The Frankston Serial Killer

by Vikki Petraitis

  'Can you explain why we have women victims?' O'Loughlin persisted.

  'I just hate 'em.'

  'I beg your pardon,' said O'Loughlin.

  'I just hate 'em,' Denyer repeated.

  'Those particular girls,' asked O'Loughlin, referring to the three victims, 'or women in general?'

  'General.'

  'You told Detective Senior Sergeant Wilson that you stabbed them in the throat. Is there any particular reason why there?'

  'Well, it looked like the most vulnerable spot.'

  'Did each girl get stabbed in the throat?'

  'All of 'em… I saw it in a movie once and it just looked effective.'

  'What movie was that?' asked O'Loughlin.

  'It was called The Stepfather. And a guy stabbed a guy in the neck with a broken glass and, yeah, just looked effective.'

  Denyer then denied memory of any of the vicious marks and cuts he had inflicted on his victims, although he conceded he must have done them.

  O'Loughlin asked if he was in a habit of forgetting things. Denyer said he wasn't.

  'How did you feel afterwards?' asked O'Loughlin, trying to get a picture of what was going through the killer's mind.

  'Like the temperature gauge was coming down.'

  'What do you mean?' O'Loughlin asked him.

  'Well, it was going up to boiling point, then afterwards it just came down till it stopped at a level and them climbed up again.'

  'You're referring to what type of feeling?'

  'Hate, anger.'

  'Is this something that you plan?'

  'No. I would just go to a certain area and then pick targets around, just, you know, anyone you see walking around is… anyone, women, woman by herself. So I'd just wait for them. No it wasn't premeditated in that way.'

  'Wait for the right opportunity to come along. Is that fair to say?'

  'Yeah, just sort of go to the area and hope for the best.'

  Denyer discussed his weapons with the detectives. The cord he used, he told them, had come from around the waist of his tracksuit pants. It had come off and he had kept it to strangle someone with. And the fake gun, he said, was on a shelf in the spare room at his flat.

  Rod Wilson placed a scrapbook, that had been taken by police from Denyer's flat, on the table and asked if it was his.

  Denyer said it was, and explained that he had been practicing drawing. There was a sketch of one person pointing a gun at another. It was labelled 'The Last Great Act of Defiance'.

  There were other sketches, including old ones of scrub and bushes that Denyer said he had done from sites around the same Flora and Fauna Reserve where he had stopped the previous Friday before his final murder on the bike path near Skye Road.

  Rod Wilson checked his watch. It was 6.05am on Sunday morning. The interview had lasted all night. In order to prevent possible allegations of maltreatment of the murderer, Wilson mentioned on video-tape that Denyer had been supplied with a hamburger and a few cups of coffee.

  'Yeah, I was well looked after,' Denyer agreed politely.

  Wilson told Denyer that he would make arrangements to go to the areas mentioned in the statement. First port of call would be where Denyer buried Debbie Fream's purse.

  'Do you have any objections to that?'

  'No,' replied the confessed killer.

  Rod Wilson suspended the interview.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Re-enactment

  It was still dark at 6.40am when Senior Constable Stephen Batten set up his video camera tripod on the footpath on Cranbourne Road. Batten turned on the bright camera light and Rod Wilson, Darren O'Loughlin and Paul Denyer stood in front of the camera waiting for Batten to tell them he was ready.

  Behind the scenes were a number of other officers, including crime scene examiner Brian Gamble who had not long finished the examination of Denyer's flat. Gamble had joined the group to organise searches of the areas that Denyer indicated.

  Wilson read their suspect his rights again and the young man quietly responded that he understood. Denyer had directed the detectives to the corner of McClelland Drive and Cranbourne Road to point out the location where he had discarded the knife he used to kill Elizabeth Stevens.

  'Can you tell us where it is?' Wilson asked, looking into the scrub adjacent to the footpath.

  'Follow me,' Denyer said, and began walking down Cranbourne Road, one hand tucked behind his back. As he spoke, his breath fogged in the cold of the first day of August, while the camera view of him from behind accentuated his height and bulk.

