Underbelly 11 Read online

  On the outside he was a qualified fitter and turner and in prison he was a natural handyman often called on to fix small problems.

  He soon settled in at the factory as the man who cut the timber to size before it was sent to the furniture craftsmen.

  Like all sixteen staff members, Dupas was instructed that any injury that occurred at work or any damage to private property was to be immediately reported.

  All injuries, even down to a splinter, were recorded in the company’s injury book and the firm had a standard practice of compensating workers for property damage.

  A partner and production manager at Blue Diamond, Mr John Kazakis said, ‘The staff are told to report the smallest injury’.

  But despite the scratch to his face there was no note of an injury in the company record or of damaged spectacles.

  So what happened to the glasses?

  A damaged pair was found next to Mersina’s body but they probably belonged to her.

  Detectives believe his glasses were damaged in the struggle and he later threw them away, making up the story that they were damaged at work as a cover.

  But only Dupas knows and he isn’t talking.

  POLICE say Dupas probably stalked women in the cemetery for three months, waiting until he found one alone and vulnerable.

  It could have been anyone – but it was Mersina Halvagis.

  One of Australia’s most experienced homicide investigators has a surprisingly sympathetic view of offenders such as Dupas. He does not see them as truly evil, rather he believes they are driven by demons they cannot control.

  ‘Does anyone think they want to be like that? They would do anything to be normal. The real bad ones are hit men who will kill anyone for a price. They kill for money because it is easier than working for a living. They choose who they are. Dupas never had a choice.’

  And his victims never had a chance.

  Police had built a solid case against Dupas but were shattered in late 2005 when prosecutors told them they were still short. Without a fresh breakthrough Dupas would never be charged with the murder detectives were convinced he committed in the Fawkner Cemetery.

  And that breakthrough would eventually come from the most unlikely source.

  CHAPTER 7

  The long road to justice

  The place was full of psychopaths.

  To me it was just a matter of staying alive.’

  HE HAD heard so many confessions before. Desperate suspects wanting the hardened lawyer to produce that magic get-out-of-jail card from his well-worn book of tricks.

  He was no stranger to prisons. His clients – accused police killers, underworld gunmen, fallen footballers, failed billionaires and successful drug dealers – would call him after their arrests, at any time of the night or day.

  But this was different.

  This time the lawyer could not give advice then drive home in his gunmetal grey, two-door Mercedes before uncorking a vintage red to dull the day’s memory.

  This was different because the lawyer was also an inmate and the confession was from a serial killer who shared the same high-security cellblock.

  There would be no immediate escape. He would see the killer again and again – every day for fifteen months. And he would have to hide the truth.

  Until now.

  The lawyer – or, more accurately, the former lawyer – is An drew Fraser, who was serving five years for cocaine trafficking. The killer is Peter Dupas, who was serving life for murder.

  As a convicted drug dealer, Fraser had resigned himself to never entering a courtroom again. But he did return to the Supreme Court – not as an advocate but as a star prosecution witness whose pivotal evidence led to Dupas’s conviction in August 2007 for the murder of Mersina Halvagis a decade earlier.

  She was just 25 and tending her grandmother’s grave at the Fawkner Cemetery on November 1, 1997, when she was ambushed from behind and stabbed to death in what police described as a frenzied attack.

  Detectives compiled a suspect list of more than 100 but eventually had only one left – the man with dead eyes and no conscience who, police say, has killed as many as six times.

  Without Fraser, it is unlikely that Dupas would ever have been charged with the Fawkner cemetery killing, let alone convicted. While homicide detectives had built a compelling case against the serial killer, Director of Public Prosecutions Paul Coghlan, QC, was not convinced it was enough to put before a jury.

  In November 2005, he opened the murder inquest saying, ‘Much of the evidence in this case will revolve around Mr Dupas.’ But he added that there was insufficient evidence to sustain a murder charge.

  There was no forensic evidence, no eyewitnesses and, most importantly, no confession.

