Dupas: Prime Suspect
The Age
Wednesday August 8, 2001
AFTERWARDS, the thing she could not credit was how normal he had seemed. Through the trivial chat with the glasses of lemonade, and the roast chicken dinner, and the pan-cake dessert, and his showing her the snaps from a trip to Queensland to visit his mother, through all that his manner had seemed so unremark-able.
Fleetingly, it occurred to her that the scratch on his left cheek might have been left by a fingernail, but she said nothing.
She did ask, the way she always did, whether he had told his live-in girlfriend about his past. He told her he had a new life and added: "Don't ask me again, please Sister Clare."
What Sister Clare meant was, had he told his girlfriend his criminal his-tory?
But she did not press him because he seemed upset.
What Peter Dupas had told his girlfriend was that he had been mar-ried and divorced, which was true, and that his divorce led to a break-down and time in hospital, which true to the extent that he was more familiar than most with the workings of mental hospitals.
The rest of it - the rapes and knives and balaclavas and convic-tions for loitering and peeping and threatening to do harm to babies if their mothers did not submit, and attacks on teenagers and the elderly - all that he left out.
The failed attempts to suppress his twisted sexual urges with Depo Provera, and the teenage engage-ment that lapsed when he was jailed for rape, and the refusals to admit his attacks on women while privately fantasising over them, and his resist-ance to psychiatric treatment - that he left out, too.
Had she asked about the scratch on his cheek, and the other one on his neck, he would have told her he had scratched himself on a piece of wood in his workshop. That was the story he told his other friend, a for-mer priest called Patrick O'Brien who had commented on it the day before, the Monday, when it was still fresh.
Dupas complained to O'Brien that he had not had a good day. The car alarm was acting up and then he had scratched himself on a piece of wood.
That was a half-truth too: the car alarm had been wailing intermittent-ly all morning while the Toyota Hi-Lux remained undisturbed in the driveway of the rented Pascoe Vale weatherboard. No-one was home.
Dupas had gone out shortly after his girlfriend left for work about 8am.
A neighbor saw him return, driving his girlfriend's car, a brown Mitsubishi Lancer, about 11.45am.
O'Brien arrived about an hour later. They had known each other more than 20 years, from the time Dupas was a prisoner at Ararat Prison and O'Brien was the local parish priest asked to visit Dupas on his parents' behalf.
O'Brien did not stay long - leav-ing just after 1pm on April 19, 1999.
"He seemed quite normal," the priest recalled later.
That evening a friend of Nicole Patterson would discover the 28year-old's mutilated body in her home in Northcote. She had been murdered about 9am that day.
Police analysing the scene deduced that she left her killer briefly in the front room. When she returned with coffee and two cups, he attacked, stabbing her in the chest and back 27 times. After she was dead, her body was stripped and her breasts removed.
The next evening, the Tuesday, Dupas sat down for dinner with his friend Sister Clare - a nun from the Victorian Offenders Support Agency.
On Thursday he was arrested in a Thomastown Hotel and charged with Patterson's murder.
Dupas became a suspect after tele-phone records showed 15 calls from his number to Patterson's between March 3 and April 12. He had been known to police, as they say, for 31 years and had numerous convic-tions for rape and related offences.
Patterson's diary had a notation "Malcolm 9am" and a mobile tele-phone number at the entry for April 19. Searching Dupas' property, police found several pieces of torn newspaper in the garbage bin with a note scrawled on them. Pieced together it read: "Nicci, Northcote 9.00 morning", "Malcolm" and the middle six digits of Patterson's phone number.
It was later found to be a page of the Northcote Leader on which Nicole Patterson advertised psychothera-py services. The mobile phone num-ber in her diary was found on a note on Dupas' fridge. It belonged to a university student Dupas had hired to do some laboring. In his laundry, police found a newspaper story of Patterson's murder, the photograph of her slashed across the face.
In the garage they found a bala-clava and a jacket with blood stains on the sleeve. Tests showed the blood was 6.5 billion times more likely to be Patterson's than that of someone chosen at random. Neither Patterson's severed body parts or her driver's licence were recovered. Police believe they were taken as trophies.
