She Was Ch*ined to a Bed by Australia’s Worst Serial Killer Couple — Then She Hid Evidence Everywhere, Knowing She’d Die: The Case of Kate Moir!!!

Kate Moir, 17, was chained to a bed by David and Catherine Birnie — serial killers with four victims already. Police told a rookie cop to charge her with lying.

It began as an ordinary night out. After a concert in downtown Perth, 17-year-old model Kate Moir found herself on a sofa between two strangers, a knife at her throat and a Stallone movie flickering on the screen. The couple beside her, David and Catherine Birnie, were by then connected to a string of disappearances that had unsettled Western Australia for a month.

Some early accounts put the toll at nearly a dozen victims. Investigators, however, could tie the pair to four, and that number is the one the record supports. Whatever the true figure, Moir’s night was meant to be the next entry on the list.

It’s a Monday, November 10, 1986, in the suburbs of Perth. A half-dressed teenager, bruised and marked by restraints, is running along Moorhouse Street. She has just escaped the Birnies.

“It’s pretty rare to survive serial killers,” she would say decades later.

Her fear, she recalled, had given way to something sharper.

“I went from being terrified to being like, I’ve really gotta do something here.”

Her chance came when her captor left the room for about a minute. Kate was locked in with a single door and a small window, both fastened. She understood she might never be alone again.

“I finally got the courage to check the window.”

She forced the lock, jumped, and landed hard on her head. Concussed and unsteady, she limped toward the nearest house.

“Knocked on the door. No one home. I’m hysterical. I’m crying and laughing at the same time.”

Next house, no one. The next, the same. She hauled herself over a back fence and was attacked by a black dog, and as she fought it off she could not stop picturing her captors cruising the street behind her.

Then she saw a man smoking outside a store. She ran to him as she had never run before.

“I ran up to him and said, ‘I’ve been assaulted. Please take me aside and call the police.’”

She gave him a warning as well. If a woman turned up claiming to be her mother, he was not to believe her. He remembered it clearly.

The call sent Kate to a local police station, where Constable Laura Hancock was in her first week on the job. Her sergeant handed her the statement of a battered teenager picked up off the street.

“That was my first panic, because this is the first statement I’ve ever taken.”

Kate wasn’t interested in her own story. She insisted the couple were serial killers and that officers should be out looking for them, not sitting across a desk from her. By Hancock’s account, Kate believed there had been others, and that she would have been next.

Then the urgency drained away. Kate began speaking in a flat, almost stoic voice, and the details began to wobble in the ears of the officers listening. How had the couple taken her? Why had they not killed her? Why had they left her alone?

Hancock’s sergeant, it turned out, had already made up his mind. He suspected a fabrication and had handed the interview to the rookie so no one senior would waste an afternoon on it. When she returned with the statement, his instruction was blunt.

“I was told that it was a bizarre story and to stitch her up for a false report.”

Hancock has never shaken those words. “I have lived those words for 30 years,” she said. She was ordered to charge a girl who might be telling the truth.

Hancock hesitated, and what stopped her was something in Kate’s manner. The girl never talked about herself, only about the couple and the women who came before her.

“This is who they are. Go get them.”

Thirty days earlier, across town, Detective Paul Ferguson had received a file on his desk. Mary Nielsen, a Perth University student, had vanished. Days later a much younger girl, Sue Candy, was added to the stack.

“Child, absolute child. It’s terrible. It really is terrible.”

Then came a puzzling instruction. Neither girl had been found, yet Ferguson was told to stand down on both cases, because each had apparently phoned or written home to say she had run away. Before he could voice his doubts, a third name landed on his desk: Noelene Patterson.

“She was doomed to begin with,” he said, describing how a married couple had offered her a lift to a service station. “She never got out of the car.”

Within a week came a fourth, 21-year-old Denise Brown, who had left a friend’s place in Coolbellup and never reached home.

“I was relatively certain that this was out of character for Denise Brown and that she was the subject of foul play.”

Her mother said the same, and she added a detail Ferguson had now heard before. Someone claiming to be Denise had phoned a friend to say she was staying elsewhere. A pattern was forming. The missing were calling in with explanations, and the explanations were wrong.

Superintendent Vince Katich showed a photograph to a woman who lived across from where Denise was last seen. She recalled the girl catching a bus in Fremantle.

