Ep.1 Stabbed and Left to Die

The queen of the cat ladies is dead, stabbed 52 times and left to die. Her fellow cat ladies discover the body. Who was the victim, and why was she so unpopular in her neighbourhood?

Transcript

MURDER AND THE HELLCATS

EPISODE ONE

Can a Palmist predict, by reading a palm, if the owner of that hand will suffer a violent death, be murdered? And in turn, how likely is the hand belonging to the person who commits a murder to have the tell-tale sign known to palmist as the clubbed or murderers thumb.

I am Catherine McHugh and I'm presenting this multi-episode True Crime Podcast, Murder And The Hellcats. This is a deep dive into the vicious 1998 stabbing murder of 52-year-old Kathleen Marshall, the head of a cat rescue organization in Brisbane. The convicted killer, Andrew Fitzherbert, was a professional practitioner of palmistry, a world leading expert and author in the pseudoscientific field. 

It was headline grabbing stuff at the time, not only because of cat ladies and palmistry, but because his conviction rested on one piece of evidence. This was the first time in Australian criminal history that a murder conviction was based on the science of DNA alone. As the judge said at trial, if it hadn't been for the invention of DNA, Andrew Fizherbert would not have been convicted.

 Without a motive, any witnesses, any known physical association between Andrew and Kathleen, or any other forensic evidence, Andrew Fitzherbert was sentenced to life for the murder.  In this journey, the definitive and irrefutable proper science of DNA profiling, collides with the spurious science of parry.

 But before I begin, I'm going to ask you to forget what you've seen on TV crime dramas. All DNA matches are not equal and perfect, and not all DNA laboratories operate to the same standards. And not all DNA scientists stringently practice the science of DNA with only justice in mind. 

In this series, I'm going to be talking to legal experts, forensic specialists, a retired homicide detective, trial witnesses, neighbours, cat ladies, and a whistleblower, as I question the first case in Australia of DNA alone leading to a murder conviction.

VOICE MONTAGE FROM UPCOMING INTERVIEWS

I think it's highly likely that she knew the person who attacked her. Well, there's got to be a motive behind something like that. She was that sort of person. She was just an absolute bitch. So Don Robinson came up with the theory that she could have been clawed by a cat. She was very bossy with her husband, Ian. She told him what to do all the time until one night he didn't come home from work. Kath Marshall resumed pushing me, not with her hands, but her whole body. She then grabbed my hair. I'm being stalked. It's the bitch. I'm sure of it. She's out to get me. Many people are now aware of your dishonesty, smear, campaigning, and downright lies. I am of the opinion, that she is responsible for the death of Kathleen Marshall. She's a very psychotic and vindictive person. The idea was that he'd had this pregnant cat and he'd taken it to Kathleen to be treated and she'd killed the cat, and so he killed her. The evidence he was giving on the DNA meant virtually nothing. It could have exonerated anywhere. I had a look at this material and immediately realized there's a major problem with the DNA results. 

This crime gripped Brisbane in the late 1990s, not just because it was a case of evil unleashed in suburbia, a shocking crime where a woman living alone is gruesomely stabbed and left to die. Its ability to capture the attention of the media at the time was its bizarreness, a story so far-fetched that it sounded made up. And that's before we get to another murder of a cat lover in the same organisation. There's plenty of twists and turns in this story.

Join me as I take a deep dive into this fascinating case to find out was there a miscarriage of justice, and if so, who might have killed Kathleen Marshall.

ACT I

 It was 1:45 PM on one of those sultry Sunday afternoons in Brisbane, the capital of Australia's northeastern state of Queensland, on the first of March 1998. A posse of cars converged on a house in the suburb of Wilston. The cars were carrying members of the Queensland Cat Protection Society. They had just come from an important society meeting, and they wanted to talk to their leader. But when they knocked, Kathleen Marshall didn't answer her door.

The milk and paper delivery lay untouched outside. They headed downstairs, but as they approached the surgery under Kathleen's house where she practiced as a vet, they called the smell of something dead and the through the frosted glass of the front door to the vet surgery, they saw flies swarming and what looked like a body.

