David Birnie and his partner, Catherine Birnie, abducted and murdered four women in Perth, Western Australia, in October and November 1986. The youngest of them was a 15-year-old girl; the oldest was 31. The killings ended when a fifth victim, a 17-year-old girl the couple were holding at their home in the suburb of Willagee, escaped and alerted police. Both pleaded guilty and were sentenced to life imprisonment in 1987. Graeme Scott, who prosecuted the couple and later retired as a judge of the Supreme Court, said in 2005 that the case changed Western Australia. He compared the public's apprehension at the time to fears of terrorist bombings, and said that apart from the case of Eric Edgar Cooke it was probably the first time in the state's history the public had been so unsettled.
David Birnie spent 19 years in prison. On October 7, 2005, aged 54, he was found dead in his cell at Casuarina Prison, a maximum-security prison in Western Australia. A coronial inquest heard that he had gone three days without his antidepressant medication because of a paperwork error. The Deputy State Coroner found that the missed medication contributed to his decision to take his own life, though she would not conclude that it caused his death.
In 1986 David and Catherine Birnie shared a house in Willagee, a suburb of Perth. ABC News described Catherine as his partner; she used his surname. Little about his life before 1986 has been reported in the news. Later reports give glimpses of how investigators saw the couple. Paul Ferguson, a former Fremantle detective who arrested them, told the Supreme Court of Western Australia in February 2026 that David Birnie was "driven by Catherine", and that she believed women existed to give men pleasure. The same hearing was told that Birnie had been forthcoming and detailed with police about his sexual conduct, and Ferguson agreed.
Four women were killed. ABC News named them in 2005 as Mary Nielson, 22; Susanna Candy, 15; Noelene Patterson, 31; and Denise Brown, 21. Other published accounts spell the first two names Neilson and Susannah. ABC News has reported that the women were taken over about five weeks in October and November 1986, and that the couple abducted them, sexually assaulted them and murdered them at their Willagee home.
Mary Nielson was the first to be killed. ABC News reported that David Birnie lured her to the house he shared with Catherine.
Susanna Candy was 15, the only child among the four.
Noelene Patterson was 31, the oldest of the women.
Denise Brown, 21, was the last of the four.
The news reports say little about who the four women were in life, beyond their names and ages.
ABC News reported in February 2026, in its account of evidence given at a Perth murder trial, that the Birnies forced their victims to telephone or write to their families with false stories that they were staying with friends or travelling. The aim was to keep relatives from raising the alarm while the women were held. Reports from 2005 onward describe the crimes as abduction, rape and murder. The Western Australian government and ABC News have also described the women as having been tortured.
In November 1986 the couple were holding a 17-year-old girl at the Willagee house. She escaped and went to police. In the words of a 2017 AAP report, her escape and report led police to follow up, and that ended the killings. The survivor's account was taken by investigators; ABC News reported in 2005 that Neville Collard was the first officer to interview her after she got away.
She has since spoken publicly about what happened to her.
Police arrested David and Catherine Birnie after the escape. Paul Ferguson, then a Fremantle detective, was among the officers who arrested them, ABC News reported in 2026. The exact date of the arrest and the details of the couple's interviews with police, and how the women's bodies were found, were not reported.
Asked in 2026 whether police had considered David Birnie's possible involvement in other disappearances, Ferguson told the Supreme Court that there "would always be a consideration", and agreed that he could not be excluded from culpability in those cases. Ferguson said he had not questioned Birnie about every missing woman; homicide detectives had followed up missing persons interviews, but he did not know what those interviews contained.
David and Catherine Birnie both pleaded guilty, ABC News reported, and both received life sentences in 1987. ABC described the four women as aged between 15 and 31. In sentencing David Birnie, Justice Wallace said he should never be released from prison.
ABC News described his life sentence in 2007 as being for the sexual assaults and murders of the four women. The full list of counts on which he was sentenced, and the date of sentence, were not reported.
Catherine Birnie received a life sentence with a minimum term of 20 years, ABC News reported in 2016. Her sentence became open to review by Western Australia's parole authorities every three years after her minimum term expired, which ABC put in 2007. A 2016 HuffPost Australia report put the end of her minimum term in 2000.
The guilty pleas meant there was no trial and no evidence heard before a jury. For that reason much less of the case is on the public record than in cases decided at trial.
By 2005 David Birnie was held in the high-security Unit 6 at Casuarina Prison, a maximum-security prison.
For years he wrote to Catherine, who was held at Bandyup Prison. At the 2007 inquest into his death, the superintendent of Casuarina, Robert Jennings, said Birnie kept writing to her until about five months before he died. Catherine had ended contact in 1993, and his letters went unanswered. When he died in 2005 she was still listed as his next of kin. Ian Johnson, the state's executive director of prisons, said then that she had cut all ties with him, at least in recent years.
