ according to a report added to his file in September, 1980.
Dupas was found guilty of rape, malicious wounding, assault with intent to rob and indecent assault for the 1979 attacks. He was sentenced to six and a half years jail with a five-year minimum.
It was to become a pattern. Dupas would do what he was told in jail, attend the courses, do the therapy and appear to be changing, only to attack women whenever he was out of jail.
He was released again on 27 February, 1985, although no-one seriously believed he would not attack again. It didn’t take long. On 3 March he raped a twenty one-year-old woman who was sunbathing at Rye ocean beach.
After the beach attack he gave police his trademark speech of remorse: ‘I’m sorry for what happened. Everyone was telling me I’m okay now. I never thought it was going to happen again. All I wanted to do is live a normal life.’
He was sentenced to twelve years with a minimum of ten. The beach rape was near the spot where a woman sunbather had been bashed and murdered in remarkably similar circumstances only weeks earlier.
Helen McMahon was bashed to death on the Rye back beach on 13 February that year. Her body had been found naked, covered only by a towel, and her murder was never solved.
A counsellor who tried to help Dupas wrote, ‘Through long-term association with various professionals he has learned to manipulate any individual who has endeavoured to challenge his offending behaviour by way of saying the right things and behaving in a convincing manner in a supervised environment.’
Despite the treatment his crimes became more violent. Despite his repeated claims he was dealing with his problems, he just became more cunning.
While in jail Dupas met and married a female nurse, sixteen years his senior. They married in Castlemaine Jail in 1987 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 March, 1992, and in January, 1994, he attacked a woman at knife point in a toilet block at Lake Eppalock.
The woman’s boyfriend, an off-duty Australian Federal Police officer, grabbed Dupas after a car chase. He was held until two Victoria Police arrived. He even whined pathetically, ‘They’re hurting me!’ while he was pinned as the police approached. He was found guilty only of false imprisonment and given a two-year minimum.
Dupas was released again in September, 1996, and eventually moved into a house in Coanne Street, Pascoe Vale – near a shopping strip in Cumberland Road.
Margaret Maher, a local prostitute, regularly went shopping in Cumberland Road. That is, until she was abducted and murdered in October, 1997.
About a month later Mersina Halvagis was stabbed to death in the Fawkner Cemetery while she was visiting her grandmother’s grave. Dupas’s grandfather is buried at Fawkner in the same area.
EVERYBODY liked Nicole Patterson. She was a psychotherapist who devoted much of her time trying to help with young people with drug problems. Those who knew her described a vibrant and compassionate young woman. Her sister, Kylie, said, ‘She was the most beautiful person I’ve known and she had a lot of special gifts that not many people have.’
In early 1999, Ms Patterson, then twenty eight, decided to broaden her client base and converted the front bedroom of her house in Harper Street, Westgarth, into a consulting room.
She began to advertise in local newspapers. On 3 March a man calling himself ‘Malcolm’ telephoned. Over the next five weeks he was to ring her fifteen times before he made an appointment for 19 April.
Malcolm said he wanted to be treated for depression. He didn’t say he was a violent sex offender. Ms Patterson wrote the name ‘Malcolm’ and his mobile telephone number in her diary and circled the time of 9am on 19 April.
Police believe Dupas knocked on the door at 9am and was ushered into the consulting room. Ms Patterson made plunger coffee and entered the room with cups, sugar and milk. Then, without warning, he attacked, stabbing her repeatedly.
She managed to scratch his face and yell before she was overwhelmed.
What followed was almost beyond belief in its savagery. But, despite his frenzy, Dupas’s cold-blooded instinct for self-preservation asserted itself. 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 would lead police to him.
When police raided his home three days later they found the newspaper advertisement for Ms Patterson’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 Ms Patterson ‘than from an individual female chosen at random from the Victorian Caucasian population.’ They also found a black balaclava and a front page of the Herald Sun report on the murder. The picture of Nicole Patterson had been slashed with a knife.
The head of the investigation, Detective Senior Sergeant Jeff Maher, is used to dealing with killers, but he found Dupas unsettling. ‘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.
There is also evidence to suggest a connection with the way Mersina Halvagis was killed in the Fawkner Cemetery in 1997.
Nicole Patterson wore a silver choker-style necklace. When police found it next to her body it had been broken and repaired with sticky tape. Friends who saw Nicole the night before the murder said the necklace was then intact. Detectives believe the killer may have ripped it from her and worn it himself while he was in the house.
Police said many of his attacks were concentrated on the breast area of his victims.
The doctor who examined Dupas when he was arrested said he was ‘an anxious, timid-looking man wearing bifocals. I noted that he had prominent deposits over the pectors muscles which had the appearance of female breasts.’
BILL Patterson and George Halvagis were old mates. They watched their children grow up together when they lived in Warracknabeal, in country Victoria, in the 1970s.
But, like many families that move to big cities, they lost touch over the years. Now they are linked by a shared grief.
Both men have had to deal with the death of a daughter. In both cases they were murdered and now, in a bizarre coincidence, it appears both women were killed by the same man.
In August, 2000, Bill Patterson and George Halvagis sat in the public gallery of Court Four in the Supreme Court and watched as Dupas, forty seven, was convicted of killing Nicole Patterson.
