by Ruth Wykes
Love Mum
Very little is known about Catherine Birnie's children, as is right. Life in a city as small as Perth would have been almost unbearable for anyone who was associated with the Birnies, let alone members of their family. When news of the arrests broke in the media, five of Catherine's children were living with their father. Her six-year-old son went home from school at lunchtime in tears, having been teased by older children. A relative told a local journalist: 'The children don't want to be judged. They just want some consideration.'
Catherine Birnie's letter is a very small insight into a complex issue. Was she, as she claimed, so in love with David that she was willing to do literally anything for him? She said it was her love for David, not the man himself, that made her commit those crimes. And she held to this line for many years, especially when there were people who were interested enough to ask her why she had committed such unthinkable acts against innocent young women.
Yet her story has changed a little over the years. Whether it's distorted memory, or whether the truth is slowly beginning to emerge, Catherine no longer credits her former partner with so much power when she relates the story to people.
After their arrest both David and Catherine Birnie claimed the only reason they murdered the women was to prevent them from being able to identify their killers. While this may appear a logical, if somewhat chilling confession, it doesn't account for the Birnies' behaviour.
The Birnies were displaying all the signs of being lust killers, for whom the killings had become as important a part of their perverted sexual rituals as the bindings, torture and rape. The fact that Birnie stabbed his fourth victim while he was in the act of raping her was an indication that his sickening violence was escalating, that what he had done in the past was no longer enough to feed his perverse appetite.
The FBI have undertaken extensive research on the crimes of sexual sadists, including interviewing a significant number of offenders and studying the case files. Their findings are used throughout the world as both a reference and an investigative tool. Some of the things they have learned certainly lend weight to the argument that David Birnie was a sexual sadist whose crimes would have escalated had he not been caught. This extract from the FBI's findings is enlightening:
Careful planning epitomizes the crimes of the sexual sadist, who devotes considerable time and effort to the offense. Many demonstrate cunning and methodical planning. The capture of the victim, the selection and preparation of equipment, and the methodical elicitation of suffering often reflect meticulous attention to detail.
The overwhelming majority of offenders studied used a pretext or ruse to first make contact with the victims. The sexual sadist would offer or request assistance, pretend to be a police officer, respond to a classified advertisement, meet a realtor at an isolated property, or otherwise gain the confidence of the victim.
Almost invariably, the victims were taken to a location selected in advance that offered solitude and safety for the sadist and little opportunity of escape or rescue for the victim. Such locations included the offender's residence, isolated forests, and even elaborately constructed facilities designed for captivity.
Almost 77 percent of the offenders used sexual bondage on their victims, often tying them with elaborate and excessive materials, using neat and symmetrical bindings, and restraining them in a variety of positions. Sixty percent held their victims in captivity for more than 24 hours.
The most common sexual activity was anal rape, followed in frequency by forced fellatio, vaginal rape, and foreign object penetration. Two-thirds of the men subjected their victims to at least three of these four acts.
Sixty percent of the offenders beat their victims.
Two men, who offended as a team, used a variety of methods to kill a series of victims. One victim was strangled during sex. Another was injected in the neck with a caustic substance, electrocuted, and gassed in an oven. A third victim was shot. Twenty-nine of the 30 men selected white victims only. Eighty-three percent of the victims were strangers to the offender. While the majority of the men selected female victims, one-fourth attacked males exclusively. Sixteen percent of the men assaulted child victims only, and 26 percent attacked both children and adults.
These offenders retained a wealth of incriminating evidence. More than one-half of the offenders in our study kept records of their offenses, including calendars, maps, diaries, drawings, letters, manuscripts, photographs, audio tapes, video tapes, and media accounts of their crimes. For the most part, these secret and prized possessions were hidden in either their homes, offices, or vehicles, kept in rental storage space, or buried in containers.
Forty percent of the men took and kept personal items belonging to their victims. These items, which included drivers' licenses, jewelry, clothing, and photographs, served as mementos of the offense, and some of the offenders referred to them as 'trophies' of their conquests. However, none of the offenders retained parts of their victims' bodies, though some kept the entire corpse temporarily or permanently.
Sexually sadistic offenders commit well-planned and carefully concealed crimes. Their crimes are repetitive, serious, and shocking, and they take special steps to prevent detection. The harm that these men wreak is so devastating and their techniques so sophisticated that those who attempt to apprehend and convict them must be armed with uncommon insight, extensive knowledge, and sophisticated investigative resources.
Women's prisons in Perth have never enjoyed equal status, or even equal conditions, with the men's prisons. Part of the reason for this was that in the past so few women committed jailable offences that no government was willing to spend money on funding a separate prison. Part of it was the historic and patriarchal view that the fairer sex was simply not capable of committing terrible crime.
Until 1970 female prisoners were housed in a separate facility at the maximum security Fremantle Prison. Their living quarters were horrific: small, convict-built cells with an adjacent caged, concrete exercise yard no bigger than the average modern bathroom. By 1970 the government understood that the world was changing and there needed to be a separate prison for women.