  Throughout decades of stalking, attacking and killing women, Dupas rarely spoke of his crimes. Police who have interviewed him say he retreats within himself and then, shaking and sweating, denies the undeniable.

  Derek Ernest Percy

  Marianne Schmidt: Teenagers murdered at Sydney’s Wanda Beach in 1965. Last seen with youth resembling Derek Percy.

  Christine Sharrock: Teenagers murdered at Sydney’s Wanda Beach in 1965. Last seen with youth resembling Derek Percy.

  Derek Ernest Percy (right) at 16 with Mt Beauty High School classmate. A strikingly similar school tie was later used to bind murder victim Alan Redston in Canberra.

  Alan Redston … was he another victim of child killer Derek Ernest Percy?

  The search: Police and citizens comb the beach for clues after the discovery of the girls’ bodies on January 11, 1965. The case was never closed.

  Identikit compiled from witnesses during Wanda Beach murder investigation.

  Identikit of suspect for Alan Redston murder in Canberra.

  Identikit compiled during investigation of Simon Brook’s murder.

  Derek Ernest Percy after his arrest in 1969: Never convicted on grounds he was insane. This was a blessing as it meant he could be held indefinitely rather than released to kill again.

  Yvonne Tuohy: Taken by Percy from the beach at Warneet in Victoria and murdered. It was the first time police could prove that Percy was a killer, but was it the first time he had killed?

  Linda Stilwell: Abducted from St Kilda beach in 1968. Police say Percy is the only remaining suspect.

  Unreliable: This original artist’s impression of the Beaumont suspect was little use because it was based on witness descriptions so vague they hindered the investigation.

  The Beaumont children: When they went missing on Australia Day, 1966, Australia lost its innocence. Derek Percy admits being in Adelaide at the time.

  Re-enactment: Hours after killing Yvonne Tuohy, Percy shows police where he had hidden the murder weapon in his car.

  Anne Louise Crawford: Murdered, but by whom? The prime suspect walked free.

  Ron Crawford (right): the luckiest man in Australia walks free with his lawyer.

  A view to kill for … the angle from which an unidentified sniper shot hardworking transport owner Kevin Pearce at Bendigo. Police know who was behind the hit.

  Trouble ahead … battler Kevin Pearce in collar and tie years before he was gunned down.

  But having a top lawyer in his division was too tempting. He began to open up, in halting half sentences, at first seeking advice and later implicating himself – admitting facts that only the killer could know.

  When Fraser agreed to give evidence of the jailhouse confessions, it persuaded Coghlan to charge Dupas with the murder. ‘Without Fraser’s evidence of Dupas’s confession there would not have been a prosecution,’ he said.

  The irony of detectives relying on the word of the former solicitor was lost on no-one, as Fraser was the lawyer police loved to hate. Tough, relentless and a courtroom street fighter, he left many detectives bruised after bare-knuckle cross-examinations. ‘I was never a great academic lawyer but I liked a fight and could think on my feet,’ he says.

  Some were delighted when he crashe
d and burned because of his $1000-a-day cocaine habit. In December 2001 he was sentenced to a minimum of five years after pleading guilty to being knowingly concerned with the importation of cocaine, trafficking cocaine and possession of ecstasy.

  Discredited, disbarred, broke and soon to be separated from his wife, Fraser was a low-risk prisoner – he was a first-time offender, was not violent and was not an escape risk. He could at least expect to spend his sentence in a medium-security country jail.

  But someone (he blames old police enemies with long memories) wanted him to do his time hard. Intelligence was fed into the system that his life was at risk and he needed protection.

  He was taken in shackles to Sirius East, the maximum-security protection division of Port Phillip Prison that housed up to 38 of the most detested and dangerous inmates in Victoria.

  ‘It was for the worst of the worst and I was stuck there. It was not a place where I belonged.’