The day after his arrest, Sister Clare used that word again. She told police: "That's the thing I can't get over. He just seemed so normal on the night." N ormal is not the usual description for Peter Norris Dupas. Back at Waverley High School in the 1960s, if there was one word for him, it was loner, recalls classmate Stephen Howell.
"He used to try to hang around with us, but because of his nature no one wanted much to do with him," Howell says. He remembers Dupas urinating in the teachers' drinking glasses, draining them, then replac-ing them as if they were clean."
He was weird. I really believe that he had problems years back.
When I first heard many years ago he was in jail I thought he should not be in there - he should be in a psychi-atric place getting help.
"There was another word for him, one borrowed from the after-school TV sitcom, The Addams Family. It was the name of the foolish fat kid, Pugsley, and Dupas hated it."
I don't think he was teased more than anyone else, I just don't think he cottoned on to it very well," says Peter Thomas, another former class-mate.
"He used to really go off in class. He used to get razor blades out and take swipes at us - that was in form 2 . . . He was a pretty emotional kid. He had no set friends." Academically, he was mediocre.
Socially, he was almost invisible. He disappeared from the school for two weeks at the end of 1968 after attack-ing a female neighbor. Warren Buswell, a classmate who knew him as "more or less a friend", says he did not even realise Dupas was out of the school.
After the attack he was admitted to Larundel psychiatric hospital, where he told Dr Julie Jones a pathetic story - how his best friend Graham had left the neighborhood without telling him. The story is another half truth. Graham, who asked that his last name not be published, says that he told all his classmates he was leaving school to find a job, and that he kept in touch with Dupas for a couple of years.
Graham remembers Dupas as "different". He was the kid who dropped his pen to peep up the girls' dresses and made a show of groping a young teacher's breast in a crowded hallway. "He was picked on a bit at school because he was overweight," Graham says. "He did have some very strange tempers. I have seen him lose his temper and punch a brick wall until his knuckles would bleed." Dupas' parents adored him, Graham says. Yet even at home he was, in a sense, isolated. Dupas was George and Merle Dupas' third child, born in Sydney in July, 1953, 11 years younger than his brother and nine years junior to his sister.
A member of the extended Dupas family said the couple had separated and Peter was conceived after they reconciled, but the marriage remained tense. George Dupas was a hard, demanding man and led his family into a nomadic existence as he bought and sold a series of small businesses.
He built a home and poultry sheds in Langwarrin and enrolled his young son at Lyndhurst South Primary. Though the school had only 34 students, a former teacher and several fellow students have no memory of him. It seems he was unattached even then.
The nomadic lifestyle resumed when the family headed to Queensland for an extended holiday in July, 1964, and Peter Dupas missed much of the final year of primary school. When they returned, the Dupases moved into Bradstreet Road, Glen Waverley. "I think Peter had the best of everything," recalls a neighbor, Valda Renshaw. "He was learning the organ. He had a Gerry Gee doll and a wonderful Scalextric set of cars." She remembers the street and its adjoining courts as a quiet, amiable little community. "It was such a shock when he attacked 'Barbara'." It was early October, 1968. Five weeks earlier, Barbara had her first child. "We were young marrieds, new to the area," Barbara says. "We were good neighbors (with the Dupases).
We used to visit their place to play cards." Young Peter Dupas knocked at the back door of the house and asked for a knife to peel potatoes. As he was about to leave, he knocked Barbara to the floor, falling on her and jabbing with the knife. She fend-ed him off. She grabbed the blade but he slashed her hands and face.
When he could not get a clear lunge at her with the knife he grabbed her hair and banged her head on the floor. He told her: "I can't stop now, they'll lock me up." But suddenly it was over. She was breathless and shocked. He was crying and docile.
"The (Dupas) family effectively did not believe it," Renshaw says.
"Right from the beginning they tried to cover it up, which we thought was the wrong way."
