Women Who Kill: Profiles of Female Serial Killers

by Carol Anne Davis

  Victim three

  Ten days later Catherine and David went out looking for sex slaves again. This time they saw Noelene Patterson standing beside her vehicle, which had run out of petrol. She knew the couple slightly so had no reason to suspect that their offer of assistance wasn’t genuine. They helped her to push her vehicle to a service station then they forced her at knifepoint into their car.

  Like the others, the thirty-one-year old was chained to the bed, gagged and raped. She was beautiful and classy so an infatuated David Birnie delayed killing her. By the third day Catherine was insanely jealous and insisted he kill the woman now. He drugged Noelene, strangled her and buried her in the forest near to the others. Catherine picked up a handful of earth and threw it over Noelene’s face as her corpse lay in the hollow they’d dug for her in the woods.

  Catherine would photograph some of the corpses for her own and David’s pleasure. And the police said that when she led them to the thirty-one-year old’s body, she spat on the grave.

  The fourth victim

  Early the following month, on Guy Fawkes Day, Catherine spotted twenty one year old Denise Brown at a bus stop. Denise loved dancing and nightclubs and tended to see the best in everyone so she was happy to accept a lift from the slim, unassuming-looking couple who seemed so much in love.

  She too, was treated like the Birnie’s previous victims, though her terror lasted a shorter time, for that day and most of the next. On the second day the Birnies made her phone a female friend to say that she was well. Thereafter they drugged her and drove her towards a pine plantation where they planned to bury her.

  On the way, they drew up alongside a nineteen-year-old university student who was walking home. David sat staring straight ahead in the driving seat whilst Catherine did all the talking. She asked the teenager if she wanted a lift. Between sentences she sipped from a can of rum. 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 escapes

  She 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 arrest

  The 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 trial

  At 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.

  Update

  Another 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. But I was able to check the facts with the Australian police who confirmed that it was the man she’d had six children with who had expired - and that her team killing partner David Birnie is still very much alive in prison.

  9 Trying to get the feeling again

  The murderous aphrodisiacs of Gwen Graham & Catherine Wood

  Catherine May Carpenter was born in 1962 in Michigan, USA. Her father was a warehouse truck driver who had served in Vietnam. Her mother was a book keeper who went on to have two more children, a boy and a girl. Catherine would later admit that her father drank heavily and beat her and that
they had a very poor relationship. Cathy’s father was a distant and angry man - like his father before him - who publicly called little Cathy names and mocked her chubbyness. And the overweight child felt equally unloved by her mother who was always giving her offspring tasks to perform and who seemed preoccupied and cold.

  Cathy spent her childhood either looking after the younger members of the family or hiding away from the world in her bedroom. From an early age she showed one of the traits that unloved or abused females often suffer from, an obsession with eating vast amounts of food.

  She grew into a six foot tall, broad shouldered teenager who loved reading. When she was sixteen she met Kenneth Wood and almost immediately began to test his love for her, getting her friends to phone him up and ask him out. She demanded that he choose between her and his hobbies, making it clear that she needed unconditional love.

  Cathy moved in with Ken after a family fight. Shortly afterwards she announced that she was pregnant and they decided to get married, Ken taking out a loan to pay for the reception. Her parents gave them a cake and a few dollars for alcohol then asked for change. The wedding took place in August 1979 when Catherine was just seventeen and Ken twenty. He worked in a car plant and she went to school until nearing the birth.

  From the start it was clear that Cathy had few maternal feelings towards their only daughter. Her husband would later state that she was always criticising the little girl and ignored her childhood illnesses. Indeed, Cathy would later tell the authorities that when she was around children she wanted to hit them, including her own desperate-to-please child.

  She also hated housework and Ken would usually come home to a house filled with dirty crockery and fast food wrappers, Cathy having spent the day eating junk food and reading everything from the classics to crime novels. As she refused to go shopping, he often brought in more takeaway for their evening meals. For years after her daughter’s birth she lived like this, rarely venturing out in the daylight, and her weight soared to almost four hundred and fifty pounds.

  In her favour, she was bright and well read and was able to work out other people’s strengths and weaknesses, perhaps using the hypervigilance that many abused children develop. She had an impressive general knowledge, kept up with current affairs and was good at games like chess.

  By 1986 even Cathy had had enough of her workless existence. Deciding that she could cope with helping the elderly, she applied for and got a job as a nursing aide at Alpine Manor, a local nursing home in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The home had over two hundred bedrooms, each containing two patients, many of whom were suffering from Alzheimer’s or other organic brain diseases. Others had multiple sclerosis or severe arthritis. All required extensive nursing care.

  At first Cathy seemed hesitant and shy as she spoke to her supervisors. Other aides found her almost excessively polite and so self conscious that she ate alone in the dining room. They were seeing the nice side of what many people would later note was a Jekyll and Hyde personality. Within a few months she would gain in confidence and the dark brutalised side would reveal itself. She would drink heavily, become physically violent with some of her colleagues and ultimately help kill the helpless patients in her care.

  Thanks to her hard physical work as a nursing aide, Cathy soon lost one hundred and fifty pounds and started to take more interest in her appearance. She dyed her hair platinum, bought new clothes and had a brief lesbian affair with a co-worker. This was her second Sapphic relationship for as a young teenager she’d had sex with another girl.

