Catherine Birnie has been in prison in Western Australia since 1986. With her partner, David Birnie, she abducted and murdered three young women and a 15-year-old girl in Perth over about five weeks in October and November of that year. The killings stopped when a fifth captive, a 17-year-old, got out of the couple's house in the southern suburb of Willagee and went to the police. Both Birnies pleaded guilty and were sentenced to life imprisonment in 1987. David Birnie took his own life in his cell in 2005. Catherine Birnie's minimum term of 20 years expired in 2007, and since then every government in the state has refused to release her. A law passed in 2018 now lets the Attorney General direct that her case not even be considered, and the current direction runs until December 13, 2030.
Little was reported about Catherine Birnie's life before the killings. ABC News gives her full name as Catherine Margaret Birnie. Australian Associated Press (AAP) reported in February 2017 that she was 65. She and David Birnie lived together in Willagee in 1986, and the press has described him over the years both as her partner and as her husband.
She had at least one son from before her life with David Birnie. That son spoke publicly in favor of the 2018 parole law, according to AAP.
ABC News, reporting David Birnie's death in October 2005, named the four people the couple killed and gave their ages. Other publications spell two of the names differently.
Mary Nielson was 22. She was the first person the Birnies killed, in October 1986.
Susanna Candy was 15, the youngest of the four.
Noelene Patterson was 31.
Denise Brown was 21. She was the last of the four to die, in November 1986.
Little else was reported about the four women. Their families have mostly kept out of the public eye. A former Fremantle detective who worked on the case, Paul Ferguson, said in 2010 that the families of the victims had been given a life sentence of their own.
The Birnies' crimes took place over about five weeks, between October and November 1986, ABC News reported in 2024. The couple abducted the women and the girl, held them at the Willagee house, and killed them. ABC News has described the offences as abduction, sexual abuse and murder. In February 2026 Paul Ferguson told the Supreme Court of Western Australia, during an unrelated murder trial, that the victims had been made to telephone or write to their families saying they were staying with friends or travelling, so that no one would look for them at once.
Ferguson also gave the court his view of the couple. He described the killings as spontaneous and said David Birnie was "driven by Catherine." That was the opinion of one investigator, given under cross-examination; it was not a finding of any court.
Police later recovered the bodies of all four victims.
The fifth captive was 17. She escaped from the house in November 1986 and raised the alarm. ABC News and AAP have both said that her escape is what ended the killings. She survived sexual assault.
Her first contact with police was not straightforward. In a 2017 Seven Network program, Murder Uncovered, the young constable who was on duty at the small Palmyra police station that day said the girl was at first treated as unreliable and that senior officers told her not to file a report, treating it as a false complaint. According to the Sydney Morning Herald's coverage of the program, the girl's detailed account, which included the couple's address and telephone number, led to the Birnies' arrest and to the discovery of the bodies.
Catherine and David Birnie were arrested in November 1986. Both pleaded guilty and both received life sentences, ABC News reported. The judge, Justice Wallace, said that David Birnie should never be released.
Catherine Birnie's sentence was life imprisonment with a minimum term of 20 years, ABC News reported in 2016. Under the law then in force, that meant she could be considered for parole once the minimum term was served. Her case was prosecuted by Graeme Scott, who later became a judge of the Supreme Court of Western Australia. In 2005 he said the case had had a lasting effect on public feeling in the state, and he compared it with only one earlier Western Australian case, that of Eric Edgar Cook.
Catherine Birnie was held at Bandyup Women's Prison in Perth's northeast. AAP reported in February 2017 that she was the head librarian there. She was held under a strict-security life sentence, according to a 2016 report in the Huffington Post Australia.
David Birnie was held separately, at Casuarina Prison. He was found hanged in his cell there at about 3 a.m. on October 7, 2005, aged 54. The state's executive director of prisons, Ian Johnson, said Catherine Birnie had been told of his death, because she was still listed as his next of kin, but that she would not be allowed to attend his funeral. Johnson said she had cut her ties with him, especially in the recent past, and that her condition and behavior would be watched. A coronial inquiry into the death was announced.
