Peter Dupas - Marriage

Marriage

While imprisoned at Melbourne's Pentridge Prison, Dupas formed a relationship with mental health nurse Grace McConnell, who was 16 years his senior. The pair married in 1987 inside Castlemaine Gaol.

McConnell described her marriage to Dupas during the inquest into the murder of Mersina Halvagis:

"He insisted that he was in love with me .... and that with my help he could come out of himself and become a normal person. I agreed (to marry Dupas), not out of particular love for this man but from a sense of responsibility to helping him become a useful member of the community. In my mind, our relationship was mother and son. "Our sex life was very basic, almost non-existent. I would go along with it out of a sense of responsibility … It got to the stage where I could not bear him touching me.

His new wife found him to be self-obsessed, lazy, needy, and a snob, and they divorced during the mid-1990s.