The random killings that shook Melbourne
Most murder victims are killed by someone they know. But killers who strike at strangers play on our deepest fears. These are some of the random killings that shook Melbourne.
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In Australia, the majority of homicides are committed by a person known to their victim and, in many cases, within a relationship or a family.
But the murder of a person in a random attack plays on our darkest fears. These are some of Victoria’s most notorious and savage crimes.
MERSINA HALVAGIS
At 25, Mersina Halvagis had her whole life ahead of her when serial killer Peter Norris Dupas attacked her as she tended her grandmother’s grave at Fawkner Cemetery on November 1, 1997.
Her fiance discovered her body in an empty plot just three graves from her grandmother’s four days later.
Mersina had been stabbed 87 times, with wounds from her neck to her knees but concentrated on her breasts.
Dupas, who had a long history of violence and sexual violence against women and had already done significant jail time, lived nearby and was identified as a suspect during a 2006 inquest into Mersina’s unsolved murder.
The inquest was suspended when disgraced lawyer Andrew Fraser, in prison for drug offences, told police that Dupas had confessed the crime to him.
Dupas had already been convicted of two brutal mutilation murders – in 1999 for the murder of psychologist Nicole Patterson in her Northcote home in April 1999 and in 2004 for the murder of sex worker Margaret Maher in October 1997 – a month before Mersina was killed.
Dupas was sentenced in 2007 to a third life term in prison without parole. He will never be released.
AIIA MAASARWE
Israeli student Aiia Maasarwe died desperately trying to fight off her killer, Codey Herrmann.
Aiia, 21, had just left a tram in Plenty Rd, Bundoora, near La Trobe University, and phoned her sister Ruba in Israel as she walked home on the night of January 16, 2019.
Ruba had just picked up. Aiia said to her, “I didn’t expect you to answer”, then yelled in Arabic, “You piece of shit” before Ruba heard four distinct thuds.
Herrmann bludgeoned Aiia with a metal bar, raped and murdered her in nearby shrubs before fleeing.
The pair had never met, but he saw Aiia as she left the tram.
Herrmann was arrested two days later, police led to him by a trail of forensic evidence.
He pleaded guilty to Aiia’s murder in the Supreme Court and in October 2019 was jailed for 36 years with a minimum of 30.
In June 2021, prosecutors failed in their bid to ensure Herrmann is never released.
SHEREE BEASLEY
Little Sheree Beasley died at the hands of a church elder Robert Arthur Selby Lowe who snatched her from a Rosebud street as she rode her pink bicycle to the local milk bar.
Lowe, a grubby opportunist, spotted Sheree, 6, riding to the shop on June 29, 1991.
He bundled her into the back of his wagon, forced her to perform a sex act on him, then asphyxiated her.
Her decomposed body was found in a drain beside a Red Hill road three months later.
Lowe had 14 prior convictions for indecent exposure to children and witnesses reported seeing a distressed child matching Sheree’s description in a car similar to Lowe’s.
A psychotherapist Lowe began seeing in the months after the murder for marital issues, Margaret Hobbs, began to suspect he was Sheree’s killer.
So did police, who had already interviewed Lowe and began secretly recording his sessions with Hobbs (later with her permission).
He admitted murdering Sheree.
Lowe was sentenced to life in jail without parole in 1992, although he protests his innocence and last made a bid for freedom in 2014.
KYLIE MAYBURY
Another little girl on an errand was snatched by a stranger as she returned from the local shop – and it took more than 30 years to bring that evil killer to justice.
Kylie Maybury, 6, was with her mother Julie at friend Lorna Simpson’s house in Gregory Grove, Preston East, on Melbourne Cup Day 1984 when Lorna sent Kylie to buy sugar at a shop just metres away in Plenty Rd.
Kylie made the purchase but never returned.
A witness said she was driven away by a man in a Holden wagon.
Kylie’s body was found face down in a gutter in Donald St, about 2km away, about 12.45am the next day.
A man with a history of violence, dishonesty and child sex offences was interviewed and released by detectives in the days after Kylie was killed.
Gregory Keith Davies lived with his mother in the area and drove a Holden like the one seen that day.
In the aftermath of the crime, Kylie’s uncle Mark Maybury and her grandfather John Moss were both considered suspects. Mark even accused his father of the crime.
Both men were cleared but rumours dogged Mr Moss until he took his own life in October 1985.
Mark Maybury hanged himself in a Pentridge jail cell in 1987, where he was doing time for unrelated offences, leaving a suicide note claiming he murdered two paedophiles.
In the 1990s, Robert Arthur Selby Lowe was also a suspect. The cases had many similarities, and Lowe was arrested in Preston in 1984 over alleged sexual advances towards three girls just months before Kylie’s murder in a car like the one in Kylie’s case.
Police relaunched Kylie’s case on the 30th anniversary in November 2014.
Following a tip, detectives visited Davies’ home in Waterford Park, near Kilmore. He volunteered his DNA. That tied him to Kylie’s murder.
Davies, then 73, pleaded guilty to Kylie’s false imprisonment, rape and murder in May 2017.
That December, he was sentenced to 28 years’ jail, ensuring he’ll die behind bars.
JILL MEAGHER
The savage rape and murder of Irishwoman Jill Meagher, and the hunt for her killer, sparked a wave of protest over violence against women and Victoria’s parole laws.
Jill, 29, an ABC Radio producer, was returning home to husband Tom from a work function at a Sydney Rd, Brunswick bar when Adrian Ernest Bayley spoke to her in full view of a shop CCTV camera shortly before 1.45am on September 22, 2012.
Moments later, he raped and strangled Jill in a laneway just around the corner, off Hope St, and later dumped her body beside a lonely road in South Gisborne.
Jill’s disappearance sparked a widespread search and a social media campaign that led to a street march with tens of thousands of people calling for an end to violence against women.
The CCTV images helped police identify Bayley, who was arrested at his Coburg home on September 27. He led detectives to Jill’s body.
Bayley was on parole for previous sexual offences. The Victorian government moved to tighten parole laws in response.
In June 2013, Bayley was sentenced to a minimum 35 years’ jail for Jill’s rape and murder.
He unsuccessfully appealed.
In March 2015 his sentence was increased to a minimum of 43 years’ jail after he was convicted in three separate trials of three historical rapes.
BRENDAN KEILAR
Solicitor and father of three Brendan Keilar’s instinct to help a woman in trouble cost him his life in the CBD on June 18, 2007.
Former Hells Angel bikie Christopher Wayne Hudson began a drug-fuelled rampage that morning when he beat unconscious an exotic dancer outside King St nightclub Bar Code, turning on girlfriend Kaera Douglas when she tried to help the woman.
He dragged Ms Douglas by the hair along Flinders Lane. At William St about 8.20am, Mr Keilar and Dutch tourist Paul de Waard tried to intervene.
Hudson drew his pistol and shot Ms Douglas in the stomach, then shot the two men. Keilar was shot in the head and died instantly, while de Waard was critically injured but survived with upper body wounds. Ms Douglas lost a kidney.
Hudson was on the run until he surrendered to police at Wallan about 5pm on June 20 after hiding out at a Hells Angels safe house.
In May 2008, he pleaded guilty to murder and other charges, and in September that year was sentenced to a minimum 35 years in jail.
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