The Birnies’ house, 3 Moorhouse Street, Willagee, in Fremantle, still stands today.
Now aged 67, Catherine Birnie has the dubious notoriety of being Western Australia’s most high profile serial killer.
She is Bandyup women’s maximum security prison’s longest-serving inmate and shares a prison wing with vampire wheelie bin killer Jessica Stasinowski.
Stasinowski and her accomplice, Valerie Parashumti, killed in the inner Perth suburb of Lathlain, the same suburb where Catherine Birnie spent some of her troubled childhood.
Hopeful of parole, Catherine Birnie has been found in possession of a knife and is said to be clever at conning prison officers.
More than 30 years ago, Catherine Birnie was the clever con woman of the victims she and her evil psychopath de facto captured after choosing them with a sinister game they played.
Called the “puppeteer” of their deadly play, Catherine Birnie would be on the lookout for potential prey as the pair drove around.
On sighting a potential victim, she would say, “I’ve got the munchies.”
If David Birnie liked the look of the vulnerable female Catherine had spotted on the street, he would seal the girl or woman’s fate by uttering the words, “I’ve got the munchies too.”
The Birnies’ killing season took place in the spring of 1986 when Catherine Birnie was a 35-year-old mother of six children.
Her twisted relationship with the sex-addicted monster David Birnie, however, stretched way back to their early teens.
FILTHY HOUSE, INCEST
Born within a couple of months of each other in the first half of 1951, Catherine Harrison and David Birnie both had difficult childhoods.
David Birnie was the first of five children to an alcoholic mother and physically handicapped father who lived in what was then a semirural suburb in eastern Perth.
Rumours about incest within the family abounded, and the Birnie house was filthy.
Mrs Birnie swore and was ill-kempt, did not cook family meals and was known to exchange sexual favours with taxi drivers in lieu of payment.
When they moved suburbs, the Birnies began living next door to where a lonely, motherless 12-year-old girl, Catherine Harrison, lived with relatives.
When she was two years old, Catherine’s mother had died giving birth to a baby brother, who then also died.
Catherine moved to South Africa, where she was abused by her father, until being taken back to Perth by her maternal grandparents.
When her strict and isolating grandmother had an epileptic fit, Catherine was shipped off to her aunt and uncle in the inner southeastern Perth suburb of Lathlain.
Living next door was a smart, wild teen her age, and before they turned 14, neighbours David Birnie and Catherine Harrison were in a sexual relationship.
David Birnie was a brilliant conversationalist, having read up on everything from politics to science to the Egyptian pyramids and he enthralled Catherine.
But after 10 years of welfare officers repeatedly removing the neglected Birnie children from their parents due to neglect, all five were sent off to different foster homes.
David Birnie lost touch with Catherine, at least for a while.
HURTING ANIMALS
David Birnie was skinny and small of stature and left school, where he was picked on, to became an apprentice jockey.
At Ascot Racecourse, David Birnie developed a reputation for hurting the animals and for exposing himself.
He was fired after the boss learnt he had tried to rape an elderly lady at his boarding house after breaking into her room naked with a stocking over his head.
In the small Perth community of the mid-to-late 1960s, David Birnie and Catherine Harrison again met up.
He already had a juvenile record for petty theft, burglary and assault.
Catherine had left school to work as a machinist in a factory making window blinds.
David Birnie had also become addicted to pornography, fetishism and sex.
His brother would later say that if David did not have sex every night he would go mad.
Once after a couple of nights of going without, David asked his younger brother if he could have sex with him.
When the teenager declined, he woke up to find David trying to have sex with him.
In 1969 when they were both aged 18, David Birnie and Catherine faced Perth Police Court charged with break, enter and steal of a safe at the local drive-in theatre.
David Birnie went to prison. Catherine, pregnant to another man, was put on probation.
When David Birnie was released from prison in mid-1970, he teamed up with Catherine, and they subsequently committed more thefts.
David Birnie returned to jail and Catherine, too, was imprisoned for six months in a detention centre and her infant child taken away by welfare authorities.
Behind bars, she was convinced by an officer her life would be better without David Birnie on release.
Her child returned to her, Catherine secured a job as a nanny and housekeeper with the respected McLauchlan family.
When she became pregnant to one of the sons, Donald McLauchlan, they were allowed to marry on her 21st birthday in 1972.
DEPRAVED PLAN
They would have seven children, but tragedy struck when the first, Donny Jr, was hit and killed by a car in their driveway while just an infant, the accident witnessed by Catherine.
A council employee, Donald supported their burgeoning family until a back injury incapacitated him, and the family was forced into a government housing property.