He seemed to have a thing about young married women with babies." Almost opposite the Dupas house was Amesbury Court. A woman there, a young mother, told Renshaw that Dupas hung about watching her.
"She was convinced he rang her a few times," Renshaw says.
But if Dupas had a problem with young married mothers, he was apparently comfortable with mater-nal figures generally. In his late teens, when the Dupases had a beach house on the Mornington Peninsula, they spent time with another family.
When everyone else went fishing, Dupas would stay behind with the mother from the other family. Just the two of them, the woman's son remembers, sometimes for hours.
After the attack on Barbara, Dupas was admitted to Larundel psychiatric hospital where Dr Jones observed that he appeared "to have been over-protected by his mother and thus developed a rather timid approach to people." And then the fall into ever-deep-ening depravity began. In March, 1972, he was caught peeping at a woman through her bedroom win-dow.
In November, 1973, feigning car trouble, he knocked on the door of a house in Mitcham and asked the woman who answered for a screw-driver.
She had her 18-month-old baby in her arms when she returned.
He produced a knife, threatened to harm her baby, bound her feet and hands, slapped her, bit her breast and raped her.
While waiting to face court on the rape charge he was caught watching women shower at the McCrae cara-van park. Dupas was admitted to Larundel for six weeks where a psy-chiatrist, P. J. Shannon, noted that attempts to get him to talk about himself failed. "He persistently denied he had any problems."
UNDERLYING our penal system is the presumption that wrong doers can be reformed and that their punishment should not destroy all hope. So the promise of parole is held out as much to foster a compliant prison population as it is to reward good behavior. Through human error and the presumption of reform, Peter Dupas made the most of this generosity.
Following his first rape conviction in July, 1974, he was jailed for nine years, with a minimum of five years before parole. He was released in September, 1979, just two years after finally admitting guilt.
In July, 1977, a prison officer at Ararat observed that while he no longer denied the rape, he "still seems to have no understanding or insight into his emotions and psy-chological processes which precipi-tated the offence . . . it is very likely that (treatment) will be ineffective." Yet, two years later, he was out.
His release was a mistake, his parole officer conceded after Dupas had raped again. The officer, Wal Solowiej, added that another parole in future was "simply out of the question" unless Dupas made monu-mental progress psychologically. His warning was ignored.
Dupas was 26 but was like "a scared little boy", according to Solowiej. Usually you can look at a prisoner and see them doing the thing of which they were convicted, recalls Solowiej, who spent 27 years in the parole service. Not so with defer-ential, apparently harmless Dupas.
But he was perplexed by Dupas' high anxiety - "to the point that he shakes".
"My general approach has always been, if the situation seems to war-rant it, to give the person a chance . . . It seemed he was worth taking a chance on." Dupas' parents had moved to Frankston and Peter went home, but not for long. Within two months he had accosted a woman on the Nepean Highway and raped her. He attacked three others.
Dupas was convicted of rape again in June, 1980. In a report to the County Court's Judge Lazarus, the pre-eminent forensic psychiatrist of the time, Dr Allen Bartholomew, said Dupas' condition would be very hard to treat even if he was cooperative.
Dupas used denial as a coping device. "In this case the condition may well be highly resistant to any presently used forms of treatment," Bartholomew wrote, and concluded that Dupas would remain a danger to women. This time, he was sen-tenced to a maximum of six-and-a-half years, with a minimum of five.
F ROM Gunnamatta to Cheviot, there are kilometres of wild, occasionally treach-erous, unspoiled beaches. Along here, Helen McMahon, a 47-year-old swim-ming instructor, used to sunbathe semi-naked in secluded areas among the windswept dunes.
On February 13, 1985, she was found battered to death, naked but for a towel that was placed over her.
Prison records show that Dupas was still serving his sentence when McMahon was attacked. But he was not in jail that day - he was free on pre-release leave.
He returned to jail the day after the murder and, on account of time served while awaiting trial on his second rape charge, he was released on February 27 - four years and eight months after sentencing.