 It was before the widespread use mobile phones, so someone asked the neighbour to call the police. They arrived and found six people standing outside Kathleen's house. One of the Cat Society members told the police there was a spare key hidden under the house. Police used the key to enter the upstairs, via the back door, and looked for a downstairs key.

They found a set of keys and took them downstairs but discovered they weren't the right keys to open the surgery’s front door. Meanwhile, Cat Society members entered the home and went to the kitchen. They used knives to cut up meat for her pet dogs and the rescue cats that Kathleen kept locked in cages in her house  

While downstairs trying to get access to Kathleen's vet surgery, police peered through a set of broken louvers on one wall of the surgery and saw the body bloated and fly blown lying face down with the victim's dress pulled up over her underwear.

 Police finally located the right keys under the house. The vet surgery, which was less than three square meters in size, also had a back door. They removed animal cages that were blocking the entrance to the back door and managed to get access to Kathleen's body. But with so much decay of her remains, the police couldn't immediately determine the cause of death.

The police scientific officers started collecting and documenting evidence. Starting upstairs, he immediately noticed that furniture was upturned. The place was untidy appearing as if it had been ransacked. There were documents strewn about on the floor. He noted that a bathroom window was open, that there were no lights on upstairs, but the light in the surgery downstairs was on. 

Blood samples were swabbed from numerous locations inside the surgery and outside its front door area. He found no blood on the louvers on the inside of the surgery, but there was blood on a set of collapsed cardboard boxes that sat near the broken louvers. There was a cleaning cloth and a bucket of bloody water, and in the same bucket was a single lady's shoe and a pair of spectacles.

Maggot samples were taken from the body as well as photos and videos of the crime scene. The police concluded that the only way out of the surgery for the killer was through the front door, yet no blood was found on the front door on the inside, but blood smears were found on the outside of the front door. Droplets of blood had deposited on plants near the surgery's front door. There were no bloodstained handprints or shoe prints found at the scene, but there was also no sign that someone had cleaned up shoe prints

As the Cat Protection Society as the Cat Protection Society members waited outside Kathleen's house while the police started their investigation. Another member of the Cat Society drove past the house very slowly staring blankly at the scene, but she didn't stop.

ACT II

I want you to picture this. There is an argument taking place on a median strip outside Kathleen's house.  A gang of council workers are tasked with trimming overgrown vegetation, and there's a fight taking place.  Kathleen is not backing down. So council workers are forced to call police to prevent her from stopping their work. That's how neighbour Graham Steven described to a local newspaper about the time council workers needed a police guard to keep Kathleen at bay.

But let's go back to the beginning. Who was Kathleen Marshall?

We know she cared about animals, and she also cared passionately about many other things. She was a one-woman army defending green spaces, heritage buildings, the arts, and the world generally from the thoughtlessness of neighbours, bureaucrats, and politicians.

One of her pet causes was the Bellevue Hotel. Built in the 1880s, it was once Brisbane's premier hotel. But then in the 1970s, before the heritage architecture movement really gained momentum, the site was viciously fought over until, in the dead of night in 1979, the Queensland government had it razed to the ground.

Kathleen was a board member of the Queensland National Trust at the time, which had campaigned hard for its protection. She'd even joined street protests in an era famous for the Queensland Conservative government, brutal crackdown on street demonstrations.  She wasn't cowed by powerful people or men and often led the fight, joining organisations and quickly rising through the ranks to leadership. Her desire for control didn't just extend to these charities.

She was born in 1946, the daughter of a school, headmaster and headmistress. She completed her secondary education at Brisbane Girls Grammar. The private school was founded a century and a half ago on prominent Brisbane real estate, and the original school building was Heritage listed in 2004, a development that Kathleen would've thoroughly approved of.  Kathleen went on to study vet science at the University of Queensland, graduating in 1968. It was still a time when university education was only for the rich or vice scholarship, And women were not encouraged to pursue degrees or a profession.  

