The Frankston Murders. Vikki Petraitis
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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 most studies suggest they are incurable. Denyer was granted a 30-year minimum sentence because he hadn’t offended before. This is pretty standard for serial killers and needs to be recognised in sentencing.
A 30-year non-parole period sounded substantial back in 1993, but on the 25th anniversary, that time is nearly up. It’s certainly something to think about.
Vikki Petraitis
2018
1
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.
2
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 called 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.
Written in block letters in blood above the stove were the words, ‘Donna You’re Dead’ and next to that was the name ‘Robyn’.
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