Sadistic Killers: Profiles of Pathological Predators (28 page)

But the three murders which Paul Denyer

committed during a seven-week period in 1993 were
so shocking that they made headlines around the
world. And his ongoing gender confusion ensures
that he continues to make headlines today.

Formative experiences

Paul was born on 14 April 1972 to Maureen and Anthony Denyer who had arrived in Australia from England seven years before. They moved around, eventually settling in Campbelltown near Sydney. Paul was their third child and they went on to have three more.

When Paul was a baby he rolled off a bench and knocked his head. Thereafter, whenever he did anything unusual, his family would joke, ‘That’s because you were knocked on the head as a child’. Head injuries can indeed change a person’s 232

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behaviour, especially if damage is done to the frontal lobe of the brain which handles aggression and impulse control.

Despite the fact that he had four brothers and a sister, Paul found it hard to mix with the other children in his kindergarten class. He was already overweight and looked stressed and awkward. Thankfully he seemed to fare better at primary school.

But when Paul was nine, the family moved to Victoria so that his father could become manager of a steak house. None of the Denyer children wanted to move but Paul found it especially difficult and was too shy to make friends with his new classmates, most of whom had known each other for four years.

Though still a young boy, he continued to grow rapidly in height so that he was much taller than his contemporaries. For this he was laughed at and bullied. He increasingly turned to food for comfort and his girth also became a reason for local jokes.

Alleged sexual abuse

Paul would later say that he was sexually abused by a relative during these years, but later still he said that he’d invented this allegation. The relative he named has protested strongly of his innocence and is considered blameless. However, it’s very likely that Paul was abused by
someone
, especially in the light of his later sexual identity crisis and appalling violence.

Unable to connect with other people, he began to collect knives and catapults, fantasising about a powerfulness which he lacked in real life. He also began to cut off the heads of his sister’s dolls, something that serial killer Edmund Kemper also did as an abused boy. Paul went on to stab his sister’s teddy bears with a knife and slapped a classmate who mocked him so that the pencil the boy had been sucking lodged deep in his throat.

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Cruelty to animals

Given his immense size, Denyer probably pubertised at age ten and began to have sexually sadistic fantasies. It is known, at least, that at this age he stabbed the family kitten, slit its throat and hung it from a tree in the yard where his family were sure to notice it.

At 12, he stole a car. It was doubtless a cry for help but the authorities released him with a warning. At 13, he phoned the fire brigade and falsely reported a fire. That same year he was discovered vandalising a nearby property. Again, nothing was done to counsel this deeply disturbed boy.

By age 14, Paul wanted to kill. As such, he sought out films where people were brutally murdered, watching them over and over. By 15, he’d gravitated to sex crime, bullying another boy until he agreed to masturbate in front of a group of children.

For this he was charged with assault.

Unemployment

Denyer found work in a Safeways supermarket and it was there, at age 20, that he met his first serious girlfriend Sharon Johnson. That same year they moved into a flat in Frankston together, but Denyer lost his job after deliberately knocking down a woman and child with a convoy of shopping trolleys.

Again and again he displayed the sadist’s urge to destroy. He found a job at a marine workshop but spent so much time making knives to fuel his fantasies that his employer fired him.

The grossly overweight young man now lay around at home imagining what he’d like to do to women, whilst his long-suffering girlfriend Sharon held down two jobs to make ends meet.

Later that year, 1992, he broke into a flat in the same block as his own and slashed all of the owner’s clothes to pieces.

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He also cut up her engagement photographs, determined to destroy the symbols of another’s happiness.

Deciding to up the ante, he entered the flat of another girl called Donna whom he pretended to like but secretly hated.

He planned to stab her to death but she was out so he settled for dismembering her cat instead. He then dragged its entrails through the house to create a bloody trail and wrote messages in blood on the walls, including the chilling words ‘Donna

– You’re Dead.’

Not content with this mayhem, Denyer cut the throat of two kittens which lived in the house and put their bodies into the plastic bath where Donna bathed her baby. He also slashed all of her clothes.

But, satisfying as these cruel acts were, they fell short of the sadist’s fantasies about murdering women. The following year he would do just that.

The rst murder

On 12 June 1993 at 7 p.m. he was loitering at a bus stop in Langwarrin, near Frankston, looking for a victim when student Elizabeth Stevens walked past him. He followed her and stuck a piece of aluminium pipe in her back, telling her that it was a gun. He then walked the terrified young woman to a nearby park.

After choking her into unconsciousness, he stabbed her again and again in the throat. She was still alive and began to move about, so he thrust his knife into her chest six times. He also cut her from her breast to her abdomen, before raking his blade across her stomach again and again. The blade broke during the stabbing so he stamped on her neck.

The young woman began to make the death rattle, whereupon the sadist stripped her above the waist. He also broke her nose and cut her face, the ultimate hate crime. When her dying convulsions had ended he dragged her body to a nearby drain.

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Later, back at home, his girlfriend noticed nothing different about him, for as a sadistic psychopath in the grip of an obsession he felt absolutely no remorse for his actions. But he did have one overwhelming desire – the desire to hurt, mutilate and kill again.

A failed murder attempt

Almost a month later, on 8 July, he approached 41-year-old Roszsa Toth on a Frankston pavement, pushing a knife into her side and telling her that he had a gun. He tried to pull her into a nearby wildlife reserve but she fought back, biting his fingers. She raced into the road and tried to flag down a car but none of them would stop for the shoeless woman with the torn clothing so Denyer was able to attack her again. For the second time she fought him off, then successfully flagged down a car.

