Killing Time (22 page)

Time and time again over the years the coppers have had Dupas in custody and questioned him, and every time he has behaved in exactly the manner I described to them. They didn't describe it to
me
; I told
them
. And it was only after I had made my formal statement that the police told me that over the years Dupas's behaviour has been totally consistent. That is, he sits in a police station being interviewed, he gets to a stage where you think he is going to make admissions, he starts sweating and becomes nervous, anxious and shaky, then clasps his hands together. Then, when he is really anxious, he puts his hands between his legs and crushes his knees together and then starts rocking backwards and forwards. Every other time he has displayed those behaviours he has pulled himself up short and that has been the end of the discussion. The blinds come down and he blocks the matter out of his mind and he will not talk about it any more. The only difference, with me, was that he took the process one step further and blurted out the admissions that led to his conviction. It was only after he had blurted out the admissions that the blinds came down. Not much of a change, but a change of immense significance as far as the police, the Halvagis family and the Victorian public were concerned.

As I said earlier, being in the witness box was easily the most disturbing thing I have ever done; and frankly, if I knew then what I know now, I wonder whether I would have come forward to give the evidence when requested. However, now that it's done and Dupas is convicted, I am pleased that I have come through the ordeal and this poor family now has some closure.

Mr and Mrs Halvagis visit their daughter's grave daily. These people have been devastated by what happened to them and I, as a parent, can understand that to lose a child would be the most horrible thing that could happen to you. But to lose such a beautiful child in such tragic circumstances is something you would never recover from. I am told by people who have been to the Halvagis family home that Mersina's bedroom has not been touched since the day she was murdered. It is almost a shrine to her. These are good people who came to a new country to provide their kids with something they would never have had if they had stayed in Greece – and this is what they get. I am glad I did what I did.

Chapter 13

What Else? Solved and
Unsolved Atrocities

Science is always simple and always profound, it is
only the half truths that are dangerous.

– GEORGE BERNARD SHAW,
THE DOCTOR'S DILEMMA

Peter Dupas was the prime suspect in six murders. He has now been convicted of three of those and he is serving three life sentences without any prospect of parole.

Nicole Amanda Patterson

Dupas was suspected, and eventually convicted, of the murder of Nicole Patterson on 19 April 1999 after her semi-naked body was found lying on the lounge-room floor of her home in the northern Melbourne suburb of Northcote. She had been stabbed twenty-seven times and both of her breasts had been removed after death.

When the Homicide Squad arrived at the scene they found that the killer had removed jewellery and other items from her body and worn them. The killer had also removed her shirt and had taken that and unknown bloodied items, most likely the victim's breasts, down to her bedroom where there is further evidence that the killer has dressed up in the victim's clothing.

There was further evidence that the killer had searched the victim's premises before leaving, clearly with a view to finding any incriminating evidence. However, the killer missed one most important item, and that was Nicole's diary. On the day of her death she had written “Malcolm 9.00 am” and a phone number. A call charge record on the deceased's phone revealed that a number which belonged to Dupas, who was by then a convicted serial rapist with a propensity for violence, had called Miss Patterson fifteen times over the last week, a chilling fact indeed.

Not long after, on 22 April, Homicide Squad detectives arrested Dupas at a local hotel and searched his house. In the rubbish bin outside the house police found a pair of white runners with blood stains all over them. Also located was a small piece of newspaper that had been torn into several pieces. When pieced back together, this piece of paper revealed the handwritten note “Nicci – Northcote – 9.00 o'clock morning – Malcolm”. It is obvious now that Dupas had rung and used a false name for the purposes of making an appointment with the victim. Also, on his fridge, was a handwritten note with a mobile number: the same as the phone number written in Patterson's diary. Dupas had obviously deviously used another mobile phone to ring Patterson and make his fatal appointment.

During their search of the premises, the police also found a copy of the
Herald Sun
with the front page showing Patterson's face after her murder was discovered. The picture had been slashed with a knife. Located in the garage were numerous tools with their handles wrapped in yellow electrical tape; the tape was identical to that found on the deceased's body.

Well hidden in Dupas's garage were a balaclava, gloves and a green army jacket with a packet of condoms in the pocket. On the sleeves were blood stains. DNA testing was later conducted and it became clear that the blood on the runners found in the rubbish bin and the blood on the jacket sleeve as that of Miss Patterson. Dupas was charged and bail refused. This was the beginning of the rest of his life in custody.

At the trial, expert evidence was given that the blood on the jacket located in Dupas's garage was 6.53 billion times more likely to be that of Nicole Patterson than any other person. As a former lawyer familiar with DNA testing, I can say that these sorts of numbers show categorically that the blood was Nicole Patterson's. Floated as Dupas's defence was the highly unlikely and in my view fanciful scenario that Detective Senior Sergeant Geoff Maher and Detective Senior Detective Paul Scarlett had obtained a phial of the deceased's blood and had walked around and sprinkled it liberally all over Dupas's jacket and runners during the execution of the search warrant. I have heard some fanciful defences in my day, but this one takes the cake. It is no wonder the jury only took two hours to convict Dupas, and His Honour Justice Vincent duly sentenced him to life imprisonment with no minimum.

Margaret Josephine Maher

Margaret Maher was a well-known heroin user and had been addicted to the drug for most of her adult life. She had struggled with her use, as is often the case with heroin addicts, and had been unable to support her habit through legal means, so had turned to prostitution – a very common event.

