Peter Dupas is serving three sentences of life imprisonment, each with no minimum term, for the murders of three women in Melbourne, Victoria. Margaret Maher, 40, was killed in October 1997. Mersina Halvagis, 25, was stabbed to death at Fawkner Cemetery on November 1, 1997, while she tended her grandmother's grave. Nicole Patterson, a psychotherapist, was killed at her home in Northcote in April 1999. The High Court of Australia described all three as vulnerable women killed in knife attacks of extreme violence.
The convictions came in the order the cases were solved, not the order of the deaths. A jury convicted him of the Patterson murder in August 2000 and of the Maher murder in August 2004. The Halvagis case took longest. A jury convicted him in 2007, the Court of Appeal of Victoria quashed that verdict in 2009, the High Court refused to stop a retrial in 2010, a second jury convicted him in November 2010, and a five-judge appeal bench rejected his last challenge in December 2012.
By the time of the first murder he already had convictions for rape and for violent attacks on women going back to the early 1970s. In 2018, while serving his life sentences, he was charged with a fourth murder, that of Kathleen Downes, 95, who was killed in her room at a Brunswick nursing home on the last day of 1997. That prosecution was discontinued in October 2019, when the main witness became too ill to give evidence. A coroner had already found, in 2015, that Mrs. Downes died as a result of his actions; the finding was published in July 2020.
Little has been reliably reported about Dupas's early life. He was 56 when the Court of Appeal ordered a retrial in September 2009 and 57 when a jury convicted him again in November 2010, according to Neos Kosmos.
His adult record is better documented. In sentencing him in 2010, Justice Elizabeth Hollingworth of the Supreme Court of Victoria noted a criminal history dating back to 1972. In 1974 he was convicted of rape and sentenced to nine years in prison, of which he served five, Neos Kosmos reported in 2011. In 1980 he received a sentence with a five-year minimum term for three counts of assault with intent to rape and for malicious wounding. A report prepared that year described him as "an extremely disturbed, immature, and dangerous man." He was released from prison in February 1985. The women he attacked in these cases survived.
The same 2011 report described him as the prime suspect in at least three other Melbourne murders from the 1980s and 1990s. None of those cases has led to a conviction.
Margaret Maher was 40. She worked as a sex worker, the newspaper Neos Kosmos reported. She was killed in October 1997, one month before Mersina Halvagis, and her body was found at an industrial estate in Somerton. She had been stabbed.
The case remained unsolved for years. It was the second of the three murders for which Dupas was convicted, and it came to trial only after he was already serving a life sentence for the Patterson murder. In August 2004 a jury in the Supreme Court of Victoria found him guilty of her murder. He was sentenced to life imprisonment with no minimum term, his second such sentence. His application for leave to appeal against the conviction was refused, the High Court of Australia recorded in 2010.
Mersina Halvagis was 25. She was the daughter of George and Christina Halvagis, and the sister of Bill, who was younger than she was, and of Nick. On the afternoon of November 1, 1997, she went alone to Fawkner Cemetery in Melbourne to tend the grave of her grandmother, in the Greek Orthodox section of the cemetery. She was attacked there and stabbed many times with a sharp knife. A pathologist later told a jury it had been "a frenzied attack."
Her father spoke for the family through every stage of the case that followed, and in later years he also came to court to support another family. He called Mersina his "beloved daughter." In November 2014 the family gathered again at her grave.
The Victorian government offered a reward for information leading to a conviction, and in 2005 it raised the reward to one million dollars. That year a coroner held an inquest into her death; Christina Halvagis attended. Dupas was named in the media as a suspect in the Halvagis murder from an early stage, the High Court later noted.
Nicole Patterson was a psychotherapist. She was stabbed to death at her home in Northcote, Melbourne, in April 1999.
Hers was the first of the three murders for which Dupas was convicted. A Supreme Court jury convicted him in August 2000, and he was sentenced to life imprisonment with no minimum term. His application for leave to appeal against that conviction was refused. Over the following years the Patterson verdict shaped the other cases: his convictions for her murder and for that of Margaret Maher were later reported to the jury at his Halvagis retrial, and the publicity that followed both convictions became a central issue in his long fight against the Halvagis charge.
