Peter Norris Dupas was convicted of three murders in Victoria, Australia, committed between October 1997 and April 1999. He is serving three life sentences with no non-parole period, one of a very small number of Australian prisoners never given a date on which release could be considered. He has never admitted any of the killings.
He was born in Sydney on July 6, 1953, the youngest child of older parents, and grew up in the Melbourne suburb of Mount Waverley. In October 1968, at fifteen, he asked a neighbour for a knife to peel vegetables and then attacked her with it. He was assessed by psychiatrists and placed on probation.
What follows is the part of this case that Victoria has never satisfactorily answered for. Between 1973 and 1993 he was convicted of a succession of rapes and attempted rapes of women aged from fifteen to seventy-six, in Melbourne and Frankston and Ringwood and elsewhere. He received a series of sentences and was released from each. On more than one occasion he reoffended within weeks of walking out, in one instance within days. He was on parole or recently released for most of the two decades before the first killing.
Margaret Josephine Maher, forty, was killed in October 1997 and her body left in a field at Somerton, in Melbourne's north. Mersina Halvagis, twenty-five, was stabbed at the Fawkner cemetery on November 1, 1997, while she was tending her grandmother's grave. Nicole Amanda Patterson, twenty-eight, a psychotherapist, was killed at her consulting room in Northcote on April 19, 1999.
The Patterson killing is how he was caught, and it turned on paperwork rather than forensics. She had recorded an appointment in her diary with a man who had given his name as Malcolm. A scrap of paper bearing Dupas's own telephone number was recovered from the fireplace at the house. He was arrested on April 22, 1999, three days after her death, and convicted of her murder in August 2000.
The Maher conviction came in 2004, on a case that included a piece of physical evidence found much later than the killing. The Halvagis conviction, in 2007, was the most contested of the three: it rested substantially on the testimony of Andrew Fraser, a struck-off criminal lawyer who had been imprisoned alongside Dupas and said Dupas had confessed to him. That conviction was quashed on appeal in 2009 on the ground that the trial had miscarried, and secured again at a retrial in 2010, where Justice Elizabeth Hollingworth imposed a third life sentence.
A fourth case was pursued and abandoned. He was charged in 2015 with the murder of Kathleen Downes, ninety-five, killed at a Brunswick nursing home in December 1997, and the charge was dropped in October 2019 before it reached trial. He remains suspected of further killings in the same period, and the roster carries his count as three convictions against as many as six attributed. Nothing beyond the three has been established in court.
He was interviewed at length and said very little. The Halvagis family spent years pressing for the case to be brought, and Mersina Halvagis's father died before the retrial concluded. Dupas is held at Port Phillip Prison.
The reason this case is still argued about in Victoria is not the three murders but the twenty years in front of them. Every element of what he did after 1997, the knife, the mutilation, the choice of women alone in ordinary places in daylight, appears in the offences he had already been convicted of and released for. The sentencing and parole arrangements that produced those releases were the subject of sustained official criticism afterwards, and were changed.