The Evil Within - A Top Murder Squad Detective Reveals The Chilling True Stories of The World's Most Notorious Killers (4 page)

On the way to her home, Miller talked her into going for a drive with them in the Adelaide foothills. Miller pulled the car off the road onto a small track and Worrell forced the girl into the back seat. Miller went for a walk to allow his friend some privacy and waited for half an hour before returning to the car. Worrell was sitting in the front seat and the girl was lying motionless on the floor in the back. She was fully dressed. Worrell told Miller that he had just raped and murdered the girl.

They then drove to Truro a few miles further on. They drove down a dirt track and pulled over next to a wooded area. When Miller resisted helping Worrell lift the body from the car, Worrell threatened him with the knife. They then disposed of the body.

On 2 January 1977, and in similar circumstances, Worrell picked up 15-year-old Tania Kenny, who had just hitchhiked up from Victor Harbour. Worrell had chatted her up in the street. They drove to Miller’s sister’s home on the pretext of picking up some clothes. After checking that no one was home, Worrell and Tania went into the house while Miller waited in the car. Eventually, Worrell came out to the car and asked Miller to come inside. From the look on Worrell’s face, Miller knew that something was drastically wrong. In the children’s playroom was Tania’s body – she had been bound with rope and gagged with a piece of sticking plaster. She was fully clothed and had been strangled. Miller and Worrell had another violent argument. Worrell threatened to kill Miller if he didn’t help him hide the body. They hid the body in a cupboard and returned later that night, putting the body in the car then driving to a remote location where they had been earlier in the day and had already dug a shallow grave. They buried Tania in the prepared grave. Miller later maintained that he helped bury the body because he didn’t want to get his sister involved.

On 21 January 1977, a third young female victim met her death. The pair met 16-year-old student Juliet Mykyta at the Ambassador’s Hotel in King William Street. She had just rung her parents to tell them that she was going to be a little late getting home and that they were not to worry. She was sitting on the steps of the hotel waiting for a bus at 9pm when Worrell offered her a lift. Miller drove to one of their usual spots and Worrell forced the girl into the back seat. Miller sat in the front, waiting to be told to leave. While he was sitting there, Worrell started to tie the girl up. She was struggling and crying but Worrell was too strong. Miller got out of the car and walked about 50m away. He later stated that he heard voices and turned
to see the girl falling out of the car to the ground as if she had been kicked in the stomach. Worrell rolled her over with his foot, knelt on her stomach and strangled her with a length of rope. They placed the body back in the car and drove back to the Truro area. On this occasion, they didn’t bury the body in a grave but simply covered it with branches and leaves. They took care to dispose of the body away from the previous victims. They then drove back to Adelaide.

On 6 February, Miller and Worrell picked up 16-year-old Sylvia Pittman as she waited for a train at Adelaide Station. They drove to another secluded area where, as soon as they arrived, Worrell told Miller to go for a walk. After half an hour, Miller returned to find the girl lying face down on the back seat with a rug over her. She had been strangled with her own tights. As with the previous victims, they then disposed of the body in a similarly remote area.

The following day, 7 February 1977, Worrell told Miller to pick him up at the Adelaide Post Office building at 7pm. With Worrell was 26-year-old Vicki Howell. Vicki was older than the others and Miller took a liking to her straight away. Vicki seemed to have a few worries and mentioned that she was separated from her husband. As they drove along, Worrell even had Miller stop the car so the girl could use the toilet. A little further on Miller stopped the car and, leaving the couple to chat, he went to the bushes to relieve himself. He returned a few minutes later on the pretext that he had forgotten his cigarettes. He was really checking to see if the girl was all right. She was nice. He didn’t want Worrell to kill her.

Miller was still hoping that the woman would not be murdered and walked away into the bush. A short time later, Miller returned to the car to find Worrell kneeling on the front seat and leaning into the back. He was covering Vicki Howell’s body with the blanket. She had been strangled. Again, they drove back to Truro and disposed of the body, hiding it under foliage.