Five days later he was back in custody, having this time stalked and raped a young woman at knifepoint on a beach at Rye. He was caught by friends of the victim and later told police: "I thought I was OK. Everyone was saying I am OK now." This attack, at Dimmick's Beach, was 4.6 kilometres from where Helen McMahon was killed. Dupas was interviewed by police over the mur-der but he was able to provide a loose alibi. Detectives knew he was a sex offender, but at the time they did not know he was capable of murder. The case remained dormant for 15 years.
In June, 1985, following Dupas' third rape conviction, Judge Leckie remarked that Judge Lazaras had apparently been swayed to a light sentence by psychiatric evidence suggesting he might be rehabilitated with drug treatment. Judge Leckie wasn't persuaded: he delivered a 10 year minimum.
A mental health report the next year described Dupas as an imma-ture 32-year-old acting out sadistic rape fantasies when rejected. He admitted fantasising about his crimes. There was no evidence he wanted to do anything about it.
He attempted suicide in May, 1987, and was prescribed Melleril and Depo Provera to quell his sex drive, without much success, while undergoing treatment at Mont Park.
He was out in March, 1992, less than seven years after sentencing. At that time, prisoners who behaved were granted remissions of one-third off their sentence.
Throughout his stints at Larundel, Mont Park, Pentridge and Ararat - including periods serving time alongside recidivist sex offenders - Dupas had psychotherapy and drug treatment, but it was usually aimed at managing the "reactive depres-sion" he suffered in jail rather than tackling whatever was at the core of his behavior.
In 1994, forensic psychologist Ian Joblin said Dupas was only ever hospitalised as a suicide risk. And Bartholemew observed in 1990 that: "(Dupas) really has had little or noth-ing to be termed treatment." The clinical director of the Victorian Institute of Forensic Mental Health, Professor Paul Mullen, says he doubts that Dupas was ever treated for his underlying disorder. "Dupas in prison is self-damaging, suicidal, depressed," Mullen says. "No one has ever, when he has come before the courts, sent him for treatment."
Sex offenders don't have a coher-ent and properly thought through approach for treatment. If a Mr Dupas appeared tomorrow, you can't be confident that he would be man-aged with any more effective inter-vention than the real Dupas was 20 years ago." And just what is Dupas' underlying problem? Forensic psychologist Ian Joblin said in 1994 that Dupas attacked women to fulfil fantasies of conquest, to express mastery, strength and control. "For Dupas the actual assault has not lived up to the fantasy which preceded the assault and is seen at times as disappointing," Joblin wrote. "He does not feel reassured by either his performance or his victim's response and must find another vic-tim, this time 'the right one'. Thus, his offences become repetitive." Solowiej says that prisoners with a hatred of women often had prob-lems with their mother, but in Dupas' case the big issue was his domineering father. "He might blame his mother for not protecting him from his father," Solowiej specu-lates.
"Offenders like him, as long as they have somebody to blame, they think they don't have to change." Mullen says that Dupas is typical of a type of sex offender who is inse-cure and dependant. They are angry, vindictive, clinging, easily offended and likely to lose control when rejected.
His mother wondered whether a childhood accident, when he was knocked unconsious, might be to blame. Tests show no evidence of brain damage, but reveal a mediocre intelligence.
To most of those whose path he crossed, Dupas seemed inoffensive in the extreme. Ingratiating, excessively polite, utterly harmless. He is, it seems, a loathsome mixture of self-pitying and predatory instincts, aggressive and violent, cowardly and obsequious.
On the street, he was a danger to female society. In prison, he was fearful and tremulous. It was extraor-dinary then, that in Pentridge prison's G Division, a psychiatric nurse 16 years his senior - a mother and grandmother - would decide to marry him.
Sex offenders are usually con-demned by their label. Dupas, how-ever, brought out the mothering side of staff, male or female, one staff member recalls. So capable of manipulation is he that it almost seems a gift.
The woman he married says she detected in him a "beautiful nature".
