Killing Time (11 page)

Time continued to drag. Eventually the Chinese prisoner was moved to a country jail in preparation for being deported, so I scored the gardening job. This was great because I could be outside more and actually have something to occupy my mind apart from staring at nuts and bolts. I also took the opportunity to enrol in a horticulture course, which was strictly elementary: I knew most of it, having been interested in gardening and particularly Australian native plants most of my life. However, we were given a couple of videos to watch and Dupas and I would watch them together, always in his cell, and we would have the horticulture teacher come occasionally to teach us stuff in the garden. With the rudimentary tools and few plants provided, together with the attitude of the authorities, the kind of gardening we could do was basic to say the least.

Dupas was obsessive – not just in the garden, but about himself and his cell, which was pristine. To give you an idea of just how obsessive he was, in jail it is very hard to get hold of any proper cleaning materials, but somehow Dupas had an entire bottle of floor polish and a scrubbing brush, a small paintbrush, about a two inch brush. Every morning after his shower, he would wipe out his shower recess, which was on the same level as the floor – it was all a poured concrete floor. Then, after let-out, everyday without fail he would paint his entire floor with floor polish. He would paint his way back towards the door and would then go outside to do his gardening and leave it to dry. Also, as a matter of protocol, you never, ever barged into Dupas's cell unannounced. If you did – and I saw this with my own eyes – he would stare, shake, and threaten you.

Swearing in jail is endemic. Everybody swears, non-stop. You become completely conditioned to it. However, the first time I heard Dupas utter the word
cunt
I was absolutely dumbfounded. It sent a shiver down my spine. He spat the word out with such venom that it made me stop in my tracks, realising how much he must hate women. I have never forgotten it. So when Dupas told you to fuck off he really meant it, and you did so and you did so smartly.

After polishing his floor every day Dupas would then put a towel on the floor. To visit him, you had to follow a procedure: you would go to his cell and knock on the door. Dupas would always be sitting on his bed watching television, his hands clasped between his knees, which later became significant. He would then look around and either he would say Yes, you could come in or he would tell you to fuck off. If you were invited in, and only if you were invited in, you then took off your shoes and stepped across the threshold onto the towel – whatever you do, don't step on the floor – and then sit at the end of his bed on the edge. That was it, that was his obsessive, controlling type of behaviour.

It might seem astounding, but we were allowed out into the garden on our own, with no supervision. Here was a man who was a serial killer, whose modus operandi was killing by repeated stabbings and slashings, who was given a very wide berth by everybody in the unit (for obvious reasons), and guess what he was given every day to take out into the garden, unsupervised… A pair of secateurs! He would get these from the officer and stick them in his overalls pocket. The drill was that if you wanted the secateurs you had to ask him for them and he would hand them to you. You then gave them back to him when you had finished and he would place them back in the pocket of his overalls. They were his secateurs. Other tools were issued each time we gardened: a garden pitchfork, a mattock and a couple of shovels, all deadly weapons in the hands of somebody like Dupas. Not one officer, ever – and I mean ever – came out to supervise what we were doing in the garden. Needless to say, I kept my eyes well and truly peeled when I was out there with Dupas as it would have been very easy for him to attack me with any of these potential weapons that the authorities gave him each day.

This is significant because anything could happen in the garden, and did. On one occasion, from my cell window I watched Camilleri make a shiv out in the garden. I watched him walking around with it in his hand and I watched him secrete it in a drain pipe. I saw him go to the drain pipe the next day and retrieve the knife, then walk around with it. It was when I saw him put it back that I told the screws about what I had seen. The whole joint was locked down and the knife was located. Dupas was regularly armed with a shiv and was not once stopped by the screws and searched.