  Her new lover’s obvious devotion seemed to boost Cathy’s ego to the extent that she thought she was irresistible to the other lesbian women who worked alongside her and she would flirt with and then spurn them. In short, she was showing some classic serial killer traits, a dangerous mix of omnipotent periods, violent outbursts, emotional distress and very low self esteem.

  Cathy started to play mind games with those staff members she didn’t like, pouring water onto their patient’s sheets, then claiming that the beds were urine-soaked because the nursing aides had failed to change them. She also started being rough with some of the patients, reporting injuries from them that in hindsight were clearly defense marks from lashing hands and feet. Some of the patients were visibly afraid of her and at least one family complained about Cathy’s roughness to another member of staff.

  A few months before, this twenty-four-year old had felt too worthless to do anything but eat, read and find fault with her bewildered daughter. But now Catherine was in a position of power, with emotionally fragile co-workers claiming their desire and their love. More potently, she had an almost endless supply of patients who were completely dependent on her for hours at a time.

  Some of the senior citizens were tied to their beds with soft restraints at night to stop them sleepwalking, which rendered them completely helpless. Others had lost their voices as the result of strokes or brain disease so couldn’t shout for help. At this stage Gwen Graham joined Alpine Manor and was soon to join Cathy’s bed.

  As her attraction to Gwen deepened, Cathy asked her husband to leave the marital home. Angry and upset he did so, taking their daughter with him. Gwen moved in and the two began an affair. Both seemed immature and would write each other bad poetry and leave adolescent messages for each other on the answering machine.

  Gwendolyn Gail Graham

  Gwen Graham’s childhood had been even more loveless than Cathy’s. She was born to Linda and Mack in 1963 in Santa Monica. She was their first child - though her mother would go on to have another two children in quick succession. By the time she was twenty-two Gwen’s impoverished mother had three offspring under the age of five and a husband who was often away due to work. She would later admit to journalists that at the time she couldn’t cope.

  Linda would hit the children with her belt and later admitted hitting Gwen with an electrical cord when the little girl was just eighteen months old.

  Gwen’s father kept switching employment, working in everything from law enforcement to welding and each job change caused him to move the family around California with all the change of schools and childhood friends that entailed for the younger Grahams. The five of them rarely had enough money - and Gwen’s dad believed that you shouldn’t pick up a crying baby because this made it spoilt - so family tensions grew. Gwen would later recall incidents where someone forced her head down the toilet and flushed it, leaving her with a phobia about water faucets. She had nightmares and became increasingly accident prone.

  By her teens Gwen’s arms were badly scarred by cigarette burns. When asked about this she explained that her father had sexually assaulted her for several years and that she’d self harmed in order to ease the emotional anguish. A woman on Gwen’s paper round would later say that Gwen looked like an abused child.

  By seventeen she’d had several lesbian relationships and had moved in with a woman in her mid-twenties who loved her. Despite the good times, the pair drank heavily and sometimes got into physical fights.

  Gwen grew into a woman of five foot two with reddish hair and a smile that many people would later describe as cute and innocent. When her lover took up a job in Grand Rapids, the needy Gwen followed her out there and got the job at Alpine Manor. But the relationship deteriorated and so she began an affair with her co-worker Catherine May Wood.

  Gwen’s work performance had originally been first class but after she began her relationship with Cathy her patient’s care deteriorated. The two started whispering and giggling together and leaving doors shut whilst they cleaned and turned the patients, something that was against the Manor’s open door policy. A supervisor tried to get them assigned to different shifts but no one acted on her suggestion - and even when the pair were working separately they often swapped duties with other aides so that they could be in the building at the same time. Soon some of the patients were telling the other aides that someone had threatened to kill them. As many had Alzheimer’s they simply weren’t believed.
Patients started dying, but no one initially suspected murder as they were old and ill…

  The deaths

  The deaths took place between January and April of 1987 when the lovers were on the same shifts at Alpine Manor, though they weren’t usually assigned to the same patients. Cathy would later claim that Gwen held a washcloth over each patients nose and mouth, kneeling on them if necessary to restrict their struggles. She herself, Cathy said, would keep anxious watch at the door. The pair would then hurry to a nearby anteroom and make love, enjoying intense orgasms as they relived their murderous acts. They also took souvenirs such as socks and part of a table decoration from the victims and kept them on display at Cathy’s home.

  During this period five patients died. The first was sixty-year old Marguerite Chambers who had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s five years previously. Her family was surprised to hear of her sudden death in January 1987.

  The following month Myrtle Luce died. Earlier a nurse had noticed Myrtle’s nose was bleeding, but put it down to high blood pressure or to the heat in the nursing home. Later Cathy would admit to pinching patient’s noses closed with her fingers to see how much they struggled. It helped her and Gwen decide which of their charges would be the simplest to kill. Whatever the reason for Myrtle’s nosebleed she couldn’t tell anyone as a series of strokes had left her brain malfunctioning. As she was ninety-five and had been losing weight, the nurses weren’t alarmed to find her dead in bed.

  Mae Mason was the third woman to die. Cathy would later say that she kept other people talking in a nearby part of the building while Gwen carried out the killing. Mae was seventy-nine.

  Seventy-four-year old Belle Burkhard was murdered in late February. A nursing aide who Cathy detested went in to turn her patient, and found the woman dead with her arm bent beneath her. The arm was bruised, but as Belle often had fits nothing more was thought of this.