On October 8, 2019, in the Supreme Court of Victoria, prosecutors discontinued the case against Peter Dupas for the murder of Kathleen Downes, a ninety-five-year-old woman stabbed in her bed at a Brunswick nursing home on the last night of 1997. Their key witness, Andrew Fraser, a disgraced former lawyer and convicted drug trafficker who had served time alongside Dupas, was too ill to give evidence and face cross-examination. Justice Peter Almond told the court that the decision was not an acquittal and that Dupas could be indicted again at any time. He also lifted the suppression orders that had kept the case out of the news. Dupas was already serving three life sentences, never to be released, for killing three other women in Melbourne between October 1997 and April 1999.
Kathleen Downes was the matriarch of Brunswick Lodge, as police described her when they offered a $100,000 reward in December 2000: a dear old lady with a wonderful nature. A staff member checked on her at 12:30 a.m. on December 31, 1997. Another found her body at 6:20 a.m. She had been stabbed three times in the neck and her throat had been cut. Whoever killed her had cut the chain of a wind-out window with bolt cutters, slit the flyscreen and stacked milk crates to climb in. No weapon was found and no identifiable fingerprints were left. Investigators later learned that Dupas had telephoned the nursing home some time before the killing. The case sat unsolved for two decades before he was charged in February 2018. Her granddaughter, Jodi Downes, was in court when it ended, and said the family was disappointed but understood.
By the time Kathleen Downes died, Dupas had been attacking women for nearly thirty years. He was born in Sydney on July 6, 1953, the youngest of three children in what was described as a fairly normal family, and moved to Melbourne as a toddler. His brother and sister were much older, and his aging parents raised him almost as an only child. He left school after Grade 10 and later finished his Higher School Certificate. On October 3, 1968, at fifteen, he knocked on a neighbor's door, asked to borrow a knife to peel vegetables, and stabbed her in the face, neck and hand as she fought him off. He told police he could not help himself and did not know why he had done it. He was given eighteen months' probation and spent two weeks under evaluation at Larundel Psychiatric Hospital. A year later, in October 1969, someone broke into the mortuary at the Austin Hospital and mutilated the bodies of two elderly women with a pathologist's knife; police came to believe Dupas was responsible, because a wound to one woman's thigh matched a wound on a woman he later killed. He was never charged with it.
Senior Detective Ian Armstrong interviewed him at Nunawading police station on November 30, 1973, and found him weak and compliant in front of authority and an unmitigated liar. Armstrong told The Age years later that he had thought at the time, "This guy could go all the way." On July 25, 1974, Dupas was sentenced to nine years, with a minimum of five, for breaking into a woman's home, threatening her with a knife, tying her with cord and raping her while threatening to hurt her baby. The sentencing judge called it one of the worst rapes that could be imagined. The prison psychiatrist Allen Bartholomew wrote that he was in constant denial, had a serious psychosexual problem, and was to be seen as potentially dangerous.
About two months after his release in 1979 he attacked four women in ten days, and on February 28, 1980, he was given a minimum of five years for assault with intent to rape, malicious wounding, assault with intent to rob and indecent assault. A report that year found little to say in his favor and concluded that his release on parole had been a mistake. In prison, at Pentridge, he formed a relationship with a mental health nurse, Grace McConnell, sixteen years older than he was, and they married in 1987 inside Castlemaine Gaol. She told an inquest years later that she had agreed out of a sense of responsibility, not love, and had come to think of the relationship as that of a mother and son. They divorced in the mid-1990s.
He was released again in February 1985 and within weeks, by one account four days, he followed a twenty-one-year-old woman along a beach at Blairgowrie on the Mornington Peninsula, held her down at knifepoint and raped her. "I'm sorry for what happened," he told police. "Everyone was telling me I'm OK now." On June 28, 1985, he was sentenced to twelve years, and he served seven. A few miles away at Rye, on February 13, 1985, Helen McMahon, forty-seven, had been beaten to death while sunbathing on the beach and was found naked under her towel. It was long assumed that Dupas was still in prison that day; investigators later learned that he had been out on pre-release leave and living in the area. Police believe she may have been his first murder victim. The case is officially unsolved.