Two days later, on 9 February, Miller and Worrell were
cruising in the centre of Adelaide when they spotted 16-year-old Connie Iordanides standing on the footpath. They did a U-turn, pulled up in front of the girl and asked if she wanted a lift. She accepted and sat in the front between the two men. Connie became frightened when the car headed in the opposite direction to where she wanted to go. Miller stopped at another secluded spot and Worrell forced the screaming girl into the back seat. Miller did nothing to help the girl and got out and walked away from the car. When he returned to the car, Connie Iordanides was dead. Worrell had strangled and raped her. She was on the back seat covered with a blanket. Again, Miller did as he was instructed and drove back to Truro and hid the fully clothed body under bushes.

On 12 February 1977, they committed their fourth murder in a week. In the early hours of that morning Miller and Worrell were again cruising the city when they picked up 20-year-old hitchhiker Deborah Lamb. Worrell suggested that they could take her where she wanted to go and the girl allegedly accepted the ride. They drove to the beach at Port Gawler. Miller left them alone and went for a walk. When he returned to the car, Worrell was standing in front of it, filling in a hole in the sand by pushing sand into it with his feet. The girl was nowhere to be seen. It was later to come out in court that this victim may have still been alive when buried in the sand.

On Saturday, 19 February 1977, in a cruel twist of fate and before the police had a chance to arrest and convict Christopher Worrell, he was killed in a road crash. Also in the car at the same time was a female, Deborah Skuse, who was also killed. James Miller escaped with a fractured shoulder. It would seem that she had been another intended victim.

At the funeral, Miller struck up a conversation with Worrell’s girlfriend. During this conversation, he told her that Worrell had been killing young girls. It was not until almost two years later, when some of the victims’ bodies were discovered, that she broke her silence, telling the authorities about the conversation she had
had with Miller. As a result, Miller was arrested and later charged with being involved with the murders of the seven women. However, he did assist in the recovery of the bodies of some of the victims.

At his trial in February 1980, Miller pleaded not guilty to seven counts of murder. His defence was that, although present, he had taken no part in the actual murders and therefore there was no joint enterprise. The jury did not agree with this defence, and on 12 March 1980, Miller was found guilty of six counts of murder. He was found not guilty of the murder of the first victim, Veronica Knight. The jury agreed that he had not known that Worrell intended to murder the girl. He was sentenced to life imprisonment.

In 1999, James Miller applied to have a non-parole period set in the hope that one day he might be released. On 8 February 2000, Chief Justice John Doyle of the South Australian Supreme Court granted Miller a non-parole period of 35 years from the date of his arrest.

On 21 October 2008, at the age of 68, Miller died of liver failure, a complication of hepatitis C. He also suffered from prostate cancer and lung cancer. At the time of his death he was one of the longest-serving prisoners in the state.

By the time Peter Dupas (b. 1953) committed his first murder, he had a long history of violence towards women and many convictions for rape and connected sex crimes. Dupas is probably best described as the perfect sex predator. He was a man to whom ordinary people warmed, showing nothing on the outside of the evil that lurked within him. At the age of 15, he stabbed a neighbour with a knife. For this, he was given psychiatric treatment, and for many years afterwards continued to receive such treatment. However, in all this time, the authorities were never able to pinpoint any specific mental disorders.

It seemed that prison and attempts at rehabilitation had no
effect on Peter Dupas and a little more than two months after his release on 4 September 1979, after serving five years and eight months for raping a woman, he attacked four women over a 10-day period, leaving them traumatised for the rest of their lives. This time, he was equipped with what would become his signature. The first of these four attacks was the rape of a female in a public toilet. His next three intended victims managed to escape. However, one, an elderly woman, was stabbed in the chest as she tried to fight him off. His attempt at rape thwarted, he made off.

The police subsequently arrested Dupas and he made full and frank admissions to all the offences when interviewed. He told the police he was glad he had been caught. As for his motive, he cited an irresistible urge to attack women in this way. For these crimes, he received only a six-year prison sentence despite his previous convictions for similar offences.

