Killing Time

by Andrew Fraser

  For the first couple of weeks in the unit I said nothing to Dupas – we just made a nodding acknowledgment of each other whenever we made eye contact. It was in fact Ray Edmunds who first spoke to me and introduced himself, but he needed no introduction as I well and truly knew who he was and the despicable crimes he had been convicted of. Then, one day while walking back to my cell with my lunch, I had to walk past Dupas’s table on my way. He looked up and said “Hey, Andrew, why don’t you sit here and join us?” At that time only Edmunds and Dupas were sitting at the table. I’d already made a calculated judgment that the Dupas crew was far stronger than Camilleri’s and when I was invited I thought I might as well get with the strength – it might at some stage come in handy if the shit did hit the fan with Camilleri. I sat down. Dupas formally introduced himself and we chatted about nothing in particular. That was the start of the ride that was going to take me into the Supreme Court of Victoria in July 2007 when I was to give evidence against Peter Dupas in his trial for the murder of Mersina Halvagis.

  In Sirius East there is a garden area and within that is a vegetable patch. Dupas’s only passion in life was this vegie patch. He would head out there to spend every available moment that he was allowed. He was the unit gardener, assisted by a Chinese prisoner who was in for trafficking huge amounts of heroin and blowing the proceeds at Crown Casino. My cell had a view of this garden and I used to sit and watch the two at work out there. The Chinese bloke was in protection because it was perceived in the jail community that he had a lot of money. Common sense plays no part in the thought processes in jail. What prisoners knew was that this man had lost a lot of money gambling at Crown Casino. It illogically follows in jail that, if he had that much cash to blow at the Casino, he must still have a large amount which could be scared out of him. The reality was that this bloke’s assets had been seized under Proceeds of Crimes legislation, so he was effectively penniless. However, he had been hassled so much in mainstream for money that he had to be put in protection.

  Dupas would get very anxious if he couldn’t get out into the garden for some security reason or if he was denied anything for the garden, which regularly happened. To give you an idea of the rehabilitation deliberately withheld in prison, even though we had a vegetable garden it was virtually impossible to obtain seeds. My sister was prepared to pay for some packets of vegetable seeds to be sent in to the jail via the horticultural teacher so we could have something to grow, but her offer was declined. So we saved the seeds out of tomatoes, capsicums and chillies. Dupas would painstakingly remove the seeds and fastidiously dry them on toilet paper on his window sill. He would then sort them and plant them the next season. That was how we got our seeds.

  Dupas continued in the garden and I continued doing nuts and bolts. At the end of each afternoon, the nuts and bolts workroom was left empty – no more screaming and shouting or smoke-filled air. It was deserted, quiet, relatively fresh and somewhere you could be somewhat at peace.

  By the way, although smoking is banned just about everywhere in this country now, it is still permitted in jails. At Sirius East the common areas of the unit were the only places you were not allowed to smoke. One senior officer once said to me that jails run on nicotine and caffeine and it is just too hard to stop both the inmates and the screws from smoking. Each cell is full of cigarette smoke, which obviously permeates the entire unit. People also smoke outside and they smoke in the workroom. So to be able to go out to the workroom after hours and sit there in a smoke-free environment was, for somebody like me who has never smoked in his life, a blessing.

  One afternoon I was sitting out in the workroom, facing the door, quietly doing nuts and bolts – lost in my thoughts, lamenting the disastrous state of my life – when Edmunds, Gorman and Dupas all wandered in over a span of a few minutes and sat down to do nuts and bolts too. At that stage I didn’t socialise with anybody in the unit. I’d only been in jail a relatively short period compared with these blokes, who had done well over fifteen years each, and I didn’t want to sound like I was whinging. In jail, if you have a short sentence and you complain about it to a long-termer, you are told in no uncertain terms that you copped a “drunk’s lagging” and to kick along with it and stop whinging. The origin of this expression is that anyone charged with drunk and disorderly is locked up for four hours until they are sober and then they are discharged without conviction.