The second murder

Paul Denyer fled, but he was determined to find himself another victim. That same night he took the train to Kananook and found himself a vantage point where he could watch people entering and leaving a local store. He saw 22-year-old Debbie Fream park her car and hurry into the shop, whereupon he clambered into the back of her car. There he saw a baby seat so he knew that he was about to kill a young mother – Debbie had given birth only 12 days before.

Debbie returned to her car with groceries and cigarettes, and he held his pretend gun to the back of her head and ordered her to drive to a quiet area. After she followed his instructions and parked, he told her to get out of the vehicle. When she obeyed him, he looped a cord around her neck.

When she began to lose consciousness, he stabbed her again and again in the head, neck, breasts and arms. During the ensuing struggle he managed to pull her top off, exposing her 236

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breasts. He also stabbed her in the stomach, pleased when air began to whistle through the holes in her throat.

Eventually he took her body to a nearby paddock and covered it with branches before heading home to his empty house. Later he picked his girlfriend Sharon up at the railway station but he acted calmly and she noticed nothing untoward.

The following day he returned to Debbie Fream’s car, stole the $20 note he found in her purse, and took her groceries home with him. He feasted on them as her body decomposed.

For the next four days Debbie remained listed as a missing person, then, on 12 July, a shocked farmer discovered her mutilated corpse.

The third murder

Beginning to perfect his modus operandi, Paul Denyer scouted out a local bike track, realising that he could cut a large hole in the fence and push himself and his next victim into the adjacent nature reserve. He cut three holes with pliers on the morning of 30 July, then returned in the afternoon in his car. Slumped down behind the wheel, he waited for a female victim to come along.

17-year-old college student Natalie Russell was en route for home at 3 p.m. when the overweight giant came up behind her and held his knife to her neck. She struggled until he threatened to cut her throat, whereupon she stopped fighting and offered him sex or money if he’d let her live. But the evil sadist got off on causing fear and pain so he dragged her to the ground and cut her across the face. Natalie began screaming and jumped up but he forced her down again and looped a strap around her neck.

He strangled her while forcing her head back, then made a small incision in her throat and pushed his fingers into it, pinching her vocal cords and twisting them. She began to lose consciousness and he grabbed his knife and almost decapitated 237

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her, then watched her die. Afterwards he kicked the body and slashed down the side of the dead girl’s face.

Later he collected Sharon from her work and spent the evening with her at her mother’s house. He’d later say that he’d never hurt his girlfriend, that she was a kindred spirit. She asked him about the cuts on his hands – obtained during the stabbing frenzy – and he said he’d sustained them whilst fixing his car.

But unknown to Denyer, a piece of skin from his finger had become attached to the bloody skin of his third victim so the police were closing in.

Clues

The police had been hunting extensively for the Frankston killer for weeks, but now they had the skin of his finger to extract DNA from. They also suspected that he was the owner of a yellow Toyota Corona which had been seen parked near the track around about the time of Natalie’s homicide. A policeman had taken a note of its location and description, suspicious because the vehicle didn’t have number plates.

Luckily he’d written down its number from the registration label so they were able to trace it to Paul Charles Denyer. They were also fortunate in that a passerby had seen a man matching Denyer’s description slouching down in the car as if he didn’t want to be seen.

When the police interviewed Denyer, they noticed several cuts on his hands, the kind that criminals often sustain during the commission of a violent act. But he denied being the killer, and, taken to the police station, continued to deny culpability for several hours. Only when the police asked him for blood and hair samples to determine his DNA did he realise that it was all over and admit to murdering all three women. Asked why, he said that he’d hated women for years.

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Whydunnit

Paul Charles Denyer’s trial began on 15 December 1993

at Victoria’s Supreme Court. He pleaded guilty to all three murders, the attempted murder of Roszsa Toth surprisingly being reduced to the lesser charge of abduction.

A clinical psychologist identified the defendant as a sadist.

He said that Denyer had explained that his cruelty was due to his hard upbringing which included sexual abuse by a male relative, abuse that relative strenuously denied. But the psychologist noted that he’d known numerous people who’d had worse experiences than those which Denyer reported and they hadn’t gone on to kill.

On 20 December, Justice Frank Vincent sentenced him to three life terms without the possibility of parole plus an extra eight years for the abduction of Roszsa Toth.

A lesser sentence

Denyer appealed to the Full Court against his life sentence and on 29 July 1994 it reduced his tariff to 30 years after which he has the possibility of parole. It was a chilling moment for his victims’ relatives, knowing that he might be released in his middle years whilst still strong and dangerously disturbed.

Apology

After several years in prison, Paul Denyer tracked down his relative and wrote to him, apologising for accusing him of sexual abuse. The man was devastated to hear from Paul, as Paul had previously threatened to kill his wife and children and they’d emigrated to begin a new life.

Sex change

Incarcerated in Barwon prison in Victoria, Denyer became a Christian then a Muslim. But religion didn’t make him 239

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content and, in 2003, he decided that he was really a woman trapped in a man’s body and applied for a sex change. After due consideration, he was turned down as an unsuitable candidate.

Undaunted, he began to refer to himself as Paula and applied to change his name by deed poll.

He also asked the authorities to let him wear make-up and, when they refused, he appealed citing Victoria’s anti-discrimination laws. Meanwhile he has used the prison sewing machine to make his clothes look more feminine and has had photographs taken of himself wearing feminine attire.