In July 2004 a former remand prisoner at Casuarina, who had been acquitted of the arson charges that put him in custody, was awarded almost $73,000 in criminal injuries compensation. He said that about five years earlier David Birnie and another prisoner had raped him in custody. His lawyer called for police to reopen their investigation, and argued that his client should never have been placed in custody with a prisoner like Birnie. The ABC report recorded no charge against Birnie over the claim, and no court tested it.
Fellow prisoners who gave evidence at the inquest described a different side of him. Two men who had been in prison with him told the coroner that they had become his friends, that he was helpful and a model prisoner, and that they had always known he would one day take his own life. They said he became depressed in his last months. He had lost his computer, which was confiscated permanently after pornography was found on it; he had been banned from telephone contact with a woman journalist; and he had missed his medication.
A psychologist who had counselled him over several years told the inquest that he had always been aware of the risk that he would take his own life. As a long-term prisoner who was probably never going to be released, she said, he was a chronic suicide risk, and the task for prison authorities was to manage that risk. The investigating police officer, Constable Shane Graham, told the inquest that Birnie had accepted he would spend the rest of his life in prison.
David Birnie was found dead in his cell at Casuarina Prison in the early hours of October 7, 2005. He was 54. The Western Australian Department of Justice confirmed that he had taken his own life.
ABC News reported the time he was found as about 3:00 a.m. Western Australian time. Later the same day the state's Justice Minister, John D'Orazio, said officers checked on Birnie every four hours, and that he had been checked just after midnight and again just after 4:00 a.m., when he was found dead. The inquest later heard that he had last been seen alive at a routine cell check about four hours before he was found.
D'Orazio defended prison procedures, saying normal procedures had been followed. He and the Justice Department would not say at the time how Birnie had died. Johnson said Catherine Birnie had been told of the death, but would not be allowed to attend the funeral; D'Orazio said she could apply.
ABC News reported that the date of his death matched the anniversary of the first of the killings.
The day after Birnie's death, the survivor who had escaped from the Willagee house in 1986 spoke through a statement read on ABC's Stateline program by Neville Collard. She said her family now had closure and could look forward to life without a convicted killer alive in prison. ABC News reported that she believed he should have received the death penalty and that keeping him in prison had been a waste of public money.
A man ABC News identified as the state's police commissioner at the time said the murders had devastated the victims' families and the officers involved, that he was glad Birnie was dead, and that he regretted the death penalty had not been an option. His views on capital punishment for premeditated crimes of this kind were well known, he said, and he believed he spoke for most of the community.
The inquest into David Birnie's death was held at the Coroner's Court in Perth before the Deputy State Coroner, Evelyn Vicker, in December 2007, and resumed in April 2008.
The court heard in December 2007 that Birnie would have spent considerable time planning and carrying out his suicide. Constable Graham said the preparations would have taken hours. Graham said Birnie had not received his antidepressant medication for the three days before his death because of a paperwork problem, and that procedures had since been changed.
In April 2008 the counsel assisting the coroner, Felicity Zempilas, said that although witnesses believed Birnie would eventually take his own life, prison authorities still had a duty to take reasonable steps to look after him. ABC News summarized the case put to the inquest that day as a claim that prison authorities had not provided adequate care and treatment before his death.
Vicker released her findings on June 18, 2008. She found that Birnie had gone three days without his antidepressant medication even though he held two valid prescriptions. She said she would not conclude that the missed medication caused his death at that time, but she believed it contributed to his decision to take his own life. She recommended a change to the approval process for restricted medications in prisons, which then required both a prescription and authorization from the Director of Health Services, and called for risk management plans for prisoners who need essential medication.
Catherine Birnie remained in prison after David Birnie's death. She first became eligible for parole consideration in 2007. In May 2007 the new Prisoners Review Board of Western Australia refused her parole; she had not applied. The Attorney-General, Jim McGinty, said she should never be released. In March 2010 his successor, Christian Porter, accepted the board's recommendation that she not be granted parole or placed in a program to prepare prisoners for release. A further refusal came in 2013, and in March 2016 the Attorney-General, Michael Mischin, accepted the board's recommendation not to release her on her fourth review. In 2017 AAP reported that she worked as head librarian at Bandyup Women's Prison.
The three-yearly reviews became a political issue. The survivor who escaped in 1986 started an online petition in 2016 calling for an end to automatic parole reviews for such prisoners. The Western Australian government said in 2018 that it drew more than 41,000 signatures. In February 2017 the opposition's spokesman, John Quigley, said a Labor government would change the law; the Premier, Colin Barnett, replied that no government would release a killer like Catherine Birnie and that removing her from parole consideration would amount to revising her sentence.
