by Gordon Kerr
Little had changed when he was released on 4 September 1979 after serving five years and eight months. During a ten-day period just two months after his release, wearing a balaclava, he attacked four women and threatened them with a knife. The balaclava and the knife would become his clothing and his weapon of choice from this point on.
The first of these four women was raped in a public toilet in Frankston. The next three managed to escape rape, but one was stabbed in the chest as she struggled with him. He was picked up and confessed to the attacks, claiming that he was glad to have been arrested. He could not excuse himself in any other way than by telling investigating officers that he ‘gets the urge … it just comes over me’. He continued: ‘I can’t help myself. I have had this problem for about six years. I don’t know if it was because my girlfriend left me or what it is. I just find it hard to mix with people and I haven’t many friends’.
An array of charges were thrown at him, including rape and malicious wounding, but, astonishingly, the judge gave him a lighter sentence than the previous one, sending him to prison for just six and a half years, again with five having to be served before he could be considered eligible for parole.
Released in February 1985, Dupas took only four days to reoffend. He attacked and raped a twenty-one-year-old receptionist while she sunbathed on a secluded Melbourne beach. The distraught victim had sought help from a couple of men and they caught up with Dupas as he walked to his car.
Arrested once again, police quizzed him about the murder of a mother of four, Helen McMahon,who had been beaten to death in the sand dunes at Rye Beach, coincidentally at the very same time as one of Dupas’s home visits from prison.
This time, the judge – the same one who had presided when he had been tried for the rape of the woman in Nunawading – threw the book at him. He told the court that all efforts to rehabilitate Dupas had ‘failed miserably’ and described Dupas as ‘walking around with a loaded time bomb in his pocket’. He sentenced him to twelve years, with a minimum of ten to be served before parole could be considered.
In prison they tried to deal with his problems, giving him medical treatment to try to reduce his sex drive. Surprisingly, he got married in 1987 while still an inmate, to a nurse sixteen years older than him. He was considered to be getting better, leaving his problems behind him. A psychiatrist said, ‘he understands himself better and has become more assertive’.
He was released in March 1992 after serving seven years, and kept out of trouble for eighteen months. On 23 September 1993, however, he attacked a fifteen-year-old girl horse-riding at Knyeton. The girl quick-wittedly pushed her horse between herself and Dupas and managed to escape unharmed.
Just over three months later, on 3 January 1994 ,he attacked a twenty-six-year-old bank teller at 11.30 in the morning as she sat in a cubicle in a public toilet in north-western Victoria. He burst into the cubicle wearing his trademark balaclava and wielding a knife. She resisted his orders to turn and face the wall and struggled with him violently, receiving numerous cuts on her hands. Abruptly, he stopped, turned round and calmly walked back to his car, parked nearby.
The woman’s boyfriend, an off-duty police officer, sped off in pursuit along with other people, capturing Dupas after his car ran off the road. In the boot of the vehicle was found a chilling collection of tools of the rapist’s trade – a roll of tape, knives, a black balaclava, condoms and, most worrying of all, a shovel and a sheet of plastic. He was prepared, it seemed, for every eventuality, even murder.
Tragically, there was not enough evidence to charge him with attempted rape and he was charged, instead, with false imprisonment, a much lesser charge. He pleaded guilty and went to jail for two years and nine months.
Back on the streets in September 1996, he was on his own. His wife had left him and he moved into an apartment in Brunswick, working in a factory. Shortly after, he moved in with a woman, telling her nothing of his violent past.
More women were murdered around this time. Recovering forty-year-old heroin addict and prostitute Margaret Maher was found dead in October 1997 in long grass in Somerton. She had been stabbed repeatedly and her breasts had been mutilated.
A month later, twenty-five-year-old Mersina Halvagis was also found with numerous stab wounds at Fawkner Cemetery where she had been putting flowers on the grave of her grandmother.
On the last day of 1997, ninety-five-year-old Kathleen Downes, who had been crippled by two strokes, was found stabbed to death in her room at Brunswick Lodge Nursing Home. Interestingly, a number of phone calls had been made from Dupas’s home to the nursing home in the weeks before the killing, but police were unable to establish a link between the calls and the murder.
Nicole Patterson was his last victim. She was killed on the morning of 19 April 1999 and was found on the floor of her consulting room, naked from the waist down and with her clothes ripped. The wounds on both hands suggested that she had put up a desperate fight for her life. Disturbingly, both of her breasts had been sliced off and taken away as there was no trace of them at the scene. Her wounds reminded investigators of the wounds suffered by Margaret Maher two years previously.
A neighbour said she had heard a shout at about 9.30 that morning and had seen a man walk away from the house about ten minutes later. It was obvious to police, however, that he had been very careful. The house had been cleaned from top to bottom and there were no finger- or footprints.
