Killing Time (14 page)

I was still standing up against the wall and obscured by the bushes. Dupas walked over and I can still see the scene as clearly as if it was yesterday. I had the knife in my left hand and he came up to me on my left. I handed the weapon to him and he didn't say anything but I could read all the signs from his body language. Dupas started to shake, he became sweaty and he looked rather excited in a psychotic sort of way. He took the knife from me very gently and he held it in the palm of his open hand, almost as if he was weighing it up. He started moving the knife up and down in this weighing up motion, then, to my amazement, he started reciting, almost chanting in a trance-like state, the words “Mersina, Mersina, Mersina.” I couldn't believe my ears. This man had completely lost the plot. I was in the immediate vicinity of a psychopath holding a large knife. More importantly a psychopath who was admitting that he was the one who had killed Mersina Halvagis and had used a knife to do so.

The only time in jail I was genuinely in fear for my life was this moment. I thought, by the look on Dupas's face and the manner in which he was behaving, that he was more than capable of killing me there and then. I tried to keep my act together and said to him “Pete, just give me the knife back, we'll chuck it in the bin.”

We always used to throw any contraband we found in a waste bin which was emptied most days and so the contraband left the unit. I took the knife from him very quietly and gently and slowly walked to the rubbish bin. I threw the knife in and slammed the lid down, then walked away. By the time I got back to where Dupas had been standing, he was gone. He was back in the vegie patch, weeding away as if nothing had happened. The frightening thing about all of this was that he never once mentioned the knife after this and he seemed to shut the whole thing out of his mind yet again. But it was clear to me that he had made another admission that he killed Mersina Halvagis.

That night I hardly slept because I was concerned that this extremely dangerous weapon had been put in the rubbish bin. I went back first thing the next morning to make sure the bin had been emptied. It had been, and the knife was gone.

It was only later, after Dupas was convicted and I was able to speak to the police about this matter, that I learned of one of the things that had impressed them about my discussions with them regarding Dupas: I had noted precisely the same behaviour as they had when questioning him or dealing with him. That is, he would sweat, shake, even on occasions become a little teary, and you'd think he was about to blurt out an admission, hands clasped tightly between his knees pressed together, rocking backwards and forwards. But then it was almost as if a blind or a curtain came down across his entire face. He would suddenly change. He would look at you as if wondering who you were and what you were doing there, and all of a sudden the conversation was over. It was as if the preceding conversation had never taken place and he had never mentioned anything. It was lucky that I was able to take him further down the track in terms of admissions than the police had ever been able to. This was probably because of my background, my closeness to him and the fact that he may – and this is speculation – have thought that I would be subject to some sort of professional privilege, which of course I wasn't.

Chapter 9

A Bolt from the Blue:
The Odyssey Begins

Be as great in act as you have been in thought.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,
KING JOHN

“Fraser! Officers' station, now!” It is five or six o'clock in the evening and I am in my room reading, as per usual. It is now mid-2005 and it's a few months since I was moved from maximum security to Fulham Correctional Centre, a medium-and minimum-security prison outside Sale in Gippsland, Victoria. I had eighteen months of my sentence left to go when the command was given.

I thought What now? No doubt another piece of petty jail politics in which I've managed to become embroiled. No matter how hard I tried to keep myself away from such situations, crooks would come and speak to me and then would talk to the officers saying that I had given them advice. This often caused problems for me, starting with my first day at Fulham when I got off the bus from Port Phillip. The operations manager got hold of me, sat me in a small ante room next to the strip-search room and gave me a talking-to about what I would and would not do while at Fulham. What I would not do, according to him, was give anybody advice. I didn't follow his instructions and constantly helped any blokes who needed assistance. Illiteracy in jail is breathtaking and you have no idea how many times a crook would come and knock on my unit door and ask me to read him a letter. Many of the illiterate prisoners were young and most were Aboriginal, and their lack of education is a sad indictment on our society. On one occasion I remember there was a letter from Legal Aid merely telling this kid that his case had been adjourned. It was a one-line letter and he couldn't read it.