Some later reports spell her first name Nicola; the High Court of Australia uses Nicole.
Kathleen Gladwyn Downes was 95. She was a widow and a great-grandmother who had lived most of her life in Strathmore, in Melbourne's north, where she raised three children, according to Victoria Police. From 1989 she lived at Brunswick Lodge, a nursing home on Loyola Avenue in Brunswick. Her family and friends remembered her as "a dear old lady with a wonderful nature," and she was considered the matriarch of the home.
A staff member last saw her alive at about 12:30 a.m. on Wednesday, December 31, 1997, during a routine check. At about 6:20 a.m. another staff member found her body on the floor of her room. She had been stabbed in the neck. Investigators believed the intruder had come in through a window: the chain of the winding mechanism had been cut with bolt cutters, the flyscreen had been cut, and milk crates had been stacked outside, ABC News reported. Police said nothing had been stolen, and that she was not known to have kept anything of value in her room; they thought the killing was possibly a burglary that went wrong. No weapon and no identifiable fingerprints were found. AAP later reported that investigators had found a bloodied glove print on venetian blinds at a fire escape and scuff marks on a neighboring fence.
In December 2000 Victoria Police offered a reward of 100,000 dollars for information leading to an arrest and conviction. Dupas had been a suspect since 2001, AAP reported, and police questioned him about the case in 2013. Their inquiries reportedly showed that he had telephoned the nursing home some time before her death.
The witness who changed the Halvagis case, and later the Downes case, was Andrew Fraser. He had been a criminal lawyer whose clients, Lawyers Weekly reported, included the businessman Alan Bond, the crime figure Lewis Moran and the Hells Angels. In 2001 he pleaded guilty to helping import more than five kilograms of cocaine, and he was jailed.
In prison Fraser was held with Dupas. AAP reported that the two men shared a cell at Port Phillip Prison in 2005; Neos Kosmos described them as held in the same protection unit. Fraser told police that Dupas had made incriminating statements about the Halvagis murder and had mimed the fatal stabbing in his cell. He also told police about a conversation in which Dupas discussed other killings, including a reference to "the old sheila down the road," which investigators believed meant Kathleen Downes.
Fraser has written several books, among them Court in the Middle, Lunatic Soup and Snouts in the Trough. Paul Coghlan, a former Victorian Director of Public Prosecutions, said: "Without Fraser's evidence of Dupas' confession, there would not have been a prosecution."
Dupas was charged with the murder of Mersina Halvagis and pleaded not guilty. Before a jury was chosen, his lawyers asked the trial judge, Justice Philip Cummins, to stay the prosecution permanently because of the publicity the case had received. The evidence before the judge covered about seven years of coverage: material on seven internet sites, about 120 newspaper articles, four books and television programs, much of it hostile to Dupas, who had been identified as a suspect early on. Justice Cummins accepted that the publicity would have prevented a fair trial if a jury acted on it, but he said he had "very responsible confidence" that properly directed jurors would decide the case on the evidence alone. He refused the stay on July 3, 2007.
The prosecution case was circumstantial. It rested on three witnesses who identified Dupas as a man they had seen at the cemetery and on his alleged confession to Fraser. The trial lasted four weeks, and the defense called no evidence, according to a Crikey commentary written after the verdict. On August 9, 2007, the jury found him guilty. He was sentenced to life imprisonment with no minimum term, his third such sentence. At the plea hearing before sentence, Crikey reported, he told his lawyers not to make any submissions on his behalf.
In September 2007, just before the 14-day time limit ran out, his lawyers lodged an application for leave to appeal, arguing that the verdict was "unsafe and unsatisfactory." George Halvagis told ABC News the family had hoped the ordeal was over. "Just when we thought we go on with our lives and, let Mersina rest in peace," he said, the appeal made things difficult for his family. "Obviously we are not happy but we will just let the law take its course."