The killer had been careful but had missed one vital piece of evidence. In Nicole’s appointment book there was listed an appointment with a man called ‘Malcolm’ for nine that morning. Next to the entry was a mobile phone number.
The phone number did, indeed, belong to a man called Malcolm, a student. But he had never heard of Nicole Patterson. Officers asked him to list everyone to whom he had given his mobile number in the recent past and on that list was the name of none other than Peter Dupas for whom Malcolm had recently done some odd jobs.
When they went to Dupas’s home, they discovered a bloodstained jacket on which was the DNA of Nicole Patterson. He had arrived for the appointment at nine, hoping, he told her, to cure a gambling addiction, but had attacked her as she made coffee for them both. He had killed her and then meticulously cleaned up before taking the body parts as souvenirs and leaving. He was placed in the vicinity around this time by CCTV footage taken at a nearby petrol station.
Naturally, he denied everything, as he always had when arrested, claiming that the police had planted the evidence. The jury failed to be convinced, however. On 17 August 2000, he was found guilty and sentenced to spend the remainder of his life in prison with no possibility of parole.
In prison, he has been questioned about the murders of Margaret Maher, Mersina Halvagis, Helen McMahon and Kathleen Downes. He denies it all, as ever.
Catherine and David Birnie
Four young women had gone missing in Perth in the last twenty-seven days. They were all unconnected and from good homes, with no record of drugs or even any secret love affairs that might have given a reason for their disappearances. In a couple of cases relatives had received letters and phone calls from them saying that they were alright, but after that, nothing. The officers investigating the disappearances were convinced they had a serial killer on their hands.
They seemed to have had a breakthrough in the investigation when it was announced that a naked and very distressed young woman had staggered into a shopping centre in Willagee and had been taken to Palmyra police station. They thought that it might be the last girl to go missing, Denise Brown, and hurried to Palmyra to interview her. It wasn’t Denise Brown, but the sixteen-year-old girl they found was able to tell them a horrific story and finally solve the case for them.
She told them that she had been abducted at knifepoint the previous evening as she walked along a street near her home. A couple had asked her for directions and when she stopped to help them, the man had pulled a knife. They had driven her to a house in Willagee where she had
been raped repeatedly after being tied up and chained to a bed. While the man raped her, the woman had watched. She had listened in horror as they talked about injecting cocaine into his penis.
Earlier that morning, the man had gone to work and the woman had forced her to make an agonising call to her parents to tell them she was staying with friends. Shortly afterwards, there was a knock at the door and when the woman went to answer it, the girl had leapt from an open window. She provided comprehensive descriptions of her attackers, their address and their telephone number.
A short while later, Catherine and David Birnie were in custody.
Each of their lives was a car crash from the start. Both born in 1951, they first met when they lived next door to each other as children. Catherine’s mother had died in childbirth when she was two years old and she was bundled off to live with her father in South Africa. Two years later, however, she was back in Australia, being cared for by her grandparents. She grew into a lonely little girl who was not allowed out to play with the other kids.
David Birnie’s early life was not much better. His family was well known as a particularly dysfunctional one. There were rumours of incest and his parents were both chronic alcoholics. By the time he was a teenager he had already acquired a catalogue of juvenile offences. In his early teens he trained as an apprentice jockey, but during this time he broke into an elderly lady’s house, naked but for a stocking over his head, and committed the first of his many rapes. The next few years were spent in and out of jail for a series of crimes.
Catherine and David were reunited in their late teens. Soon, however, they had embarked on a burglary spree for which he was locked up for nine months and she was put on probation. In July 1969, further charges led to three years being added to David’s jail-term and a further four years being added to her sentence.
Birnie escaped from prison a year later and the two teamed up again before being rearrested just under three weeks later and charged with fifty-three counts of stealing, receiving, breaking and entering, and a range of other crimes. He got two and a half years and she went to prison for six months.
When Catherine was released she found work as a live-in domestic for a Fremantle family. There she fell in love with and married the son of the house, Donald McLaughlin, with whom, over the course of the next thirteen years, she had six children. The marriage, however, was not a good one, and Catherine was desperately unhappy. In her heart she still longed for David Birnie.
She had found Birnie again and for the last two years with her husband she had been seeing her old lover. Finally, one day, she just rang Donald and told him she wasn’t coming home. She moved in with David at Willagee and, in a show of love, changed her name by deed poll to Birnie.
David Birnie was addicted to sex and possessed an extensive library of porn videos. He is described by his own brother as having to have sex four or five times a day and he also describes how he liked to have it. He would inject ‘that stuff you have when they’re going to put stitches in your leg. It makes you numb. He put the needle in his penis. Then he had sex’. But sex, no matter how kinky, was not enough for this dysfunctional couple. They began to debate how they could get even more of a thrill, and rape and abduction began to feature in their fantasies. They first made their fantasies real on 6 October 1986.
