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A serial killer is urging a judge to lock him away for life, penning a letter to the court begging to never be released following his arrest for the cold case murder of a Victorian mother.

The Supreme Court of Victoria heard former Geelong man Darren Chalmers, 56, remains a grave danger to the community after fatally strangling two women decades apart on opposite sides of the country.

Darren Chalmers (left) arrives at the Supreme Court of Victoria in Melbourne on Wednesday.Credit: AAP

In an unprecedented move Chalmers himself wrote to the court about his sentence saying: “Not 25 [years] not 30, please 40 plus. I think I deserve it and more.”

Details of Chalmer’s murder of Geelong mother Annette Steward, 29, in March 1992 were aired in court for the first time on Wednesday where it was revealed he had met his victim only hours before bludgeoning her with an iron and strangling her with an extension cord after she offered him a couch to sleep on.

Director of Public Prosecutions Kerri Judd, KC, said Steward left her job at the Winchester ammunition factory on the day she died and arrived home where a man she had been seeing intimately, Keith Pengelly, turned up with three friends.

The group, which included Chalmers, stayed for less than an hour, sharing coffee and fixing the young woman’s television antenna before they left, Pengelly kissing Steward on his way out.

Annette Steward (left), killed in 1992, and Dianne Barrett (right), killed in 2019.

But Judd said soon after Chalmers returned alone, knocking on the door with a beer bottle in hand and telling Steward it was his birthday and he had nobody to celebrate it with.

She allowed him to sleep on her couch before she too went off to bed. Chalmers said he lay awake on the couch for an hour before putting on gloves and attacking Steward as she slept, striking her multiple times in the head with an iron.

He then choked her to death with an electrical cord. No motive has ever been revealed.

Chalmers then left through a rear door, smashing his beer bottle on nearby train tracks. He returned home, leaving his blood-stained clothes in the laundry trough before going to bed.

“They had no previous relationship and were not otherwise known to one another,” Judd said.

Two days later Steward’s former housemate arrived to collect his belongings and found her dead.

Crime scene investigators were able to collect bedding, cigarette butts in the lounge and hair fibres on her body that would later prove crucial in Chalmers arrest.

An autopsy later found Steward had died from a “sustained” attack, suffering lacerations, bruising and abrasions to her face, neck and body with fragments of plastic from the iron embedded in her forehead.

Darren John Chalmers.

At the time of the murder, Steward’s two children, 13-year-old Jacinta and 10-year-old Aaron were with their grandparents.

Despite the offer of a $1 million reward, Steward’s death remained unsolved until a crucial breakthrough came 27 years later, during an investigation into the murder of another woman in Western Australia for which Chalmers was a person of interest.

Chalmers visited the home of his then neighbour Dianne Barrett – in the Perth suburb of Medina – in May 2019 to have a cup of tea before using an iron bar and his knees to choke her to death.

He then drove more than 50 kilometres to dump her body in remote bushland.

A DNA match led Victorian police to Chalmers who confessed to an undercover officer in January.

“It must’ve taken four minutes or something like that, she stopped breathing,” he said of Steward’s death.

On Wednesday, Steward’s daughter Jacinta Martin turned to face her mother’s killer in court where she revealed the heartache of growing up without a mum.

“You took our mother. You took whatever words of wisdom she may have shared with us,” she said.

“Because of your actions we were left to feel like a burden to our family.”

Annette Steward was murdered in her Geelong home when she was 29 in 1992.

Martin said she would forever remember her mother as a fun, loving, outspoken and caring person to all.

“She judged people for who they were to her and not because of what others may have thought about them. She did not care about where they were from, whom they loved, she just cared,” she said.

“I know telling you this will change nothing, we still don’t have Annette in our lives, but we will always have her in our hearts. All this does for us is open a chapter of our lives that remained unanswered for so long.”

Defence barrister Amy Brennan said her client had suffered a shocking childhood and a chaotic adult life marred by a father who was ill-equipped to meet his children’s needs.

Brennan said her client’s letter, which asked that he never be released and urged the judge to sentence him to life behind pars with no minimum term, was a sign of his remorse.

In discussing the case, Chalmers’ homicidal behaviour was compared to one of the country’s worst serial killers, Bandali Debs, who is serving life without parole for killing four people, including two police.

“There are some disturbing similarities in the features of these crimes. In each case, for no apparent reason [they] murdered completely defenceless, blameless females who had shown them nothing but kindness. [Chalmers] has then … gone about life as though he couldn’t care less,” Justice Andrew Tinney said.

The court heard Chalmers had since been assessed as having poor prospects of rehabilitation, a high risk of reoffending and a violent attitude towards women.

Judd said the deliberate, calculated and unprovoked attack on Steward, who had shown the offender kindness, coupled with an unwillingness to reveal his motive showed just how dangerous he was.

She called for Chalmers to receive a life sentence and said it was open to the judge to withhold the possibility of parole.

“It is clear this offender remains a grave danger to the community,” Judd said. “We call for life.”

Chalmers, who pleaded guilty to murder, will be sentenced at a later date.

He is already serving a life sentence with non-parole term of 20 years for Barrett’s murder.

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