Never to be released: Victoria’s most evil prisoners unmasked
Life with no parole is a sentence handed to Victoria’s most depraved criminals. Meet the monsters doomed to die in jail. LISTEN TO THE LIFE AND CRIMES PODCAST
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There is no light at the end of the tunnel for these monsters, whose heinous crimes will leave them rotting in jail cells until they die.
All of them have effectively been thrown away by Victoria’s justice system, deemed beyond rehabilitation and any redemption for their criminal misdeeds.
Leslie Alfred Camilleri
CAMILLERI has a penchant for kidnapping, raping and murdering teenage girls.
Although he’s yet to admit it, police believe his third victim was murdered as payback for convictions meted out over the Russell Street bombing in 1986.
Bega schoolgirls Lauren Barry, 14, and Nichole Collins, 16, were snatched from a roadside near Bega, NSW, on October 3, 1997.
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Police say the pair was raped repeatedly by Camilleri and accomplice Lindsay Hoani Beckett over a period of about 12 hours before they were driven to Fiddlers Green Creek, in remote bush just inside the Victorian border near Cann River in east Gippsland.
Beckett, acting on Camilleri’s orders, murdered the girls.
Nichole was stabbed to death by the creek.
Lauren’s neck was slashed with a knife, then her neck and chest were stabbed while she was tied to a tree.
Lauren did not die immediately, and was kicked, punched and stood on by Beckett as she bled to death.
The pair drove north to a lookout near Canberra, where they burned their blood- stained clothes, ropes and gags used in the crime, then threw their knives from Canberra’s Commonwealth Avenue bridge into Lake Burley Griffin.
Related: Killer Camilleri denies prison sex claim
ACT Police divers found one.
Between them, Camilleri and Beckett had more than 200 criminal convictions.
Camilleri’s first murder had occurred five years earlier but it took years for the law to catch up.
Prudence Bird was abducted from her home in Justin Avenue, Glenroy, on February 2, 1992.
Prue was the step-granddaughter of Paul Hetzel, an armed robber who befriended Russell Street bomber Stan Taylor in Pentridge and, on the outside, was later introduced to co-conspirators in the bombing in April 1986, which killed police constable Angela Taylor and injured more than 20 others.
Hetzel grassed on the conspirators before he could be implicated in the crime and during the trial, Hetzel’s partner Jenny Finlay said bomber Craig Minogue had threatened harm if Hetzel became a Crown witness.
Camilleri, long a suspect in the crime, admitted his part in 2011 but said he acted alone.
He said he randomly abducted Prue, who died accidentally while lying hogtied in the back of his car.
Police believe two other men including now deceased drug dealer Mark McConville were involved and that Camilleri was acting on the orders of Craig Minogue, with whom he and McConville were linked.
They believe Prue was locked in a shed in Doncaster Street, Ascot Vale, for days and was sexually assaulted before she was killed.
Her body was never found despite a search of a Frankston tip where Camilleri claimed he dumped Prue’s body along with the dismembered body of a man who had molested him as a child, and another search of Flat Rock Creek, near Cann River.
In sentencing Camilleri for an additional 28 years, Justice Elizabeth Curtain said she did not believe Camilleri’s version of events and that she was satisfied that Camilleri and McConville were both involved.
John Leslie Coombes
COOMBES was a triple loser — convicted of two murders, he was released twice to commit a third.
But he won’t get another chance outside.
He already had a long criminal history when he was convicted over the November 1984 murder of associate Henry Raymond Kells, who he stabbed to death in Kells’ Chelsea home.
He was paroled in 1996 despite escaping from prison during his sentence but was arrested only two months later for the February 1984 murder of Michael Peter Speirani.
He lured Speirani onto a boat, stabbed him and dumped the body at sea. There was evidence a boat propeller was applied to the victim’s body.
In 1998, Coombes was sentenced to minimum 10 years in jail, but was released again in February 2007.
He saved his worst for last, stabbing his partner Raechel Betts, 27, following an argument in bed in her friend Nichole Godfrey’s Phillip Island home in August 2009.
Coombes, then 54, dismembered her body in the bathroom as Godfrey waited in an adjoining bedroom and blocked her ears, then he dumped the bags from a pier.