In September 2009 the Court of Appeal of Victoria quashed the conviction by a majority of two to one and ordered a new trial. Dupas's lawyers had argued that some of the identification evidence should not have gone to the jury, and that the judge should have directed the jury differently on other issues. The majority found that Justice Cummins had not adequately warned the jury about matters that could have undermined the witnesses' accounts. Justice Weinberg dissented. The court rejected Dupas's challenge to the refusal of a permanent stay, although one judge, Justice Ashley, would have stayed the case until further order.
George Halvagis said he was devastated. "The system is putting us on trial and nobody else," he told Neos Kosmos. "The only thing I know is that for the last 12 years we've been in a morass and who knows what's going to happen now."
Dupas took the stay question to the High Court of Australia. He argued that the publicity about the Halvagis charge, and about his two earlier murder convictions, had caused prejudice so deep that no trial could be fair. The appeal was heard by all seven justices: Chief Justice French and Justices Gummow, Hayne, Heydon, Crennan, Kiefel and Bell. C. B. Boyce and L. C. Carter, instructed by Victoria Legal Aid, appeared for Dupas; J. D. McArdle QC and B. L. Sonnet appeared for the Crown.
On April 15, 2010, the High Court dismissed the appeal. The decision, Dupas v The Queen [2010] HCA 20, dealt with whether the publicity had caused irremediable prejudice, whether a trial judge could cure the feared unfairness with thorough and appropriate directions to the jury, the court's power to prevent an abuse of process, and the public interest in bringing an accused person to trial. The case went back for retrial.
The retrial began in the Supreme Court in late October 2010. Dupas again pleaded not guilty. The jury heard that he had been convicted in 2000 of the murder of Nicole Patterson and in 2004 of the murder of Margaret Maher. His barrister, Graham Thomas SC, urged the jurors to decide the case on its evidence and not to assume that "if it happened once it could happen again."
After three and a half days of deliberation, the jury found him guilty in November 2010. He showed no emotion as the foreman read the verdict, Neos Kosmos reported. Christina and George Halvagis were in court.
Justice Elizabeth Hollingworth sentenced him to a third life term without a minimum term. She said he had attacked Mersina "suddenly and savagely" with a knife, that he had probably gone to the cemetery looking for an easy target, and that she had been "simply in the wrong place at the wrong time." She found that he had shown no remorse and had no prospects of rehabilitation, and said he appeared to be driven by a "deeply entrenched perverted and sadistic" hatred of women. Family members hugged outside the court afterward. In a victim impact statement, Nick Halvagis told Dupas to go away and never be heard of again.
Dupas appealed again. In early 2011 he asked Victoria Legal Aid to fund the appeal, and George Halvagis wrote an open letter to the Premier, Ted Baillieu. "As one father to another I ask you to help us," he wrote, saying the family was tired of watching Dupas use the system to drag the case out. Baillieu asked the Attorney-General to have the Victorian Government Solicitor work with the Office of Public Prosecutions to speed up the appeal.
By late 2011 Dupas had faced 33 legal proceedings since 1997, at an estimated cost of more than three million dollars, Neos Kosmos reported. Victoria Legal Aid refused to fund the new appeal, and an independent review upheld its decision. Dupas told the Court of Appeal he had learned of the refusal only four days before a hearing on an application to strike his appeal out. Chief Justice Marilyn Warren called the delay in telling him "unfortunate" and gave him until December 14 to find a barrister who would act without fee, warning that otherwise he should be ready to argue the appeal himself. The Melbourne defense lawyer John Desmond agreed to act for him pro bono, and the Chief Justice gave Desmond until January 30 to seek leave to appeal and file grounds. Premier Baillieu and Attorney-General Robert Clark said they would not rule out changes to the law in light of the long appeal process, and that they understood the Halvagis family's frustration.
In October 2012, while the appeal was pending, Dupas went to the Supreme Court to stop the Seven Network from broadcasting two episodes of the drama series Killing Time, which was based on Andrew Fraser's life and included a character based on Dupas. His lawyer argued that the episodes could harm a retrial if the appeal succeeded. Justice Emilios Kyrou refused the order, finding that what the episodes portrayed was already public, and later ordered Dupas to pay the network's costs for the hearing, saying he had "acted unreasonably" in refusing the network's earlier offer to end the case without costs. George Halvagis said Dupas "seems to have all the rights."
