Lunatic Soup by Andrew Fraser

Author:Andrew Fraser
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
ISBN: 9781742731933
Publisher: Hardie Grant Books
Published: 2010-08-17T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

Mersina Halvagis: Evil Knows

No Bounds

You present the awful, threatening and unanswerable question: how did you come to be as you are?

– HIS HONOUR MR JUSTICE FRANK VINCENT ON SENTENCING

DUPAS FOR THE MURDER OF NICOLE PATTERSON

Things were heating up for Dupas, particularly in relation to Margaret Maher. But also hanging over him was the ever-present question of the murder of Mersina Halvagis. It was clear that the police and the prosecuting authorities had one suspect for this murder and one suspect only. It was a matter of constant speculation in the media but the police were careful not to release all aspects of their investigation because they clearly wanted to keep back some matters that only the killer would have known.

The Halvagis murder was an old case but certainly not a cold case. In an attempt to try and flush additional evidence out of the woodwork, on 17 December 2004 the then police minister for the state of Victoria, Andre Hairmeyer, announced a reward of one million dollars payable to anybody who gave evidence that led to the conviction of the murderer of Mersina Halvagis. The offering of this reward did nothing to reveal any fresh evidence.

I hate writing about this period of my life because it takes me back into the depths of despair that was life at Port Phillip Prison. I was in jail with a murdering sex monster who wanted to tell me about his crimes and who wanted to use me as essentially free, in-house counsel. I was stuck, there was nothing I could do: damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

I have already mentioned that you can’t write anything down in jail, but you also can’t talk confidentially to anybody from outside and more importantly you can’t privately ring anybody. Therefore, the old adage “Loose lips sink ships” applies. If I had been on the phone and spoken to the coppers about this matter, the fact of that conversation would have almost certainly found its way back to Dupas and I would have been a dead duck, literally. In jail, if you lag, then the twisted morals that apply come into play: as a lagger you will most likely be killed. It never seems to occur to anybody to assess who the lagging has been done about or why. You are grouped into the most despicable and despised of categories: that of police informer. I was not prepared to place myself in that position but I was certainly caught in a dilemma because now, through no fault of my own, I had become involved to some degree with Peter Dupas. I now knew things that I didn’t want to know and I had a feeling of dread that this would come back to haunt me at some stage in the future. However, I was not prepared to place my life on the line and say anything while I was still in custody.

On the day that Dupas first raised the Halvagis matter with me in his cell and told me how he had left no forensics at Fawkner, I noticed his body language change.

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