  The three men walked along the footpath and Denyer's eyes scoured the scrub. He turned around to face the camera and spoke to Stephen Batten.

  'Can you turn the light off for a sec? I just want to have a look in here,' he said, indicating a fallen tree. 'I'd remember it better in the dark.'

  Batten obliged and cut the light, leaving the two detectives and Denyer in the dark.

  'Yeah, I remember the log there.' He pointed to the tree as Batten switched the light back on. 'I can't remember exactly where; it could be here, or it could be up there,' he said, pointing to scrub further up the road.

  'Can you indicate how you threw it in?' Wilson asked.

  Denyer said that he had thrown the knife underarm and swung his right arm imitating the movement for the benefit of the detectives. 'Actually, I saw something red in there just before,' Denyer said, bending to look in through the knee-high grass.

  The knife had a red handle and he wasn't aware that the police had already found it in the line search the day after Elizabeth Stevens's body had been discovered.

  Rod Wilson asked Darren O'Loughlin to have a look and the detective took a couple of tentative steps down the incline and bent down to inspect beneath the fallen tree.

  'It's just a Coke bottle,' O'Loughlin reported as the other two watched on.

  'Oh,' said Denyer sounding disappointed. Since the confession, he seemed to be trying to prove beyond doubt that he was the killer. After taking pains to hide forensic evidence during the murders, he was now trying his hardest to point it all out to the investigators.

  The three men continued walking, in front of the camera, further up Cranbourne Road. Denyer kept his left hand in the pocket of his baggy blue-grey tracksuit pants, his right held to his face in concentration.

  'Possibly in there,' he said, considering another patch of scrub.

  Rod Wilson stopped walking and stood beside him.

  'I know it was in the bushes but it wasn't as far as that power pole there,' Denyer said, pointing further up Cranbourne Road.

  Wilson turned to the camera and told Steve Batten they would cease the interview there and go to the next location. It was 6.45am.

  Just as the camera switched off, Denyer noticed another fallen log and told the detective that it could have been there so the video was switched on again and that area was filmed.

  The sky was turning a steely grey when, 15 minutes later, the camera was switched on again at the milk bar, on the corner of McCulloch and Kananook avenues, where Debbie Fream went for milk on the night she was murdered.

  Rod Wilson again told the confessed killer that he wasn't obliged to say anything and that anything he said could be used in evidence.

  'Yeah,' said Denyer. He understood the routine.

  'Can you tell us what happened here?' asked Wilson.

  'Well, the car was sitting over here.' Denyer pointed to the opposite corner and Batten swung the video camera around to film the empty road.

  'Debbie Fream's car, we're talking about?' asked Wilson to get it straight for the record.

  'The Pulsar. I was walking down this road here and saw her jump out of the car, into the milk bar here.' Denyer turned and pointed to the corner shop.

  'The car was directly across the road and I could see her from inside the car. I watched her come out and I crouched down under the seat. She drove to do a U-turn down that street down there,' he said, pointed diagonally across to Kananook Avenue, 'and
she drove around here.' Denyer turned to face the accountant's office next door to the milk bar and walked over to the red brick entrance to show the detectives where Debbie Fream had collided with the wall.

  'Where did she hit?' asked Wilson standing next to him.

  Denyer bent down, scrutinised the brickwork for a few seconds and said, 'There.' He pointed to the sixth row of bricks from the pavement, about knee high to himself.

  'Sure about that?' asked Wilson, looking closely to see if he could see any marks.

  'Positive,' said Denyer firmly. He then told Wilson that they had driven down Kananook Avenue.

  Wilson asked Batten to stop the tape.

  At 7.19am, the camera lights illuminated the spare room of Denyer's flat. Cluttered with junk and second-hand furniture, Denyer picked his way through the mess and located the glove gun he had mentioned in his interview. From a distance, it resembled a real revolver. It was small, black and square looking. He picked it up with his left hand, holding a half smoked cigarette in his right. Turning the gun towards his head, Denyer stuck the muzzle in his mouth and blew, making the rubber glove finger pop out the other end.

