Underbelly 11 Read online

  He muttered of pressing down on the neck of a woman and cutting around a breast. ‘He liked blood. You could tell that he liked it. When he spoke of the blood, he breathed differently and sounded excited.’

  Taylor told police four years later that as his ramblings became more graphic, her mood changed from revulsion to fear: ‘I was petrified’. She hung up but the man immediately rang back and said, ‘Don’t hang up. I know where you live’.

  She said he became increasingly excited as he described in vivid detail stabbing a woman. Taylor didn’t believe the man was living out a twisted fantasy. ‘(He) made her seem like a real person.

  ‘He never said the word “knife”. He either used the word “steel” or “blade”.

  ‘I called him a “sick prick” and hung up. I picked the receiver up and he was still there … I pulled the plug out of the wall and went to see my children.’

  Police say the detailed description of stabbing and mutilating a woman almost perfectly described the wounds inflicted on a prostitute whose body had been dumped on the outskirts of Melbourne.

  Margaret Maher was a streetwalker whose mutilated body was discovered in Somerton on October 3, 1997. The wounds were grouped in the breast area in what was a trademark Dupas attack.

  He was later convicted of her murder and sentenced to life with no minimum.

  Coincidence?

  Police checks of telephone lines have identified two calls between Taylor and Dupas. Both were made on November 1, 1997, the day of Mersina’s murder – one at 12.45am and the second at 5.14pm, less than an hour after the killing.

  IT WAS the tragic case of Nicole Patterson that proved – too late – that the experts were right and it had been in evitable that Dupas would progress to murder.

  Nicole was a popular psychotherapist who tried to help young people battle drug addiction.

  In early 1999, Ms Patterson, then 28, decided to broaden her client base and converted the front bedroom of her house in Harper Street, Westgarth, into a consulting room.

  She advertised in local newspapers and on March 3 a man calling himself ‘Malcolm’ telephoned. Over the next five weeks he rang her fifteen times before finally making an appointment for 9am on April 19, claiming he needed treatment for depression.

  Police believe Dupas knocked on the door at 9am and was ushered into the consulting room.

  Nicole made plunger coffee and entered the room with cups, sugar and milk. Then, without warning, he attacked, stabbing her at least 27 times.

  She managed to scratch his face and was heard yelling before she was overpowered.

  After the murder, he searched the house for any evidence that he had been there. He missed her diary, which was under clothing on the couch in the living room. It had details of the 9am appointment and a phone number.

  It would lead police to Dupas.

  When police raided his home three days later, they found the newspaper advertisement for Nicole’s psychotherapy sessions with her name handwritten by Dupas on the border.

  They also found a blood-splattered jacket. DNA tests established the blood was 6.53 billion times more likely to have come from Nicole Patterson ‘than from an individual female chosen at random from the Victorian Caucasian population’.

  They discovered a black balaclava and a front page of the Herald Sun report on the murder. The picture of Nicole had been slashed with a knife.

  The head of the investigation, Detective Senior Sergeant Jeff Maher, (no relation to previous victim Margaret Maher) said of Dupas, ‘He was pure evil. He was not physically intimidating but he really sent shivers up your spine’.

  Maher said Dupas refused to talk of the crime or co-operate with the investigation in any way. ‘Nothing he did was on impulse. Everything was planned in the most calculating manner.’

  FBI expert John Douglas says each serial killer has a ‘signature’ that links his murder victims. Nicole Patterson and Margaret Maher were killed in almost identical ways.

  In another bizarre coincidence, the Patterson and Halvagis families had long been associated. Nicole’s father Bill and George Halvagis are old mates. They watched their children grow up together when they lived in Warracknabeal in country Victoria in the 1970s, but they lost touch over the years. Now they are linked by a shared grief and one killer.

  There is yet another murder where Dupas remains the only viable suspect, that of 95-year-old Kathleen Downes, stabbed to death in a Brunswick nursing home on December 31, 1997.

