I used to live near death. Well, not far from it.
If you wanted to drop in on the Birnies, all you had to do was head out the front door of our house in Willagee, take a right, walk down Wheyland Street, then, before you got to Leach Highway, take the short footpath that leads to Moorhouse Street. David and Catherine Birnie lived at the end of that footpath in a pale-blue asbestos house.
I must have walked down that path a thousand times when I was a kid. I would pass the blue house and walk a little further, to the park or the deli or the fish and chip shop or the cake shop for the brief time it was there. The shops were about a ten-minute walk. From our front door to the Birnies’ front door couldn’t have taken more than four minutes.
In 1986, in the months of October and November, Catherine and David Birnie abducted, raped, tortured, and murdered four young women.
I’ve retained the particulars, assembled facts and factoids from all manner of places, pieced together fragments from the reaches of my own memory.
But let’s go back to the start, before we knew what was going on, or who was doing what, before the Birnies were caught.
That spring—remember, seasons are inverted in Australia—girls were disappearing in quick succession.
The names and dates: Mary Neilson vanished on October 6. Susannah Candy disappeared on October 20. Noelene Patterson vanished on the first of November. Denise Brown was last seen on November 6.
Every day it was in the papers: the dates, the names, out-of-focus photographs of the young women’s faces. Details: Noelene’s car was abandoned on Canning Highway; it appeared she had run out of petrol. Mary’s library books from the university—psychology textbooks, including Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams—were found scattered on the esplanade in Perth. Denise had been dancing all night at The Stoned Crow in North Fremantle; she came with friends but decided to make her own way home. Susannah sent letters to her parents, professing she was okay and not to worry, but her dad didn’t believe them; there was something questionable about the slant of his daughter’s handwriting.
People were fearful. The papers warned women not to be out alone at night. My sister Julianne was studying pharmacology, taking evening classes at the same university that Mary attended; Julianne waited at the same bus stop Mary was last seen at on Stirling Highway.
At first, my sister wore her white lab coat; she thought it made her look less appealing. But then she worried it attracted attention, the bright whiteness of the coat, so she took it off and stuffed it in her bag before she left the building.
Naturally, Julianne was distressed when it turned out that it wasn’t just a man abducting the girls but a couple, and this couple lived nearby.
Imagine if they had offered her a ride: Oh you live in Willagee too, Woodhams Street? We live right around the corner from you! Isn’t that funny! What a coincidence! Why wait by yourself when you can drive with us? No, it’s no trouble, no trouble at all.
Unlike my sister, when I came home from school that day and heard it was our neighbors who had been killing the girls, I wasn’t upset. The Birnies wouldn’t have been interested in a boy like me.
I was about to use a term from adolescence and say that I was so spun out, but this would imply there was stress attached, and that’s not true either.
I’m not sure what the right word is to convey how I felt knowing something like this was going on just around the corner, while I was doing my homework, watching TV, dreaming.
Like in every good crime story, we slept with the doors unlocked and the windows open.
So what ended the Birnies’ spree, or our dark adventure, as David Birnie referred to it in the West Australian?
There was a fifth young woman, who got away. Colleen Sheir was abducted at knifepoint by the Birnies, Sunday night, November 9. The couple drove her at knifepoint to their home. The next morning, she escaped through a window. That lucky girl, as the paper referred to her, saved by a knock on the door, ran naked through the park, the grass still wet with dew, straight to the local fish and chip shop. The owner was just getting the fryer going. The girl snatched up some newspapers to cover herself, those papers filled with stories of all the disappearing girls, and began to tell him her story, in fits and starts. She began to weep, not about her predicament but because of the thorns embedded in the soles of her feet, from the park’s harsh grass. The police were called and, in a dark-blue dressing-gown that was far too big for her, Colleen led them back to the pale-blue asbestos house.
In custody, when it became clear the game was over, both Catherine and David were surprisingly talkative.
Their technique was as follows: they would offer the woman a ride, or ask for directions. Catherine’s presence made it easier to lure women near or into their car—a 1971 emerald-green Toyota.
Once the women were in the car—make sure you put on your seatbelt; it’s the law, you know—the couple would pull their knives out of nowhere, like magicians.
