JUNE 2018 | The Australian Women’s Weekly 97
Real life
I
n the winter of 1993, the haunting
image of luffy-haired newborn
Jake Blair found its way onto
the front pages of the national
news, tragically famous for being
the baby boy whose mother had
been brutally murdered by one of
Australia’s most infamous serial
killers. While the name of the sadistic
killer who had stabbed and strangled
22-year-old Debra Ann Fream was yet
to make headlines, the poignant photo
of the 12-day-old infant became the
innocent face of the terrifying murders
that sent a sleepy Melbourne bayside
suburb into lockdown.
Twenty-ive years later, Jake Blair
has ventured back into the spotlight to
tell The Weekly what it has been like
growing up with the agonising legacy
of one of Australia’s most horriic
and notorious crimes – and why the
monster who robbed a child of his
mother, and two other families of their
children, should never be released. “I’ve
lived my entire lifetime with what the
killer did that night,” Jake says sadly.
“He took everything from me. He took
the happy life that was waiting for me.”
The chilling discovery of Debbie
Fream’s body, in an isolated paddock
in Carrum Downs on July 12, 1993,
just one month after the stabbing
murder of Frankston TAFE student
Elizabeth Stevens, 18, generated fear
and panic across the city’s south-east,
where an intensive murder hunt was
underway. Over the coming days, the
horrifying prospect of a serial killer
stalking the streets of Frankston took
a more alarming twist as the media
speculated about a possible connection
between the crimes and other unsolved
murders, including the likely abduction
of Sarah MacDiarmid, 23, who had
disappeared without a trace in 1990.
Three women had already been
plucked from the streets at night –
including an attempted abduction an
hour before the new mother’s
kidnapping – prompting police to
warn local women not to venture out
alone after dark. The suburb became a
ghost town.
With a killer on the loose, dozens
of extra oficers were drafted into
Frankston, where a door-knock of
every home was undertaken. Police
also held public meetings, studying the
audiences, convinced the killer could
be under their noses and enjoying the
panic generated by his reign of terror.
They believed it was only a matter of
time before he struck again.
On July 30, the body of Frankston
student Natalie Russell, 17, who had
failed to return home from school,
was discovered on a local reserve, her
throat savagely slashed and, like the
two previous victims, she had been
repeatedly stabbed and strangled.
But this time the killer had left crucial
clues behind, including his hair on the
victim’s body and skin beneath her
ingernails.
The net tightened when a postal
worker reported seeing a man
slouched in a rusty Toyota watching
the girl through binoculars at around
the time she was murdered. The car
belonged to Paul Charles Denyer.
On July 31, the suspect was taken
to Frankston Police Station, casually
informing detectives in a video-taped
interview that he had passed the crime
scene that morning and had watched
police conducting inquiries in his
street. Observing cuts and abrasions
on Denyer’s hands, they asked how
he had hurt himself. Fixing the fan
belt on his car, he answered calmly.
For hours, Denyer denied any
knowledge of the crime, then did an ➝
“My mother’s
murderer
stole my life”
THE
FRANKSTON
SERIAL KILLER
PHOTOGRAPHY BY JAMES GEER. FAMILY PHOTOGRAPH SUPPLIED AND USED WITH PERMISSION.