In December 2012 a five-judge bench of the Court of Appeal unanimously rejected the appeal. "Finally Mersina can lay to rest and we can get on with our lives," Bill Halvagis said. In February 2013 Dupas's lawyers said he would not seek leave to appeal to the High Court. "It is a relief that he's not going anywhere, and that he's not going to be bothering my family anymore," George Halvagis said.
The 2012 decision, reported as Dupas v The Queen (2012) 40 VR 182, dealt with how a trial judge should weigh the reliability of identification evidence before admitting it. Legal scholars have cited it as an example of the Victorian approach, before the High Court's 2016 decision in IMM v The Queen, of taking credibility into account when assessing the probative value of evidence.
The million-dollar reward offered for the Halvagis case had been claimed after the first trial by Fraser and others, but payment was put on hold while the appeals ran. After the December 2012 decision the applications were expected to go to the Chief Commissioner of Police, Ken Lay. Asked about Fraser, Bill Halvagis said: "He did his part." In early 2013 Fraser, who had spine cancer, said he believed police resentment had stalled the process. Asked in July 2013 whether he had received any of the money, he would neither confirm nor deny it: "Assume nothing in this world except debt and income tax."
In February 2018, ABC News reported that Dupas had been charged with the murder of Kathleen Downes. The Office of Public Prosecutions filed a direct indictment, so the case went to the Supreme Court without a committal hearing. Victoria Police Chief Commissioner Graham Ashton said: "We've been trying to bring justice to the victim for some time." Dupas appeared by video link on March 14, 2018, and a trial date was set for January 30, 2019.
The case was soon back in court for a different reason. On March 20, 2018, Justice Lex Lasry heard argument over words spoken on air by the Seven Network newsreader Peter Mitchell about the coming trial, which were not in his script and which could not be reported. The network's barrister made what he called a sincere and genuine apology and asked the judge not to refer the matter to prosecutors for contempt. Justice Lasry said it was "bleeding obvious" the words should not have been broadcast. John Desmond, again acting for Dupas, called them highly reckless.
The trial was later listed for October 2019. Before it began, prosecutors discontinued the case because Andrew Fraser, the key witness, was too unwell to give evidence or to face cross-examination; reports of the decision were published on October 8, 2019. Justice Peter Almond told the court that the discontinuance was not an acquittal and that Dupas could be indicted again on the murder charge at any time. He also lifted the suppression orders that had prevented reporting on the case. Dupas, appearing by video link, did not react.
Jodi Downes, Kathleen's granddaughter, said the family was disappointed but understood the decision, and thanked police and prosecutors. George Halvagis was also in court. He said he felt very sorry for the Downes family that they had waited so long for justice, and that he wanted every victim to get it.
The Downes death had been the subject of an inquest. In 2015 Coroner Ian Gray found: "I am satisfied that the death of Mrs Kathleen Gladwyn Downes was a result of the actions of Mr Peter Dupas." The finding was kept secret by an order meant to protect any future trial. It was released in July 2020, after the order was lifted. Fraser's evidence was central to it. At the inquest he testified that Dupas had referred to "the old sheila, Downes," and had said he left no forensic evidence behind.
A coroner's finding is not a criminal conviction. Dupas has never been tried for Kathleen Downes's death, and the charge, though discontinued, could legally be brought again.
Dupas has been reported as a suspect in other killings of women in Victoria. None has led to a charge.
Helen Victoria McMahon, 48, of Rosebud, was found dead at about 3:30 p.m. on February 13, 1985, at the Rye back beach near Dundas Street, Rye. Police believe she had driven to a car park on Dundas Street and walked to the beach to sunbathe. She died of head injuries. In June 2015 Victoria Police announced a reward of up to one million dollars for information leading to a conviction. The police reward page does not name any suspect. AAP has reported that Dupas is a suspect in her death.
Renita Brunton was killed in Sunbury, Victoria, in 1993, AAP reported, naming Dupas as a suspect in her death as well. No further detail of that case was reported.
Neos Kosmos reported in 2011 that he remained a suspect in three other murders. No court has ruled on any of these deaths, and Dupas has not been charged with any of them.
