The Frankston Serial Killer

by Vikki Petraitis

  THE FRANKSTON SERIAL KILLER

  by

  VIKKI PETRAITIS

  BLURB

  In 1993, the unthinkable happened - a serial killer began killing young women on the streets around Frankston. Read the incredible story about the hunt and capture of Paul Denyer, the 21-year-old responsible, and the lives that were ruined as a result of his crimes.

  This book is dedicated to

  the memory of:

  Elizabeth Ann-Marie Stevens

  Deborah Ann Fream

  Natalie Jayne Russell

  INTRODUCTION

  I began writing The Frankston Murders back in 1993 when people living in the bayside suburbs were terrified because we had a serial killer in our midst. At that time, I had written my first book called The Phillip Island Murder and was working on my second true-crime book which was a collection of short stories from different areas of the police force. I had spent quite a bit of time with the police at Frankston gathering material. One afternoon, I was scheduled to meet with police officers from the community policing squad.

  I remember walking into a solemn office where most of the talk was taken up with concerns for a missing mother of a newborn baby. The woman, Debbie Fream, had been cooking dinner for a friend when she had driven up to the local shops to buy milk. From there, she had vanished. At that stage, it was a community policing squad issue, because the only thing that made any sense was that Debbie must have suffered some kind of post-natal depression and taken herself off somewhere. Young mothers didn't vanish off the face of the earth.

  Talk in the squad rooms of the community policing squad had taken a worrying turn because Debbie's car had been discovered near a local hall of worship with the driver's seat pushed right back. Debbie was short and drove with the seat pushed forward. Had someone taken her and then driven her car? Adding to the growing concern were reports that drivers along the Frankston Dandenong Road had seen a car similar to Debbie's flashing its headlights at oncoming cars around the time she disappeared.

  After an anxious four-day wait, Debbie's body was found dumped on a remote road at the back of Carrum Downs. Her murder was linked with the earlier murder of 18-year-old Elizabeth Stevens and other murders in the Frankston area over the previous years.

  It didn't take long for newspaper headlines to start screaming that Frankston had a serial killer and people started to panic. I lived a couple of suburbs down and witnessed the panic like everyone else. Detectives in long dark coats knocked on our doors asking if we'd noticed anything odd, seen anything that could help. Police flooded into the area, transferred from duties elsewhere on the hunt for the serial killer.

  Finally came the night that I knew I had to write this book. I was doing a police ride-along with a sergeant in Frankston and we arrived for the nightshift around 10.30pm. We were met at the back gate by the group of stalwart smokers puffing away under the spot light at the back door of the big new police station.

  'Another one's gone missing,' one of the cops told us.

  'Right under our bloody noses,' said another, shaking his head hopelessly.

  'What kind of girl is she?' asked the sergeant.

  It was a question that would make every feminist shudder; as if the kind of girl made a difference. I soon realised, though, that the question was in fact cop-speak for whether she was a likely run-away or not.

  The answer? 'Nah, she's a good kid. Just never came home from school.'

  Not long after we entered the police complex, news came of a body found off a pathway between two Frankston golf courses.

  And so it was that I found myself alone in the backseat of a police car, in the car park of the school that adjoined the track where the body had been found. I stayed there taking notes while the low-flying police helicopter shone its night-sun over where the body lay. In the small hours of the morning, I sat with my notebook, watching the shadowy police officers doing what they do, wondering about this man who seemed uncatchable. Where was he now? Was he gloating? Was he watching the news for glimpses of the carnage he had caused; laughing at the cops who couldn't catch him?

  How many more women would die before they caught him?

  When the police finally returned to the car to head back to the police station, the sergeant warned me that I couldn't use the notes I had taken, or talk to the press. When they caught the bastard, everything had to be done by the book.

  Sure, I said. I wasn't a journalist; I didn't want to race my notes off to the nearest newspaper anyway. I was a true crime author and if this story was written, it would need more than just headline-grabbing prose. It would need to be measured and tell a bigger story. It would need to talk about not only what the serial killer did, but about what he took from us. It would need to explore the aftermath of such a killing spree on the families affected and the community.

  And so after the key clanged on the killer's jail cell, I set about documenting the events as thoroughly as I could. The result was this story.

  What do we get from looking at cases like this? What can we learn about ourselves and our community? For one thing, an atrocity like the Frankston murders is always counter-balanced by the community response. While nothing replaces what Denyer took, and nothing repairs the families who were forever altered with loss, the community spirit swells when it is needed, both in support and in the voice of outcry against the justice system which didn't seem to recognise that a 30-year minimum sentence just wasn't enough.

  Another thing we learn from a close examination of Paul Denyer is that there are some people in our community who do not operate with the same sense of right and wrong as we do.

  Some people just don't get it; they are not on the same wave-length as everybody else. At no time did Denyer indicate remorse or regret for what he had done. It would appear that he is incapable of such feelings.