George and his wife Christina sat in the back of the court and watched most of the seven-day trial. Police were concerned the grieving couple were there to take justice into their own hands. On the last day of the trial police checked them for weapons before they were allowed into the court.
I do not know why they would do that. We were here to support Bill and his family, not to do anything to the man who was charged,’ Mr Halvagis said later.
‘We were old friends and now it may be that the same animal killed our daughters.’
If the accused man knew who was behind him he didn’t show any concern. He sat in the dock looking straight ahead. Dressed in a blue suit and a 1970s style tie, he looked composed, his hands resting on his lap.
Only the occasional fidget with his thumbs betrayed any sign of nerves. He looked harmless enough, the sort who might be given the role of the librarian in an amateur play. But his looks belied his criminal history.
When the jury began to file in to hear the judge’s final summary Dupas was on his feet, even before the court was asked to rise. Dupas didn’t need to be told – he knew the rules because he had been in the criminal dock many times before.
The Patterson family sat through the whole trial. They listened to evidence about how Nicole died, about her last moments. They learned facts that grieving relatives should never have to hear.
George Halvagis is driven man, but not a vindictive one. He says he is not looking for revenge, only justice. He too, sat through the entire trial and, like the Pattersons, he wept after the jury found Dupas guilty. The Pattersons cried because they finally knew what happened to their daughter, the Halvagises because they still don’t know for certain what happened to theirs.
George Halvagis has one dream left. He wants the man who killed his daughter to be put in the dock in the Supreme Court and stand trial. I don’t want anyone to harm him (Dupas) in prison. I want him to live so we can find out what happened to Mersina.’
THE police also have unfinished business and unanswered questions. They want to talk to Dupas about the murders of Mersina Halvagis and Margaret Maher.
Homicide detectives got the court’s permission to speak to Dupas over the Halvagis murder while he was in custody but he still refused to co-operate.
In any case, Dupas’s arrest record would indicate he is unlikely to talk. The days of heavy-handed police interviews are long gone and an investigation based on the need to gain a confession is usually flawed. Police need evidence that cannot be later recanted.
The former head of the homicide squad, Carl Mengler, who retired as a Deputy Commissioner, believes juries should know when a suspect refuses to answer questions.
‘In a murder case the formal interview is video taped. Why not play it to the jury? If the suspect declines to answer questions then let the jury see it. If the police are unfair in the interview then the jury would know from watching the tape. If juries are to make decisions based on the facts then let them have all the facts, in fairness to both the defence and the prosecution.
‘A suspect does not have to answer questions but a jury should be aware of what they have and haven’t said.’
WHAT makes a man evil? Peter Dupas was not beaten as a child. He did not come from a broken home. His only complaint was that he was spoiled by his elderly parents.
Some men are driven to greatness, others can never overcome their compulsions.
Another sex offender, Ian Melrose Patterson, cut a nipple off one of his victims and slashed her more than 250 times. In his cell he collected pictures of Princess Di and Jana Wendt and in each picture he would cut off the nipples. He drew elaborate pictures of naked women tied up while in jail and yet he was released after serving his bare minimum sentence.
When freed in 1992 he was found to have inoperable cancer. He had tumours in his liver, kidneys, lungs, bones and chest wall. When he was released from hospital he went straight out and bought eight bondage books and a boning knife. He told associates he intended to commit more sex crimes before he died. ‘What has been done can be done again. I have thought about it. They will have to take me out with a bullet this time,’ he said.
He sexually assaulted a woman with a knife two weeks after he was diagnosed as terminally ill.
When he returned to hospital he was so sick that he needed constant oxygen. Even then he wouldn’t stop, removing his mask to sexually harass the nursing staff. Eventually only male nurses would treat him. Only when he lapsed into a coma was he no longer a risk to women.
It would be convenient to blame someone for Dupas’s life and, by extension, Nicole Patterson’s death. But no judge gave him an unrealistically light sentence and no jury ignored compelling evidence. Every time he was charged with a serious sexual offence he was convicted. The problem was, while many in authority believed he would one day kill, they appeared powerless to stop him.
Nicole Patterson’s sister, Kylie Nicholas, said that while the family was relieved when Dupas was found guilty they still felt betrayed by a criminal justice system that freed Dupas when it was almost certain he would attack again.
‘Why did they let him out? I just don’t understand the system. I only hope that people listen so this never happens again.’
AFTER being found guilty of the murder of Nicole Patterson, Peter Norris Dupas was sentenced to life in jail.
Justice Frank Vincent told him, ‘You must, as a consequence of the commission of this terrible crime which has brought you before this court, be removed permanently from the society upon whose female members you have preyed for over thirty years.
‘The sentence of this court is that you be imprisoned for the rest of your natural life and without the opportunity for release on parole.’
Justice Vincent was a criminal barrister who specialised in murder cases, he is an experienced Supreme Court Judge and chairman of the Parole Board. He has probably seen more killers than anyone in Australia.
During his closing remarks he captured the mood of the wider public in one sentence.
‘At a fundamental level, as human beings, you present for us the awful, threatening and unanswerable question: How did you come to be as you are?’
The first police report into Bennett’s murder, completed within five hours of the hit. More than twenty years later the courtroom killing remains unsolved.