In the bedroom their props included chains, sleeping pills, more knives, gags, nylon cords, cocaine. David Birnie injected his genitals with coke or anesthetic to keep his member numb, so the act of rape could be repeated. Catherine Birnie was always in the bed, a queen-size with an antique headboard, sometimes participating, sometimes just observing.
Ideally, the couple liked to keep the girls alive for several days, then, when it was time, when they were done, they would kill the girls with knives and hands and pills and nylon cords and bury them in the pine forests, not the one near Willagee (which, incidentally, means place of pines) but the more remote forests on the northern outskirts of Perth.
One stubborn girl they thought was dead kept sitting up in her grave. Kind of like Rasputin, David was quoted as saying, alluding to the mad Russian monk who, despite cyanide-laced wine and cakes, numerous shots to his body, and blunt force trauma to the head, refused to die.
Rasputin finally drowned, in a frozen river. David finished his victim off with an axe, or was it a shovel?
The police found pine needles in the car, all over the house, even in the couple’s bedding. In the station’s transcripts, Catherine talked at length about the pine needles, how annoying they were, how difficult they were to get rid of, how they got in absolutely everything.
Reporters had a field day, combing through the fine points, coming up with their theories, analyzing the colorful aspects of the case.
David Birnie worked in a wrecker’s yard: Was it just coincidence, one article asked, that this man who made his living not by fixing cars but by dismantling them, breaking automobiles down into their components, also liked to take apart young women?
And what was the meaning of the torn-out picture of Rasputin taped to the refrigerator? Did Mr. Birnie fancy himself as some kind of depraved mystical healer?
Another article focused on Catherine: How could a mother of seven from a previous marriage perpetrate such evil? The writer played up her role in the murders, positioning her as the mastermind. After all, when police asked David why he had committed the crimes, he responded, Because of this book Catherine showed me.
A few years back, she had introduced him to the Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom; they nicked a copy from the university library where they began to look for potentials, studious girls, though, as they both admitted, they had only read certain passages: it was such a bloody long book.
Nonetheless, they had read enough to develop their own Sadean system; one of the more sensational papers stated that David forced his victims to wear white net veils embroidered with tiny white satin flowers, as if they were preparing for marriage. In his inverted world, the honeymoon occurred prior to the nuptials; the murder and burial served as the wedding ceremony, in which he was both husband and priest and Catherine the jealous bridesmaid, never the bride.
I looked forward to waking up in the morning, so I could get the latest installment.
I had to wait for my mom to do the crossword and then for my dad to finish the paper, but the wait was worth it.
To read about horror that doesn’t touch you or anyone you love; could there be anything better?
David’s younger brother came out of the woodwork, claiming that David had forcibly sodomized him multiple times, during a lapse in the couple’s relationship.
When Catherine returned, David summoned his brother into their bed, offering Catherine to him as a gift for his eighteenth birthday. It was his way of saying sorry, the brother said. I figured it was alright, as they weren’t really married, just de facto.
That article’s headline was “Unholy Arrangements.” My eyes lingered on the terms sodomy and de facto—phrases that often appeared in crime reports. I saved this article and reread it numerous times, although this aspect of the story was extraneous to the case.
I’m still not sure what word would best encapsulate the feeling that bloomed inside me, knowing there was nothing between me and the Birnies and the night but the flywire screens on our windows with their flimsy clasps, like the clasps on old ladies’ purses, purses that could be easily unfastened, screens that kept out spiders and flies but could be opened from the outside with the flick of a wrist.
My mother had her own theory concerning the Birnies’ guilt, their culpability. Over the years, on our walks, we had frequently gone down the footpath with its gray corrugated asbestos fence, past the Birnies’ house.
Every time, she would lower her voice, just in case the neighbors were about, and comment on the dreadful state of their garden—if you could call it that, dead grass and weeds, and some rust bucket on bricks. Just look at that, she would whisper, what an eyesore; they’re letting the whole street down.
When the Birnies’ misdeeds were revealed, my mother was not so much horrified by the proximity but smug; her suspicions were confirmed.
Well of course they did it, she said. Just look at the state of their garden.