The first review came in 2007, when her minimum term expired. In May 2007 Western Australia's newly created Prisoners Review Board refused her parole and said she would stay in prison for at least three more years. The Attorney General, Jim McGinty, noted that she had never applied for parole. He said she should never be released and that the public should not expect her ever to live in the community again. He praised the board for publishing its decision.
The next review came in 2010. On March 6, 2010, the Attorney General, Christian Porter, announced that he had received the board's recommendations and that there would be no change to her status: she would not be released on parole and would not be placed in a re-socialisation program, the scheme that prepares long-term prisoners for life outside. He said the next statutory review was due in March 2013 and that he would not prejudge it. The board's recommendations were not made public. Paul Ferguson, the former detective, told ABC News that she had given up any right to freedom on the day she took part in the deaths, and that working on the case had changed the way he raised his own children.
Her release was refused again after the 2013 review, as ABC News later recorded.
In March 2016 the Attorney General, Michael Mischin, accepted the board's recommendation not to release her. ABC News called it her fourth parole bid and noted that, under state law, her sentence had to be reviewed every three years. The Huffington Post Australia reported that the reviews went ahead whether or not she applied.
Each review meant that the woman who had escaped in 1986 was notified, and she said the process made her relive what had happened. In early 2016 she began a public campaign, with an online petition, against mandatory parole reviews for prisoners like Catherine Birnie. She asked for reviews to be scrapped for premeditated murderers who had pleaded guilty, or at least for prisoners who did not ask for release. She also asked the media to stop publishing photographs of the Birnies and their victims. By December 2017 the petition had more than 40,000 signatures, ABC News reported; the state government later put the figure at more than 41,000.
Michael Mischin said in 2016 that he was looking at ways to reduce the stress of reviews on victims' families, including possible changes to the law. In February 2017, however, he told the campaigner that the Barnett Liberal government would not change it. The Premier, Colin Barnett, said that no government would ever release a serial killer of Catherine Birnie's kind, and that it had never happened. He argued that excluding her from parole consideration altogether would amount to a revised sentence, and that sentences were for the courts, not politicians.
The Labor opposition took the other side. Its spokesman, John Quigley, promised before the March 2017 state election to end automatic three-year reviews for prisoners of her kind. Labor won the election, and Quigley became Attorney General.
In December 2017 Quigley announced that he would change the parole law so that the Attorney General could stop the board from considering the most serious multiple killers. "I will not have the victims going through this trauma," he told ABC News, naming Catherine Birnie and William Mitchell as examples.
The Sentence Administration Amendment (Multiple Murderers) Bill 2018 was introduced into the state parliament on October 18, 2018. The government said it was meant to spare victims' families and survivors the trauma of repeated reviews. It defined a serial killer as a person who had committed two or more murders on separate days, and a mass murderer as someone who had committed three or more murders on the same day. "Why should the secondary victims be put through this process every three years?" Quigley asked. On the day the bill was introduced, his office released a list of six prisoners it had in mind. Catherine Birnie was one of them, and AAP noted that her next review was due in 2019. Her son, AAP reported, supported the bill.
The bill's explanatory memorandum sets out how the scheme works. The Attorney General, or a former Attorney General acting as minister, may issue a written direction that a designated prisoner not be considered for parole or a re-socialisation program. While a direction is in force, the Prisoners Review Board and the prison authorities may not assess, consider or report on the prisoner's release. A direction may last no more than six years, but a fresh one may be issued within three months after the last expires, with no limit on how many. The board may still report on exceptional cases. Directions cannot be challenged in court except for jurisdictional error.
The opposition's Michael Mischin questioned whether the bill did anything beyond the cases the board and the Attorney General would never release anyway. The bill passed with little opposition. Writing in The Conversation, a legal academic said it affected six prisoners, none of whom had been released after board consideration, and argued that decisions about a person's liberty belonged with independent bodies rather than politicians.