  Phone records show someone rang the nursing home from Dupas’s house in the weeks leading up to the murder. Police say the elderly woman was the victim of Dupas’s simmering rage over his older wife’s rejection exactly four years earlier, when she’d been working at a nursing home.

  Dupas also had a prior conviction for attacking an elderly woman. On November 18, 1979, he dragged an elderly woman into a vacant block and stabbed her.

  NO-ONE can doubt that Dupas is a serial killer but the question that police want put to a jury is: did he kill Mersina Halvagis?

  With no eyewitness and no compelling DNA the police case is largely built on similar-fact evidence that the wounds to Halvagis, Patterson and Maher were so similar that they must have been committed by the same offender.

  It was this type of evidence that helped convict him of the Margaret Maher murder after a Supreme Court jury was told the wounds to her were virtually identical to the injuries found on Nicole Patterson.

  Pathologist Professor David Ranson has found a series of similarities in the fatal wounds inflicted on Margaret Maher, Nicole Patterson and Mersina Halvagis. In each case, the attack was concentrated on the breast area and each victim suffered a severe blow near the right eye.

  Some police believe Dupas was reliving his first murder – Helen McMahon on the Rye Back Beach in February 1985.

  But there was another case where similar wounds were inflicted. In October 1969, someone broke into the mortuary of the Austin Hospital and mutilated the bodies of two elderly women using a razor-sharp pathologist’s knife.

  There was also a strange slash wound to one thigh. The same wound was found on Nicole Patterson 30 years later. Mersina also suffered similar wounds to her right thigh and a slash near the left knee.

  Weeks before the Nicole Patterson murder in April 1999, Dupas finally decided to buy his own home and placed a deposit on a house a few streets from the Austin Hospital and a short walk from where the bodies were mutilated.

  An analysis of the damage to the clothing worn by Mersina Halvagis and Nicole Patterson shows the knives used in the attacks were similar although it is impossible to say if they were identical.

  Forensic scientist Jane Taupin concluded: ‘There were multiple stab-type cuts detected in the clothing of Mersina Halvagis. These cuts were similar in profile to the multiple stab-type cuts detected in the clothing of Nicole Patterson.’

  Professor Donald Thomson is a psychologist and barrister considered an expert in profiling. He found clear patterns in Dupas’s behaviour and in the way he stalked and attacked women.

  He said a feature of his attacks was that ‘Most were calculated and planned, they were not opportunistic offences. Dupas staked out either a place or a victim.’ Thomson found that he did not continue his carefully-planned sex attacks if he thought there was a risk of being confronted by another man.

  He said the crimes were invariably ‘located in proximity to places where Dupas had lived, went to school or had worked.’

  He said Dupas always used the same method, used a knife, and selected his victims when they were at their most vulnerable.

  ‘An analysis of the deaths of Helen McMahon, Renita Brunton, Margaret Maher and Mersina Halvagis suggests that these deaths are consistent with the features identified in the offences for which Dupas was convicted.’

  Police had long known that Dupas would establish a beat where he would wait for the opportunity to attack, as he had at Rye years earlier.

  But they needed to find
if he visited the cemetery for any reason before the murder.

  When he was interviewed, he told police he had never been to the cemetery as he had no relatives or friends buried there. But he lied.

  Once, when driving past the memorial park with one of his few friends Dupas had said, ‘My grandfather’s buried in the cemetery somewhere’.

  Police found that his grandfather was buried there about 100 metres from the Halvagis grave.

  He lived about a kilometre away in Pascoe Vale, drank at the First and Last Hotel, across the road from the cemetery and almost certainly drove past the memorial park each weekday on his way to work in Thomastown.

  Detectives have established that the wounds inflicted on Mersina Halvagis were similar to those found on other Dupas victims, that he lived in the area and had a reason to visit the cemetery.

  But to fit the 30-year pattern of Dupas’s sex crimes, police would have to find that he haunted the area planning his attack.