The court trial went quickly. Attention was given not to the Birnies’ garden as a reflection of their moral turpitude but to the couple’s personal appearance. One daily wrote of a rather nondescript, ordinary looking couple you might find running a petrol station in a country town. David was a weedy little man and Catherine was his drab, slightly buxom wife with a sour face.
This portrayal reminded me of that nursery rhyme couple who despite their physical differences complemented each other: Jack Sprat could eat no fat, his wife could eat no lean. And so between them both they licked the platter clean.
The same paper recounted how the pair behaved in court, their private displays of tenderness: the patting of each other’s hands, the rubbing of each other’s handcuffed wrists. There, there, Birnie was overheard whispering to Catherine during a particularly tense moment.
After the judge delivered the verdict—four life sentences each—and the Birnies were led outside, separately, David gave the finger to the crowd and blew Catherine a kiss.
At school, word got around that I lived in the same suburb as the Birnies. The other boys asked me questions: Did you know the killers? Did you ever see them do anything out of the ordinary?
I’m sure I made up some story. Like I heard screams one night. Or I caught sight of a scared face in their bedroom window. Every time I walked past, Catherine would glare at me and David would eye me like a snake.
But no, it was nothing like that. I only encountered the Birnies once.
It was three or four years before their spree (but, as the papers said, they had been contemplating the idea for a long time). So that makes me about eleven or twelve.
I was walking past the house, and David was outside, working on a car. Catherine was outside too, standing on the small porch, chatting with her common-law husband. I must have seen one or both of them before. As I passed, they stopped talking and looked up.
“Hey love,” Catherine said. Her hair was long, a little greasy, and her skin was pale. She clearly wasn’t getting much sun. She had on light-blue terry-toweling shorts, and I saw the purple varicose veins meandering up and down her legs, just like my mother’s. “Are you heading to the shops?” she asked. “Would you mind popping this in the mailbox?”
“Okay,” I said. She came over and handed me an envelope.
“But it needs a stamp. Hang on,” she said as she went inside.
I waited there. David was tinkering with the car. He seemed . . . engrossed in it, this mechanical thing he needed to fix. He was shirtless, wearing a pair of jeans.
I glanced at the envelope. Someone’s name was on it, in what I presume was Catherine’s handwriting, an uncommon blend of print and cursive. I looked at the house. Their door was open and I saw they had a fireplace in their lounge room and I felt a tinge of envy because our house didn’t have one.
Catherine came back outside and gave me money for a stamp. “Keep the change,” she said, “and buy something for yourself.”
“I reckon he’s gonna get a beer with that, love,” David said, still absorbed in the car.
He laughed and so did she. “Oh no he won’t, he’s a good boy,” Catherine said, and ruffled my hair.
Then I went to the shops, asked for the correct stamp, licked the stamp and fixed it to the envelope, bought a chocolate bar with the change, and mailed the letter to who knows where.
You would think I might have boasted about this errand, created a plot to entertain my schoolmates, but I didn’t.
Up until now I’ve never told anyone.
Even though it was a few years earlier, I was concerned it somehow connected me to the Birnies’ crimes, made me a kind of accomplice. I could end up in jail, in a cell with David. He was housed on death row in Fremantle Prison, a limestone edifice from the mid-nineteenth century, right across the street from my school, so he was still nearby, still my neighbor. He might even be able to see me and the other boys from the tiny window in his cell.
One night, some friends and I were driving around—not going anywhere in particular—and before they dropped me off, we went to see the house. We parked in the driveway, turned on the headlights, and stared. It had only been a few months since the trial and there was already a For Sale sign next to the mailbox.
At first we were messing around, cracking jokes. We laughed about who would be fool enough to buy the place. Someone suggested pitching in, becoming the proud new owners, and converting the house into a museum. We could charge admission, give visitors guided tours, show them where everything went down. It would be even better if we could get back the evidence from the cops, we agreed, the bed and chains and knives and stuff. We could make a bloody fortune.
Gradually the tone became more solemn. The longer we gazed at the house, its blue exterior bleached to near-white in the car’s high beams, the more it seemed to dawn on all of us that inconceivable things went on in there.