According to discussions I have had with people who knew her, she was considered likeable, harmless and a bit of a hopeless case as far as her drug use and prostitution were concerned. On 4 October 1997 at about 1.45 pm, the body of Margaret Maher was found dumped on the side of Cliffords Road, Somerton. She had been assaulted and stabbed numerous times and her left breast had been severed and shoved into her mouth. The police sealed off the area and began a minute forensic examination of the scene. Located on and near the deceased's body were items of rubbish and discarded computer equipment that had purposely been placed there obviously to conceal the deceased's body from passers-by. A problem for the killer was that one of his woollen gloves had slipped off and was found in the pile of rubbish.

You will note that Margaret Maher's murder took place before Nicole Patterson's. There was an extensive investigation by the Homicide Squad and they couldn't find any records of a killer having severed a breast over the previous ten years. Sexually motivated killers usually follow a pattern of behaviour, whether they mean to or not. Once the pattern has been established, they tend to stick to it pretty rigorously. The only other known murder in which a breast was severed came in April 1999 when Dupas was arrested for the murder of Nicole Patterson. This breakthrough in the investigation was the beginning of the end for Peter Dupas because the Victoria police formed a task force known as Mikado and it re-examined the unsolved murders of five women: Margaret Maher, Mersina Halvagis, Kathleen Downes, Helen McMahon and Renita Brunton.

Having got to know Detective Senior Sergeant Geoff Maher and Detective Senior Constable Paul Scarlett well during my interaction with them and in the course of my giving evidence in the Mersina Halvagis prosecution, I can say from first-hand experience that these two police officers are dedicated, dogged and meticulous in the pursuit of solving outstanding crimes. That was how Senior Detective Scarlett came to talk to me at Fulham about Mersina Halvagis; any other cop would have put the issue of talking to me in the too-hard basket.

The police went back over all of the evidence that had been discovered at the scene and in the case. The obvious item for re-examination was the black woollen glove located alongside the victim's body. DNA techniques have rocketed in their accuracy in the last decade or so, and the woollen glove was again subjected to DNA investigation, but this time using the most recent and accurate of testings. A DNA sample was subsequently discovered inside the glove, and Dupas could not be excluded as the source of this sample.

In a great piece of lateral thinking the coppers went back over Dupas's phone records around the time of the death of Maher, and found that calls had been made from his landline to a phone sex service known as “Grandma's sex line” on 1 November 1997, the day Dupas murdered Mersina Halvagis, and not quite a month since he had murdered Margaret Maher. The police spoke to a phone sex operator who was clearly rattled by the person who had called that day. She remembered a male calling the line and detailing to her how he had cut off a woman's breast and cut around the nipple. She further recalled how the anonymous caller appeared to become more sexually aroused as he spoke about blood pouring over his knife and referred to the victim as his mother, “the bitch!” The person on the other end of the phone described in great detail injuries that bore a striking resemblance to the post-mortem injuries inflicted by Dupas on Margaret Maher.

On 2 October 2002 Dupas was charged with Maher's murder and after a three-week trial he was convicted and sentenced to a second life sentence.

Mersina Halvagis

On Saturday 1 November 1997 Mersina left her fiancé's house and drove to the Fawkner Cemetery to tend her grandmother's grave, as was her usual practice. She arrived at the cemetery at about 3.30 pm and was last seen alive walking away from the car park at the Greek Orthodox section of the cemetery towards her grandmother's grave. Mersina failed to arrive home that afternoon, and by that evening an extensive search involving all of her family and her fiancé was underway. It was totally out of character for her not to be at home on time. At about 4.00 am the following morning, Mersina's fiancé climbed over the boundary fence into the cemetery. Lying in an empty plot just two graves from her grandmother's gravesite, he made the gruesome discovery of Mersina's body.

The Homicide Squad was called to the scene of the grisly murder. It was apparently random and obviously carried out with great force, displaying the frenzied infliction of a great number of wounds. The scene indicated to the police that Mersina had fought courageously with her attacker, despite the fact that she was short and weighed just 55 kilograms. A significant injury to the back of her head indicated that she had been attacked from behind, and she had received over eighty stab wounds to her body, with an obvious concentration in the breast area. The similarity with the Patterson and Maher murders was marked.

Unlike in the case of Margaret Maher, however, there was no glove containing a DNA sample at the scene; and unlike Patterson, no phone records to connect anybody to the murder. This attack appeared to be truly random – until it later emerged that Dupas's grandmother is buried within a couple of hundred metres of Mersina's grandmother. So much for Dupas's later assertion that he had no connection to Fawkner Cemetery, had no knowledge of the area and had no logical reason to be there. Again deny, deny, deny.

The Halvagis family were devastated and constantly kept at everybody concerned to try to solve this awful murder. One of the most touching aspects of this investigation from the police's point of view was the unflinching love of the family for their deceased daughter and sister and their unyielding determination to have Mersina's killer brought to justice. Meanwhile, there was not one skerrick of forensic evidence for the police to hang their hat on. Over the next couple of years the police investigated, and eliminated as persons of interest, 215 suspects and they obtained 149 statements.

While the police were minutely combing whatever evidence they could find, it became apparent to them that, in the five months leading up to Mersina's murder, there had been seven separate instances of females being approached at the Fawkner Cemetery, sometimes aggressively, by an unknown male. A couple of the women got a very good look at his face. When Dupas was apprehended for Nicole Patterson's murder and his photograph was shown in the media, several women contacted police to say that he was the man who had accosted them in the cemetery. There are always problems with identification evidence, particularly after a long period of time, but Dupas's face is quite distinctive, particularly as he is an older man, making it the kind that can be easily identified.

In May 2005 the police contacted me and I provided them with the evidence that was required to charge Dupas. He pleaded Not Guilty. The case received a huge amount of media coverage and, on 27 August 2007, Dupas was convicted of his second murder. He was again sentenced to life, no minimum.