Paula Denyer Biography
Paula Denyer (born Paul Charles Denyer, April 14, 1972) is an Australian serial killer who is currently serving three consecutive life imprisonment sentences for the 1993 murder of three young women in Melbourne with a non-parole period of 30 years. In the media, Denyer became known as the “Frankston Serial Killer” as her crimes took place in Frankston’s neighboring suburbs.
Paula Denyer
Later, when she was about 30 years old, Denyer started identifying as a transgender woman during her imprisonment, but prison authorities refused permission to wear maquillage, receive sex reassignment surgery, or change her name legally.
Paula Denyer Age
Paula is 46 years old as of 2018.
Paula Denyer Early Life
Denyer was born on April 14, 1972, in Campbelltown, New South Wales, an outer suburb of Sydney, to British immigrant parents, Anthony and Maureen Denyer. Her parents had immigrated to Australia in 1965, before moving to Adelaide, and in 1981 the family (now including five sons and one daughter) moved to Melbourne.
Denyer then reportedly had difficulty fitting in with her peers in her new town, leading to problems of study and self-confidence that had been exacerbated by significant weight gains in her teen years. She slashed her sister’s teddy bear’s throat at the age of 11 and cut the family cat’s throat before hanging it in a tree; she was arrested and cautioned at the age of 13 for stealing a car; and at the age of 15 for assaulting a fellow student.
After school, she had trouble holding down jobs, was fired seven times, and failed a physical when she tried to enter Victoria Police.
Paula Denyer Crimes
Denyer, aged 20-21 and identified as a male at the time of her crimes, began stalking and attacking a number of women in and around Frankston’s Melbourne suburb during a five-month period in 1993. The first known incident attributed to Denyer occurred in February 1993, when the Claude Street unit of Donna Vanes in Seaford was broken into. When they arrived home at about 1:00am with their boyfriend, having been out for about an hour, they found that the throats of their cats had been slashed, as had the walls, furniture, and some of the clothes of their baby.
Also found was female pornographic imagery, and the message “Donna you ‘re dead” written in blood on the wall. Unwilling to stay in the unit, she moved in with her sister, who lived in the unit next to Denyer and whose neighbor had also recently been the victim of a slasher break-in. The first victim of the murder was 18-year-old Elizabeth Stevens, who had come from Tasmania to study at TAFE Frankston in Melbourne in January 1993.
Living on Paterson Avenue, Langwarrin, she and her aunt and uncle had left a bus at the Cranbourne Road stop on Friday, June 11. As she was expected to be home around 8:00pm, her uncle started searching for her in his car at 10:00pm, and the police were notified about 1:00am, but little could be done because of the bad weather that day. The next morning a man found her partially hidden body in Lloyd Park Reserve: she was strangled, stabbed, her throat was slashed, and a criss-cross pattern was carved into her. A month later, 41-year-old Rosza Toth alighted at Seaford Railway Station on Thursday, July 8, and headed north on her way home along Railway Parade. As she walked past Seaford North Reserve around 5:50pm, she noticed a man wandering near the toilet block and was attacked shortly after passing him.
Toth was dragged into the park, but broke free after Denyer held a fake weapon on her head, pretending to submit. Shaken, and with light injuries, she then ran back to the road, stopped a car, and was assisted by the driver back to her house. That same night, Deborah Fream, 22, who lived near Kananook Station, Seaford, was kidnapped in her car early in the evening. She had left her 12-day-old son with a male friend at home when she went out on a short trip at 7:00pm to buy some milk for an omelet dinner.
By 8:00pm, when she had not yet returned, she called her boyfriend, the police, and the local hospital seeking news of her whereabouts and possible accidents. The friend and boyfriend tried to find her and then reported her missing at the Frankston Police Station.
A farmer found Fream’s partially covered body on Taylors Road, Carrum Downs, on the afternoon of Monday, July 12; she had been strangled, savagely slashed, and her throat cut, like Stevens. The third and final victim, 17-year-old schoolgirl Natalie Russell, was attacked on Friday 30 July as she walked home from John Paul College. Despite media speculation, public fear increased, and her schoolwarnings, she took her usual short cut home to Frankston North, a fenced walkway (now called Nat’s Track in her memory) that passes between two golf courses on Skye Road.
Russell was reported missing at the Frankston Police Station at 8:00pm, and her body was soon found by a police search. She was dragged into adjacent scrub from the path through a large hole in a wire fence. She had died similarly to the others, but she had put up a considerable struggle during the attack, which helped investigators because DNA evidence was finally available on the scene.