  I remember chatting to a man at a talk I gave after this book was first published. He told me that his wife felt guilty about Natalie Russell's death because they knew the Russell family, and his wife would sometimes give Natalie a ride home from school. On the day Denyer murdered Natalie, the wife had been caught up and didn't drive past at the normal time. While the man was telling me this, it suddenly occurred to me that so many people felt guilty about all the victims.

  If only, they thought. If only I had picked Natalie up; if only Debbie had remembered to buy milk earlier; if only Elizabeth had caught a different bus; if only…

  Ironically, the only person who didn't feel guilt, was the only person who should have, Paul Denyer.

  And lastly, perhaps the Denyer case has taught us that we need to rethink laws about serial killers. They are a danger to society and all studies indicate they are incurable. Denyer was granted a 30-year minimum sentence because he hadn't offended before. Aside from petty crimes, this is pretty standard for serial killers and needs to be recognised in sentencing. And even if thirty years sounded like a long time back in 1993 when Denyer was sentenced, in 2011 he only has another twelve to serve before he can start applying for parole.

  It's certainly something to think about.

  Vikki Petraitis

  2011

  CHAPTER ONE

  In the beginning

  In late February 1993, a young man called Paul began working at a Seaford boat-building firm, Pro Marine, doing general clean up duties as part of a government employment scheme. Being a big man, over six feet tall and around sixteen stone, Paul quickly earned the nickname 'John Candy' after the overweight Canadian actor.

  Paul had worked at Pro Marine for only a couple of weeks before his co-worker, Jason, noticed something odd about him. One morning, he walked into the store room and saw Paul standing in the corner near the
paint shelves. His back was towards Jason, but the young man could see that Paul was fiddling with something. When he turned around, Jason quickly went to another shelf and pretended to look for something. Without a word, Paul abruptly walked out of the store room.

  Wondering what he'd been doing, Jason went over to where Paul had been standing. Pushing aside a couple of large tins, he found a dagger-shaped piece of metal around twenty centimetres long and half a centimetre wide. It looked like it had been cut out of scrap aluminium with one of the band saws. He took the knife out into the factory and showed it to another workmate, Peter.

  'Look what I've found that John Candy has been trying to hide in the store,' he said, not quite knowing what to make of the knife.

  Between them, they decided it would be best to cut the aluminium into smaller pieces and throw it out.

  A few weeks later, Peter also saw something peculiar. Paul borrowed a heat gun from one of the electricians and disappeared with it into the store room. Minutes later Peter entered and saw Paul bending over with his foot up on a cable roll, torching the end of his running shoe. As Peter was trying to figure out what on earth Paul was doing, the manager walked in and asked what was going on. Paul explained that his runners were too small and he was trying to stretch them. The manager told him to do it in his own time.

  After a couple of months at Pro Marine, it was clear that Paul could not be relied upon to carry out even the simplest task and his boss decided not to continue his employment past the three-month trial period.

  While Paul was unpopular with other workers, and he certainly did some strange things, nobody thought to connect him with the holes cut in the cyclone wire fence bordering Pro Marine, nor was his name mentioned in connection with the slaughter one night of two goats in a nearby paddock.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The first cut

  Donna Vanes was uneasy. With her tiny baby nestled in a bassinet, she asked her boyfriend Les to take them on his pizza delivery run. She just didn't feel like being alone at their flat in Claude Street, Seaford. It was a pleasant flat and they had only lived there for three weeks, but an anonymous telephone call a couple of days earlier had spooked her. The caller had said nothing and then hung up. Nothing unusual about that, but still.

  Les packed them both in the pizza delivery car and they drove around the streets of Seaford delivering pizzas to customers with late-night appetites. It was a short shift and they were only gone an hour.

  Walking into the darkened hallway of the flat around 11pm, Donna was hit by a foul odour; it was like nothing she had smelt before. She and Les made their way through the lounge room towards the kitchen, then Donna saw the blood. Smeared on the wall just before the kitchen doorway were swirls of blood about shoulder height and splatters of something else near the skirting boards.

  Donna suggested that they all get out of the flat as quickly as possible. Les agreed. Shaking and scared, she remained outside while Les caller a neighbour to go into the flat with him to see what on earth was going on. Where was Donna's cat and its two kittens?

  Entering the flat again, Les saw a sight he would never forget.

  Awakened early the following morning, Detective Sergeant Chris McCann of the special response squad took a call from Frankston CIB detective Peter Stirling.

  'We've got some dead cats,' Stirling told him. 'Not sure whether it's your job, but you might want to come down and have a look.' McCann scribbled down the address in Claude Street, Seaford. The special response squad mostly handled aggravated burglaries and he wasn't sure whether this was within their charter, but thought it was best to take a look anyway.

  After a quick briefing out the front of the flat, McCann and two other detectives from his squad entered through the front door and the odour that Donna had smelt the night before immediately assaulted them. The smell of death reminded McCann of a body-find he had attended where a woman had died in her flat and hadn't been found for a week. In the forty-six cases McCann had investigated since the squad had begun operations six months earlier, he had never seen anything like what he saw in the Claude Street flat.