  He would spend all his waking hours with inmates such as double murderer Raymond ‘Mr Stinky’ Edmunds, Bega school-girl killer Leslie Alfred Camilleri and Dupas – serving life for the murder of Nicole Patterson, whom he stabbed to death in her Northcote home on April 19, 1999.

  He soon saw the quality of the company when he met his first roommate – an obsessive paedophile who chain-smoked butts scavenged from bins.

  Quickly the lawyer learned the dos and don’ts of life in maximum security. ‘You mind your own business, don’t ask too many questions and try not to make enemies.’

  He would never queue for food ‘because you could be stabbed in the neck by the inmate behind you’. If he missed out by being last in line he would slip back to his cell where he kept his survivor’s food stash – tinned fish, cheese slices carefully’ wrapped in hoarded newspaper plastic and dry biscuits.

  On his first day in the unit he was about to go back to his cell to avoid alienating one of the division’s hard men by sitting in the wrong seat at meal time when he heard a voice call, ‘Sit here, Andrew.’ It was Peter Dupas.

  Dupas and Edmunds ran one clique and Camilleri the other. By sitting with one crew he risked alienating the other and within a day he learned the potential consequences. ‘Camilleri chested me on the second day and said, “I should kill you”.’

  The incident confirmed what Fraser already knew. ‘The place was full of psychopaths. To me it was just a matter of staying alive.’

  They were to become the jail’s odd couple – the ex-lawyer (and schoolboy athlete) and the suspected serial killer. They became the division gardeners and could be seen nearly everyday, pottering around the division’s small vegetable patch.

  At night they would sometimes sit and watch gardening programs on television and read up on horticulture. For Fraser it was a distraction and gave him a chance to get out doors to breathe fresh air.

  A shrewd student of human nature, Fraser soon marked Dupas as a brooder and a schemer: the sort who could take a set against you, then seek revenge with a sneak attack. Fraser thought it was safer to treat him as an ally than an enemy. ‘Dupas is probably the most dangerous and unpredictable person I have ever met. He is quite spooky, very quiet and you have no idea what he is thinking.’

  While Dupas had a flabby body and his criminal record shows he attacked only defenceless women, Fraser found the killer to be surprisingly powerful. ‘He had enormously strong fingers. He could open stuck jars and would twist wire in the garden that others needed pliers to manipulate.’

  Fraser had no real interest in Dupas’s past.

  The former lawyer was determined to live in the present – his plan was simply to survive each day until his release and then try to salvage something from the wreckage of his life.

  But as time dragged on, he was slowly sucked into the morass of Dupas’s mind – learning against his will about the serial killer’s crimes.

  It began when they were both in the small, wire-covered exercise yard known as the ‘Chook Pen’ when a ‘Greek-looking’ prisoner rushed over and starting yelling abuse at Dupas from outside the fence.

  According to Fraser, the inmate called Dupas an animal and blamed him for the Halvagis murder. ‘The verbal attack was out of the blue and Dupas was clearly shaken by it. Dupas then said, “How does that c… know I did it?” ’

  Fraser remains adamant Dupas was clearly admitting guilt rather than just questioning the exchange.

  A week later Fraser saw Dupas standing in the vegetable garden staring at a window in Sirius West. ‘He was starting to shake, a sure sign he was agitated. I asked him what he was looking at and he told me he now knew which cell the abusive one was in and he was going to try and knock him.’

  A few days later Dupas confided he knew the prisoner had a doctor’s appointment and ‘he was going to jump him then kill him’.

  He warned Fraser, ‘It would be better if I was elsewhere as he did not want me involved. He took the garden fork and put it where it could not be seen near the pathway’.

  Fraser decided to break his promise of minding his own business. He quietly tipped off a prison guard and the medical visit was cancelled.

  POLICE had long suspected Dupas was a serial killer. They believe that the weird boy who first attacked a young mother who lived next door when he was just fifteen had gone on to stalk women for the next three decades – and had killed at least six times.