Catherine proved unskilled at keeping house, and the children ran wild.
David, meanwhile, had married a woman, Kerrie, and they had a child.
But by about 1983, Catherine and David Birnie had started seeing one another again and embarked on an affair.
In 1985, Catherine left her husband and six children – the youngest was three years old – to live with David Birnie.
The couple was never legally married, but Catherine changed her surname by deed poll to Birnie.
They moved into 3 Moorhouse Street in Willagee, a working-class Fremantle suburb.
David Birnie got a job selling car parts at a wrecker’s yard in Myaree, a four-minute drive from the house, where he was known as reliable, trustworthy, intelligent and happy-go-lucky.
At home, where neighbours considered them quiet people who kept to themselves, the Birnies smoked cannabis, took heroin and prescription drugs.
David Birnie wanted sex up to six times a day and would inject anaesthetic into his penis to extend his performance.
He needed constant gratification, and the pair experimented with sex toys.
David Birnie did several more stints in prison for theft and had begun having sexual fantasies of rape and murder.
David told Catherine that if she helped him abduct, bind and rape a young woman, she too would achieve maximum results.
Catherine was a willing participant, whether it was for herself or just to keep David happy.
FIRST MURDER
In September 1986, David Birnie placed an advertisement in a local paper as a lure to potential victims.
It read: “URGENT. Looking for a lonely person. Prefer female 18 to 24 years, share single room flat.”
A young woman, Mary Frances Neilson, 22, had meanwhile approached David at the spare parts yard to buy some tyres.
The pretty, young psychology students with long, wavy brown hair was working part-time at a delicatessen in Attadale, not far from Willagee, while studying at the University of Western Australia.
When he suggested she visit his home for new tyres at a special cut-rate deal, she agreed.
On the evening of October 6, 1986, Ms Neilson knocked on the door of 3 Moorhouse St, an unimpressive, single-storey home with a neglected garden.
As soon as she was inside, Ms Neilson was chained to a bed, and David raped her as Catherine watched.
David Birnie then expressed a desire to kill their young victim.
The pair drove Ms Neilson to a location then known as the Glen Eagle State Forest picnic area, around 50km southwest, where she was raped again.
As she begged for mercy, David Birnie strangled her with a nylon cord.
Then he stabbed Ms Neilson and mutilated her body, which they buried in a shallow grave.
MURDER #2
Around two weeks later, Susannah Candy, 15, was hitchhiking along the Stirling Highway in Claremont, near where a decade later girls would start vanishing.
Smart, pleasant and a straight-A student at Hollywood High School, Susannah was the daughter of one of Perth’s most respected ophthalmic surgeons, Dr Douglas Candy.
He didn’t entirely approve of her working part-time at a restaurant, and he would usually meet her afterwards to accompany her home.
But on October 20, 1986, a Monday, Susannah was making her way home alone when an innocuous-looking couple in their 30s offered her a lift.
The presence of a woman in the car had to have reassured the teenager.
The Birnies drove Susannah back to Moorhouse Street, tied her to a bed, and he repeatedly raped her.
Susannah was raped repeatedly over several days as the couple’s sex slave.
The couple forced Susannah to write letters to her parents, saying she was OK and just needed some time away to sort out some problems.
Finally sick of her, David Birnie produced a nylon rope and put it around her neck, but the young girl became hysterical and fought him off.
The Birnies forced sleeping pills down Susannah’s throat.
When she was comatose, David Birnie picked up the rope again and said to Catherine, “Prove you love me.”
Catherine Birnie then strangled Susannah to death.
The couple drove her body to the Glen Eagle forest and dug a shallow grave near where they had put Ms Neilson.
The Birnies then posted one of Susannah’s letters and two weeks later the second.
The Candy family had reported Susannah as a missing person, and the letters did not convince them any different, but police believed she was a runaway.
MURDER #3
On November 1, 1986, a Saturday, Noelene Patterson was driving home from work when her car ran out of petrol.
Ms Patterson, 31, was elegant, attractive and accomplished.
She had worked as a flight attendant for the (now defunct) Ansett Airlines, for entrepreneur Alan Bond on his private airline, and her latest job was at Nedlands Golf Club.
She lived with her mother in Bicton, on the Swan River, in eastern Perth.
As Ms Patterson stood by her car, she saw a couple draw up beside her, and she was relieved.
She knew the Birnies, who had helped her wallpaper a room in her house just a few weeks earlier.
She got in the car, and her relief turned to horror when David Birnie held a knife to her throat, and she was driven to the house at Willagee.
They chained her to a bed, gagged her and repeatedly raped her, but Catherine was feeling insecure because she knew that David actually liked Ms Patterson as a person.