A separate 2018 law, the Sentence Administration Amendment Act 2018 (known as the no body, no parole law), bars the board from releasing a person convicted of a homicide unless police know where the victim's remains are or the prisoner has helped to find them. All four victims' bodies in the Birnie case were recovered in 1986, and none of the sources opened links that law to her case.
On November 2, 2024, ABC News reported that Quigley had decided Catherine Birnie would not be considered for parole for at least six more years, until December 13, 2030. The same direction covered two other prisoners. Quigley said he had read the statutory reports and the sentencing remarks and was sickened and revolted by the details of the murders. He said the step was meant to address the re-traumatisation of the secondary victims of these crimes. A University of Western Australia law lecturer, Jamie Walvisch, criticized the process as lacking transparency and independence. ABC News said Western Australia was the only Australian jurisdiction to give its Attorney General this power. At the time Quigley was due to retire at the state election in March 2025.
Catherine Birnie has been convicted of four murders and no others. Over the years other cases have been linked to the couple in the press, and none has been proved.
In February 2017 Murder Uncovered claimed that the Birnies might be responsible for at least two more killings. The program raised the case of Cheryl Renwick, a single mother of two who disappeared at 33 in May 1986; her daughter said a woman who looked like Catherine Birnie had visited the family home several times. It also raised Barbara Western, who was last seen leaving a Perth tavern on June 27, 1986, and whose remains were later found. A third case, that of Lisa Mott, a 12-year-old last seen in Collie in October 1980, was linked to David Birnie in the same program, though his first wife gave him an alibi for that day. AAP reported that the program alleged David Birnie had hinted at killing three more women between 1980 and 1986. The police commissioner, Karl O'Callaghan, would not comment on individual cases but said the Special Crime Squad was still investigating long-term unsolved homicides and missing persons cases. The Birnies were never charged over any of these cases.
In February 2026 the Birnies were named in the Supreme Court trial of Raymond Reddington, 79, who was accused of murdering his wife, Sharon Fulton, who disappeared in March 1986 at 39. Reddington had told a later partner that the Birnies killed her. Paul Ferguson, called as a witness, agreed that the Birnies could not be ruled out as suspects in her disappearance or other women's disappearances. He said he had not asked David Birnie about her or about the couple's movements in March 1986, and that homicide detectives had followed up missing persons interviews whose content he did not know. No evidence linking the Birnies to Sharon Fulton was reported.
Catherine Birnie remained in prison as of February 2026, ABC News reported. Under the Attorney General's direction of November 2024 she is not to be considered for parole before December 13, 2030.
October to November 1986: Catherine and David Birnie abduct and murder Mary Nielson, Susanna Candy, Noelene Patterson and Denise Brown in Perth.
November 1986: a 17-year-old captive escapes and goes to police; the couple are arrested and the bodies are recovered.
1987: both plead guilty and are sentenced to life imprisonment; her minimum term is 20 years.
October 7, 2005: David Birnie is found dead in his cell at Casuarina Prison, aged 54.
May 2007: the Prisoners Review Board refuses her parole at the first review after her minimum term.
March 6, 2010: Attorney General Christian Porter announces no change to her status.
2013: release refused again.
March 2016: Attorney General Michael Mischin accepts the board's recommendation not to release her; the survivor's petition against mandatory reviews begins.
February 2017: Premier Colin Barnett rejects Labor's call to end the reviews; Murder Uncovered raises other possible cases.
December 2017: Attorney General John Quigley announces plans for a new law.
October 18, 2018: the Sentence Administration Amendment (Multiple Murderers) Bill 2018 is introduced; she is on the government's list of six prisoners.
November 2, 2024: Quigley directs that she not be considered for parole until December 13, 2030.
February 2026: the Birnies are discussed in evidence at the Reddington murder trial; she remains in prison.