  IT took Stefanie Pawluk more than seven years to finally buildup the courage to phone the police and tell them the reason she no longer went to Fawkner Cemetery alone.

  She was at her mother’s grave in the Ukraine section when she saw a man walking fast and looking around as if to see if anyone was watching. She thought, ‘This is very strange, he is coming straight towards me.’

  She was so concerned that she left the grave, hopped in her car and locked the door. I looked up and saw that he had followed me to the driver’s door of my car. He stood very close to my car and just looked at me. I was very frightened.’

  The man had blond hair and wore glasses. Years later, she saw Dupas’s picture on the television news. I said out loud, “Oh my God, I think that’s him”.’

  Janet Morton is not the sort of woman who scares easily. She says she has only been truly frightened twice in her life. The first time was when she was nearly hit by a train. The second was when a man in the Fawkner Cemetery stalked her.

  Around August 1997, her husband dropped her at the cemetery where she was researching her family tree.

  She saw a podgy man staring at her and she smiled, but felt foolish when he ignored her greeting. She moved to another section of the cemetery and saw him again. When she moved a further 50 metres, he followed her. Mrs Morton moved to another section of the memorial and had her head down reading the graves when she heard a noise and looked to her left. ‘I saw the same man coming straight at me with a look in his eyes that really frightened me.’

  She put up her left hand, started to walk backwards and might have yelled or screamed. Mrs Morton said he stopped and had a ‘rabbit in the spotlight look’ then moved and hid in some nearby bushes.

  ‘I could see his feet below the two bushes that he was standing behind. I turned and ran as fast as I could and I recall I even jumped over one of the gravestones.’

  She ran down the middle of the road inside the cemetery only slowing when she ran out of puff and saw people in the distance.

  ‘This man frightened me so much that it took me about six years to return to that spot to complete my research.’

  Years after the incident she was flicking through the paper when she saw a photo of Dupas. Her response was instantaneous. She turned to her husband Ross and said, ‘That’s the bastard that day in Fawkner’.

  On October 5, 1997, Seval Latif was sitting at her father’s grave and crying when she felt ‘a horrible sense of danger’.

  She looked up and saw an overweight man four metres from her on the left ‘striding along the road purposely and I felt he was trying to get me with my head down’.

  She stood up and he appeared intimidated and moved a short distance away. She headed back to her car but the man followed and stopped to stare through the car window.

  In August 2000, she contacted the homicide squad after she saw Dupas’s picture in a newspaper. ‘I knew he was the man in the cemetery.’

  A week before Mersina Halvagis was murdered, Enza Romanella was visiting her husband’s grave when she was approached by a man who wanted help to find the spot where a relative’s ashes were kept.

  At first she tried to help but something about the man made her scared and she cut the conversation short. In 2000 she saw Dupas’s picture on television. She says it was the man who approached her at Fawkner.

  Patricia Nemeth was another mourner who saw a stranger heading towards her at the cemetery. ‘I immediately felt he was going to hurt me.’ It was not his mousy brown hair or his gold-framed glasses that made him stand out. ‘It was his eyes, they were blank. There was something peculiar about him. He was evil-looking.’

  She stopped going to the cemetery – ‘I am terrified to go back’ – and when much later she saw Dupas’s picture in the paper she told her family, ‘I know this man. I’ve seen him, he’s the one from the cemetery’.

  She was so sickened she could not bring herself to read the article.

  HOURS before the Halvagis murder, Laima Burman was working as a volunteer at the Latvian section of the cemetery when she was approached by a man who said he had just found his adoptive mother’s grave.

  She later helped produce a computer image of the man. It has a striking resemblance to Dupas. Later she was shown a photo board and asked to identify the suspect who spoke to her on November 1. She picked three – shots numbers six, seven and twelve – as being similar. Number seven was Dupas.

  In August 2000, when on holiday in Echuca, she picked up a paper and saw his picture staring back. ‘I immediately kept saying to myself, “That’s him, that’s him”.’