  Detectives say he murdered Helen McMahon (February 1985), Renita Brunton (November 1993), Margaret Maher (October 1997), Mersina Halvagis (November 1997), Kathleen Downes (December 1997) and Nicole Patterson (April 1999).

  But Dupas had always maintained his innocence and launched an appeal (that failed) against his conviction over the Patterson murder.

  ‘In jail, the etiquette is that you never ask another prisoner what they are in for; to be nosey is to invite violence,’ Fraser said. ‘I did not ask Dupas any questions as I didn’t want to be attacked.’

  But one day at the back of the small work station a group of the long-termers were discussing their crimes. Edmunds admitted killing Garry Heywood, eighteen, and Abina Madill, sixteen, in Shepparton in 1966 and said he regretted what he had done but was paying the price. A serial sex offender said he was soon due for release but expected he would re-offend. Then Edmunds said, ‘What about you, Pete?’

  According to Fraser, ‘Dupas hesitated and all was quiet. He then haltingly admitted killing Nicole Patterson’.

  It showed that, despite suggestions to the contrary, Dupas did not have a mental condition that enabled him to ‘forget’ his crimes. He was evil and cunning rather than compulsively disturbed. Fraser, the 30-year legal veteran, saw that Dupas showed no sign of remorse. ‘His attitude was what’s done is done and not to worry about it.’

  But Dupas did worry when he learned the homicide squad was far from finished with him. In September 2002, police interviewed him over the murder of Margaret Maher, 40, who had been found dead near the Hume Highway at Somerton on October 4, 1997.

  ‘When he came back from being questioned he was rattled and came straight to my cell,’ Fraser said. Dupas had good reason to seek urgent legal advice.

  Detectives had told him they had DNA evidence that incriminated him – there was a glove at the scene that linked him to the crime. (Dupas was charged and later convicted of the murder.)

  Dupas left the interview convinced he would be charged with both the Maher and Halvagis murders. Under immense pressure, the quiet and suspicious convict began to break his habit of non-disclosure. He confided to Fraser that there was no forensic evidence at Fawkner and none ‘with the old sheila down the road’.

  Fawkner was clearly the Mersina Halvagis murder scene and the old lady was Kathleen Downes, 95, who was murdered in her nursing home not far from where Dupas had lived at the time.

  After Dupas was charged with the Maher murder he handed Fraser the police brief of evidence to read. In their conversations, Dupas continued to gradually implicate himself in the Fawkner murder.

  �
��Dupas repeated he left no forensics at the scene and no-one, not even the deceased, would have seen him as he attacked her from behind as she was either kneeling at or bending over her grandmother’s grave – a frank and surprising admission.’

  One day Fraser went to the multiple murderer’s cell – remembering to remove his shoes before he entered as everyday Dupas would paint the concrete floor of his cell with floor polish. As Fraser began to review the brief, Dupas put his fingers to his lips as a gesture to remain quiet.

  He then pointed to the intercom that he believed hid a police bug. ‘He sat on his bed, hands folded tightly and tucked between his legs. He trembled and sweated and started to rock back and forth as he did when he was agitated.

  ‘He then got up and took a kneeling position like a victim. He then stood up, became bug-eyed and began flailing wildly with repeated stabbing gestures. When he finished he sat back calmly and started watching the television in his cell. I was just stunned. I put it to the back of my mind. I just wanted to survive.’

  At the time, police had deliberately held back the information that Halvagis was kneeling over her grandmother’s grave. Only one person could have known – the killer.

  Later, while he was weeding the garden patch, Fraser found a homemade knife fashioned from a sharpened metal table-tennis brace. He called over his gardening partner. Dupas took the knife from Fraser and moved it up and down.

  ‘He started to sweat and looked (at) me with a very strange look on his face. I was apprehensive at this time and he uttered one word – “Mersina” – and handed the knife back. I have no doubt he was telling me he killed Mersina with a similar knife.’ Fraser dumped the knife in a bin but was so concerned he checked the next day to see that it had been emptied.