  As a distraction from the mind-numbing activity of assembling Dynabolts, we all started talking about our respective crimes. This was the first time I’d had any discussion with any of these blokes about their offences and I was somewhat apprehensive, but, like anybody, I had a morbid fascination for what they would have to say about themselves. I stuck my hand up first, saying that I had pleaded Guilty and therefore I was guilty of what the Crown had alleged. It would have been most unwise, at that stage, to express any other view of my own culpability.

  Ray Edmunds volunteered that he had committed some terrible crimes and reckoned he had paid a hefty penalty for them. He was still paying that penalty, as he had been in jail over twenty years. He said he regretted what he had done. Frankly that didn’t carry much weight with me because Edmunds was now around seventy and his crimes were serial rapes and murders carried out in the most audacious manner over some years. He was clearly a recidivist who, if given the chance to be back in the community, would probably reoffend despite his advanced years.

  Paul Gorman, chatting along with us, had served well in excess of ten years and was still unrepentant: he boasted that he would get out and reoffend in a very short space of time. As an example of the duty of care not shown by the authorities, this was the man who always volunteered to share a cell with young blokes sent to protection precisely because they were young and vulnerable and had malleable personalities. He would do this under the guise of helping them through a difficult period – and guess what would happen! Within a couple of days, the young bloke had been moved because he had made complaints against Gorman for unwarranted sexual advances and in some cases sexual assault. All that happened was that these blokes were moved. I understand Gorman was subsequently convicted of a jail rape and had an extra few months added to his sentence. He once said to me, in a group, it doesn’t matter where you put “it” as long as it’s out of sight – at which we all laughed. Now I am home, away from the jail atmosphere, I find that type of comment disgusting in the extreme.

  The other person at the table on this day, Peter Dupas, sat on my right, fiddling with the nuts and bolts and just staring at the table. I can still see him now. Edmunds said, “What about you, Pete? Spit it out.” Dupas continued to look at the table. Then he said words to the effect that “I’ve been convicted so I’ve got to wear it.” That was in relation to Nicole Patterson’s murder only. No other matters had reared their ugly head at this stage, even though I knew full well that the police were investigating Dupas for further crimes and that he was a red-hot suspect in at least two and probably more murders.

  Time drags in jail so I don’t know how long it was after this that I applied for a job in the garden. I was told by the supervisor of the unit, Mr Fox, that he would consider my request but the other blokes had the job at the time and I would be a candidate for it only if one of them left. Surprisingly he asked me whether I would be able to work with Dupas. In every other job I had in jail, I was told what I would be doing, not asked, and I find it significant that this officer was so concerned about Dupas that he asked me whether I could work with him.

  Time continued to drag. Eventually the Chinese prisoner was moved to a country jail in preparation for being deported, so I scored the gardening job. This was great because I could be outside more and actually have something to occupy my mind apart from staring at nuts and bolts. I also took the opportunity to enrol in a horticulture course, which was strictly elementary: I knew most of it, having been interested in gardening and particularly Australian native plants most of my life. However, we were given a couple of videos t
o watch and Dupas and I would watch them together, always in his cell, and we would have the horticulture teacher come occasionally to teach us stuff in the garden. With the rudimentary tools and few plants provided, together with the attitude of the authorities, the kind of gardening we could do was basic to say the least.

  Dupas was obsessive – not just in the garden, but about himself and his cell, which was pristine. To give you an idea of just how obsessive he was, in jail it is very hard to get hold of any proper cleaning materials, but somehow Dupas had an entire bottle of floor polish and a scrubbing brush, a small paintbrush, about a two inch brush. Every morning after his shower, he would wipe out his shower recess, which was on the same level as the floor – it was all a poured concrete floor. Then, after let-out, everyday without fail he would paint his entire floor with floor polish. He would paint his way back towards the door and would then go outside to do his gardening and leave it to dry. Also, as a matter of protocol, you never, ever barged into Dupas’s cell unannounced. If you did – and I saw this with my own eyes – he would stare, shake, and threaten you.

