Don't Ever Call Me Helpless

by Ruth Wykes

  DON'T EVER CALL ME HELPLESS

  by

  Ruth Wykes

  BLURB

  Have you ever wondered what it would be like to spend time with a convicted serial killer? Or how you would feel when they told you what it was like to take a life?

  Don't Ever Call Me Helpless is a powerful, chilling true crime story that offers a rare glimpse into the mind of convicted murderer Catherine Birnie.

  In the late 1980s, Catherine and her defacto partner David Birnie went on a killing spree that shocked and numbed the Western Australian community. In just six weeks they abducted, tortured, raped and murdered four Perth women, and were only caught when a fifth victim escaped and led police to the killers.

  During the 1990s Ruth Wykes was a frequent visitor to Perth's Bandyup Women's Prison. She spent many hours with Catherine Birnie, and her account of the woman, mother, and remorseless killer is a must-read for anyone who is interested in true crime.

  DON'T EVER CALL ME HELPLESS

  It's the stillness in her, the calm, when she watches me that frightens me more than anything. I know enough to be aware that her conscience is bankrupt; she is bemused by ordinary human emotions and reactions.

  I am her reluctant teacher. I know she mimics my interactions with people to help her pass as ordinary and insignificant. I have become her mask. Yet barely beneath the surface, in those times she is tested, her true character is revealed. When she is real she is cruel, deeply arrogant, manipulative and difficult.

  She won't change because she can't. She won't find redemption, and in any case she doesn't want to.

  Catherine Margaret Birnie resides in Perth's Bandyup Women's Prison. It has been her home for 22 years, and if public sentiment is any measure of her future, she will remain there for the rest of her life. In 1987 she was imprisoned for abducting, kidnapping, torturing and murdering four Perth women and attempting to murder a fifth. She and her partner David Birnie were kidnappers. They were torturers. They were sexual sadists. They are serial killers.

  The first thing you notice about Catherine Birnie is that you don't notice her at all. She blends in, taking up very little space. It isn't until she becomes aware that you haven't recognised her that she makes herself known to you.

  She doesn't look scary; neither does she carry an aura of danger. In her everyday life Cathy Birnie is a diminutive woman, only around 160 centimetres tall with tiny features. Her hands are small and well defined, and when she walks it is with the air of someone who doesn't have a care in the world.

  Even her face is still and unremarkable when she is relaxed. Her eyes, which have been variously described as cruel, evil and dark, are rarely that; they are part of the mask she wears so successfully. She passes as 'nobody'.

  One woman, a social worker who was conducting a workshop at Bandyup, spent some time chatting with Catherine in the library one day. As she was leaving the prison she was talking to a colleague about the 'lovely woman in the library'. She went on to speculate that this nice woman must be one of those people you read about who is in prison for social security fraud. When she learned who she had been talking to she refused to believe it: 'No way! She's like any normal person you'd meet in the street. She couldn't have done that!'

  But Catherine isn't like any normal person. She has a native intelligence that enables her to read a person's character very quickly. She also has an intuitive sense of someone's vulnerabilities, and an absolute willingness to play with that. For someone with Catherine's propensity for games, an institution with 180 other women to choose from is a smorgasbord.

  Life in prison is relatively comfortable for her. She has gained the right to live in one of the self-care units, which are separate from the main cell blocks and have their own small gardens. She gets access to the daily newspapers and to a computer. All meals are provided; it's still jail, but a self-care unit is as comfortable a place as anyone can find within the prison.

  By her own admission she is now a Christian. And while she is quite happy to state that she has found God, her reluctance to expand on this life-changing experience leaves many people cynical. It is far from uncommon for prisoners, especially those serving lengthy jail terms, to convert to Christianity. It is also not uncommon for that to be nothing more than a convenient 'character reference' for their next parole hearings.

  Now 58 years old, Catherine is a fading version of the hateful, belligerent woman who stares defiantly out of photos taken after her arrest in 1986. Her face has softened and her hair has turned grey.

  The hateful facial expressions, captured by the news media and police photographers, represent a moment, frozen in time, when she had just been convicted of murder. They are inarguably the reference point by which everybody forms their judgement of Catherine Birnie. After all, the closest most people will ever get to her is by looking at those frozen images. In real life she is softer, less intimidating. But is she any less lethal?

  The year 1986 was one in which Australian politics was dominated by the Labor Party. Bob Hawke, the charismatic bloke you'd want to have a beer with, was Prime Minister of Australia. Brian Burke, a man who himself would become intimately familiar with the inside of a prison cell, was Premier of Western Australia. In New South Wales Neville Wran resigned after a decade of leading the state.

  Culturally, the Australian Ballet was bravely performing Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew to surprisingly excellent reviews, but the arts event most Australians remember more was the debut of the movie Crocodile Dundee. Starring Paul Hogan, it became a worldwide smash. On the small screen an ambitious local soap opera made its debut. Producers and TV executives wondered how it would be received, but Neighbours is still entertaining us more than two decades later.

  In the sporting arenas around the nation, the Parramatta Eels beat Canterbury Bankstown to become premiers of the New South Wales Rugby League, and in the VFL's 90th year Hawthorn defeated Carlton.

