Women Who Kill: Profiles of Female Serial Killers (14 page)

Suddenly Judith decided she’d seen the light and became a Christian Fundamentalist. Alabama’s
governor
was also a Christian Fundamentalist. He only had a few days left in office, so had nothing to lose in voting terms when he commuted her sentence to life imprisonment. He added the term ‘without possibility of parole’ - and the local newspapers then reported that she would spend the rest of her life behind bars. In reality, a governor cannot prevent the parole-consideration process, so she will eventually be eligible for parole.

Occasionally crime encyclopaedias state that Judith Neelley tortured fifteen young female victims to death in Alabama, Georgia and Tennessee, but fail to give names beyond those known; Lisa Ann Millican, Janice Chatman and the wounded John Hancock. One sociology book started that Neelley claimed six victims. Again, no concrete details were given.

It’s certainly true that serial killers are often tried for far fewer killings than they are believed to have actually committed, but I contacted various true crime writers in the states and they were unable to find names or any other details of these deaths.

This author read what is considered the definitive book on the subject,
Early
Graves
by Thomas H. Cook, which only names the victims profiled here.

Although the crimes were of a sexual nature, it’s apparent that Judith Neelley’s motivation was power. She clearly took pleasure in hearing her victim’s plead for their lives and in watching them writhe on the ground. Alvin, police and other witnesses would say that ‘Judy liked to be in charge.’

It’s also possible that she was trying to kill an earlier version of herself. She’d written to Alvin when she was in the youth correctional facility, describing his other women as ‘a little bunch of nothings.’ She doubtless saw the abused, impoverished Lisa and the low IQ Janice as being akin to the trailer trash background she so despised.

Judith had dreamt of a nice home and a career, a life a million miles away from the crowded trailer with its endless fornication and drinking. Yet here she was,
driving
from state to state, staying in cheap motels and conning stores out of cash. The girl with the high IQ had fallen low - but through a mixture of cruel words and even crueller actions she could make her victims seem even lower than herself. To the women who
passed her in the shopping malls, Judith Neelley was an unwashed drifter with an equally shiftless husband - but to Lisa, Janice and John she became omnipotent, holding the key to their immediate wellbeing and having power over whether they lived or died.

It’s a well known fact that the person who has the most menial day job is often the person who is a despot and a sadist to his family - and indigent Judith Neelley was sadistic enough to inject drain cleaner into a thirteen-year-old child and watch the child’s flesh bubble and liquefy.

The fact that Lisa was tortured and killed in the Grand Canyon of the South upset the local people and made the canyon seem more sinister than it had before. In the early 1990’s various volunteer groups banded together and worked hard to clear it of trash and restore it to its natural beauty. Locals also started an energised campaign called
Save
Our
Land.

Judith’s sister and three brothers launched a ‘save Judith’ statement in January 1999, claiming that she too was a victim of Alvin’s alleged violence. ‘Domestic violence goes more deeper than just a beating,’ (sic) one of her relatives said. They added that her family loved her very much.

And of Judith’s own much-travelled offspring, all born in custody? Her twins have been adopted by Alvin’s mother, whilst her third son - whose middle name, at her request, is Alvin - is being cared for elsewhere in the states. She has been appealing to have the children returned to her. Her own mother is now dead.

Judith Neelley will be eligible for parole in Alabama in 2014, assuming she doesn’t manage to file a successful appeal before that. She will be fifty years old. However, she may remain behind bars because she was also sentenced to life in Georgia for kidnapping when she abducted Janice Chatman there.

8 Giving it up for your love

The dependent world of Catherine Margaret Birnie

Catherine was born in Australia on 31st May 1951. She was only ten months old when her mother died, at which stage she went to live with her father in South Africa. This arrangement lasted for two years, after which she was sent back to Perth, Australia to live with her controlling grandparents who wouldn’t allow other children into the house.

Given few treats and little fun, Catherine had such a loveless and lonely childhood that people who knew her would report that she rarely smiled. She also endured the trauma of watching her grandmother die in front of her during an epileptic fit. She would remain in poverty throughout her life.

By the time she was eighteen, Catherine was
burgling
factories and shops with her friend and next door neighbour David, who was the same age as her. Both were convicted, though Catherine received probation for the early breaking and entering charges. The third time she was imprisoned for six months and the previously-jailed David Birnie got two and a half years.

The pair of them were at one stage caught with wigs, coshes, gelignite and guns, everything needed to cause serious damage to property. Their criminal kit was
chillingly similar to that owned by female serial killer Judith Neelley, profiled previously.

Catherine gave birth in prison and the baby was taken from her until her release. The child wasn’t David’s and indeed it isn’t known who the father was. It’s likely that, like most unloved young women, Catherine was desperate to be held and cared for and tried to achieve this by being promiscuous. When she and David drifted apart he married someone else.

