David and Catherine Birnie offered Denise Brown, 21, a lift while she waited for a bus on Stirling Highway in Perth on 5 November 1986. Instead of taking her home, they drove her to their house in the suburb of Willagee, where she was held captive.
Later, the couple drove Denise north to a pine plantation near Wanneroo, where she was stabbed and struck with an axe before being buried in a shallow grave. Her disappearance became part of a series of murders that would leave Perth in fear, until another young woman escaped the Birnies' home and alerted police later that month.
Noelene Patterson had run out of petrol on Canning Highway near Fremantle when David and Catherine Birnie pulled over, on this day in 1986, and offered her a lift, only to force her into their car. She was held captive for three days, one of several women the couple had already taken that year in a string of killings that had gone unsolved by police.
Unlike their other victims, David Birnie seemed to grow fond of Patterson, allowing her small comforts and talk of letting her go, a softness that stirred his wife's jealousy. According to accounts of the killings, Catherine Birnie's resentment decided the outcome: David forced sleeping pills down Patterson's throat and strangled her, then buried her body in bushland outside the city.
Kidnap concept word written on a blackboard background
John Lloyd, a ticket-of-leave convict working near Geraldton, shot his own labourer John Brown with intent to kill at Port Gregory in June 1857. Brown was himself a former convict, but only months earlier he had been granted a conditional pardon for manslaughter, finally free after years under sentence, before his own employer put a bullet in him.
Lloyd was tried and convicted that October, and hanged at Perth Gaol on this day in 1857. It was not his first brush with the gallows' shadow: a decade earlier he had been transported for life from Wales for highway robbery, and had already served years in the colony before the shooting that finally ended his.
Henry Sherry had formed an attachment to Catherine Waldock, the wife of a neighbouring farmer near the Williams, and proposed they elope together; when she refused, he borrowed a gun and strychnine from a neighbour under the pretence of shooting a hawk. On 16 September 1885 he intercepted her and her two young sons as they walked home from an opossum hunt, led her a short distance away, raised the gun and said "Here goes" before shooting her dead in front of the boys.
The horror deepened once he was found the next morning. Sherry told a neighbour it had all been agreed between them, a pact in which he would kill Catherine and then himself. He claimed to have already swallowed the strychnine and tried to drown himself in a nearby pool, but both attempts failed, "I floated on the top like a corpse." Resigned to his fate, he said plainly, "I am not going to build up any false hopes; I expect the rope for it."
Tried and convicted of murder, he was hanged in Perth on this day in 1885. Witnesses described him walking to the scaffold erect and composed, showing almost no sign of fear as the trapdoor fell.
In a letter written to his wife before his death, Sherry acknowledged the "great sin" he had committed and admitted the justice of his sentence.
