David Birnie

She married Donald McLaughlin on her 21st birthday and had seven children; their firstborn, a son, was struck and killed by a car in infancy.

David John Birnie (16 February 1951 – 7 October 2005) and Catherine Margaret Birnie (née Harrison; born 23 May 1951) were an Australian couple from Perth who murdered four women at their home in 1986, also attempting to murder a fifth.

These crimes were referred to in the press as the Moorhouse murders, after the Birnies' address at 3 Moorhouse Street in Willagee, a suburb of Perth.

David Birnie was the oldest of five children and grew up in Wattle Grove, a semi-rural suburb of Perth.

School friends and church acquaintances remember Birnie's family as having been dysfunctional and subject to frequent rumours involving alcoholism, promiscuity and incest.

The family never had regular meals together, and Birnie's parents did not cook meals for their children.

Catherine Birnie was born Catherine Margaret Harrison on 23 May 1951.

She was two years old when her mother, Doreen, died giving birth to her brother, who himself died two days later.

Unable to raise Catherine, her father Harold sent the girl to live with her maternal grandparents.

When she was aged 10, a custody dispute resulted in Harold regaining sole custody of Catherine.

Catherine met David at age 12 and began a relationship with him two years later.

Her father pleaded with her on several occasions to leave David as her involvement with him led to her getting into trouble with police, resulting in her being sent to a youth prison in adolescence.

Encouraged by a parole officer, Catherine began working for the McLaughlin family as a housekeeper.

In the early 1960s, Birnie's parents decided to move the family to another Perth suburb, where he eventually met Catherine Harrison through mutual friends.

At age 15, he left school to become an apprentice jockey for Eric Parnham at the nearby Ascot Racecourse.

During his time there, Birnie physically abused the horses and developed a habit of exhibitionism.

One night, Birnie, wearing only stockings over his head, broke into the room of an elderly lady where he was boarding and attempted to rape her.

By the time he was an adolescent, Birnie had been in and out of prison for several misdemeanors and felonies.

As an adult he became addicted to sex and pornography, and was a paraphiliac.

In his early twenties he married his first wife and had a daughter, Tanya, who was aged 10 at the time of his arrest.

Tanya, who has changed her surname since Birnie's capture, has never married and had no children, stating, "I don't wanna spawn another David Birnie".

In 1985, Catherine left her family and resumed her relationship with David.

The couple were never legally married, but Catherine changed her surname by deed poll to Birnie.

Over a period of five weeks, the Birnies abducted five women, aged between 15 and 31.

All of the victims, except for one, were raped at the couple's residence at 3 Moorhouse Street and subsequently murdered.

The sole exception was their final victim, who escaped the day after her abduction and led police back to the Birnie house, thus ending their crime spree.

22-year-old Mary Neilson, a psychology student at the University of Western Australia and part-time delicatessen worker, met David at the car wrecker's shop where he worked.

David offered to sell Neilson some cheap tires for her car and subsequently gave her his phone number.

In late 1986, at the time of the murders, Birnie was employed at a car wrecker's shop in Willagee, a suburb of Perth.

Upon visiting Moorhouse Street on 6 October 1986, Neilson was gagged, chained to a bed, and raped by David while Catherine observed.

She was then taken to Gleneagle, near Albany Highway in Bedfordale, where she was raped again and strangled with a nylon cord.

David then stabbed her thinking that it would speed up her decomposition as he "read that in a book somewhere."

Catherine joined him in burying Neilson in a shallow grave.

She would have received her degree for psychology from the university one year after her murder.

Two weeks later, Susannah Candy, a 15-year-old high school student from Nedlands, was abducted while hitchhiking along the Stirling Highway in Claremont.

Once she entered the Birnies' car, Candy was bound and held at knifepoint.

The Birnies forced her to send letters to her family to assure them that she was all right, then took Candy to Moorhouse Street and subjected her to the same ordeal as Neilson.

Afterward, after an abortive attempt to strangle the girl with the nylon cord, the Birnies forced sleeping pills down her throat.

Once they took effect, David put the cord around her neck and told Catherine to prove her undying love for him by murdering the girl herself.

Catherine complied and killed Candy while David watched.