Fremantle was a quiet port town with a small police force. Ferguson told its officers he would come by that afternoon, and before he could leave, Sergeant Chris Cassidy called him back over the radio. A young woman was talking to them, he said, and her account might be connected to the Denise Brown file.

Back at the Palmyra station, the two stories finally touched. Only Hancock had believed Kate until then. When Ferguson arrived and began asking about Denise Brown, Kate sensed she was at last being heard.

She named her captors, a couple living together in Palmyra, Catherine and David Birnie. She also explained why she was certain they were behind Denise’s disappearance. While she was held, Catherine had picked up a newspaper carrying Denise’s missing-person photo, and she had burst out laughing.

“I said, ‘What’s funny?’ And she said, ‘You think a big girl like that could look after herself.’”

The photo showed only a head. Kate says there was no way to tell from it that Denise was a big girl. “So I knew for a fact that they’d killed Denise Brown.”

Ferguson asked whether she had challenged Catherine. “Of course not,” Kate said. “I didn’t wanna die.”

Ferguson asked for everything, from the beginning. Two nights earlier, Kate had gone to a concert in downtown Perth with friends. One of them drove her toward her parents’ home on the far side of the city, and partway there she decided it was too far and asked to be let out so she could walk.

Soon a young couple in a brand-new car pulled alongside and offered her a ride. She felt no alarm and climbed into the back seat.

“They pulled up outside my house. I went to get out of the car. There was no door handle.”

The window handle, too, was missing. At that moment David slammed her head between the front seats and Catherine pressed a butcher knife to her throat. They bound her hands, wrapped her in a blanket, and drove off.

Kate asked them a question, and their answer told her something worse than the question itself.

“I wasn’t the first. They’d done this before. They were good at it.”

At the house, Catherine unbound her and told her to undress. David sealed each item of clothing in a plastic bag and labeled it with her name, age, and address.

Ferguson, who had met his share of criminals, saw how different this was. “The purpose of that was to ensure that there was no evidence left at the house,” he said.

Then the couple put on a film, the 1982 Stallone picture “Rambo,” and quizzed her at knifepoint about her family and her boyfriend. Kate understood what they were doing. They were compiling a list of the people who might come looking for her once she was gone.

What followed was a night of assault and mental torture that she has described to interviewers in terms she reserves for herself. She was chained by wrist and ankle to the posts of a single bed. She would later say that she cried through all of it.

Near the end of the night, David cuffed her ankle to his own and gave her sleeping pills. She tucked them under her tongue and hid them beneath the mattress.

“I’m in a nightmare,” she remembers thinking, awake all night.

She was convinced that if she slept she would not wake. So she started to scheme. All evening Catherine had mocked other girls by name and laughed at them, and Kate worked out within a minute that she was talking about past victims.

She didn’t have an escape plan. She had a different idea, a way to reach the couple even if she died.

“Yeah, someone’s gonna know. Someone will find out.”

The next morning David removed the cuffs and left for work. Catherine led Kate back to the living room and forced another Stallone film on her.

This time Kate did the talking. She became friendly, compliant, even pleasant, and Catherine’s guard slipped a little. Each time Catherine looked away, Kate used the moment to leave a trail.

Asked how she tilted the odds, she said she hadn’t tried. “You know you’re gonna die, but you don’t acknowledge that to yourself.”

What she did instead was plant evidence for whoever found her body. She hid a lipstick in a beanbag and tossed a packet of cigarettes into the roof space, standing on the back of the couch to do it. Her parents, she reasoned, would then know she hadn’t run away and who was responsible.

Catherine made her phone her parents with a cover story, as the other girls had been made to do. In the end, Kate’s good behavior won her a small mercy. Catherine locked her in the bedroom without the chains.

“She told me to go to the room, shut up and not say a word or she’d kill me.”

From there Kate went out the window and down the street.

Ferguson and Cassidy weighed her account against what they knew of the other missing girls. They found it matched.

“We were satisfied that everything she said was absolutely accurate.”

Cassidy gathered Hancock and a convoy of officers and took Kate with him, still questioning her in the car. “Would you identify the house?” he asked.

“Oh, I think so. It’s not that far from here,” she answered from the back seat.

They drove past, and Kate looked at the house, ducked down, and burst into tears. Catherine appeared to have already left. While the officers fanned out and knocked on doors, Ferguson found a neighbor across the street, Sandy Holloway, who had seen a girl in almost nothing climb out of a front window and run up the laneway.