  But 1986 was a horrific year for crime. In February a young nurse, Anita Cobby, went missing. When her body was found in a paddock, every ordinary person in New South Wales was stunned, then outraged. Rage was palpable when five men were arrested and details emerged of what they had done to Anita.

  In March a car bomb exploded outside Police Headquarters in Russell Street, Melbourne. The bomb killed a policewoman and injured 22 other people. Four men were arrested and sent to prison for the bombings, although one of them was later acquitted on appeal. The apparent motive for the bombings was revenge against the police. The bombers had previously been arrested by the Victoria Police for other crimes.

  In July Kevin Barlow and Brian Chambers were hanged in Malaysia. Barlow and Chambers had been caught trafficking 141.9 grams of heroin and, in what Prime Minister Bob Hawke described as a 'barbaric' act, became the first westerners executed under the tough new Malaysian anti-drug laws. They were hanged on 7 July in Pudu Prison.

  In August, a beautiful nine-year-old girl, Samantha Knight, went missing in Bondi, Sydney. Despite a huge police investigation and intense media campaign nothing came to light and Samantha wasn't found. Ten years would go by before a real clue led police to start looking at a convicted paedophile, and it would be 17 years after her death that this man would be found guilty of killing her. Samantha's body was never found.

  In October 1986 a working-class couple in the Perth suburb of Willagee grew tired of talking about their fantasies and decided it was time to do something about it. In the intimate language of couples they developed a shorthand - a code - for their perverted intentions: 'I've got the munchies'. David and Catherine Birnie started hunting.

  It was all well planned beforehand, and it happened so quickly that most of the damage had been done before P
erth's police or general community had any real idea that something was wrong. By the time a young, half-naked woman ran into a supermarket in Willagee and asked them to call the police, at least four young women were dead. Abducted, repeatedly raped, tortured, drugged and murdered.

  As police listened with mounting horror to the story being related to them by the frightened young woman, their sense of dread grew. They knew that in the previous several weeks there had been four separate reports of missing women in Perth, and at least one police officer had privately begun to worry that a serial killer was operating in the small, isolated city. Until now it had been a vague fear, but as the story began to unfold that fear gave way to disbelief, then horror.

  Willagee is one of Perth's unpretentious suburbs. Situated around 13 km south of Perth, it is a Labor heartland. Australian to its back teeth, its population is 76 per cent Australian-born, 10 per cent of English origin and the rest a smattering of other immigrants. Half the population is married, more than one-third are Catholic and the average house is a separate dwelling.

  Developed in 1951, Willagee is named after a small swamp referred to on early maps as 'Wilgee', an Aboriginal term meaning red ochre. This swamp, from which local Aborigines dug ochre, was situated in what is now Kardinya. Most streets are named after those who arrived on HMS Success under Captain Stirling in 1827.

  David and Catherine Birnie moved into 3 Moorhouse Street, Willagee, in 1984 and were still there in 1986. The house itself was unprepossessing, a modest white-brick building that seemed to be suffering from neglect. The garden was bedraggled, paint was peeling from the walls and bushes had been allowed to grow tall enough to conceal the front windows. A cursory glance from a passer-by would have left you with the impression that this was just another rental property, and that the tenants were terrible gardeners.

  But 3 Moorhouse Street was something else altogether: it would become known as Perth's House of Horrors. It became a prison, a torture chamber and a crime scene, a stage upon which unimaginable acts of depravity and sadism would be acted out by the Birnies.

  When the Birnies were captured, and the extent of their horrific crimes was revealed to a stunned and disbelieving public, there were cries to have the house bulldozed. Nobody could imagine living in that house, not once they knew what had taken place inside those walls. But 3 Moorhouse Street has survived, and today remains structurally identical to how it looked back then. It has been painted and cleaned up, and the garden is healthy and thriving. It looks like a nice house in a pleasant working-class suburb of Perth.

  Mary

  Monday 6 October started out like any other week for 22-year-old Mary Neilson. She was a psychology student at the University of Western Australia who was planning to work as a counsellor with the Department of Community Welfare. To earn some extra cash Mary held down a part-time job in a deli.

  Mary's parents were both TAFE lecturers, and in October 1986 they were enjoying a holiday in Britain. Mary's Monday began like any ordinary week: she went to work at the deli, and had lectures at university later that day. With a few hours to spare Mary decided to do something about the tyres for her car. She needed new ones.

  Like many university students Mary had limited funds and the option of buying cheaper tyres was appealing, so she went to a car wreckers in the southern suburb of Myaree. Here she was served by small, mild-mannered David Birnie, who showed her some tyres and then told her that if she called around to his place he would be able to do her a much better deal. David lived less than five minutes' drive from where he worked. Mary agreed to go and buy the tyres privately from Birnie.

  When she knocked on the door at 3 Moorhouse Street, Willagee, she was met at knifepoint by a very different David Birnie who, along with his partner Catherine, dragged Mary into the bedroom, tore her clothes off her, gagged her and chained her to the couple's double bed. For the next several hours Mary Neilson was repeatedly raped by David Birnie while Catherine looked on, encouraged him and asked him explicitly what was turning him on the most.