He finally moved in with his wife at Woodend, and later Kyneton, after his release in 1992. "Bart (Allen Bartholomew) always said that I was his second mother," Dupas' wife 'Mary' recalls.
"He was very dependant on me. He was more or less sooky, and always around." Late in 1993 she resumed work, and he began to sulk.
A visit from his parents deepened his distress.
"His parents came down for Christmas 1993," says Mary. "I was not there to instigate conversation or to try to enterain them. When they left he said: 'Thank goodness they've gone'. They had not reached home when he had re-offended." In fact, they had barely left for home than he was planning his next attack. Not who it would be or where. Just that it would be. He loaded knives and a balaclava into his car. He added a plastic sheet. A shovel. In his pockets, he stuffed masking tape and handcuffs. He told Mary he was going fishing.
Ballee Bay is a generous title for the clearing on the western flank of Lake Eppalock in central Victoria.
From the highway an unsealed road runs through eucalypt forest before it disappears into the hard reddish earth of the lake's shoreline. The lake seems to be on a plateau, so stand-ing on the cleared space at its edge there is just the water, the gum trees marking the opposite shore and the big, broad blue above.
Half-hidden in the scrub is a toilet block of dingy, grey bricks.
It was January 3, 1994. A group picnicking at Ballee Bay - two engaged couples and another young bloke, all in their 20s - ignored the middle-aged stranger who approached them.
He said "Gidday" and "It's a nice day". Nobody responded. He hung around briefly. Finally, he said "See ya", as if they'd had a real conversation, returned to his car and drove away.
About an hour later, on her way to the toilets, one of the women noticed the stranger's station wagon was back.
As she was sitting on the toilet the cubicle door pushed open. A hand and a knife appeared followed by a man, his face hidden with a balaclava.
They struggled. He was telling her to turn around, she was saying she was frightened, resisting being turned, fearing she was to be raped.
He told her repeatedly to face the wall and each time she refused while fending off the knife and feeling her hand grow wet and sticky with blood.
He dragged her from the cubicle but finally left her and returned to his car. Her friends chased him 15 kilometres, catching him when he lost control turning on to a dirt track.
The year before, new laws had been introduced demanding tougher sentencing for sex crimes. Despite his history, despite the handcuffs and tape in his pockets and the shovel in his car, the new laws were not applied to him because prosecutors felt only the relatively minor offence of false imprisonment could be sustained.
Prosecutor Tom Gyorffy told the County Court that while it was possi-ble to infer the motive behind Dupas' attack, it could not be inferred beyond reasonable doubt.
This evidently concerned Judge Hart, who asked: "Is it not a proper ques-tion for a sentencing court to ask itself: clearly, why did he do this?" Judge Hart believed that Dupas intended to commit a sexual offence, nevertheless he could sentence him only for false imprisonment. Dupas received a minimum two years and nine months, of which almost a year had already been served in cus-tody awaiting trial.
And in September, 1996, Solowiej saw him again.
By now Dupas was a vet-eran of counselling courses. "By now he would know what any-body would want to ask him. He would have the answers," Solowiej says."
What still puzzles me is that extreme anxiety.
What is that about? You would think someone with that anxiety, that they would crack eventually." Dupas did not come again to police attention until the check of Nicole Patterson's tele-phone records two-and-a-half years later. It is the longest peri-od in which he is not known to have committed some form of sex-related offence since his teenage attack on Barbara. He was living in the northern suburbs, had found a job as a general hand in a Thomastown factory and had a girlfriend.
Did he really resist his urges for two-and-a-half years? This is what the Mikado police taskforce set out to investigate. They re-examined 22 unsolved murders, and eventually ruled Dupas out of most of them.
Now they are focusing on four cases they believe may be linked to Dupas.
IN October, 1997, a year after his release and two months after he started work at a Thomastown factory, a prostitute, Margaret Maher, was murdered. Her body, muti-lated in a similar fashion to Patterson's, was found dumped by a narrow road cutting through sprawl-ing industrial estates.