The minimum-security section of Fulham, “The Cottages”, is a horseshoe-shaped area with twenty-two cottages contained in a garden, four blokes per cottage, one small bedroom each, with a shared kitchen and lounge area, bathroom, toilet and laundry. A far cry from the stark conditions I had been used to for the first three years of my sentence. At least at Fulham I was able to run each day, and the job I had in the prisoners' property store was one that provided long hours and some autonomy in what you were given to do. The screw that ran the store was also smart enough to know that I wasn't going to steal anything and in return for me working in the store I was at least allowed to go for my run each morning.

My cottage was immediately over from the officers' station, where the staff sat and watched television or read the paper all day instead of supervising the prisoners.

As I approached the officers' station, the officer on duty came out to meet me in the garden area instead of waiting for me to approach the window, which is the usual procedure. All procedures in jail are designed to minimise the requirement for an officer to get up off his arse to do anything, so making the effort to walk out to me was unusual. He walked over to me and stood very close and whispered, almost inaudibly, that the Homicide Squad were on the phone and wanted to talk to me.

As a sentenced prisoner, you are not obliged to accept a visit from a police officer or talk to a police officer unless you consent and the screw indicated to me that, in view of my previous attitude to being interviewed by police about my former clients who were deceased as a result of the Melbourne Gangland wars, all I had to do was say the word and he would tell them I wasn't prepared to talk. Surprising as it may seem, the instant I heard it was the Homicide Squad on the phone, I knew precisely what they were ringing about and I said I would talk to them.

Over the years I have had extensive dealings with the Homicide Squad. They are elite coppers doing a tough job and once they get hold of a case they keep at it with a tenacity that others can only dream of emulating. A couple of the blokes in the squad are easily the best investigators I have seen. One in particular, Detective Senior Sergeant Ron Iddles, is in my view the best investigator in the Victorian police force. Homicide cases, by their very nature, are usually highly emotionally charged, so my relationship with the Homicide Squad has been hot and cold to say the least. They've lost their temper with me, I've lost my temper with them.

The usual cases I had conducted with the squad were felony murders – for instance, where someone is murdered during the course of an armed robbery. The crooks charged with these offences were real old-fashioned crooks and the cases were always bruising court-room contests where emotions ran high. But there are many other cases that are tragic and then you see a human side to the squad members.

One such case was that of a woman who was psychotic and delusional. She had murdered her own five-year-old daughter because she thought she was the devil and she had disembowelled the child with her own bare hands. When the father came home and found this awful sight, he called an ambulance. The ambulance officers had to cut the child's hair because they could not make the mother let go. That woman went to trial for murder in the Supreme Court and I think the trial lasted twenty-three minutes. The learned trial judge instructed the jury that they must retire and return a verdict of Not Guilty of murder by means of insanity. The woman was then certified as insane and sent to a secure mental facility. It was probably the most harrowing case I've ever worked on, to see this poor insignificant woman standing in the dock charged with murdering her own child. She was so distraught, as were the family. To watch the humane, caring way in which the Homicide Squad handled that case was a real eye opener for me.

I answered the phone. The caller said, “It's Senior Detective Paul Scarlett from the Homicide Squad here”, and before he could say another word I said to him “What took you so long?” Apparently Scarlett was flabbergasted at this response. He said, “Do you know what I'm ringing about?” I said “My bet is you're ringing about Peter Dupas and Mersina Halvagis.” He said, “How did you work that out?” I said “I just thought that's what you would be ringing about.” He said “Will you talk to me?” I said “Yes.” He said “When?” I said “Well, my diary is not exactly full at the moment.” It was a fair indication of how serious the coppers were about finding out what I might have to say that Scarlett was at the jail first thing the next morning, ready to see me as soon as I was allowed to leave my cottage.