  Swearing in jail is endemic. Everybody swears, non-stop. You become completely conditioned to it. However, the first time I heard Dupas utter the word cunt I was absolutely dumbfounded. It sent a shiver down my spine. He spat the word out with such venom that it made me stop in my tracks, realising how much he must hate women. I have never forgotten it. So when Dupas told you to fuck off he really meant it, and you did so and you did so smartly.

  After polishing his floor every day Dupas would then put a towel on the floor. To visit him, you had to follow a procedure: you would go to his cell and knock on the door. Dupas would always be sitting on his bed watching television, his hands clasped between his knees, which later became significant. He would then look around and either he would say Yes, you could come in or he would tell you to fuck off. If you were invited in, and only if you were invited in, you then took off your shoes and stepped across the threshold onto the towel – whatever you do, don’t step on the floor – and then sit at the end of his bed on the edge. That was it, that was his obsessive, controlling type of behaviour.

  It might seem astounding, but we were allowed out into the garden on our own, with no supervision. Here was a man who was a serial killer, whose modus operandi was killing by repeated stabbings and slashings, who was given a very wide berth by everybody in the unit (for obvious reasons), and guess what he was given every day to take out into the garden, unsupervised… A pair of secateurs! He would get these from the officer and stick them in his overalls pocket. The drill was that if you wanted the secateurs you had to ask him for them and he would hand them to you. You then gave them back to him when you had finished and he would place them back in the pocket of his overalls. They were his secateurs. Other tools were issued each time we gardened: a garden pitchfork, a mattock and a couple of shovels, all deadly weapons in the hands of somebody like Dupas. Not one officer, ever – and I mean ever – came out to supervise what we were doing in the garden. Needless to say, I kept my eyes well and truly peeled when I was out there with Dupas as it would have been very easy for him to attack me with any of these potential weapons that the authorities gave him each day.

  This is significant because anything could happen in the garden, and did. On one occasion, from my cell window I watched Camilleri make a shiv out in the garden. I watched him walking around with it in his hand and I watched him secrete it in a drain pipe. I saw him go to the drain pipe the next day and retrieve the knife, then walk around with it. It was when I saw him put it back that I told the screws about what I had seen. The whole joint was locked down and the knife was located. Dupas was regularly armed with a shiv and was not once stopped by the screws and searched.

  The lack of supervision didn’t apply only to Port Phillip. When I was later moved to Fulham Prison near Sale, the situation was the same. I was employed for a while in the garden gang, working outside the jail, and we went for days without seeing an officer while we were doing our job. The garden gang would walk around “no-man’s-land” this was between the perimeter fence of the prison and the property fence-line beyond that. They were the blokes who would collect the drugs and bring them back in. The trick was to fill a tennis ball with drugs and toss it into this area for pickup by the garden gang. There was a cursory search each afternoon. You could walk around for hours outside the jail with nobody watching. Yes, there is supposed to be electronic surveillance. But at Port Phillip, whenever there had been a drama that could have been solved if there had been CCTV footage of the incident, we were always told that the cameras weren’t working. And the same applied at Fulham.

  Worse than that was the “bush gang” at Fulham: the blokes who went out into the community and worked cleaning up playgrounds, building barbecue shelters and suchlike. The bush gang would pick up drugs left in a pre-determined location and bring them back into the jail. (That was one of the ways drugs were brought in, the other way being, as I’ve already said, with officers.) Where are the security officers when all this is going on? Well, they sit at the officers’ station and the only time they get up is to conduct muster, break up a fight or have a smoke and a coffee. You can always tell when the screws have arrived for another day because the unit TV goes on and there it stays until lockdown at day’s end. Most of the time they have a smoke and a coffee in the little officers’ crib room within the unit, which is an even greater farce as far as supervision is concerned because they are all in there with the door closed.

