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.The girl felt uneasy that someone should be drinking in the afternoon - and felt more uneasy when she saw a small dark haired figure asleep on the back seat of the vehicle.She explained that she enjoyed walking and hurried away.Now the Birnies took the sleeping Denise to a pine plantation.David raped her in the car and they held her there until darkness fell.Then Catherine helped David drag the distressed victim outside where he raped her once more, stabbing her twice in the neck at the same time.Catherine stood over them, helpfully shining a torch so that he could see the best way of carrying out his bloody task.Denise was still alive so Catherine fetched a larger knife and told David to stab his victim again.This time she lay still - and they erroneously thought she was dead.The Birnies then dug a grave and put Denise into it, but as they were shovelling in the dirt she sat up.David grabbed an axe and hit her with it.Again she sat up, and he used the axe to club her to death.Her corpse would be found five days later by police with the skull brutally cracked open.Catherine Birnie, the unloved child who rarely smiled, had become a young woman who enjoyed watching other women being killed.Fifth teenage victim escapesShe and David went out cruising for new sex slaves almost immediately.This time they spotted a sixteen-year-old girl walking home and they dragged her into their vehicle at knifepoint.Their need was clearly escalating as they had invited rather than forced their earlier victims to enter the car.Back at their house, they stripped the teenager and chained her to the bed by her hands and feet.David Birnie then raped her again and again whilst Catherine licked around his testes.At other times she licked his anus as he thrust into the suffering girl.Catherine told her to phone her family to reassure them that she was with friends and hadn’t come to any harm.She did so.Throughout her ordeal she tried to remember everything about the house so that if she was freed she could identify it to the police.The Birnies, of course, planned to murder her like the others so made no attempt to conceal their identities.They unchained her the following day and were then distracted by their drug dealer ringing the doorbell.The Birnies went into the living room to buy cocaine and the victim managed to clamber out of the bedroom window and run for help.The half-naked girl staggered into a Freemantle supermarket screaming hysterically.She was taken to the police station and told them the whole terrible story.Crucially, she was able to identify the address in Willagee where she’d been held.She’d even memorised the telephone number on the Birnies’ phone when they’d forced her to call her relatives and lie about being safe and well.The arrestThe police went to the house and apprehended the couple within moments of each other.Both were calm but hellbent on denial.Catherine was interviewed separately from her common law husband but refused to admit anything.She said that the girl had gone willingly with them, that they’d had consensual sex.She denied that they had anything to do with the other missing women who the police now strongly suspected were dead.For five days she denied everything, determined not to incriminate David.She only cracked when police told her that he’d admitted to killing four women and given details of where the bodies were.They were now driven to the grave area by police, where David pointed out the last resting places of Denise, Mary and Susannah.Both Birnies seemed to revel in being the centre of attention and were totally without emotion when the decomposing corpses were unveiled.Catherine said that she’d like to be the one who showed them where Noelene - who she’d hated - was buried.She gave police lots of details about why she’d loathed the elegant woman and she spat on her grave.Their hatred for these young women had been extreme.Police personnel who saw the Birnies’ photographs of the victims said ‘pack animals do not debase their prey to such an extent.’The trialAt the trial, held in Perth’s Supreme Court in February 1987, the couple held hands and Catherine was seen to pat David’s arm and constantly smile at him.He was the only one charged at this stage, as psychiatrists were still determining Catherine’s sanity.He was given life imprisonment.The following month Catherine - who had been found sane - was also sentenced to life imprisonment and was sent to the maximum security Bandyup Prison.Her psychiatric report said it was rare to find someone with such strong emotional dependency on another person.That dependency remained, with the couple exchanging thousands of letters and petitioning to be married.The request was refused.When word of David Birnie’s crimes reached his fellow prisoners, they began to beat him up.He was attacked so often that he attempted suicide a year after being imprisoned and was transferred to another establishment where he’d be safe.But the couple’s life sentence doesn’t actually mean life; under Australian law it signifies a maximum of twenty years.UpdateAnother macabre event took place a year after the Birnies’ imprisonment, when one of their friends, Barrie Watts from Queensland, was sentenced for killing a twelve-year-old girl, Sian King.In 1999 Catherine’s ex-husband Donald died and she applied for compassionate leave to attend his funeral.Prison rules for lifers deny attendance at the funeral of anyone but an immediate relative, so her request was turned down.Catherine stated this was unfair, and in doing so understandably aroused press and public rage.Because the term ex-husband was used in various reports, most internet sites wrongly reported that it was David Birnie who had died [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]