I later found out that Scarlett had been given the Halvagis murder investigation to go over yet again and see whether there was anything that could provide fresh evidence. As a tribute to Scarlett's detective and investigational skills, he is clearly able to think laterally. One thing that came out that hadn't been investigated before was that I had been a gardener with Peter Dupas at Port Phillip and it had apparently been quite a talking point that the lawyer and the psychopath worked together in the vegie patch. It had no doubt appealed to some people's sense of the ridiculous. Scarlett knew that I had been with Dupas and had worked with him. He knew that I had spoken to Dupas about the Halvagis matter. In fact, apparently Scarlett was pretty dirty on me, because I had been giving Dupas advice, but what choice did I have? Dupas could have topped me at any time if I wasn't co-operative. What he didn't know was that I had talked to Dupas about this matter for one reason and one reason only: that I wanted to find out about Halvagis. And then, once I did, I wished to God I'd never known. I knew this information would come back to haunt me, I knew that it would land me well and truly in the spotlight again if I gave evidence, and that was something I could do without. I had had enough of the limelight because to that date virtually all the publicity surrounding me and my prosecution had been negative. Apparently Scarlett thought I would probably tell him to piss off when he rang me. But being the true professional that he is, he still had to ask the question and get an answer one way or the other.

At Fulham to go and talk to the coppers is a very, very dodgy prospect because you have to walk through a no-man's-land area where you are clearly visible to everybody in the cottages and one of the large units. I was apprehensive about this as I walked into the upstairs room and introduced myself to Scarlett. Being a no-bullshit sort of bloke, he cut straight to the chase and asked me what I knew about Dupas. I said, “Enough to have him convicted because he has made certain voluntary admissions against his interest to me.”

Being an ex-lawyer, I was well able to judge the value of those admissions. As a copper, Scarlett also knew the value of a voluntary admission against interest. He said, “Are you prepared to make a statement?” and I said “Maybe, but not here.” With that, he turned his open notebook around, pushed it across the table to me and proffered a pen. I said to him, “Not so fast. If you want me to stick my head in the noose for you, it will be a ride there for a ride back.” I had eighteen months of my sentence to go and there was not a hope in hell of my giving evidence while I was in jail.

During the trial, Dupas's defence counsel, David Drake, kept demanding to know what “a ride for ride” meant. I kept saying to him, until I was blue in the face, that I did not say that, I said it was “a ride there for a ride back” – a colloquialism for “if you want me to do something for you, you do something for me first”. In other words, you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours.

I told Scarlett that I would not make a statement there and then and would not give him any particulars, save to say that I had substantial evidence against Dupas. And I said that, by the way, I was still having difficulty with whether I wanted to give evidence. I knew giving evidence was the right thing to do morally but I really didn't want to put myself or my family in any danger and I did not want a lot of unpleasant publicity and attendant media, which it was as sure as eggs I would attract.

The clincher for me was when Scarlett said to me, “You have a daughter, don't you?” The answer to that was Yes. She was a young girl at that time and I sat and thought for a moment. I thought about the Halvagis family whose story it had been impossible to miss in the media, and I decided there and then to give evidence.

I told Scarlett that I was a man of my word and now that I had committed to it, I would do so. However, there were pre-conditions. He said “What about the reward?” As I said earlier, as a matter of policy I don't read newspaper stories about cops and robbers and it follows that I don't read about rewards. I said to him “I assume there is a reward.” He said “Do you know how much it is?” I said “No, but once again I'll have a guess and say its a hundred thousand, which is the usual reward posted for a murder.” He said “Well, try a million dollars.” I nearly fell off my chair. That was not, and I repeat not, the motivation for my giving evidence. The fact that I too had a daughter
was
. I then pointed out to Scarlett that his having come to the jail and my talking to him was highly dangerous and that I would under no circumstances make a formal statement or give evidence while I was in custody. I wanted to be released a year early. Scarlett indicated that he would take that back to his superiors but his preliminary view was that he wouldn't have a problem with that proposition.