Underbelly 11 Read online

  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?’