The lack of supervision didn't apply only to Port Phillip. When I was later moved to Fulham Prison near Sale, the situation was the same. I was employed for a while in the garden gang, working outside the jail, and we went for days without seeing an officer while we were doing our job. The garden gang would walk around “no-man's-land” this was between the perimeter fence of the prison and the property fence-line beyond that. They were the blokes who would collect the drugs and bring them back in. The trick was to fill a tennis ball with drugs and toss it into this area for pickup by the garden gang. There was a cursory search each afternoon. You could walk around for hours outside the jail with nobody watching. Yes, there is supposed to be electronic surveillance. But at Port Phillip, whenever there had been a drama that could have been solved if there had been CCTV footage of the incident, we were always told that the cameras weren't working. And the same applied at Fulham.

Worse than that was the “bush gang” at Fulham: the blokes who went out into the community and worked cleaning up playgrounds, building barbecue shelters and suchlike. The bush gang would pick up drugs left in a pre-determined location and bring them back into the jail. (That was one of the ways drugs were brought in, the other way being, as I've already said, with officers.) Where are the security officers when all this is going on? Well, they sit at the officers' station and the only time they get up is to conduct muster, break up a fight or have a smoke and a coffee. You can always tell when the screws have arrived for another day because the unit TV goes on and there it stays until lockdown at day's end. Most of the time they have a smoke and a coffee in the little officers' crib room within the unit, which is an even greater farce as far as supervision is concerned because they are all in there with the door closed.

This, by the way, was how the screws all developed the PPA or the PPG. The women officers develop the PPA – the Port Phillip arse – and the men the PPG – the Port Phillip gut. Their lack of fitness was amazing. On one occasion this lack of fitness was exposed, at the same time as providing great amusement for the majority of the jail. A bloke was in the hospital as a result of a being psychologically disturbed. He managed to get his pyjamas off and jump, as naked as the day he was born, over the razor-wire fence from the exercise yard in the hospital into no-man's-land. This area has a road around it and is completely unobstructed around the entire jail to enable emergency and maintenance vehicles access to the jail. To watch this bloke nude running around the jail perimeter with a posse of fat screws chasing him was hilarious. They took nearly an hour to run him down. Every time a screw got any where near him they were puffing and blowing so hard he would merely sprint past or right through them. The whole jail was locked down because of this security breach and you could hear the various units around the jail cheering as the bloke ran past the screws yet again. He didn't look too flash once they did finally catch hold of him, though. He was given a thorough tidy up for his troubles and put into the slot. So much for his mental state!

Dupas would try to strike the seeds he had so painstakingly collected and dried in small pots. In the absence of potting mix, which we weren't allowed, we had started a compost heap – just a pile of clippings contained in a wooden box – to help with the seed-raising process. But because we were given no fertiliser or anything else to help the composting along, it was taking a long while. Meanwhile, one day we planted some tomato seeds and put them in a little hot house that Dupas had built out of bits of plastic. It looked like a humpy. The next day Dupas was screaming mad because mice, which were rampant at Port Phillip, had got into the hot house, scratched all the seeds up and eaten them. He went berserk. We weren't allowed to have rat poison, for obvious reasons; nor were we allowed to have mouse traps. There was no way of catching these mice. This went on and on, with our seeds being eaten by the mice on a daily basis.

Dupas was becoming more and more agitated about the mice, until one day when Biff joined us. Don't forget this bloke was in for murder and necrophilia, a thoroughly unsavoury character whose IQ I have already referred to. We were in the vegie garden and Biff and Dupas were digging over the compost heap when they located a mouse nest. In the nest were a number of baby mice, tiny, still blind. Dupas changed completely, so did Biff. What happened next shocked me so much that I couldn't watch after the first one. Dupas and Biff picked up each baby mouse by its tail and cut its head off with the secateurs. There was blood everywhere. Even though they were small mice these blokes had blood all over their hands and they were in seventh heaven over this. Even now, writing this paragraph, I am revolted by the memory of how these two men looked. They were both laughing almost maniacally, and having an absolute ball inflicting this extraordinary pain and death on these poor little animals. It was sickening to see the senseless pain inflicted on such tiny, defenceless creatures.