Mary Neilson, a twenty-two-year-old student, knocked on their door. Birnie worked in a yard selling spare parts for cars and she had been there earlier in the day looking for new tyres for her car. Birnie had told her that if she called at his house he could do her a better deal.
Birnie asked her in and as she walked into the hallway of the house, he grabbed her and put a knife to her throat. He took her into a bedroom where she was tied up, gagged and chained to the bed. Then, with Catherine watching, Birnie raped her repeatedly. That night they bundled her into their car and drove to the Gleneagles National Park. He raped her again and then strangled her with a length of nylon cord. When she was dead, he stabbed her. He had read somewhere that a stab wound allows the gases to exit the decomposing body. They buried her in a shallow grave.
Two weeks later, fifteen-year-old Susannah Candy was abducted as she hitchhiked on the Stirling Highway in Claremont. Back at the house, she was raped and this time Catherine climbed into bed with David and joined in. When they tried to strangle Susannah, however, she fought back and they had to force-feed her sleeping pills to calm her down. When she lay quiet, Birnie told Catherine that she had to prove her love for him by strangling the girl. Without hesitating, she took each end of the nylon cord and pulled it tight. They buried her close to where Mary Neilson lay in the State Forest.
When thirty-one-year-old Noelene Patterson ran out of petrol on the Canning Highway in East Fremantle, on her way home from work as a bar manager at a golf club, she hoped someone would pick her up. She had been an air hostess for nine years before spending two years doing the same job on the private jet owned by Australian media tycoon Alan Bond.
When the Birnies stopped, Noelene was pleased to accept their offer of a lift but a knife was immediately put to her throat and she was tied up. She was an attractive girl and Birnie’s obvious attraction to her irritated Catherine. After he had raped her, she was supposed to be killed, but he postponed the murder. Catherine, furious at her man’s attraction to another, better-looking woman, took a knife and held it to her chest, telling him he had better choose between her and the girl. It was three days before Birnie finally agreed to kill Noelene. He strangled her and she was driven to the forest where she was buried close to their other two victims.
Twenty-one-year-old Denise Brown was waiting for a bus when she was taken. The same procedure was followed as with the other girls but as she was being driven to her death the following day, the Birnies spotted another potential victim, a nineteen-year-old student. They stopped to offer the girl a lift but she was suspicious, especially when she noticed that the woman in the front seat was sipping from a can of rum and coke. She thought it was a bit early in the day to be drinking and refused the lift. As they pulled away, however, she did see a small person seemingly asleep on the back seat of the car – it must have been Denise Brown, she later told police officers. She had been lucky.
Denise Brown, of course, had not been so lucky. Still alive when they reached the forest, she had been raped again in the car before being dragged out and raped yet again. While he was doing it, he pulled a knife and plunged it into her neck. She was still not dead, however, and Catherine found a bigger knife and, handing it to Birnie, urged him to stab the girl again. Finally, convinced she was at last dead, they buried her in a shallow grave. But, as they were shovelling earth onto her supine body, she suddenly sat up in her grave. Birnie picked up an axe and swung it at her skull. He then swung it again, smashing her skull open. They finished the job of covering her up and drove home.
However, the extremely violent nature of this murder was too much even for a callous woman such as Catherine Birnie, which probably explains why their last victim remained alive long enough to escape. She later told police, ‘I think I must have come to a decision that, sooner or later, there had to be an end to the rampage. I had reached the stage when I didn't know what to do. I suppose I came to a decision that I was prepared to give her a chance. I knew it was a foregone conclusion that David would kill her, and probably do it that night. I was just fed up with the killings. I thought if something did not happen soon it would simply go on and on and never end’.
There was uproar when the news broke and furious Australians called for the reintroduction of the death penalty. They were even angrier when Catherine was seen stroking David Birnie’s hands as they stood in the dock at their trial. Their relationship was put under the microscope and one psychiatrist talked of Birnie’s evil influence over Catherine as ‘the worst case of personality dependence I have seen in my career’. They both pleaded guilty and were sentenced to life imprisonment with a recommendation by the judge that they never be released. They nev
er saw each other again but exchanged 2,600 letters during their first four years behind bars.
On 2 October 2005, David Birnie, one of Australia’s most notorious serial killers, was found hanged in his cell at Perth’s Casuarina Prison. Because no one came forward to claim his body, Birnie was given a secret pauper’s cremation at the expense of the taxpayers. His apparent suicide came almost nineteen years into his life sentence – possibly because his former lover had cut off all contact with him; or just possibly because he felt some remorse.
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Contents