Paul Denyer: The Frankston Serial Killer

Closing In

Paul Denyer's yellow Toyota

Back at the police station, detectives fed the registration number into their computer. It matched up with a report from a postman who had spotted a man slumped in a suspicious position, as if to avoid being seen, in the front seat of a yellow Toyota Corona. A quick check through the computer also revealed that the same car had been spotted in the vicinity where Debbie Fream's body had been found. Three sightings of the one vehicle were just too much of a coincidence.

The car was registered to a Paul Charles Denyer who wasn't home when detectives Mick Hughes and Charlie Bezzina called at his address at 3.40 p.m. They left a card under the door asking him to contact them as soon as he arrived home. At 5.15 p.m. the detectives received a call from a Sharon Johnson and, so as not to frighten Denyer away, she was told that it was merely a 'routine inquiry' and that they were interviewing everyone in the district. Within 10 minutes, a team of detectives, headed by Mick Hughes, Rod Wilson and CIB Detective Darren O'Loughlin, converged at the block of flats at 186 Frankston-Dandenong Road.

Paul Denyer answered the door and commented that he was surprised to see so many detectives for just a routine inquiry, but he cheerily let them in. He explained that while his car had no plates he had a permit to drive it for 28 days while he made necessary repairs to have it registered.

As Denyer explained his whereabouts at the time of the murders, the detectives noticed that his hands were cut in several places. From one cut, the skin was missing and they mentally noted that the missing piece would have resembled that which was found on Natalie Russell's body.

Although he admitted to being in the vicinity of two of the murders at the time they were believed to have taken place, Denyer steadfastly denied any knowledge of the killings other than what he had read in the papers. He offered weak excuses for being at the murder scenes, saying that his car had broken down near the place where Natalie Russell was murdered and that he was waiting to pick up his girlfriend from the train on the other occasion. He explained the scratches away by saying that he got his hands caught in the fan while working underneath the bonnet of the car.

But there was no fooling the seasoned detectives. They knew they had their man and that it was only a matter of time before he would crack. Taken to Frankston police station and questioned in an interrogation room while being videorecorded, Denyer maintained his innocence through to the early hours of the following morning. But he knew his number was up when police asked for a blood sample and a sample of his hair and told him that a DNA test would match him to anything on his victim that came from him.

Denyer asked some questions about how long the DNA results would take and whether or not the police had something with which to compare his DNA. Then he thought for a bit and, out of the blue, volunteered, "Okay, I killed all three of them," to Detective Darren O'Loughlin.