Less than two years after his release in 1992 he was arrested again. In January 1994, at Lake Eppalock, wearing a hood and carrying a knife, insulation tape and handcuffs, he followed a woman who had been picnicking with friends, held her at knifepoint in a toilet block, and was chased off by her companions; he crashed his car leaving and was caught. On August 18, 1994, in the County Court at Bendigo, he pleaded guilty to false imprisonment and was given three years and nine months, with a minimum of two years and nine months. By then he had sixteen convictions for sexual violence from six court appearances between 1972 and 1994. A judge reviewing that record in 2010 called it appalling. In September 1996 he was released once more and moved into a house on Coane Street in Pascoe Vale, near Fawkner Cemetery.
Margaret Maher, forty, a sex worker, was the first woman he was convicted of killing. She was last seen alive at the Safeway supermarket in Broadmeadows at 12:20 a.m. on October 4, 1997, and her body was found at 1:45 that afternoon under a cardboard box of computer parts beside Cliffords Road in Somerton, by a man collecting aluminum cans with his wife and her sister. She had been stabbed in the left wrist and struck above the right eye with a cinder block; her left breast had been cut off and placed in her mouth. A black woolen glove lay near the body. Dupas had been out of prison for just over a year and was no longer under the supervision of Corrections Victoria.
Four weeks later, on November 1, 1997, Mersina Halvagis, twenty-five, went to Fawkner Cemetery to tend her grandmother's grave in the Greek Orthodox section. She was attacked from behind, police believe, while kneeling over a flower arrangement, and stabbed again and again, most of the wounds around her breasts; police put the count at eighty-seven. Her fiancé raised the alarm when she did not meet him as planned, and it was he who found her, in an empty plot three graves from her grandmother's. She was buried at Cheltenham Memorial Park. People at the cemetery that day had seen a man nearby, but no one could put a name to him, and the killing went uncharged for years. Kathleen Downes died eight weeks later.
Then, as far as the record shows, there was a gap of sixteen months. Nicole Patterson was twenty-eight, a psychotherapist and youth counselor with the Ardoch Youth Foundation, which worked with young drug users, and she was building a private practice from her home on Harper Street in Northcote, advertising in the Northcote Leader. Neighbors heard a young woman screaming there between 9 and 9:30 on the morning of April 19, 1999. Her boyfriend could not reach her that afternoon, and a friend who arrived for dinner found the front door unlocked, a radio playing, and Nicole's body in the front room. She had been stabbed twenty-seven times, pieces of yellow PVC tape were stuck to her, and both her breasts had been removed; they and the knife were never found. Her handbag and driver's license were gone.
Her diary held the answer. At nine that morning she had an appointment with a new client named Malcolm, with a mobile number beside the name, and the number led to a student at La Trobe University whom Dupas had approached with an offer of laboring work. Telephone records showed that Dupas had called Nicole three times in the six weeks before her death, the first from a phone booth, asking for help with depression and a gambling problem. He had scratches on his face and hand, and told police a piece of wood had flown off a lathe in his shed; he did not own a lathe. He was arrested at midday on April 22 at the Excelsior Hotel in Thomastown and charged that day. In his house police found bloodstained clothing, PVC tape like the tape on her body, a ski mask, newspaper clippings about her murder, and her advertisement. The jury took less than three hours. On August 22, 2000, Justice Frank Vincent sentenced him to life without parole and said his prospects of rehabilitation were so close to hopeless that they could be discounted, and that he presented the question "How did you come to be as you are?" His appeal was dismissed in 2001.