  Putting his cigarette in the corner of his mouth, he held the gun in his left hand and pulled the rubber out as far as it would stretch. He let go of the rubber finger with a snap.

  'That's the way you operate it,' he explained. 'It shoots a ball bearing.'

  'Was that the weapon you used when you first approached Elizabeth Stevens?' asked Wilson.

  'Yeah, that's the one.'

  'Same as the woman at the Seaford railway station?'

  'Yep.'

  Rod Wilson pointed to two other home-made guns lying against the wall next to the book shelf. 'Did you use those for anything?' he asked.

  'Nah, nah,' Denyer shook his head, replying firmly as if the question was stupid. He bent down to put out his cigarette in an ashtray on the floor. He wasn't normally allowed to smoke in the flat. Sharon had forbidden it.

  Wilson turned to face an old green-chequered couch by the opposite wall. 'And this is the green jacket you wore on the night of Elizabeth Stevens?'

  Darren O'Loughlin leaned over and picked it out of the pile of clothes, that covered most of the surface of the couch, and held it up for the camera. Denyer agreed that it was the same jacket he had referred to in his earlier interview.

  Denyer picked up a black Adidas baseball cap from a cluttered table beside him, and told the detectives it was the cap he had worn on the night of Debbie Fream's murder and Roszsa Toth's attack.

  'Is there anything else of any significance in here?' Wilson asked, looking around the mess. He knew that the crime scene examiners would give the room and its contents another thorough going over later, but it was important that the suspect himself point out anything of evidentiary value. It added weight to his verbal confessions.

  'No, no,' he replied.

  Stepping over the junk on the floor, the three men backed out of the spare room into the kitchen. It was as cluttered and untidy as the spare room; most of the cupboards were open revealing their contents. A red and white sheet hung crookedly over the kitchen window letting in a little light.

  Denyer pointed through the kitchen to the adjacent laundry. The roof was punctuated by thin ventilation slats and he told the detectives that he had pushed the knife he used to kill Debbie Fream into one of the slats and then poked it further along with a bit of wire. Beneath the slats was a doorway leading into the back yard.

  'The handle's out here,' he said, walking through the red, white and blue plastic strips hanging from the doorway. Rod Wilson followed him past a washing line full of clothes. Denyer bent down and picked up a piece of metal from the ground beneath his laundry window. He told Wilson that it was the handle of the knife that he had used to kill Debbie Fream. He said he had removed the tape from the handle and flushed it down the toilet.

  'The black tracksuit pants missing the cord?' Rod Wilson queried when they walked back past the clothes line.

  'These ones,' said Denyer, unpegging a pair of pants next to where he stood. Wilson took the pants and inspected the waistband. There was no cord.

  'It's inside,' Denyer said.

  Before they returned inside, Wilson asked him about the knife used to kill Natalie Russell. Denyer took a couple of steps over to a metal bucket on the ground between the clothes line and an old white freezer. The knife wasn't there and Rod Wilson told him that it would have been collected by forensics.

  Before leaving the tiny back yard, Wilson asked about the grey jumper Denyer had mentioned wearing during the attack on Natalie Russell. Denyer pulled it from the clothes line and handed it to the detective.

  They moved back inside into the spare room again in search of the blue windcheater Denyer had worn when he killed Debbie Fream. He shuffled through piles of clothes on the floor in a vain attempt to find it in the mess.

  'And that black cord?' asked Wilson, picking through the piles of clothes. 'Where do you think that would be?'

  His left hand on his hip and his right hand on his chin, Denyer thought for a second and then stepped towards the back of the spare room door. 'It was hanging here on the door handle. It's not there now. I remember seeing it yesterday, so someone's taken it.'

  Crime scene examiner Brian Gamble had collected it earlier.

  Rod Wilson walked towards the bedroom Paul shared with Sharon. There was a pink blanket stretched across the window in place of curtains. Denyer bent to the floor and picked up the blue windcheater top he had been looking for.