Bandyup Women's Prison lies to the north-east of Perth's CBD in the Swan Valley. Being the only women's prison in the state, it houses a mix of prisoners, ranging from those women being held on remand, minimum-security prisoners, through to those deemed never to be released. It has the feel of a small community; a confined, disharmonious, dysfunctional community.
Life in Bandyup Prison is dull, repetitive and dehumanising. Imagine arriving in a small, enclosed community - under escort - after leaving your friends and family behind. The gates are closed behind you; you are put into a room, forced to remove all your clothes only to suffer the ignominy of being searched by a complete stranger.
From that moment on your life is completely in the control of other people. You wear the same drab maroon tracksuit as every other inmate, the same shoes or thongs. You will spend 12 hours of every day locked in a small, cramped cell that has an open window through which anyone can look at any time they please. Referred to by your surname, you will have diminished identity and even less free will.
You will have the opportunity to work, and earn up to $50 a week, and you will be able to see family and friends, make phone calls, write letters - but only if the prison authorities grant you those privileges. Your day will start when your cell door is unlocked, and you will trudge through the same, boring routine you did yesterday: shower with your fellow inmates; eat breakfast in the communal dining room; head off to work in the kitchen, laundry, garden or wherever else you spend your day. Lunch, work, recreation (which may include the gym, TV or spending time with your fellow inmates), dinner, then lockdown for the next 12 hours.
There is a shop where you can buy food, cosmetics and other luxuries, as long as you have earned the money or been given some by supportive friends and family.
There is a library where you can borrow books to help wh
ile away some of those interminable hours locked up in your cell. Your librarian is Catherine Birnie.
Catherine has adapted amazingly well to her life in prison. During her first few years she spent a lot of time writing to David, and the pair exchanged almost 2600 letters. But she absorbed her surroundings and the forced physical separation from David seemed to encourage her to seek a new way of defining her own identity.
It became a point of pride with Catherine that she stopped writing to David: 'I kept getting letters from David all the time, but I just didn't answer them.' Did she read them? 'If I felt like it.' In light of the general view that Catherine was utterly dependent on David Birnie, it is illuminating that her reasons for not writing to David anymore were so defiant: 'It felt like he was weak ... And I was stronger than him. I didn't need him anymore, and I didn't want to stay in contact with him.'
When asked how she had coped with being in prison, Catherine was forthcoming: 'It was hard at first - really hard. When I first got here women would throw food at me in the dining room ... But that only lasted for the first few months. Then it started to get better.'
According to a former inmate who was in prison with Catherine Birnie in the late 1980s, Catherine's fellow prisoners had mixed feelings about her. 'I thought she was arrogant - she thought she was better than everyone else. I just avoided her ... A lot of the young ones didn't like her, and we just avoided her.
'I don't remember if it actually happened but the girls were talking about throwing sand on her while she was in the shower. But I don't remember her ever actually getting beaten up by anyone.'
This particular inmate had one telling encounter with Catherine: 'I was working in the kitchen and one day I went to the fridge to get something. I could feel someone behind me, and I turned around and saw this big 'thing' standing there. She asked me who I was and I said some smart-arse thing to her, and she said to me "Don't you know who I am? I'm the infamous Cathie Birnie".'
Why did this woman think that 'Cathie' Birnie was big? 'I recall her being tall,' she said. When told that Catherine is only around 160 centimetres tall, this woman was shocked. Birnie's reputation, and her ability to manipulate people in very subtle ways, make her seem bigger than she really is.
Did Catherine have friends in Bandyup or did everyone avoid her? The former prisoner recalls that at that time Catherine had a few middle-aged women who hung around with her 'making teddy bears or something pathetic like that'.
As the years went by more and more inmates came to see Catherine in a more sympathetic light. Media reports that she is 'Queen Bee of Bandyup' are wildly inaccurate.
All the same, it's impossible to spend time with Catherine and not get the feeling that she enjoys her notoriety. In the same conversation where she talked about her decision to ignore David Birnie, Catherine revealed other contacts she has made. 'I wrote to Myra Hindley you know, and she wrote back. We've stayed in touch.'
Catherine was of the opinion that she, Aileen Wuornos and Myra Hindley belonged to an exclusive club. She was convinced that they were the only ones in the world who would understand each other.
Wournos was a convicted American serial killer who killed seven men in Florida between 1989 and 1990. She was sentenced to death and was executed by lethal injection on 9 October 2002.
Myra Hindley and her partner Ian Brady became known worldwide as the Moors Murderers, with British newspapers dubbing Myra 'the most evil woman in Britain'. Brady and Hindley were convicted in 1966 on charges of two counts of kidnapping, child molestation and murder, and Hindley was also found guilty of one charge of being an accessory after the fact. Before she died in prison in 2002 Hindley had launched two unsuccessful appeals to be released from prison, claiming that she was no longer a danger to society. The British justice system and the public disagreed and, right to the end of her 60 years of life, Myra Hindley remained one of the most reviled women in Britain.