‘IT’S HER OR ME’
Ms Patterson became their sex slave for days, and David Birnie showed signs of reluctance in disposing of her, always putting it off.
After three days, Catherine held the knife to Ms Patterson’s throat and demanded David choose, her or me.
David forced sleeping pills down Ms Patterson’s throat and strangled her as Catherine watched, then drove her body to join the others in the Glen Eagle forest.
Catherine threw dirt in the dead woman’s face as a final insult to a potential rival for David’s affections.
MURDER #4
Three days later, on November 4, part-time computer operator and babysitter Denise Brown was standing near the Stirling Highway at a bus stop after leaving a tavern in the Fremantle suburb of Coolbellup.
The 21-year-old accepted a lift from the two friendly strangers, and soon after getting into the car, a knife was held at her throat.
Ms Brown was taken back to Moorhouse St, chained to a bed and raped repeatedly for two days.
The couple forced her to phone her parents and tell them she was OK.
FOUGHT FOR HER LIFE
Catherine Birnie decided she had enough of Ms Brown being alive, and the couple drove the victim to the Gnangara Pine Plantation.
It was still daylight, and David Birnie raped Ms Brown again.
When night fell, Catherine held up a torch over Ms Brown, as David cut her neck with the knife while raping her again.
Not dead but making gurgling sounds from her neck wounds, Ms Brown lay still breathing until Catherine retrieved a larger knife from the car and David plunged it into her chest.
The couple dug a shallow grave and put her in it, but as they were tossing earth over her, Ms Brown sat up and gasped for breath.
David Birnie struck Ms Brown over the skull with his shovel, but she still tried to sit up.
Finally, David Birnie bludgeoned her head with an axe.
Following this ghastly scene, Catherine was feeling squeamish about committing further murders, but after 27 days of raping, murdering and burying, David’s bloodlust was on a high.
NIGHT OF TERROR
On November 9, Kate Moir, 17, was hitchhiking along the Stirling Highway after a Sunday night out with friends.
She was “very drunk” and accepted a lift from a harmless-looking couple.
Driven to her family home, she tried to open the car door, but there was no interior handle.
David Birnie then pulled a butcher’s knife from his ugg boot and held it at her throat.
She asked: “Are you going to rape me or kill me?” and David Birnie replied, “We’ll only rape you if you’re good.”
Kate would later recall she heard Catherine Birnie say, “I’ve got the munchies, have you got the munchies?”, the secret sign that they had found their next victim.
“You know you’re gonna die, but you don’t acknowledge that to yourself, you just live it,” Kate said.
RELATED: ‘Are you going to rape me or kill me?’
Taken to Moorhouse St, Kate was quizzed about who she was, was made to take a shower, smoke cannabis and sit down to watch movies.
She was made to dance to the Dire Straits song Romeo and Juliet in front of the Birnies.
She remembered David Birnie’s mustard-coloured dressing gown that her rapist wore and the shiny, cold chains they used to secure her.
“I had a 200 per cent chance of dying and 5 per cent chance of getting away,” she said in a 2017 interview.
He raped her the first time just after midnight while Catherine Birnie watched and took notes.
During the night, she was given a pen and paper to write “goodbye letters” to her loved ones.
Made to shower again and moved to the master bedroom, she was raped again.
David Birnie handcuffed her foot to his and gave her some pills to take, and she was told to go to sleep.
Kate hid the pills under her tongue and later put them under the mattress, figuring if she went to sleep “I’d never wake up”.
ESCAPE
The next morning the Birnies made her call her parents and tell them she’d been really drunk.
David Birnie told the young woman that if she told them anything she would be “murdered like the others”.
It was now Monday morning and David Birnie, who was well regarded at his workplace, left the house for his first day of the working week at the spare parts shop.
His departure gave Kate a faint hope she might escape and survive.
She hid her lipstick and a piece of paper with her phone number on it as proof she had been there.
When someone knocked on the front door and Catherine Birnie answered it without resecuring Kate’s chains, the teenager broke the bedroom window lock and pushed it open.
Falling out the window onto the driveway, she got up and ran to the nearest house.
She tried three houses but nobody was home.
Wearing only black leggings and a singlet, she found a shop with a man standing outside it.
Hysterical, she pleaded with him, “Help I’ve been raped. Please take me inside and call the police.
“If a woman comes here and says I’ve had a fight with her and I'm her daughter, don’t believe her. I’ve been raped.”
The man took her to the police station.
Kate told Fremantle Police about her ordeal at the hands of the sex-crazed couple and the clues she had left at the house.