In July 2020 Dupas was serving three sentences of life imprisonment with no minimum term, for the murders of Nicole Patterson, Margaret Maher and Mersina Halvagis, and news reports described him as never to be released.
Proven by final judgment: the murders of Margaret Maher (October 1997), Mersina Halvagis (November 1, 1997) and Nicole Patterson (April 1999). Leave to appeal was refused in the Patterson and Maher cases; the Halvagis conviction stands after a retrial, a High Court appeal on the stay and a second Court of Appeal decision.
Charged but never tried: the murder of Kathleen Downes. The charge was discontinued in 2019 and was expressly not an acquittal. The coroner's 2015 finding attributes her death to him; that is a coronial finding, not a conviction.
Suspected, never charged: the deaths of Helen McMahon in 1985 and Renita Brunton in 1993, and other unsolved cases reported in general terms.
Accounts differ on the date of the Halvagis killing (November 1, 1997 in the High Court and most reports; one 2014 Neos Kosmos article gives November 8, and 2009 and 2010 Neos Kosmos articles give the year as 1998); the time Kathleen Downes was found (6:20 a.m. according to Victoria Police and ABC News; 6:30 a.m. according to AAP in 2019; 6:40 a.m. in a 2019 Neos Kosmos report); the window used (a wind-out window, ABC News; a rear window, Victoria Police; a kitchen window, AAP in 2020); and the spelling of Nicole Patterson's first name (Nicola in a 2020 AAP report).
1972: the start of the criminal history noted by his 2010 sentencing judge.
1974: convicted of rape and sentenced to nine years; serves five.
1980: sentenced with a five-year minimum for three counts of assault with intent to rape and malicious wounding.
February 1985: released from prison.
February 13, 1985: Helen McMahon, 48, is found dead at Rye back beach (unsolved; he is reported as a suspect).
1993: Renita Brunton is killed in Sunbury (unsolved; he is reported as a suspect).
October 1997: Margaret Maher, 40, is killed; her body is found in Somerton.
November 1, 1997: Mersina Halvagis, 25, is killed at Fawkner Cemetery.
December 31, 1997: Kathleen Downes, 95, is killed at Brunswick Lodge.
April 1999: Nicole Patterson is killed at her home in Northcote.
August 2000: convicted of the Patterson murder; life with no minimum term.
December 2000: Victoria Police offer a 100,000-dollar reward in the Downes case.
2001: Andrew Fraser pleads guilty to a cocaine importation offense and is jailed; Dupas becomes a suspect in the Downes case.
August 2004: convicted of the Maher murder; life with no minimum term.
2005: the Halvagis reward is raised to one million dollars; inquest into her death; Dupas and Fraser are held together at Port Phillip Prison.
July 3, 2007: Justice Cummins refuses a permanent stay of the Halvagis trial.
August 9, 2007: convicted of the Halvagis murder; life with no minimum term.
September 2007: lodges an application for leave to appeal.
September 2009: the Court of Appeal quashes the conviction, two to one, and orders a retrial.
April 15, 2010: the High Court of Australia dismisses his appeal seeking a permanent stay.
Late October 2010: the retrial begins.
November 2010: convicted again; Justice Hollingworth imposes a third life term with no minimum.
March 2011: George Halvagis writes to Premier Ted Baillieu.
December 2011: Victoria Legal Aid refuses funding; John Desmond agrees to act pro bono.
October 2012: Justice Kyrou refuses to stop the broadcast of Killing Time.
December 2012: a five-judge Court of Appeal bench rejects his second appeal.
February 2013: his lawyers say he will not seek a High Court appeal.
2013: police question him about the Downes case.
2015: Coroner Ian Gray finds that Kathleen Downes died as a result of his actions (finding suppressed); Victoria Police announce a reward in the McMahon case.
February 2018: charged with the murder of Kathleen Downes.
March 14, 2018: appears in the Supreme Court by video link.
March 20, 2018: hearing before Justice Lasry over a Seven Network broadcast.
October 2019: the Downes prosecution is discontinued; Justice Almond says it is not an acquittal.
July 2020: the coroner's 2015 finding is made public.