As Attorney-General, Quigley introduced the Sentence Administration Amendment (Multiple Murderers) Bill 2018 on October 18, 2018. It allowed the Attorney-General to direct that a prisoner convicted of serial killings (two or more murders on separate days) or mass murder (three or more on one day) not be considered for parole or a resocialisation program for up to six years at a time. The government said the aim was to spare victims' families and surviving victims the trauma of repeated reviews. AAP reported that the government wanted the law in place before Catherine Birnie's next review, due in 2019, and that one of her sons supported it. Critics questioned the scheme. When the bill was introduced, the opposition's spokesman, Michael Mischin, asked whether it would only cover prisoners whom the board and the Attorney-General would never release anyway, and Guy Hall, a law professor at Murdoch University, argued that families should be contacted only when parole was seriously in prospect. In 2024 Jamie Walvisch, a law lecturer at the University of Western Australia, criticized the process for lacking transparency and independence, and said Western Australia was the only jurisdiction to give the power to its Attorney-General. In November 2024 ABC News reported that Quigley had directed that she not be considered for parole before December 13, 2030. ABC News reported in February 2026 that she remained in prison.
David Birnie was never charged with any killing beyond the four 1986 murders. Several unsolved disappearances of women in Western Australia have been raised in connection with the couple.
In February 2017 AAP reported, after a Seven Network program, that Birnie had allegedly alluded to killing three more women between 1980 and 1986, believed to be Barbara Western, Lisa Mott and Cheryl Renwick, and that he hanged himself in 2005 before confessing to anything further. These are claims, not findings. No court has linked him to any of those women.
The disappearance of Sharon Fulton, 39, who was last seen in Perth in March 1986, was also raised. Her husband told a later partner that the Birnies had killed her. At the 2022 coronial inquest into her disappearance, ABC News reported, police said they had ruled the Birnies out, because she did not fit their victim profile. At her husband's murder trial in February 2026, Paul Ferguson said the Birnies could not be excluded from involvement in her disappearance or others. In 2026 the Supreme Court of Western Australia found her husband guilty of her murder, and he was sentenced to life imprisonment, AAP reported.
Proven by his own guilty pleas: the murders of four women in Perth in 1986, committed with Catherine Birnie.
Reported but not tested in court: the 2004 claim by a former prisoner that Birnie had raped him in custody about five years earlier; and the 2017 claims that he alluded to three further killings between 1980 and 1986.
Points on which sources differ: the spelling of two victims' names (ABC News, 2005, gives Mary Nielson and Susanna Candy; other accounts give Neilson and Susannah); the age range of the victims (15 to 31 in ABC reports of 2005 and 2017; 17 to 31 in ABC's 2022 inquest report; 15 to 33 in HuffPost Australia, 2016); the time he was found dead (about 3:00 a.m. in ABC's first report, just after 4:00 a.m. in the Justice Minister's account later that day); the year of the first killing (ABC's 2005 reports say the killings began 20 years before his death, which would place them in 1985, while other reports, including ABC's later ones, place all four killings in 1986); and the year Catherine Birnie's minimum term expired (2007 in ABC, 2016; 2000 in HuffPost Australia, 2016).
1986, October and November: Mary Nielson, Susanna Candy, Noelene Patterson and Denise Brown are abducted and murdered in Perth over about five weeks.
November 1986: a 17-year-old held at the couple's Willagee house escapes and goes to police; David and Catherine Birnie are arrested.
1987: both plead guilty and are sentenced to life imprisonment; Justice Wallace says David Birnie should never be released.
1993: Catherine Birnie ends contact with him.
July 27, 2004: ABC reports a former prisoner's claim, made in a compensation case, that Birnie raped him in custody about five years earlier; no charge is reported.
October 7, 2005: found dead in his cell at Casuarina Prison, aged 54.
May 19, 2007: Catherine Birnie is refused parole at her first review.
December 18 and 19, 2007: inquest into his death opens in Perth.
April 17, 2008: inquest resumes.
June 18, 2008: Deputy State Coroner Evelyn Vicker releases her findings.
March 6, 2010: Catherine Birnie refused parole again.
March 18, 2016: Catherine Birnie's fourth parole review ends in refusal.
October 18, 2018: the Multiple Murderers Bill is introduced in the Western Australian Parliament.
November 2, 2024: ABC reports that Catherine Birnie will not be considered for parole before December 13, 2030.
February 2026: Paul Ferguson gives evidence at the Sharon Fulton murder trial; her husband is later convicted.