In prison David Birnie was repeatedly beaten up and attempted suicide later in 1987 and was eventually moved to Fremantle Prison's old death cells for his own protection.
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| Fremantle Prison gallows |
In the years to come, the Birnies would rarely be out of the headlines. In their first four years apart they exchanged 2600 letters but they were denied the right to marry, have personal phone calls to each other or have contact visits.
In 1990 David Birnie claimed that the denial of these rights imposed 'a punishment over and above that decreed by the law'. He said he and Catherine were suffering physical and mental torture and that denying them contact with each other was an attempt to drive them into mental breakdown and suicide.
In 1992 major crime squad detectives gave David Birnie the rare privilege of a look at the outside world when they drove him around Perth and the suburbs for five hours in the hope that he may confess to other murders that he could have possibly committed. Nothing ever came of it.
In 1993 David Birnie's personal computer was confiscated from his cell in the protection unit at Casuarina Prison when it was found to contain pornographic software.
On January 22, 2000, Catherine Birnie's first husband and the father of her six children, Donald McLaughlan, passed away suddenly in the Western Australian country town of Busselton. He was aged 59. Catherine Birnie made an application to attend her former husband's funeral. It was refused.
Commenting on the Ministry of Justice' decision to refuse attendance to the funeral, the Western Australian Premier, Mr Richard Court, said: "As far as I am concerned the Birnies have forfeited any rights for those types of privileges."
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| Richard Court |
According to Western Australian law David and Catherine Birnie will be eligible to apply for parole in 20 years after they committed their atrocities. But it seems that there is little likelihood that any parole board would go against Mr Justice Wallace's recommendation that they die behind bars.
In January 2000, the acting Western Australian Attorney General, Mr Kevin Prince, said that while the Birnies can be considered for parole in 2007, he thought they would never be released unless they became too frail or senile.
Fears of David Birnie ever being released vanished once and for all at 4:30 a.m. on October 2, 2005, when 55-year-old David Birnie was found hanged in his maximum security cell at Perth's Casuarina prison. There were no suspicious circumstances.
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