He was released on 27 February 1985, after serving five years and three months, and it took only four days for him to reoffend, raping a 21-year-old female as she lay sunbathing at a local beach. Two men, to whom the victim had run following the rape, apprehended him nearby. While in custody for this offence, he was interviewed about a murder that had occurred 16 days earlier while he was on home leave from prison. Another lone female sunbather and mother of four, Helen McMahon, had been beaten to death in the sand dunes at Rye Back beach, only 2½ miles away from where Dupas had raped the female sunbather. He denied any knowledge of this offence. For this new offence of rape, he was sentenced to 12 years’ imprisonment. While in prison, he underwent treatment to suppress his sex drive and also married a nurse.

He served seven years and was released in 1992 and, for the following 18 months, it would appear that Dupas had surpressed his sexual desires – but this turned out not to be the case. On 23 September 1993, he attacked a 15-year-old girl who was out horse riding. He was not able to carry out his plan, as the girl had
the common sense to put her horse between herself and the attacking Dupas and managed to escape, as did Dupas. Once again, Dupas was a sexual time-bomb. On 3 January 1994, he struck again, attacking a 26-year-old female at Lake Eppalock in northwestern Victoria, as she sat on a public toilet. Dupas burst into the cubicle wearing a hood with eyeholes and pointing a knife at the woman’s face. Dupas kept yelling for the woman to turn around and face the wall, but she resisted. The woman was cut badly on the hands as she fought to prevent her attacker from dragging her out of the toilet cubicle. Thwarted, Dupas abruptly stopped the attack, let the woman go and calmly walked away to his car. As Dupas sped off, the woman identified him to her fiancé. He happened to be an off-duty Australian Federal Police officer who, with friends, chased the estate car Dupas was driving. Dupas was apprehended after his car ran off into the bush on a dirt road. When he was searched, a pair of metal handcuffs was found in his pocket. When his vehicle was searched, police found a roll of insulation tape and a cache of the tools of the trade for a well-prepared travelling rapist: knives, a black balaclava, condoms, a roll of sticking plaster and, chillingly, a sheet of plastic and a shovel.

Despite all the circumstances surrounding this offence and what police saw as Dupas’s meticulous planning of what looked to be a sexual abduction, murder and concealment of the body, the prosecution stated that there was insufficient evidence to proceed with an attempted rape charge. Consideration was given to a lesser charge of false imprisonment, to which he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to three years and nine months. He was released on 29 September 1996, to find his wife had left him. Dupas, it seems, suppressed his urges for almost 12 months. Then it is suggested that he once more unleashed his violent and sexual side with a vengeance.

On 4 October 1997, a local prostitute, Margaret Maher, was abducted and murdered. Her body was found in long grass on industrial land. She had been stabbed many times and her breasts
had been grotesquely mutilated. Four weeks later, on 1 November 1997, Mersina Halvagis, 25, was attacked as she tended a grave at a cemetery. She was repeatedly stabbed and left to die. Coincidentally, the grave of Dupas’s grandfather is only 300ft away from where Halvagis was murdered. At 6.30 am on New Year’s Eve 1997, Kathleen Downes, a frail 95-year-old woman, was found stabbed to death in her room at Brunswick Lodge nursing home.

On 19 April 1999, another female, Nicole Patterson, a psychotherapist who worked from home, was found dead on her consulting-room floor. Patterson was naked from the waist down. Her clothes had been ripped and cut. An autopsy revealed that the 28-year-old had been dead since that morning. She had been stabbed 27 times. There were numerous defence wounds to both her hands. It was impossible to say whether she had been raped. Both of Patterson’s breasts had been sliced off and were nowhere to be found at the murder scene. Patterson’s mutilations were similar to those of Margaret Maher, murdered 18 months earlier. Her killer had been thorough. It appeared that he had attempted to clean up the crime scene before leaving. There were no fingerprints or footprints. The killer even took Patterson’s purse, containing her driving licence and her mobile phone.

However, the killer had missed the most incriminating piece of evidence. Under clothing in the lounge, detectives found Patterson’s appointment book. It contained a 9am appointment for a ‘Malcolm’ that morning and a mobile phone number written next to it. The police soon traced ‘Malcolm’ and he turned out to be a student who had no idea who Patterson was. He was asked if he had given his phone number to anyone recently. He then gave police a list of people to whom he had given his number. One of the names was Peter Dupas, for whom he had been doing casual work.