She described David as having an abnormally long, hooked nose and Catherine as a short woman with a permanent frown and high cheekbones.
When officers arrived at 3 Moorhouse St, no one was home.
When Catherine arrived back, she was arrested, and David was found at work and taken into custody.
Interviewed in separate rooms, the pair revealed little.
David Birnie first claimed the young girl had willingly gone to the house to smoke marijuana and had also willingly had sex with him.
The interviews stretched into the late afternoon.
Finally, one detective said to David Birnie, “It’s getting dark, why don’t you just show me where the bodies are, so we can dig them up.”
To his surprise, David Birnie replied, “OK, there is four of them.”
Told about David’s confession, Catherine broke her silence, and the detectives decided they would take the couple in handcuffs for the grim discovery of the bodies in the forest.
Late on Monday night, on the edge of a pine forest in Gnangara, 30km north of Perth, the team of detectives found a shallow grave.
Between lines of trees, the naked remains of Ms Brown had been lying there for almost a week.
Before sunrise, the team had travelled across the city and south about 80km to Glen Eagle forest looking for three more graves.
After some initial problems finding the burial grounds, they drove up a bush track and began digging at a spot indicated by David.
Another short drive, more digging, and another body was found.
These were the remains of Ms Neilson and Susannah.
Catherine Birnie wanted to show them the next grave. Back to the highway and along yet another track lay a body covered with gravel.
This was Ms Patterson, and when she saw it, Catherine Birnie spat on it.
On November 12, police charged Catherine and David Birnie each with four counts of murder, two counts of aggravated sexual assault on the 17-year-old girl and one count of deprivation of liberty.
BONES
On November 13, a team of 10 workers with two excavators began lifting sections of drain in Harrison St, around the corner from the Birnies’ house.
Workers laying pipes had, several months earlier, found pieces of bone, a pair of shoes and women’s underwear.
But it was not until the Birnie murders were revealed that they acted on it.
Police searched the drain for four hours but found nothing further.
19-YEAR-OLD COMES FORWARD
A 19-year-old female student came forward after the murders hit the news. She claimed she was walking home from the university when a couple tried to pick her up. She felt uneasy about getting in the car when she saw what she assumed was a young boy or girl laying in the back seat. The body was that of Ms Brown, drugged by sleeping pills and passed out. The student declined a ride and the car soon drove away. Her description of the driver and the woman in the passenger seat matched perfectly with David and Catherine Birnie.
TRIAL
A hearing was held in February 1987 at which both Catherine and David Birnie pleaded guilty to all charges.
Justice Alkin Wallace sentenced David Birnie to life in prison, stamping his record “never to be released”.
The judge remarked: “Each of these horrible crimes were premeditated, planned and carried out cruelly and relentlessly over a comparatively short period. (He) should never be let out of prison.”
Catherine Birnie received the same sentence but was given a minimum term that would make her first eligible for parole in 2007.
When it was over, Catherine Birnie was dragged screaming and kicking and spitting to the van that would take her to Bandyup prison.
The public screamed at David Birnie, who smiled and blew them a kiss.
LIFE IN PRISON
David Birnie continued his violent temperament in prison and was often in the middle of fights, beaten up, and spent much time in the prison infirmary.
Catherine Birnie revealed in her first full year of incarceration that she missed her de facto and blamed herself for their capture.
Catherine Birnie told one visitor: “I could have stopped that girl. I should have, but it all had to come to an end.”
For four years, the Birnies exchanged 2600 letters between Bandyup and David Birnie's cell in Casuarina prison.
Catherine Birnie received visits in prison from her six children and from David’s first wife.
She told visitors of her hopes to be released on parole despite Justice Wallace’s pronouncement that “strict security life imprisonment” should mean exactly that for her.
She said she was confused and distressed, “coming down” from heroin addiction, during her trial.
Catherine Birnie allegedly told one visitor, “If I get out when I’m 55 we might get together, but we’ll be too old to do anything.”
In 1990, David Birnie claimed that being apart from Catherine was sending him into a complete physical and mental breakdown.
DEATH IN CELL 12A
Catherine Birnie had initially wanted to marry her de facto when the pair were jailed, but by 1997 that desire had waned, and the letters from her to David dried up.
Catherine Birnie had begun her own campaign for parole and decided she stood a better chance by cutting him off.
She told detectives she took part in the killings only because of her infatuation with David Birnie, and she took part in sexual assaults on their victims to demonstrate her love for him.
Catherine Birnie told police she “was prepared to follow him to the end of the earth and do anything to see that his desires were satisfied’’.
Some time after his letters to Catherine went unanswered, David was prescribed antidepressant medication in prison.