  The video tape stopped at 7.26am.

  A little over 10 minutes later the camera rolled again. This time Wilson and O'Loughlin stood with Paul Denyer at the entrance of the bike track. After he lit a cigarette, Denyer pointed across Skye Road to the place where he had parked his car the Friday before. Then he led the detectives to the spot where he had buried Debbie Fream's purse.

  Using a pair of bolt cutters supplied by police, Denyer cut the cyclone wire and then, with his hands, twisted the wires to make a small hole. He picked up the bolt cutters again and deftly snipped further, forming a large diamond-shaped hole. As he neared the bottom of the fence, he turned and smiled over his right shoulder to Rod Wilson: 'They're not going to charge me to fix this are they?'

  Denyer laughed at his own joke. The detectives didn't.

  When the cutting was done, Denyer bent back the wire and stomped it down with his foot, puffing at his efforts and pushing his hair back to wipe his forehead. He then led the way through the fence. As Denyer walked between a couple of trees, he solicitously held back the branches, telling the video camera operator to be careful.

  'Just look for the softest part of the ground,' he said, standing under a tree and beginning to kick away loose dirt with his white runners. He bent over and felt the dirt with his hands, flicking away some more.

  'Sure about the area?' asked Wilson.

  'Positive,' Denyer replied, beginning to pant with the exertion of shuffling his feet. 'Wish I had a shovel,' he said breathlessly. Within a minute, however, Denyer unearthed a dirt-covered black purse and held it in front of him like a trophy.

  'Who does this purse belong to?' Wilson asked for the record.

  'Debbie Fream,' relied the young killer, dropping it into a brown paper bag that Rod Wilson held out before him.

  Denyer bent down beneath a nearby bush, flicked away a bit of dirt and picked up two plastic bank cards. He rubbed the dirt away, and said he'd burnt them at the spot before burying them.

  'Fream,' said Rod Wilson, reading the still-discernible name on one of the cards. He dropped them into the bag with the purse.

  Back on the main track just after 8am, the three men were filmed standing by the hole Paul Denyer had cut in the fence to lay in wait for Natalie Russell. The killer explained how he had seen her walking up Skye Road, and had run up the track to climb through the hole to hide and wait for her. He emerged once she had passed and was about 10 metres further on. />
  The men continued walking up the track to the second hole.

  'What was the purpose of this hole?' asked Wilson.

  'Oh, I put it there in case it was easier to kill her and drag her in there,' Denyer said, waving his arm casually through the hole. He had cut it at the same time he had cut the other hole, choosing this area because, he explained, being sheltered by overgrown trees, it was not visible from either end of the track.

  As the men walked up the track towards the third hole, Rod Wilson asked, 'Were you still maintaining that distance behind her?'

  'Nah, I was getting closer all the time. I walked along the grass here. Didn't make a sound.'

  They all stepped around puddles on the track that Denyer said weren't there Friday afternoon.

  'I grabbed her here,' Denyer said when they were a couple of metres from the third hole in the fence, 'around the mouth with my left hand, held the knife to her throat, pushed her against the fence and struggled here for a second.'

  'So this is the area where-?'

  'She was murdered,' finished Denyer. 'I dragged her through here.'

  Denyer stepped through the hole in the fence but Rod Wilson asked him to come back. The interview was over. They had what they wanted.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Sharon

  When Paul Denyer was taken into custody on Saturday afternoon, Sharon Johnson had been escorted to the police station too. Detectives didn't know whether she knew about the murderous habits of her boyfriend or indeed whether she was even an accomplice.

  When she walked out towards her letter box late that Saturday afternoon and was met by a number of police officers - some of whom had continued into the flat where Paul was - she didn't really understand what was happening.

  She and Paul had spent the morning shopping and looking for car parts, then Paul had dropped her at the hairdressers for an appointment. When they had arrived home, there had been the detective's card wedged in their front door. Sharon had telephoned the police herself, and the detective she spoke to said that he would be around shortly.