  This, by the way, was how the screws all developed the PPA or the PPG. The women officers develop the PPA – the Port Phillip arse – and the men the PPG – the Port Phillip gut. Their lack of fitness was amazing. On one occasion this lack of fitness was exposed, at the same time as providing great amusement for the majority of the jail. A bloke was in the hospital as a result of a being psychologically disturbed. He managed to get his pyjamas off and jump, as naked as the day he was born, over the razor-wire fence from the exercise yard in the hospital into no-man’s-land. This area has a road around it and is completely unobstructed around the entire jail to enable emergency and maintenance vehicles access to the jail. To watch this bloke nude running around the jail perimeter with a posse of fat screws chasing him was hilarious. They took nearly an hour to run him down. Every time a screw got any where near him they were puffing and blowing so hard he would merely sprint past or right through them. The whole jail was locked down because of this security breach and you could hear the various units around the jail cheering as the bloke ran past the screws yet again. He didn’t look too flash once they did finally catch hold of him, though. He was given a thorough tidy up for his troubles and put into the slot. So much for his mental state!

  Dupas would try to strike the seeds he had so painstakingly collected and dried in small pots. In the absence of potting mix, which we weren’t allowed, we had started a compost heap – just a pile of clippings contained in a wooden box – to help with the seed-raising process. But because we were given no fertiliser or anything else to help the composting along, it was taking a long while. Meanwhile, one day we planted some tomato seeds and put them in a little hot house that Dupas had built out of bits of plastic. It looked like a humpy. The next day Dupas was screaming mad because mice, which were rampant at Port Phillip, had got into the hot house, scratched all the seeds up and eaten them. He went berserk. We weren’t allowed to have rat poison, for obvious reasons; nor were we allowed to have mouse traps. There was no way of catching these mice. This went on and on, with our seeds being eaten by the mice on a daily basis.

  Dupas was becoming more and more agitated about the mice, until one day when Biff joined us. Don’t forget this bloke was in for murder and necrophilia, a thoroughly unsavoury character whose IQ I have already referred to. We were in the vegie garden and Biff and Dupas were digging over the compost heap when they located a mouse nest. In the nest were a number of baby mice, tiny, still blind. Dupas changed complet
ely, so did Biff. What happened next shocked me so much that I couldn’t watch after the first one. Dupas and Biff picked up each baby mouse by its tail and cut its head off with the secateurs. There was blood everywhere. Even though they were small mice these blokes had blood all over their hands and they were in seventh heaven over this. Even now, writing this paragraph, I am revolted by the memory of how these two men looked. They were both laughing almost maniacally, and having an absolute ball inflicting this extraordinary pain and death on these poor little animals. It was sickening to see the senseless pain inflicted on such tiny, defenceless creatures.

  As I’ve said, Dupas was pudgy, fat, looked like he wouldn’t be able to lift the skin off a rice pudding. In reality, the opposite was the case. I couldn’t believe how strong his hands were, and his fingers in particular. Occasionally we were able to scavenge a small piece of wire that could be used to hold the fence up around the vegetable patch. We weren’t given pliers but Dupas could twist the wire tighter and tighter and tighter, almost as tight as if he was using pliers, with no apparent effect on his fingers. It was something I couldn’t do. If anybody couldn’t open a jar in the unit after canteen, you would just give it to Dupas. One flick and the thing would be unscrewed. His ability to swing the mattock was another thing that I found amazing, even though he couldn’t last for long because he was so overweight, smoked excessively and was generally unfit. Nevertheless, the force with which he hit the ground with the mattock was something I noticed the first time I saw him do it. He was a real contradiction. His looks well and truly belied the inner strength. He appeared to me as if his quiet demeanour was all part of this façade. The noisy ones, in my experience, don’t do it; it’s the quiet ones you have to keep your eye on. And he fitted that bill to perfection.

  Chapter 6

  The Garden of Eden