We began to talk more earnestly, albeit in a clumsy, Catholic schoolboy fashion, about the women who suffered, just behind that bedroom window, and really, what does that mean, in the scheme of things? Why does God let this happen? And how does he make the selections? Is there some kind of infinite death lottery, a huge plastic sphere full of billions of balls with black numbers, and the sphere is constantly tumbling and if your number comes up, congratulations, you’ll die a violent death at the hands of some sick bastard. . . . Or does God pull names out of a big hat, like in a raffle? That must be how it works, it must be arbitrary; God wouldn’t have any other criteria, would he?
And then we stopped talking, and the longer we sat in Wayne’s Camaro, just staring at the house, the more it seemed as if the house wanted to tell us . . . not so much a story, but something untellable that was trying to seep out through the cracks in the walls and the holes in the floorboards. Basically, we scared ourselves shitless, deliberating what those girls had gone through, and so we drove off to our homes and our beds.
For a bored teenage boy like myself, it was . . . thrilling, I think that’s the best word to use, to be on the doorstep of this site of . . . atrocity. Thanks to the Birnies, I was taken out of, away from, the tedium of everyday life. (Speaking of which, Birnie later claimed in an interview that he committed those acts to escape life’s uniformity. Perth is so fucking dull, he said. The dullest city in the world. A man can only take so much peace and quiet.)
I managed to find a copy of 120 Days of Sodom at a secondhand bookstore in Fremantle and would go there after school to read sections on the sly. Like David, I was enchanted, transported, yet I only got so far; it’s such a long book.
For a while my sister Julianne had nightmares; this was understandable. I’d inquire about these nightmares, but she would not elaborate.
I had dreams of a different nature. Once again, I was posting that letter for the Birnies. Catherine was kind to me, motherly, ruffling my hair. David was even friendlier, calling me mate.
But this time, my errand coincided with the murders. The letter was from the girl they captured. I was the couple’s messenger. The name Susannah Candy was written in the upper-left corner, just the name, no return address, in the girl’s trembling handwriting. Candy, what Americans call chocolate, like what I bought with the change.
There were other dreams, dreams of David and me and his younger brother. I’d wake up sticky, disconcerted.
The dreams recurred, and then they ceased.
Inevitably, other serial killers emerged on the scene. Either they got caught, or, taking advantage of the emptiness of Western Australia, all that space, the killers folded themselves up neatly into the landscape and disappeared.
Talk of the Birnies quieted down. You would hear about them now and then. Parole cases denied, that sort of thing. Colleen Sheir, the lucky one, was interviewed on local TV, avowing how difficult it had been to go on with her life: I feel as though I died with the other women. I don’t feel like I’m alive. When you’ve been on the brink of death, seen your own death, you go on seeing it.
Although David and Catherine would not see each other again, they wrote more than two thousand letters to one another from prison. Someone was seeking to publish the letters; I think there would still be a readership for them.
The correspondence stopped when David committed suicide, hanging himself in his cell with a nylon cord on October 6, 2005, the same date the first girl vanished nearly twenty years before. The parallel was noted.
He was buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave at Pinnaroo Cemetery, not far from the forests where they disposed of the girls. No one attended the funeral except for a priest who said a few words.
Catherine’s still alive, head of the library at Bandyup Women’s Prison. Apparently, she takes real pride in her job.
She must have mourned David terribly. Does she continue to mourn? With no one to write to anymore, she has reportedly been working on a book of her own, a sci-fi fantasy that takes place in a kind of afterlife, though not as we conceive it, the virtuous sent to one domain, the evil sent to another. In her version, everyone’s lumped together in a junkyard afterlife that is neither above nor below us. Its laws and morals have no relation to those on earth. An excerpt of her novel was even published in the prison’s paper. I could not obtain a copy but the names of the two heroes are David and Catherine; the working title is Our Dark Adventure.
I don’t remember why I used to go by the Birnies’ house. There was a more direct route to the park or the deli. Perhaps for a change in scenery?
Their place on Moorhouse stayed vacant for years until a developer bought it at a knockoff price and immediately knocked it down.
The suburb of Willagee is of significance in Nyoongah mythology: it’s a black-hearted zone, a zone where bad things happen and evil spirits dwell. The pine forests attracted these entities; they liked something about the shade. The forest is all gone now, cleared to make way for new houses. Where do you think evil spirits go when their shade is gone?