Malcolm MacCulloch, professor of forensic psychiatry at Cardiff University, has described Hindley and Brady as the result of a 'concatenation of circumstances' that brought together a 'young woman with a tough personality, taught to hand out and receive violence from an early age' and a 'sexually sadistic psychopath'.
Is this the commonality Catherine sought? Someone who would understand her without passing judgement? Someone who knew what it was like to fall so far under the spell of an evil man that they became capable of anything? Or was it something else altogether? Was it to gloat? To share? Or was it a figment of Catherine's imaginations?
It is well known when the Birnies' killing spree ended, but nobody is certain about when it all began. They have been questioned about the disappearance of at least three other people; but whether their emphatic denials were a case of toying with police or telling the truth may never be known.
On Thursday 30 October 1980 a 12-year-old schoolgirl went to a basketball game in the quiet country town of Collie. It was early evening and as with all country towns, it was safe to wander the streets. Everyone knew everyone, and everyone walked after dark. But for Lisa Mott it was no longer safe.
After the basketball game she was waiting for her lift home in the main street of Collie. Someone saw her talking to the driver of a yellow panel van at about 8.30pm, and then she vanished. Lisa has never been seen since.
Retired CIB detective Reg Driffill was in charge of the investigation into Lisa's disappearance. After the Birnies' arrest in 1986 he interviewed them about Lisa. He knew by then that in 1980, when Lisa went missing, David Birnie was working as a crane driver in Collie. Birnie claimed to know nothing about Lisa Mott.
In 1986, the year David and Catherine are thought to have embarked on their killing spree, at least two other women went missing in Perth. Sharon Fulton disappeared from East Perth railway station and Cheryl Renwick went missing from her South Perth unit on 26 May 1986.
Brian Tennant is law reform campaigner and he was in contact with both David and Catherine. In the early 1990s David Birnie began to bargain with authorities for access to Catherine. In July 1992 Brian Tennant claimed that David Birnie told him that he and Catherine had committed other murders, and it would 'be in the public interest' if he were to give information.
When Catherine Birnie was approached about this new information and asked to cooperate, she told authorities she wanted no consideration given to possible prison visits or phone calls from David Birnie. She told Tennant that 'official mind games' had caused her to issue those instructions.
When told the news of Catherine's position David Birnie described it as shattering, leaving his life without meaning or purpose. 'Rather obviously the development means there is absolutely nothing that officialdom can now offer me as an inducement or reward in any other context for there is now nothing I want from Joe (former attorney general Joe Berinson) or his minions.'
Detectives took the highly unusual step of taking David Birnie out of prison and driving him around Perth for about five hours one day, in the hope that he would reveal further information to them. It was a fruitless exercise.
When Catherine is asked directly about whether she was involved in the disappearance of any other women, she just looks at you. Stares. And smirks.
Police and many other people involved in the Birnie murders hold strong suspicions that they killed other women. It is highly improbable that Catherine will ever reveal information, and in spite of the fact that he teased Perth police with hints of 'more', David Birnie can no longer tell authorities anything.
On Friday 7 October 2005 at around midnight, David Birnie was found dead in his prison cell. He had hanged himself. Over the preceding weeks Birnie had been secretly making plans to end his life. He had managed to acquire a length of cord, probably from the prison garment section, and hide it in his cell. He also kept two small plastic ear-drop containers. When Birnie was found by a prison officer doing four-hourly checks he was slumped in a corner of his cell, head forward and legs sticking out in front of him.
Birnie
had spent several hours fashioning a noose and then used the air-conditioning vent to hang it from. He then placed the ear-drop containers on either side of his neck to increase the pressure of the noose. Detective Senior Constable Shane Graham, who prepared the police report for the coroner, said Birnie had spent a lot of time preparing the noose, and had given a great deal of thought to his weight distribution.
A number of things had occurred in the months and weeks leading up to Birnie's death; all part of the minutiae of life for most people, but much amplified in the prison environment. Up until a few months prior to his death he continued to write to Catherine Birnie in Bandyup, even though it had been many years since she had written back to him. But then his own letters to her stopped.
Birnie had also expressed a desire to meet Kate, the woman who had escaped from their home, and who had led police to capture him and Catherine. He wanted her to visit him in Casuarina so he could talk to her. It was never going to happen.
That contributed to Birnie's depression, as did the investigation he was under after another prisoner claimed he had been sexually assaulted by Birnie. At the same time his antidepressant medication had run out. During the inquest into his death, the coroner made it very clear that this should never have happened. It emerged that a faxed request for David Birnie's medication was not received until 10 days after it was sent. He had not taken any antidepressant medication for three days prior to his suicide.
Another blow to Birnie was when he was told he could have no further contact with Sydney crime writer Amanda Howard. Birnie had been in regular contact with Howard for several years. In her blog on womenincrimeink.blogspot.com, Howard wondered out loud at her own contribution to David Birnie's death:
From that point on, we both wrote weekly. I asked questions and he'd reply with a neatly typed letter. We discussed the case in detail and covered hundreds of other topics. He was interested in politics, religion, and ancient civilizations I solicited his opinion on current crimes and listened with interest to his disgust of other criminals, particularly pedophiles.