I actually contacted the university and asked them how many female students graduated from vet Science in 1968. I was told the only way to get this information was to come to the University library and book a reading room and access the archives, which I did. It turns out there was about 10% of graduates in that year and around that time, generally, that were female. Kathleen went on to forge her own professional career path, while generally women in the workforce in the 1960s and 70s were still expected to retire once married and pregnant.

Her alma mater became another of her causes when she founded Friends of the Vet School in the 1980s. In her will, she left the bulk of her state to the vet school. The Kathleen Lamborne Building, which was named with her maiden name, was officially opened in 2002, four years after her murder with a bequest of a hundred thousand dollars. At the unveiling ceremony Emeritus Professor Keith Hughes described Kathleen as a champion of perceived deserving causes.  

Kathleen started a singles dining club called L’Epicure. She advertised for members in the classified section of the newspaper. The eligibility for membership depended on the applicant's level of education and an arbitrary character assessment conducted by Kathleen. Her preference was for a private school and university educated professionals like herself, but she herself didn't find love at the L'Epicure Club.  Some applicants were refused membership and were said to be resentful. Kathleen was due to attend a L'Epicure dinner she'd organised on the Friday before her body was discovered. But she didn't show.

Kathleen married Ian Marshall, but the childless union ended in 1991 when he went to work one day in his job as an accountant and never returned.  A woman called Heather Logovik recalls Kathleen spending hours at her mother's kitchen table, crying over Ian's departure. Dumb founded at the brutality of his exit. But Heather and her mother weren't surprised. The marriage ended.  Heather is the only daughter of Kathleen's nearest neighbour, an elderly woman called Gertrude Gwynne. Heather was living in Sydney with her husband Alan, when Kathleen was killed. She got to know Kathleen very well over the years. 

I caught up with Helen at her old workers cottage near the beach on the southern side of Sydney where she lives. Heather greeted me with her friendly blonde chihuahua Caramelo by her side and her yappy new puppy Saffron. Heather is now in her eighties, but wearing a polo shirt and jeans with a studded belt. She's kind of cool, with a wryness that makes her immediately likable.

Heather didn't require much prompting about Kathleen.

HEATHER: She was very bossy with her husband, Ian. She told him what to do all the time, and he did it. Until one night he didn't come home from work. She couldn't believe that he would leave. She thought that he was just devoted to her because he did what she told him to do.  Just to look at Kathleen, you could see she was a bully. She just gave you that impression that, uh, she was a real bully. with a rather large face and chubby, um, body. And because they're not very active and athletic, you could say, they use their tongue to get what they want. And that's what I saw in Kathleen. she, she just, uh, let you know what she thought of you. And she would, she would criticise if you went over, Alan and went over for a night for something and Mum didn't go she would criticise my mother all the time that we were there; tell her to repaint the roof, I can't stand looking out at that red roof. 

CATHERINE: What was your mother's relationship like with Kathleen?

HEATHER: Kathleen was a bit of a Jekyll and Hyde. She could be very, very good and be helpful to my mother and then in the next breath she'd turn around and uh, report it to the council for cutting down the tree that was over, over into her yard, into my mother's yard. If Mum complained about the 60-foot Western Australian gum trees that were filling the gutters, she'd get stuck into her and tell her that she was going to let them grow till they were 200 feet. She did have a couple of falls in the backyard, because it was overgrown with vines and weeds and everything, so she didn't believe in cutting or removing anything. And she slipped over a couple of times and called out to my mother to come over and get her up, because she couldn't get up. So mum went over and picked her up and took her upstairs. And later on, she'd be dobbing her into the council again. 

CATHERINE: This was quite surprising because as Heather mentioned, Kathleen was a robust personality with a build to match. In my initial research, some of the people I spoke to speculated it must have taken a very large and strong person to overpower her. But to put this in context, Heather had already mentioned to me that her mother was in her eighties at the time and of quite small stature. And despite Kathleen having quite a bulky physique, she was physically weak, certainly weaker than her elderly neighbour. 

HEATHER: If Kathleen did have a go at her over something, she never apologised, but she'd just come over and start talking again and Mum just let it go. There was no good fighting with her.

CATHERINE: Tell us about the piano. 

