Murderous Peter Dupas an 'infamous icon of evil'

PETER Dupas's lawyer told a Supreme Court judge during his last trial his client had reached the status of "some infamous icon of evil".

Peter Dupas. Picture: Trevor Pinder

PETER Dupas's lawyer told a Supreme Court judge during his last trial his client had reached the status of "some infamous icon of evil".

Dupas’s appearance has changed dramatically for this latest trial.

He has lost a lot of weight and now sports a buzz cut.

What hasn’t changed is his lack of conscience and personality, and his notoriety worldwide.

David Drake, his publicly funded barrister in that trial in 2007, told the judge during a pre-trial hearing that when he typed Dupas's name into his internet search engine it showed 78,000 hits.

Mr Drake's junior counsel, Mark Regan, quoted a US website that described Dupas as "a predatory sex monster of the worst kind, a cruel and calculating fiend who meticulously went about his depravity and could then melt into a crowd in a heartbeat".

Mr Regan told Justice Philip Cummins the Wikipedia entry on Dupas was "breathtakingly detailed" and included a list of his convictions.

The two lawyers argued Dupas had reached such a level of infamy he could not get a fair trial over the murder of Mersina Halvagis.

Justice Cummins disagreed, and after almost 10 years of torment and delay a grieving family yesterday finally heard the verdict that will hopefully bring them some peace.

It was the third time a jury has found Dupas guilty of stabbing a woman to death.

Police believe he is guilty of murdering at least another three women, but no charges have yet been laid.

Andrew Fraser, the disgraced criminal lawyer who became a key witness against Dupas in the Halvagis trial, described him to police as "probably the most dangerous and unpredictable person I have ever met".

Fraser said Dupas was "quite spooky, very quiet and you have no idea what he is thinking". That was certainly the case throughout Dupas's four-week trial.

The serial killer never showed a flicker of emotion.

When the crime-scene video recorded at Fawkner Cemetery the morning after the murder was shown to the jury, with Ms Halvagis's lifeless body still lying near her grandmother's grave, his eyes never left the screen.

But he didn't watch a video replay of his prison cell confession, as described by Fraser.

Twice, the Halvagis family was subjected to the macabre "pantomime" starring Fraser, as he played the roles of both victim and villain.

The first time, without a jury during the pre-trial hearing, the family had little warning as Fraser stepped out of the witness box and removed his pinstriped suit jacket to demonstrate how Dupas plunged a knife into Ms Halvagis in 1997.

Ms Halvagis's parents, sister and two brothers then saw the same display during Fraser's evidence at the trial.

Dupas's razor-sharp killing knife has never been found.

Nor has a pathologist's knife he is suspected of using to mutilate the bodies of two elderly women in a hospital mortuary in 1969, when he was only 16.

Dupas had already used a knife on his first known victim - a neighbour - a year earlier.

The removal of the elderly women's breasts was a feature that was to be seen again almost 30 years later in two murders committed by Dupas.

Expert evidence in those trials, over the deaths of Margaret Maher and Nicole Patterson, was that there were no other known cases in Australia where breasts had been removed.

Dupas's killing jacket - the one he wore when he stabbed Ms Patterson in her Northcote home in 1999, was an exhibit in the Halvagis trial.

The jury was invited to study the ripped right pocket, which was mentioned to police by a woman who said she saw Dupas at the cemetery the day Ms Halvagis was killed.

Jurors were told that the 20 or 30 holes cut out of the jacket had been removed for chemical testing - not that they had been spattered with Ms Patterson's blood.

Nor were they told about phone calls that could have been a clue to Dupas's motives but were considered not relevant enough to be admitted as evidence in any of his murder trials.

While Dupas's de facto was away overseas between September 1997 and January 1998 he rang 29 numbers for escort agencies, massage parlours and personal contact ads.

The night before Ms Halvagis was killed, the phone at Dupas's Pascoe Vale home was used to call three escort agencies. The day she died, Dupas's number contacted a phone sex service at 12.45pm.

At 5.14pm - little more than an hour after Ms Halvagis was slaughtered - there was another call from his phone to the sex service.

Both calls lasted only 13 seconds and were probably not answered, but they may provide an insight into Dupas's state of mind.

Ms Halvagis was murdered four weeks after the death of Margaret Maher, a sex worker whose mutilated body was found in long grass at Somerton on October 4, 1997.

None of Dupas's three trials heard the phone sex service operator's account of a call she received in 1997 from a scary man who referred to his mother as "the bitch".

She told police the man talked about pressing on a woman's neck and sounded sexually aroused when he said he "cut down and around the breast" and across the nipple - injuries almost identical to those suffered by Ms Maher.

Police are almost certain Dupas's depravity during his partner's absence was not restricted to the slaying of Ms Maher and Ms Halvagis.

They believe eight weeks after he killed Ms Halvagis, Dupas stabbed Kathleen Downes, 95, in the neck at a Brunswick nursing home.

Circumstantial evidence linking Dupas to the crime includes unexplained phone calls from his Pascoe Vale home to the nursing home just before the murder.

Mrs Downes was killed on New Year's Eve, the same day several years earlier that Dupas was dumped by his wife – an older woman who worked in a nursing home.

Chillingly, Dupas's 1997 series of killings could have been even worse.

In between killing Ms Maher and Ms Halvagis, the name Peter Dupas was recorded in the sign-in book at the Glenroy-Broadmeadows branch of Parents Without Partners.