That was enough for a search warrant. Police broke down the door, and Kate’s account checked out piece by piece. The lipstick was under the beanbag, the cigarettes were in the roof, and a “Rocky” cassette was still in the VCR.

“That pill was actually found on the floor in the bedroom.”

There were chains in the house as well, and locks stamped with numbers, just as she had described.

While police were still inside, Catherine returned carrying bags of cleaning supplies. She saw the officers and ran, and they caught her quickly and brought her back. She was aggressive, officers recalled, and denied any knowledge of an abducted girl. She told them only that she lived there with a man named David Birnie, who worked at a wrecking yard.

David was brought in, and the couple were split up. He went to Perth with Ferguson and Katich, while she stayed in Palmyra with Cassidy and Hancock.

In the interview room Ferguson found David weak and hesitant. Katich saw it too and moved in.

“Can I speak to Cathy?” David asked, and Ferguson thought he was right on the edge, looking for permission.

Katich, standing behind the detective, asked him straight out how many there were.

“There’s four,” David said, and he named them: Mary Nielsen, Sue Candy, Noelene Patterson, Denise Brown.

In Palmyra, Cassidy ran into a wall. Catherine knew her rights and refused to say a word without a lawyer. That held until word came through of what David had told police in Perth.

Then she started talking, and she tried to make it David’s fault. Detectives had a different picture, built largely on Kate’s account. In their reading, Catherine chose the victims, directed her husband during the assaults, and took notes on the girls’ reactions.

“Cathy Birnie was the puppeteer. David Birnie was the puppet.”

The two versions have never fully reconciled. Catherine has maintained that her role was smaller than police described. Investigators, and Kate, say her own behavior at the house contradicted that.

With both confessions in hand, police went to look for the first four. The couple led them to Glen Eagle, a small wooded area between a truck stop and a family picnic spot.

“Behind that log is the body of Sue Candy,” David said, and he pointed out Mary Nielsen and Denise Brown nearby.

When police asked after Noelene Patterson, Catherine took over. She walked up to the grave herself, Ferguson said, and spat on it.

The couple were sentenced to life without parole. Yet the file never felt closed to the detectives who worked it. They reopened old cold cases to see whether the couple’s methods fit.

Ferguson was careful about what he could prove and plain about what he believed. “I’m very firm on the belief that certainly David was involved in the death of several other young women,” he said.

He believes Catherine knew of those deaths, and may have been involved in them. No charges were ever brought, and both Birnies have denied involvement beyond the four convictions.

Three cases kept pulling at him, those of Cheryl Renwick, Barbara Weston, and Lisa Mott. One of them stays with him above the others.

“The one that’s with me always is the Lisa Mott one.”

The questions got harder in 2003, when David Birnie was found dead in a protective custody cell. He was 54. With him went the best chance of answering them.

In 2016, Catherine became Western Australia’s longest-serving female inmate after 30 years, and a fourth parole hearing was approaching. Ferguson, as a serving officer, kept his opinion to himself and left the question to the system.

Paul Ferguson the man, he has said, would be horrified if she were ever released.

Kate saw it from the other side. Under Western Australian law, a prisoner becomes eligible for parole review after 20 years and again every three years. As the sole survivor, she had to testify against Catherine over and over, reliving the worst days of her life in public.

She decided to take a stand against the system. She wrote a book, “Dead Girl Walking,” and became an advocate for victims of violent crime. In 2018, a member of Parliament introduced a bill and credited Kate for her work. Under the new law, anyone convicted of three or more murders in a single trial could be ineligible for parole.

Critics of such laws argue that fixed rules strip parole boards of discretion, a point the debate over the bill raised, though Kate has been clear about where she stands.

“Cathy Birnie, you forfeited your right to walk out that door,” she has said, “because those poor girls didn’t deserve it.”

Ferguson and many others believe that without her resolve the Birnies would have murdered more women in the weeks that followed.

“Katie Moir saved unknown young ladies’ lives,” he said.

In 2016, the “7 News” team brought Kate and Hancock together for the first time in 20 years. Hancock, now retired, said they had shared a pretty traumatic experience, and that it creates a bond.

“We did get there,” one told the other.

Hancock said she still worries about Kate, and when asked, answered yes.

To the retired officer, Kate’s story shows that nobody has to be defined by what was done to them.

“I think good can come out of bad,” Kate said, “and that’s what this is about now.”

Disclaimer: This article is based on publicly reported accounts and interviews, and some details, including the number of victims and the roles of each offender, remain disputed.