On the afternoon of July 30, 1993, a postal worker on Skye Road in Frankston North noticed a rusted yellow Toyota Corona with no number plates parked near a fenced walkway between two golf courses. A man sat inside it with binoculars. As she stopped at a house to call the police, she saw a schoolgirl approaching the track on her own, watched by the man, who then got out and ran up the path after her. Officers came, noted the car's registration label, knocked on a few doors and were called away before the man returned. The girl was Natalie Russell, seventeen, a student at John Paul College who had left school early and taken her usual shortcut home. That night she was reported missing, and police searching the track found her body in the scrub beside it. The walkway is now called Nat's Track.
Russell was the third young woman killed in the district in seven weeks, and she had fought hard enough to leave her killer's skin and hair on her body. Three holes had been cut in the fence with the same tool, and there was blood on one of them. The registration led detectives to Paul Charles Denyer, twenty-one, who lived with his girlfriend in a small unit on Frankston-Dandenong Road in Seaford. They visited him the next afternoon. He admitted being near the scenes of two of the murders, could not explain the cuts and scratches on his hands, and agreed to give a DNA sample. Early on August 1, apparently believing the police already had DNA evidence against him, he confessed to all three murders, to another attack and to a string of break-ins. He told detectives he had been stalking women around Frankston "for years," that he had wanted to kill since he was fourteen, and that he hated girls and women in general.
The first killing was on the evening of Friday, June 11. Elizabeth Stevens, eighteen, had come to Melbourne from Tasmania in January to study at the TAFE college in Frankston, hoping to join the armed forces, and was living with her aunt and uncle in Langwarrin. She got off a bus on Cranbourne Road at about seven and turned into her street, where Denyer grabbed her from behind and threatened her with what looked like a gun. Heavy rain and wind covered her screams. He held her hand as he walked her down the street, and people who saw them took them for a couple. In Lloyd Park Reserve, about 250 meters from her home, he strangled her, stabbed her and cut her throat, stamped on her face and dragged her body to a culvert. A man gathering pine branches found her the next afternoon.
A month later, on July 8, he attacked Rosza Toth, forty-one, near Seaford North Reserve as she walked home from Seaford station, and held a gun to her head. She realized it was a fake and fought free. That same evening Deborah Fream, twenty-two, left her twelve-day-old son at home with a friend and drove to a milk bar for milk. Denyer had found her car unlocked and climbed into the back seat, and he threatened her with the replica gun soon after she pulled away. A farmer found her partly covered body off Taylors Road in Carrum Downs four days later. She had been strangled with a cord, slashed and had her throat cut. Her car, a gray Nissan Pulsar, turned up the next day on Madden Street, and the door-to-door canvass of 4,700 homes centered on that street was code-named Operation Pulsar after it. It was the largest Victoria Police had ever mounted.
Denyer had been born on April 14, 1972, in Campbelltown, on the outskirts of Sydney, the third of six children of a couple who had married in London and migrated to Australia in 1965, and the family moved to Victoria in 1981. He struggled at school and put on a great deal of weight in his teens. At ten he slashed the throat of his sister's teddy bear and killed the family cat and hanged it from a tree. He was cautioned for stealing a car before he turned thirteen and arrested at fifteen for an assault on another student. After school he was fired from seven jobs and failed the physical for Victoria Police. In February 1993 he started at a boat-building firm in Seaford, where coworkers saw him making knives; he was let go a few months later. That same month a young mother in Seaford came home to find her unit wrecked, her cat dissected, her kittens drowned in the bath with their throats cut, and "Donna you're dead" written on the wall in blood. He later admitted it, and said he would have killed her had she been home.
He pleaded guilty to three counts of murder and one of abduction. Psychologists diagnosed a sadistic personality disorder, not insanity, and he told examiners he had been influenced by the 1987 film The Stepfather. On December 20, 1993, after four days of hearings, the Supreme Court of Victoria sentenced him to three consecutive life terms with no parole. He appealed, and in July 1994 he was given a non-parole period of thirty years, which made him eligible in 2023. Investigators had also wondered whether he was linked to the disappearance of Sarah MacDiarmid in 1990 and the murder of Michelle Brown in 1992.
In prison he was held at Barwon and later at Port Phillip. In 2003 he began identifying as a woman, called himself Paula, and wrote to another inmate that he had committed the murders "not because I ever hated womankind, but because I have never really felt that I was male." The prison refused him make-up, surgery and a legal change of name, and the mother of one of his victims called the transition a stunt. By 2022 he had gone back to calling himself Paul. When he applied for parole in 2023, the Adult Parole Board of Victoria refused it and told the victims' families, among them Natalie Russell's father, Brian, and Deborah Fream's son, Jake, the baby she had left at home to go out for milk.