Police discovered Maher had fre-quented a shopping strip in Cumberland Road, Pascoe Vale, the same area used by Dupas. Coane Street, where he lived, runs off Cumberland Road. Forensic tests have reportedly linked material found on a glove near Maher's body to Dupas.
A month later - in November, 1997 - a young woman tending her grand-mother's grave was stabbed to death in Fawkner Cemetery.
Mersina Halvagis, 25, was killed in a frenzied attack 50 metres from the grave of Dupas' grandfather.
Police have found a witness who noticed a man acting strangely at the cemetery that day. The witness' description of the man fits the chub-by, diffident Dupas.
The following month Kathleen Downes, a 95-year-old woman who had suffered two strokes, relied on a walking frame and had difficulty speaking, was stabbed to death in the Brunswick nursing home where she had lived for eight years.
On December 30, 1997, she left her door open, as always, and went to bed. At 6.30am, a staff member found her body on the floor beside the bed. Police have now uncovered a direct link between Dupas and the nursing home.
The sparse, 10th floor office in the St Kilda Road police complex occu-pied by the officers of the Mikado taskforce holds more than 50 folders concerning the murders of Helen McMahon, Margaret Maher, Mersina Halvagis and Kathleen Downes.
There are eye witnesses, forensic evi-dence and geographical links - in particular his history of offending near home.
Detectives have completed briefs of evidence and will seek legal advice on whether Dupas should be charged.
And on Monday night, they ques-tioned their suspect. Police had delayed approaching Dupas, believ-ing that once his appeal against con-viction for the killing of Patterson had failed - which it did last week - he would be at his most vulnerable.
The person who best knows Dupas, Patrick O'Brien, had thought that Dupas was rebuilding his life after his release in 1996. The killing of Patterson ended that illusion.
"I really saw him the day before, and the day of the crime, and he really did not seem any differ-ent to me, and that's the mystery," O'Brien says. "I just can't understand, assuming he did it, that he could be so normal. I believe that he believes himself inno-cent.
That's how he can function the way he does." Professor Mullen says there is nothing that explains Dupas: "His parents appear to have done their best. They did not abuse him. They didn't abandon him at the first sight of trouble.
"It never is one thing. It is always a complex combination of genetic, social, psychiatric and most awful of all, chance." Solowiej says that Dupas is one of the most deceptive people he has met, impenetrable behind an inof-fensive facade.
Despite the uncontrolled out-bursts of rage in his school years, and the attention his initial assault gener-ated, Peter Dupas later contrived to disguise himself.
He presented a vehemently pro-claimed innocence, and later, follow-ing his arrest for rape soon after his release in 1985, a sort of bemused regret: "Everyone was saying I was OK now." His girlfriend at Pascoe Vale was utterly unprepared for the discovery of what she was living with and is understood to have left Victoria. Hers is one more life diminished by Peter Dupas.
The father of his ex-fiancee, the girl who ended their engagement after his first conviction for rape all those years ago, says his daughter has nothing to say. He remarked: "Peter Dupas was two people. When he was here he was a fine young fel-low.
When he was away, he was something else.'"
On the trail of a killer . . .
1 FEBRUARY 13, 1985 Rye Ocean Beach - Helen McMahon is murdered. Dupas was out of jail on prerelease leave.
2 MARCH 3, 1985 Dimmicks Beach - Dupas rapes a 21-year-old woman and is detained near the scene.
3 OCTOBER, 1997 Cliffords Road, Somerton - Margaret Maher's body found.
4 NOVEMBER, 1997 Fawkner Cemetery - Mersina Halvagis murdered.
5 DECEMBER, 1997 Loyola Avenue, Brunswick - Kathleen Downes murdered.
6 APRIL, 1999 Harper Street, Northcote - Nicole Patterson murdered.
A Rose Street, Brunswick - Dupas' home after his release from prison in September, 1996.
B Coane Street, Pascoe Vale - Dupas' home from May, 1997, until his arrest.
C Thomastown industrial estate - Dupas worked in the area from August, 1997, to August, 1998.
© 2001 The Age
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