  As night fell the Birnies decided they needed to 'remove the evidence' from the house. Still bound, Mary was dragged into their car, driven to Gleneagle Forest, south of Perth, and in the middle of the night was raped again. Then David Birnie took out a nylon cord and wrapped it around Mary's neck. Using a small tree branch to tighten the cord, Birnie strangled Mary Neilson as she lay on the ground begging for her life.

  After she had died the Birnies dug a shallow grave and, before burying her, stabbed Mary. David told Catherine he had read somewhere that this would allow gases to escape as the body decomposed.

  Given what is now known about piquerism (a stabbing sexual fetish), it is difficult to believe that there was ever such a pragmatic thought in David Birnie's head. It is far more likely that the act of penetrating his victims with a knife was yet another kick for this depraved man.

  When they arrived back in Perth, David and Catherine knew they couldn't leave Mary Neilson's car parked outside their house. David drove the Galant to a riverside car park, opposite police headquarters, where it was found six days later.

  Over the years many people have speculated that this, the first known murder committed by David and Catherine Birnie, was unplanned. Experts believe that David impulsively took advantage of Mary Neilson turning up at his workplace and being an 'easy target'. This isn't true. While Mary was in the terrible position of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, David and Catherine had been talking about what they would do, and planning for at least a year.

  According to Catherine the murders she committed with her partner David Birnie were thoroughly researched and planned. 'We looked into everything before we started, every little detail ... right down to how long you could leave a car in a certain place before anyone would notice it,' she said. 'We bought this book, it was called Perfect Murder or something like that, and we learned a lot from that about what to do.'

  Did the Birnies leave Mary Neilson's car so close to police headquarters deliberately? Was it a message to the police and the community? 'No,' scoffed Catherine, 'we did our homework and we found out that that was a car park where the council wouldn't check for days.'

  Did they intend to actually murder Mary Neilson? 'She saw our faces, didn't she? She saw where we lived.'

  Questions about whether they knew they would kill Mary even before she knocked on their Moorhouse Street door are anticipated. A killer's eyes lock on to those of the inquisitive; cold, expressionless, soulless.

  Mary Neilson never stood a chance. From the moment she accepted David's invitation to drop over to his place and negotiate cheaper prices for her tyres, her fate was sealed.

  Susannah

  Just two weeks later, on Monday 20 October 1986, David and Catherine Birnie were actively hunting for their next victim. They spent hours driving around the streets of Perth looking for 'the right one'. Unlike some serial killers they weren't drawn to particular physical characteristics, age groups or 'types'; she just had to be female, alone, and vulnerable.

  They found her hitchhiking along Stirling Highway in Claremont, a well-heeled area in Perth's western suburbs. Her name was Susannah Candy, and she was 15 years old. It obviously didn't seem dangerous to accept a lift from a mild-looking couple in their thirties, especially since one of them was a woman.

  Susannah Candy was an outstanding student at Hollywood High School. Her father, Dr Douglas Candy, one of Perth's most respected ophthalmic surgeons, worked at St John of God Hospital. Susannah lived at home with her parents, two brothers and sister at the time of her disappearance. Dr Candy was protective of his four children and when Susannah started a part-time job in a local restaurant he would meet her after work and walk her home. Dr Candy was worried enough that he asked her to give up her job. But Susannah enjoyed her work and on that Monday night she was alone on Stirling Highway when the Birnies drew up alongside her.

  On the pretext of offering Susannah a lift home, the Birnies coerced her into their car a
nd drove back to their Moorhouse Street home. They kept Susannah Candy tied to their bed and committed repeated offences against her, until David Birnie decided it was time to kill her. He produced a nylon rope and put it around her neck, but Susannah became hysterical and fought for her life. Both Birnies forced several sleeping pills down Susannah's throat in an effort to sedate her.

  When Susannah was asleep, affected by the drugs, David again put the rope around Susannah's neck. He looked at Catherine and said: 'Prove you love me.'

  Without any hesitation Catherine Birnie strangled Susannah Candy to death.

  After Catherine Birnie strangled the young girl the couple bundled her into their car and drove her to Gleneagle Forest, where they buried her not far from where they had buried Mary Neilson two weeks earlier.

  While being held captive Susannah had been forced to write two letters to her worried parents. In those letters she explained that she was writing to assure them that she was okay, that she just needed some time out to sort through her problems. The letters were sent almost two weeks apart; one posted in Perth and the other from Fremantle. It didn't convince her family; if anything it made them more worried than ever that something terrible had happened.

  Susannah's worried family reported her missing to the police. According to a neighbour of the Candy family:

  I heard first-hand the appalling treatment that her parents received at the hands of police. They accused the missing 15 year old, a straight A student with no problems and good references, of variously being a runaway, a prostitute, troubled, drug addled and attention-seeking.

  All this in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary from fellow students, teachers, the parents, various teen counsellors and her neighbours. The police, either too incompetent or too shiftless to act, upped the ante against the teenager, accusing her of being an accomplished scammer and liar, experienced in hiding aberrant behaviour behind an angelic facade.