Paula Denyer Investigation
Following the incidents at Denyer’s unit block, where the first slasher break-in took place, and at Vanes ‘ unit in February 1993, police became involved with the case. Stevens ‘ murder was the first incident to attract a large investigation, as was Fream’s disappearance when a search was organized and the Kananook Creek was examined by scuba divers. On the Stevens scene, no external forensic evidence was found, and no witnesses came forward.
With Fream, again, due to poor weather, no foreign forensic evidence was found on the scene, but witnesses later recalled her car, a gray Nissan Pulsar, driving erratically and flashing its high-beam lights. Her car was located at nearby Madden Street by police the next day, and forensics found traces of Fream’s blood inside, next to a new front dent, and the driver’s seat pushed back.
Denyer later explained how Fream had left her car unlocked at the milk bar and had climbed into the back seat, threatening her with the gun shortly after she had dropped out of the store. Following the second attack, and with Toth’s description (she described her attacker as 18-20 years old, 180 cm tall, with a round face and blue-eyes), the police drew up a profile of the suspect: a male, probably unemployed or with a menial job, likely a local resident, aged 18-24, average looking, and living alone.
At 2:30pm, a postal worker saw a rusted yellow Toyota Corona without number plates parked near Nat’s Track on Skye Road, with a man using binoculars acting suspiciously inside. As he stopped in a house to call police, he noticed Russell approaching the track alone, observed by the suspicious man, who then ran up the track.
Police responded, noted the number of the registration label, door-knocked a few nearby houses, but had to leave soon before the man came back to attend another call. The walkway’s later forensic investigations revealed three holes cut in the fence with the same tool, with traces of blood on one, along with traces of skin and hair on Russell but not belonging to the victim.
Police also informed investigators of the details of the registration, which were quickly traced to the owner of the car, Paul Charles Denyer. Detectives visited her small unit at 186 Frankston-Dandenong Road, Seaford on the afternoon of 31 July— a unit shared with Denyer’s girlfriend and next door to Donna Vanes’s sister.
While her movements were being checked, she admitted that she was in the vicinity of the Fream and Russell assassinations at the time. She was then taken to the Frankston Police Station and her video interview began at 9: She was unable to adequately explain the cuts and scratches noticed by the officers and also admitted that she was in the vicinity of the Stevensattack. She agreed to have her DNA collected and, at the beginning of 1 August, suspected that police had evidence of DNA, admitted to the murders, the Toth assault and the slasher break-ins. Denyer also told detectives that she had stalked women in the Frank.
Paula Denyer Gender Identity
Denyer began to identify as a woman that same year, according to the first of “The Paul Denyer Letters” dated November 29, 2003. Denyer claimed that by killing them, these feelings of gender dysphoria led her to seek revenge against women. In “Letter 6” dated 4 February 2004, she wrote: “I committed these disgusting crimes… not because I ever hated womankind, but because I have never really felt that I was male.”
In prison around this time, Denyer began to wear women’s clothes and cosmetics, defying prison orders. Denyer also submitted requests for freedom of information to learn about the gender reassignment policy of the Victorian government for prisoners and sought evaluation to determine its suitability for such surgery, which was also rejected by medical specialists and criticized by the transgender community.
Denyer received counseling from prison psychologists on gender identity issues by the summer of 2004. Denyer, however, had not taken the step of changing names legally as of 2013.
Paula Denyer Trial and Imprisonment
Denyer was charged with three counts of assassination and one of abduction, charges she later pleaded guilty to and did not contest. Psychologists and experts looked at Denyer, noting a lack of emotion about the crimes, a single-minded desire to kill, and the unusual randomness by which victims were selected, leading to a diagnosis of sadistic personality disorder but not legal insanity.
She also admitted that she was influenced during the examination by the 1987 film, The Stepfather. She was sentenced to three consecutive life imprisonment sentences without parole at Melbourne’s Supreme Court on 20 December 1993, after four days of hearings. However, Denyer lodged an appeal on 31 December, which was heard in July 1994-granting her a 30-year (up to 2023) non-parole period.
Initially sent to HM Prison Barwon, Denyer is now in Port Phillip Prison. Denyer was the subject of a 7:30 Report on 9 January 2004, after 10 years in prison, entitled’ Murderer’s sex change request sparks rights debate.’ In September 2004, news broke out of a letter that Denyer had sent to her alienated brother (who had been accused of sexually abussing her as a child in her trial) and sister-in-law who had re-emigrated to the UK.
In July 2012, Denyer came to the media’s attention again on allegations of four rapes carried out over a six-week period.[10] In April 2013, the Herald Sun created a 14-letter website, written by Denyer to another inmate in 2003 and 2004, entitled “The Paul Denyer Letters” The newspaper also published articles on 8 April related to letter analysis and handwriting.