  Someone had broken into the flat in the hour that Les, Donna and the baby were delivering pizzas. Someone violent and sick. In the lounge room was an orange baby bouncer sitting in the middle of the floor on a pink and blue chequered rug. Next to it lay a baby's rattle and a disposable nappy. On the white wall of the lounge room, next to the television, the intruder had written what looked like 'Dead Don' in a red substance that the detectives suspected was blood. Entering the kitchen, Chris McCann looked down at the body of Donna Vanes' dead cat. It had been horribly slaughtered.

  The police officer shuddered involuntarily. He loved animals and the one before him brought to mind his own cat Daisy, who was safe at home. This one was not. Trailed across the floor about half a metre away from the dead cat, lay a string of intestines that had been ripped out after the attacker had cut it open. One of the cat's eyeballs was bulging out of its socket while the other was missing. But what made the whole scene even more bizarre was the picture of a naked woman placed on top of the cat's body, covering its abdominal wounds. To McCann, with fourteen years in the police force under his belt, the attack seemed particularly brutal. Small animals were so defenceless; people could fight back, animals couldn't.

  As McCann took in the scene, he echoed the thoughts of the other detectives: 'This bloke's sick!'

  In the bathroom, the detectives found the two kittens - their throats had been cut. Floating one at each end of a half-filled bath, the water had turned rust-coloured with their blood.

  The attack on the cats had occurred in the laundry over a plastic laundry basket of baby clothes. Blood had splashed everywhere, spraying high up the walls and around a packet of kitty litter that Donna Vanes would no longer need. In the blood was a distinct shoe impression.

  Walking into the main bedroom, McCann saw that the attacker had ransacked cupboards and drawers, and he had sprayed a can of shaving cream all over Donna's mirror and through the creamy swirls, the detectives could make out the words 'Donna and Robyn.' One of the cupboard doors had been covered in pictures of scantily clad models. These had been slashed and only a few jagged corners of the pictures remained. The intruder had also slashed the cupboard door, leaving deep gouges in the wood. Oddly, the door had swirls of dirty, dried water marks as if the attacker had cleaned the surface for some reason.

  Had he written another message on it then changed his mind?

  In the baby's room, the intruder had put a picture of a naked model into the baby's crib and stabbed through the picture into the bedding. Some of the baby's clothes had been slashed.

  McCann muttered to the others, 'Lucky they weren't here.'

  Looking around outside, the point of entry was clear; the intruder had climbed onto a nappy bucket around the back, forced a window open and climbed through. Left behind on the blind was a gloved hand impression in blood.

  So brutal and bizarre was the attack on the cats and the threat to Donna Vanes, that detectives called in crime scene examiners, photographics and fingerprint experts to examine the Claude Street flat. They also arranged for officers from the Australian Animal Protection Society to perform post-mortem examinations on the cat and kittens to try and come up with anything that could help in the investigation. The examinations came up with nothing of any value but it was confirmed that the messages scrawled in the kitchen and the lounge room had been written in cat's blood.

  The obvious conclusion was that the attacker knew Donna Vanes and hated her. Chris McCann drove to where she was staying at a relative's house and questioned her about any enemies she might have. Donna was at a loss to explain the vicious attack. She could think of no enemies except perhaps the father of her child with whom she had ended the relationship before the baby was born. But she doubted that he would have had anything to do with such a violent attack. While the break-up had been acrimonious, it had never been violent. She could think of no one els
e who could do such a thing. Referring to the second name mentioned in the written threats, McCann asked her who Robyn was. Donna had no idea. Her father's name was Robert but some people called him Robyn. Otherwise, she was at a loss.

  Chris McCann located Donna's ex-boyfriend and questioned him at the Dandenong police station. He had an alibi for the previous evening and welcomed the detectives into his home to have a look around. The detectives found nothing incriminating at his house, and after speaking at length to the young man, Chris McCann doubted that he would have been responsible.

  The detective also contacted Donna's father to see if he could think of anyone who hated him and his daughter. He couldn't.

  After spending all day checking the few leads, McCann headed home to a couple of hours sleep before being called out to a house in Bulleen where an elderly couple and their son had been burgled and attacked by a gang armed with machetes.

  Donna Vanes moved out of the flat, staying temporarily with her sister Tricia. One of Tricia's neighbours, Paul, had known Donna for a while. He told her that she was safe now and that if they ever caught the person responsible, he would take care of him.

  It seemed neighbour Paul made a habit of comforting women who lived in flats near him. The previous September, another of his neighbours, Julia, had suffered a similar break-in. While she was interstate, someone had broken into her flat and slashed photographs of her and her fiancé. Chillingly, her throat had been cut in all the pictures. The dress she had worn to her engagement party was sliced, and the intruder had attacked her piano with a knife, and carved symbols of reverse question marks into her wardrobe.