As I've said, Dupas was pudgy, fat, looked like he wouldn't be able to lift the skin off a rice pudding. In reality, the opposite was the case. I couldn't believe how strong his hands were, and his fingers in particular. Occasionally we were able to scavenge a small piece of wire that could be used to hold the fence up around the vegetable patch. We weren't given pliers but Dupas could twist the wire tighter and tighter and tighter, almost as tight as if he was using pliers, with no apparent effect on his fingers. It was something I couldn't do. If anybody couldn't open a jar in the unit after canteen, you would just give it to Dupas. One flick and the thing would be unscrewed. His ability to swing the mattock was another thing that I found amazing, even though he couldn't last for long because he was so overweight, smoked excessively and was generally unfit. Nevertheless, the force with which he hit the ground with the mattock was something I noticed the first time I saw him do it. He was a real contradiction. His looks well and truly belied the inner strength. He appeared to me as if his quiet demeanour was all part of this façade. The noisy ones, in my experience, don't do it; it's the quiet ones you have to keep your eye on. And he fitted that bill to perfection.

Chapter 6

The Garden of Eden

The future comes soon enough.

– ALBERT EINSTEIN

In jail you don't write anything down. Why? Because your cell is searched regularly by security staff and they read everything you have written. That wouldn't be so bad if they weren't so gossipy and didn't speak “in confidence” to other crooks. The screws well may deny that this happens but in fact it takes place with monotonous regularity. Further, if you are sitting writing anything down, some of the more dangerous crooks who have a fearsome reputation will walk in, pick up what you are writing and start reading it.

When I gave evidence against Dupas, the Dupas lawyers made a great deal about the fact that I had written nothing down. This is why. To be found out and then face the consequences was, frankly, not worth the risk. Yes, I made notes about all sorts of things, but they were all innocuous – recipes, books I wanted to read, new addresses from people who had written to me – absolutely nothing that could be even remotely connected to life in the unit. In addition to the reasons above, I was not intending to hang on to events that happened in jail. I just wanted to erase it all, get home, go and work on a mate's farm and stay under the radar. That obviously hasn't happened.

Because I kept no notes, I have no exact recollection of dates but I do know about the specific nature of the incidents that were to unfold, simply because of the profound impact they had on me.

One morning Peter Dupas and I were walking up and down in the chook pen and we were just chatting – about what, I can't remember. The chook pen is separated from the garden by a cyclone fence. Other units also used the garden. There were three protection units and they were given access to the garden at different times. It was one of the Sirius West units that had access to the garden on this particular morning. Sirius West is divided into two units: one for blokes who need general protection or from whom the rest of the jail needs protection, and the other for sex offenders and paedophiles.

On this particular morning as we were walking up and down I had not a care in the world apart from the fact I was yet to serve four years of my minimum sentence, which never cheered me. A young bloke appeared at the cyclone fence, looking straight at us. He said nothing until Dupas and I walked towards him. As we got near the fence he said to Dupas, “Are you Peter Dupas?” We stopped. Dupas said “Yes.” The young bloke, who was a Greek-looking boy, early twenties, straight darkish hair, slim build, let rip with a tirade of abuse. He claimed that he was some relative of Mersina Halvagis. He knew that Dupas had killed her and if he ever got the chance he would kill Dupas himself. This abuse was completely unexpected.

Having been a lawyer for many years and cross-examined probably thousands of people, I was good at judging when people were shocked and wrong footed. Dupas stopped dead in his tracks and was clearly flabbergasted, stuck for a word. This kid kept berating him for a good thirty seconds to a minute. I know that doesn't sound like a long time but try standing there copping abuse for that period and see how long it is. The kid then abruptly walked off. Dupas was stunned. He turned to me and said, “How does that cunt know I did it?” It was clear to me that this was an admission that he had killed Mersina Halvagis and that he couldn't work out how this kid could know.