Peter Norris Dupas: The Ordinary Monster

And Violence Begets Murder

Despite what police saw as Dupas' meticulous planning of what would be a sexual abduction, murder and concealment of the body, disappointed prosecutors told Judge Leo Hart that they did not have enough evidence to sustain a charge of attempted rape against Dupas and, unfortunately, charges would have to be reduced to the much lesser charge of false imprisonment.

It was a bitter blow to police and the prosecution. Under recently introduced Victorian legislation designed to deal more severely with serial sex offenders, they could have put Dupas away for an indefinite period where he couldn't harm any more innocent women.

But seeing as the prosecution didn't have the likelihood of getting a sexual conviction and risked the prospect of having to let Dupas get away with no conviction at all, instead, Judge Hart could only proceed with the matter presented before him, and sentenced Dupas to just three years and nine months jail with a minimum of two years and nine months after he pleaded guilty to false imprisonment.

During the proceedings the court had been told that the woman Dupas attacked and tried to abduct was still too scared to even walk down the passage from her bedroom to the toilet at night.

Dupas served the full minimum term and was released on September 29, 1996, to find his wife had left him. He got a job as a factory worker and lived for a short time in an apartment in Rose Street Brunswick. Later, he moved in with a woman, who knew nothing of his background, in Coanne Street, Pascoe Vale, near a busy Cumberland Road shopping area.

Margaret Maher

On October 4, 1997, a local prostitute and recovering heroin addict, 40-year-old Margaret Maher, who shopped at Pascoe Vale regularly, was abducted and murdered. Maher's body was found in long grass on industrial land near Cliffords Road, Somerton. Maher had been stabbed many times and her breasts had been grotesquely mutilated.

Four weeks later, on November 1, 1997, Mersina Halvagis, 25, was repeatedly stabbed and left to die between graves as she was laying flowers on the grave of her grandmother in the nearby Fawkner Cemetery. By a strange coincidence, the grave of Peter Dupas' grandfather is buried at Fawkner Cemetery, only 100 yards away from where Halvagis was murdered.

Mersina Halvagis

At 6:30 a.m. on New Year's Eve, 1997, Kathleen Downes, a frail 95-year-old who had suffered two strokes and had difficulty in walking, was found stabbed to death in her room at Brunswick Lodge nursing home, where she had lived for eight years. Detectives established that phone calls were made from Dupas' Pascoe Vale home to the Brunswick nursing home in the weeks before Mrs. Downes' death. They were unable to establish any previous link between the two addresses or any reason for the calls to have been made.

At around 6 p.m. on April 19, 1999, Rena Hoffman called on her friend Nicole Patterson at her Northcote home in Westgarth for tea. Hoffman became concerned when she couldn't get a response, so she entered the house — where Patterson worked from home as consulting psychotherapist — to find her friend dead on her consulting room floor.