The thin, pale Catherine now got herself a job as a couple’s domestic help in Freemantle, Western Australia - but found herself more interested in their adult son, Donald. When she was twenty-one she married him and soon had a child by him. She was outside with the boy when he was seven months old and saw him crushed by a car. He died immediately.

Catherine went on to have another five children by her husband, but he refused to get a job and she had to work hard to support him plus their offspring. She also helped to support two of her adult relatives.

Catherine hadn’t been parented well so she had few parenting skills of her own. She also hated housework and had very little energy left for it by the time she finished work for the day. It was an impoverished and unrewarding life - but the only type of life that she had ever known.

This exhausting marriage lasted for sixteen years, after which she again met up with David Birnie. His
own childhood had partly been spent in care as both his parents were out of control alcoholics. He’d been
brutalised
all his young life. Catherine resumed her love affair with David and he wooed her with chocolates and flowers and made her feel that she mattered to someone. Within two years she had left her husband and moved in with him.

David was no knight in shining armour - but then embryonic female serial killers rarely manage to attract knights in shining armour. He already had a failed
marriage
and numerous failed relationships and career starts and had been fired from a previous job because of sexual assault. He sometimes saw sex as a weapon and would inject numbing chemicals into the head of his penis so that he could thrust into a female for hours. He was so highly sexed that if a woman wasn’t available he would make do with a male.

Catherine now convinced herself that she loved him more than anything else and that she would do
anything
for him. This ‘perfect’ love gave meaning to her otherwise unfocused life, a life without her children and without educational or career prospects. She changed her surname to Birnie by deed poll so that he became her common law husband, but they were never officially wed. The couple set up home in Willagee in a modest old house that they rented from the local authorities. As with her previous household, Catherine let the place get very untidy and the garden hopelessly overgrown.

In fairness, she had other things to think about. David wanted sex all the time - and when he wasn’t having it he was watching videos that depicted it. He was insatiable with a preference for very young women, and he had enjoyed many before settling down with the thin, clingy Catherine.

She was a low dominance female and he was a high dominance male, so before long she wasn’t enough for him. He began to dream of kidnapping a girl who could become his sexual slave.

David worked as a labourer in a car-wrecking yard. When a twenty-two-year old psychology student, Mary Neilson, called at the yard to buy tires, he
suggested
she come to his house where he could sell her them cheaper. When she did so, he dragged her inside and held her at gunpoint. It’s not known whether this was all his own idea or whether he and Catherine had discussed it first.

Whatever the original sequence of events, thirty-five-year old Catherine now watched approvingly as her common law husband chained the younger girl to the bed, stripped her, gagged her and repeatedly raped her. Catherine had no time for her own gender - after all, her mother had deserted her by dying and her
grandmother had abused her horribly. All that she cared about was that her beloved David was enjoying himself. She noted exactly which acts with the girl were giving him most pleasure and she would later emulate these acts, possibly as a way of retaining his love.

Mary, the psychology student, did what she could to please the man who was raping her and the woman who was watching, doubtless drawing on all her knowledge of human behaviour to try to save herself. But the couple discussed the situation and decided she had to die.

Late that night they drove her to the Glen Eagle National Park where David raped her again before he strangled her with a nylon cord. The killing too, was sadistic, as he used a tree branch to slowly tighten the noose. He and Catherine then took turns in stabbing the lifeless body so that the air would escape and it wouldn’t bloat excessively and burst out of its shallow grave. Catherine helped him dig such a grave and cover up the mutilated corpse. The date was 6th October 1986 and within four weeks they’d kill another three times.

A fortnight later Catherine and her common law husband cruised around for hours in search of a second
victim. Finally they espied Susannah Candy, a fifteen-year-old hitchhiker who was pleased to accept a lift. When she entered the car she was held at knifepoint and her wrists were tied. She, too, was driven to the couple’s squalid home. There, Catherine forced Susannah to write to her parents assuring them of her wellbeing. She would make the teenager write a second such letter later in her ordeal.

In a chilling reconstruction of what had happened to Mary Neilson, the fifteen-year-old was now chained to the bed and repeatedly raped. This time Catherine actively participated in the teenager’s ordeal. She got into bed with David and sexually molested the girl. She also took photographs of David raping the teenager, something that he did again and again over several days.

Finally, David Birnie forced a sleeping draught down Susannah’s throat and told Catherine to strangle her. Catherine did so, seemingly jealous of the length of time her common law husband had kept the pretty girl alive.

She now helped him bury the fifteen-year-old’s body near to the previous girl they’d killed. So far no one had suspected them and they were on a high.

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.

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.