The investigation began when one of Ms Betts’ legs, which had a distinctive tattoo, washed ashore.
More: Coombes freed to kill again and again
After repeated denials, Coombes pleaded guilty to the crime in May 2011.
“It passes understanding that a sane human being could hack up and destroy the body of another as if, to use your own words, she were just a lump of meat,” Justice Geoffrey Nettle said in sentencing Coombes to life in jail with no parole.
Godfrey, who started a sexual relationship with Coombes almost immediately after the murder, was later convicted of attempting to pervert the course of justice for providing false alibis for Coombes.
She received a suspended sentence for assisting police.
Ashley Mervyn Coulston
IT’S still not clear why Ashley Coulston executed three university students in their Burwood share house.
Coulston, 35 at the time of the murders in July 1992, went to the house, where the tenants were advertising a room for rent.
He gagged students Kerryn Henstridge, 22, Anne Smerdon, 22, and Peter Dempsey, 27, tying their hands behind their backs with cable ties before covering their heads with dressing gowns and towels and shooting each in the head.
Related: Triple-killer Coulston picked victims at random
But it was another crime — an attempted abduction and armed robbery of a couple near the National Gallery of Victoria in St Kilda Road in September 1992 — that nailed Coulston.
Coulston tried to snatch the pair from the street but was overpowered while using cable ties just like the ones he’d used in Burwood to restrain one of the pair.
When one of the couple broke free and raised the alarm with security guards nearby, Coulston fled.
The guards gave chase. He fired his gun — the same one used in the Burwood murders — and struck one of the guards in the hip.
Coulston was arrested by police a short distance away.
He was later sentenced to three consecutive life sentences without parole, with an additional seven years for the St Kilda Road incident.
In sentencing, Justice Norman O’Bryan said of the murders: “In the annals of crime, the Burwood murders will be remembered as one of the most heinous multiple killings in this state.
“Your motivation is obscure, but the evidence points most obviously to robbery and sexual gratification.”
Peter Norris Dupas
SERIAL killer Peter Dupas will never be released after the murder and mutilation of three Melbourne women — but police fear more women may have fallen victim to the depraved killer.
The murders followed three separate jail sentences between 1974 and 1985 for a series of rapes he committed — the last just four days after he was released from jail — and another sentence for false imprisonment of a woman in a toilet block at Lake Eppalock, near Bendigo, in 1994.
The first of his victims that are known to police was sex worker Margaret Maher, 40, whose mutilated body was found dumped by a Somerton roadside on October 4, 1997.
Almost a month later, on November 1, he stabbed to death 25-year- old Mersina Halvagis as she tended her grandmother’s grave, dumping her body in an open grave just three plots away.
She had been stabbed 87 times and was attacked from behind.
On April 19, 1999, Dupas murdered and badly mutilated psychotherapist Nicole Patterson, 28, in her home in Harper Street, Northcote.
Her body was found naked from the waist down with multiple stab wounds in her chest and back.
Dupas was arrested three days later, with phone calls and evidence inside his Pascoe Vale house implicating him in the crime.
More: Peter Dupas is the beast who roamed free
He was jailed for life without parole in 2000 for Nicole’s murder and again in 2004 for Margaret’s.
His appeals against both sentences were dismissed.
A 2006 coronial inquest into Ms Halvagis’ murder yielded evidence from nine witnesses who saw Dupas at Fawkner Cemetery on the day of the murder.
Police charged him with the murder on August 1, causing the inquest to be suspended before final findings were released.
Dupas was convicted again in August 2007.
In part, the result in Mersina’s case was based on testimony from lawyer-turned-drug trafficker Andrew Fraser, who gave evidence that Dupas had confessed the crime to him while they were inmates at the Fulham Correctional Centre near Sale in 2002.
Dupas’ lawyers appealed successfully for a retrial, but the original sentence of a third term of life in prison without parole was restored in November 2010.
There is speculation Dupas may be responsible for three other murders; Helen McDougall, found bludgeoned to death at Rye in February 1985, where Dupas was living on a prerelease prison program; Renita Brunton at Sunbury in 1993, and Kathleen Downes, 95, killed at a Brunswick nursing home on New Year’s Eve, 1997.