  Katica Melink may have seen Dupas just minutes before he attacked Mersina Halvagis. She was with two other women when she noticed a man wearing glasses within metres of the Halvagis grave on November 1 just before 4pm.

  When she looked at him, she noticed he immediately turned his head away.

  Years later she saw Dupas’s picture on the news and felt he looked familiar. About an hour later it dawned on her. ‘He was the man I saw at Fawkner Cemetery.’

  She remained silent until the Halvagis family made a last appeal for help in late 2004. ‘Now I just want to get this off my chest and tell the police what I saw.’

  One glance and a sixth sense of danger may have saved Angela Baran’s life when she visited her uncle and aunty’s grave on All Saints Day.

  She was sitting on the grave in Row M around 3.50pm when she felt someone watching her. It was a man with dyed blond hair, glasses and blotchy skin. He was walking slowly and did not appear to be looking at the graves. It was only twenty metres and a few minutes from where Mersina would be murdered.

  Mrs Baran looked away and seconds later glanced back to see he was gone.

  Instantly she decided to leave. Police say the decision probably saved her life as he was probably hiding, waiting to strike.

  ‘I felt something was not right. He just vanished. I didn’t hear him walking on the gravel and there was no where near enough time for him to have walked down the end of the path.’

  As she left she noticed a red Telstar in the car park. Mersina Halvagis had just arrived.

  Sometime later she saw a colour picture of Dupas in a newspaper. She told a friend, ‘Oh my God, that looks like him, he’s got the same skin.’

  But she said she was not sure because the man she saw had blond hair while in the picture Dupas’s hair was brown.

  Even when hypnotised by a police expert to pick up any memories hidden in her subconscious she was adamant his hair was ‘peroxide blond’.

  She could not have known that less than two weeks before the murder Dupas had a hairdresser’s appointment where he had his hair blonded.

  DOMENICA D’Alberto was a young hairdresser who ran her own mobile styling business in the northern suburbs. She had a loyal and largely female client base, so when a man rang and asked her to come to his home she was hesitant.

  But the man was ‘very convincing over the telephone that it would be all right for me to go to his house. I think
he told me that he worked long hours, therefore he couldn’t go to a hairdresser.’

  It was Dupas, who was well-practised at sounding convincing to women on the telephone.

  From February 18, 1997, Ms D’Alberto cut and styled his hair, visiting Dupas every six weeks and giving him bleached blond tips on every third visit.

  ‘I used to think that Peter was always a bit odd.’ She was going out with a policeman and Dupas kept asking questions about him. ‘Peter often told me that I was pretty and this made me feel uncomfortable. Peter seemed to take a great interest in my personal life but he never said anything about his own.’

  On October 21, 1997 – eighteen days after Margaret Maher’s body was discovered – Ms D’Alberto visited Dupas to bleach his hair.

  For ten months Dupas had been happy with the style of his hair, but around the time of the Maher and Halvagis murders, he started to pester his stylist to change his appearance.

  ‘It was around this time that Peter one day asked me to change his hairstyle … He became quite irate that I couldn’t do anything with his hair. I recall thinking that I was feeling uncomfortable with his aggressive attitude and I had to say something to try and calm him down … Peter was just so determined to change his hairstyle.’

  Jack Sgourakis is an experienced spectacle maker who owns his own business in Campbellfield. He’s had hundreds of clients. One was Peter Dupas.

  On November 7, 1997 Dupas went to an optometrist in Mahoneys Road, Campbellfield, and ordered a new style of plain bifocals to replace his long-distance and reading glasses.

  During the visit he was examined by Isabella La Rocca. It was a routine examination except she noticed that he had a fresh cut to his left cheek. When she mentioned the cut, he said it had happened at work.

  He also told friends who noticed the new glasses that his old pair were damaged in an accident at work.

  Dupas was employed at the Blue Diamond Furniture Company as a factory hand. He was one of six men who applied for the job in August 1997 and after the first choice was found to be unsatisfactory, Dupas was given the chance.