The Birnies

A Serial Killer in Perth

Denise Karen Brown

On November 5, 1986, Detective Sergeant Paul Ferguson was convinced that there was a serial killer on the loose when 21-one-year-old Denise Karen Brown was reported missing. Denise's disappearance was the fourth young woman in 27 days. That type of thing just didn't happen in Perth. In other large Australian capital cities such as Sydney or Melbourne, yes. But not in Perth.

All of the missing women came from good homes and it was extremely unlikely that any one of them would simply disappear for no good reason, let alone all of them. Ferguson had eliminated all of the possibilities of links between the missing women and investigated the possibilities of secret boyfriends, married lovers or hidden drug problems that might cause any of them to disappear. He turned up nothing.

Ferguson's instinct, drawn from years of experience, told him that there was a serial killer on the loose. A serial killer who had the power to abduct young women and make them disappear. What puzzled detective Ferguson most was that two of the women hadn't completely disappeared in that friends and relatives had received letters and telephone calls from them after they had been reported missing.

Fifteen-year-old Susannah Candy had posted two letters to her parents, one from Perth and the other from the nearby port of Fremantle, in the first two weeks after she had disappeared. Both letters said that she was well and that she would return home soon. And Denise Brown had phoned a girlfriend the day after she had disappeared to tell her that everything was fine. After that no one had heard a word. It just didn't add up. Ferguson's gut feeling told him to expect the worst.

He consulted former CIB chief, Bill Neilson, who agreed with his serial killer theory. And if anyone was entitled to an opinion it would be the veteran multiple homicide investigator, a police officer among the most respected in the state.

Bill Neilson was the officer in charge of the hunt for Perth serial killer Eric Edgar Cooke, the mild mannered truck driver who had ruthlessly murdered six people, and possibly two others, in the early 1960s to become the most notorious multiple murderer in Western Australia's history. Neilson had brought him to justice and saw Cooke swing at the end of a rope in Fremantle Prison in 1964.