Bandali Michael Debs
DEBS was already sentenced to life without parole for the murders of Sergeant Gary Silk and Senior Constable Rodney Miller, but his DNA also linked him to the extraordinarily callous unsolved murders of sex workers Kristy Harty and Donna Anne Hicks.
Debs and accomplice Jason Joseph Roberts ambushed Silk and Miller, shooting them dead on August 15, 1998.
The two policemen had been on stake-out investigating armed robberies on restaurants in the southeastern suburbs when they pulled over Debs and Roberts in Cochranes Road, Moorabbin.
Police had suspected that Debs and another man committed a similar series of robberies at restaurants between 1991 and 1994, including one that left a man a paraplegic.
Related: Debs, Coulston linked to unsolved murders
Satan of suburbia: Bandali Debs pays price for sins in prison
DNA taken from Debs following his arrest and crosschecked with the Victoria Police database linked him to the murder of 18-year-old Kristy Harty, who he picked up beside the Princes Highway in Dandenong for sex on June 17, 1997.
He drove her to an isolated track in Upper Beaconsfield, had unprotected sex with her and shot her in the back of the head.
In 2010, NSW Police charged Debs with a chillingly similar crime.
The body Donna Anne Hicks was found dumped in a ditch at a Sydney quarry, shot in the head and naked except for a dog collar she had been wearing when she was last seen alive in April 22, 1995.
Debs was convicted of her murder in 2012 based on DNA evidence.
It was found Debs had picked up mother-of- three Ms Hicks, 34, beside the Great Western Highway in the western Sydney suburb of Minchinbury, had unprotected sex with her and shot her at close range in the face before dumping her body.
In sentencing him to another life term, NSW Supreme Court Justice Robert Shallcross Hulme summarised Debs’ character well.
“(The circumstances) demonstrate … a complete — I emphasise that word — lack of humanity,” he said.
Raymond John “Mr Stinky” Edmunds
EDMUNDS had never been punished for a string of heinous crimes in Victoria, but his arrest for a comparatively minor offence in NSW brought him to justice.
In March 1985, Albury police arrested Edmunds for indecent exposure.
In NSW, unlike Victoria at the time, it was compulsory for police to fingerprint all street offenders.
The prints taken that day tied Edmunds to the murders of teenagers Garry Heywood and Abina Madill, who were murdered after attending a concert in Shepparton on February 10, 1966.
Prints were taken from the roof of the FJ Holden that Garry, a panel beater, had restored, but the find was kept secret by police.
Their badly decomposed bodies were found two weeks later at Murchison East, about 40km south of Shepparton.
Garry, 18, was shot in the head with a .22 rifle while Abina, 16, was raped and bashed to death.
At the time, Edmunds was a share farmer at Ardmona, near Shepparton.
Four years later, in June 1970, a young mother was raped in her Donvale home while her husband was out and her children slept.
It was the first of a series of similar rapes across the eastern suburbs in the 1970s; all victims were attacked while their husbands were absent and their children were threatened with harm.
It was thought the rapist stalked his victims for days to establish their vulnerabilities.
The rapist carried a butcher’s knife and stockings to bind his victims.
He was also noted for his pungent body odour, and was dubbed “Mr Stinky” by a canny subeditor at the Sunday Press.
Partial fingerprints collected at three crime scenes were built into a composite set of prints, but it wasn’t until 1982 that a Victoria Police fingerprint analyst unaware of the Shepparton murders in 1966 looked through a set of old “most wanted” prints and noticed similarities to the Mr Stinky prints.
In March 1985, Edmunds’ past caught up to him when his prints, including a distinctive scar on his little finger, caught the eye of an analyst in Sydney who had searched for the same print in the NSW database for Victorian detectives without success eight months before.
Edmunds was arrested by Victorian detectives the following day.
He was convicted in 1986 of the Shepparton double murder and five rapes.
Now 73, he will never be released.
Edmunds applied to the Victorian Supreme Court in 1994 for a minimum term to be applied to his sentence, but Justice Philip Cummins refused the application, saying: “His past history reveals a continuing violation of women”.
He is a suspect in up to 30 other crimes, including rape and murder.
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