In 2005, he was charged with the sexual assault of a fellow prisoner, and his computer was confiscated after it was found to contain pornographic images.
In early October, 2005, a bureaucratic error meant that paperwork for David Birnie’s antidepressants was lost in the system and his supply was cut off.
On the morning of October 7, prison officers entering cell 12A in the protective custody unit of Casuarina prison found the body of 54-year-old David Birnie hanging by a sheet.
No one claimed his body, and he was buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave.
A close relative of Catherine Birnie’s had previously said that David’s death would precipitate Catherine’s.
“I don’t think she would take her own life unless David kills himself,” Leonard Nock told News Corp reporter George Williams.
“But if he dies there is every chance she may do it.”
‘SHE'S A PARASITE AND AN ACTOR, NEVER LET HER OUT’
While in prison, Catherine Birnie had expressed her sorrow for her victims, in particular the youngest, 15-year-old Susannah Candy.
Catherine Birnie took up painting, and began working in the prison library.
In 2007, Catherine Birnie applied for parole and, although found to be at a low risk of reoffending, was rejected because of the extreme nature of her crimes.
In 2013, her application was again rejected.
Under WA law, Catherine Birnie’s case for parole must be reviewed every three years, and in 2016, the Prisoners Review Board recommended not to release her.
Perth QC Tom Percy has repeatedly called for Catherine Birnie’s release because she is a quiet “church mouse” and keeping her locked up is an exercise in “pure revenge”, Perth Now reported after the decision.
The chief investigating detective on the Birnie case, Paul Ferguson, disagreed.
“I honestly believe that woman has never given those victims one ounce of consideration, both the dead victims and the families of the victims,” he told Perth Now.
“She’s an actor. The person I met is all for herself, and she will do whatever is necessary.
“They were parasites who lived off each other, the most evil people I’ve ever, ever come across.”
In 2009, Catherine Birnie became the centre of a security scare at Bandyup prison where it was alleged she carried a knife.
LESBIAN VAMPIRE WHEELIE BIN KILLERS
Catherine Birnie was said to be acting as a go-between for lovers Jessica Stasinowski and Valerie Parashumti.
The so-called lesbian wheelie bin killers are serving life sentences for the brutal murder of 16-year-old Stacey Mitchell.
The naive teenager’s bludgeoned, strangled and dismembered body was found in their Lathlain backyard in 2006.
Parashumti is serving her sentence in Greenough prison and Stasinowski at Bandyup after the sentencing judge recommended they be kept apart and banned from communicating.
Catherine Birnie was found to be carrying a diary written by Stasinowski, and it was suspected she was facilitating letters between the two.
In 2016, the Birnies’ fifth and surviving victim, Kate Moir, launched a petition to end victims’ re-traumatisation by the possibility of their attackers getting parole.
Due for another parole review this year, Catherine Birnie’s hopes were dashed in October 2018 when the WA Attorney-General introduced a new law into parliament.
John Quigley drafted new laws that meant rules allowing even the worst killers to apply for parole every three years would be scrapped.
This meant persons convicted of three or more murders on the one day or two or more murders on different days could be banned for parole consideration for up to six years.
Mr Quigley paid tribute to Ms Moir when announcing the proposed law changes.
A SIXTH VICTIM?
In 2017, the daughter of a woman missing since 1986 came forward to says she believes her mother may have been murdered by David and Catherine Birnie.
In fact, after the Birnies’ arrest, police reviewed a list of missing females and it included Cheryl Renwick.
Michelle Renwick was 14 years old when her mother Cheryl vanished.
In the months before Cheryl’s disappearance, Michelle remembers her mother being terrified that a man and woman were stalking her.
Overnight, between Sunday, May 25 and Monday, May 26, 1986, Cheryl disappeared from her flat in South Perth.
Uncharacteristically, she failed to show up at her office to work and was not home to meet her daughters returning from a weekend with their father.
The following week, her car was found abandoned at Perth Airport, but police could find no evidence the mother of two had travelled by plane or bus.
Her bank accounts were untouched.
Michelle told Channel 7’s Murder Uncovered she believed the Birnies were involved.
Following the Birnies’ 1996 arrest, police invited Michelle and her younger sister to look through clothes, jewellery and other items found at the Moorhouse St home to see if they recognised anything of their mother’s.
Police later told her Cheryl’s case did not fit the Birnies’ “MO”.
But Michelle is haunted by the possibility the Birnies could be responsible and says there were “too many coincidences” to discount them.
She wants Catherine Birnie to say if they did kill Cheryl and reveal where the body is bu. Continue reading
Comments
Post a Comment