AUSSIE SERIAL KILLER DON'T LET HIM WALK FREE'

Crime reporter John got inside the sinister mind of a serial killer John Silvester, 65, Melbourne, Vic AUSSIE REAL LIFE

- Claudia Siron

On a chilly Sunday morning in August 1993, the phone rang.

Please, not another victim, I thought, anxious to pick up.

'John, we've got him,' the police investigator said when I answered.

For the first time in weeks, I could breathe.

As a newspaper reporter, I'd been covering the case of a sick serial killer wreaking havoc in Frankston, Vic.

The first victim was TAFE student, Elizabeth Stevens, 18. Just two months earlier, on the rainy evening of June 11, she'd been walking home from the bus stop when she was taken to a reserve and brutally murdered.

Her body was discovered the next day.

When detective Peter Halloran inspected the strangulation marks to her neck and a deep cut in her throat, he knew it wasn't a normal crime of passion.

It was ritualistic. It was satanic.

'We have a serious problem here,' he told colleagues. This person is going to strike again.'

He was brushed off and told he watched too many Hollywood movies.

Yet only a few weeks later, a second victim, Deborah Fream, 22, was found dead by a farmer in a paddock in Carrum Downs.

That's when I was notified by Frankston Police and began reporting on the case.

On the night of July 8, new mum Deborah had driven to the local shops to buy milk and eggs while a friend watched her 12-day-old baby boy.

But when she returned to her car, the killer was waiting in the back seat.

She was forced to drive to a secluded area, where her body was later found. Her throat had been cut too.

The Frankston community were now living in fear, with women warned not to walk alone.

After work each day, I'd go home to my wife, then 35, and daughter, then five, and worry about the welfare of the women in Frankston.

Three weeks later, on July 30, schoolgirl Natalie Russell, 17, was found dead near a sports oval.