The Patterson conviction opened the older files. In custody, Dupas could be compelled to give DNA, and it matched the glove found by Margaret Maher. At the three-week trial the prosecution argued that the mutilation of the two women was so strikingly similar as to be a signature. The jury, which was not told he was already serving life, took less than a day, and as he was led away Dupas called it a kangaroo court. Nicole's sister, Kylie Nicholas, called him the most evil predator. On August 16, 2004, Justice Kaye sentenced him to a second life term and said he would have done so even if Patterson had never been killed, finding that his offending was driven by a perverted and sadistic hatred of women. That appeal was dismissed in 2005.
The cemetery case was the hardest to bring. The Victorian government and police offered a reward of a million dollars. At an inquest before the coroner Graeme Johnstone, nine witnesses said they had seen Dupas at the cemetery on the day of the killing; one woman picked him out of police photographs as the man she had seen twenty meters from the spot minutes before. His grandfather's grave was 128 meters from where Mersina died, he drank at the First and Last Hotel across the road, he had lied to police about a facial injury from around that time, and he had tried to change his appearance afterward. The car he had been driving was sold to a work associate the following month and crushed for scrap before detectives could examine it. The forensic pathologist David Ransom told the inquest there was not enough evidence to say the same knife or the same person had inflicted her wounds and those of the other two women, and Dupas's lawyer, David Drake, argued that the case rested on where his client lived and what he had done before.
Then Andrew Fraser came forward. He told police that in 2002, when the two men worked together in the garden at Port Phillip Prison, he found a homemade knife hidden in the weeds and showed it to Dupas, who took it, handled it strangely and began repeating "Mersina, Mersina." Police charged Dupas with her murder on September 11, 2006, and Fraser was released from Fulham Correctional Centre the same day, two months short of the end of his sentence; he later applied for the reward. The case was sent directly to trial without a committal hearing in December 2006. The first jury was discharged on July 9, 2007, because potential jurors had not been told how long the trial might last. He had been named in the press as a suspect early in the investigation, and his lawyers argued that the publicity made a fair trial impossible. The trial judge refused a permanent stay, and on August 9, 2007, a jury convicted him; the sentencing on August 27 was filmed by a single television camera. On September 17, 2009, the Court of Appeal, two judges to one, agreed that no stay was warranted but quashed the conviction because the jury directions had been inadequate. The High Court of Australia granted special leave on the stay question alone in February 2010 and dismissed that appeal in June, sending the case back to a second jury.
At the retrial, which began in late October 2010, three witnesses placed Dupas at the cemetery at or near the time of the killing. It was the coverage of the Patterson and Maher cases that had led them to recognize him. Fraser told the jury that Dupas had confessed to him while the two shared a unit at Port Phillip Prison. After three and a half days of deliberation, the jury convicted him on November 19, 2010. A week later Justice Elizabeth Hollingworth imposed a third life sentence without parole. She found no remorse and no prospect of rehabilitation, said he seemed motivated by a "deeply entrenched perverted and sadistic" hatred of women, and told the court that Mersina Halvagis had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Outside, her brother Bill Halvagis turned the phrase around: it was Dupas, he said, who had been in the wrong place, and he should not be given the right to appeal again.
The same witness was the whole of the Downes case, and when Fraser's health failed, so did the prosecution. The discontinuance leaves that killing where the law left it: charged, never tried, and open to a fresh indictment. Dupas has never admitted any of the murders. Besides Helen McMahon, he has been named as a suspect in the killing of Renata Brunton, thirty-one, who was stabbed 106 times in the kitchen of her secondhand clothing store in a Sunbury mall on November 5, 1993; the figure of as many as six killings attributed to him includes deaths no court has ruled on. He has been held at Port Phillip and at Barwon prison near Geelong, and has tried several times to kill himself. Prison staff have described him as a model prisoner inside and a monster whenever he was let out.
What Victoria has argued about since is less the three verdicts than the thirty years before them. The knife, the mutilation and the choice of women alone in ordinary places, at home, at a grave, at work, run through offenses he had already been convicted of and freed from. Each release was lawful, and each was followed by another attack. Kathleen Downes's family was left with a charge that a court declined to call an acquittal and that no one has yet brought back.