HEATHER: She had a grand piano in the lounge. And she'd start thumping out in the middle of the night, go right through to the morning, annoying everybody around Mum used to go to some of the, um, musical evenings that she would put on to raise money for, um, artists who were Trying to get themselves overseas for more experience.  

CATHERINE: So did you know any of the other people that went to those evenings? 

HEATHER: Well, the only one that I really knew was, um, David Kelly, who had the chemist shop down at the village. I knew her for years. And had run ins with her in the shop.  Wherever she went she'd have some complaint to make about the service or overcharging or something like that. And, funny thing was, she was never embarrassed by it. If I did that, I feel as though I couldn't go back to the shop. But she'd be straight back, you know, the next time, carrying on as though nothing happened. 

CATHERINE: Now I saw something in a newspaper article about her baking cakes.

HEATHER: When it came Christmas time, she always made mum a cordon bleu Christmas cake, which was very, very nice. I think she thought that made up for all the bad things that she did throughout the year.

CATHERINE: And she had a different side that might surprise people.

HEATHER: Kathleen always made sure that she got one of these calendars there's all sorts of sex scenes, that's what it was all about. She got one of these calendars and put it up on the wall where everybody would see it and see who she could embarrass. 

CATHERINE: And did you know anything about how Kathleen was as a vet?

HEATHER: She was on the cruel side. She worked for Purcell at Stafford. My mother took our, must have been a dog that she had at that stage, I think, to Purcell, Purcell at Stafford. She worked for Purcell. I don't know how they come to be chatting about it, but he must have got Mum's address and realised that she lived next to Kathleen. And they started talking and he said that he had complaints from owners that she was rather cruel to the animals while they were being assessed apparently the complaints increased. So he gave her the sack.

CATHERINE Now, I found this newspaper article that talked about Kathleen having this fight with council workers. And I wondered if you knew about Kathleen's relationship with the rest of the neighbourhood.

HEATHER: She’d sit out on the back veranda. And she could see most of Wilston. And if she could see a puff of smoke, or anything, she'd call out to my mother to see if she could see who was lighting a fire. She'd be straight down to the council and report them for lighting fires because there's a fire ban. 

 CATHERINE: Kathleen did seem to have a lot of conflict with a man called Warren Smith, who lived a few doors away on Main Avenue.

HEATHER: She would look through her lounge windows, when she saw him out at the car late at night or something, to see what she could see, because she was pretty certain that he was a drug dealer at that stage. Apparently other people would turn up late at night, and when they did, well that's just her thought, that you wouldn't have people coming late at night unless you were a drug dealer. And then if she thought that, well that was it.

CATHERINE: The animosity started between Kathleen and Warren Smith as far back as when he moved into the street. When he was a milkman, he parked his milk truck on the side of the street and Kathleen said to him, you are renting. You can't park your truck on the street. He told her to mind her own business. He was renting at the time. This was back in 1978, but he later bought not just the house he was renting, but another house on the street. He was entitled like every other resident on the street to park wherever he wanted. I actually have Warren's police statement, but it is not Warren's voice reading it out:

WARREN SMITH: Over the time I've been living there, Kathleen Marshall has caused me no end of troubles. Some years ago, I knew the postman would deliver letters to my address. One day she stopped him and she demanded to know of him how many dole checks were being delivered to my address and the name of the people living there. There would always be confrontations between Kathleen Marshall and myself.

CATHERINE: Neighbours who also lived on the street at the time and had never met Kathleen, revealed to police that one person standing outside on the footpath after the police arrived when Kathleen's body had been found, had said something to effect that he had finally killed her. That person was later identified as Warren Smith. The same witness also said they'd overheard other onlookers saying that Kathleen was crazy and they didn't like her. You might remember it was a neighbour, Graham Steven, who was the person who described Kathleen and the council workers needing a police guard.

He lived on the same street as Kathleen for many years with a friend Justin McKelvy, and they both got to know her quite well. They seemed quite private yet, knew quite a lot of the street gossip as you would having lived there for so long. But I think when it came to Kathleen, they tried not to get into confrontations with her, but like Gertude Gwynne was sometimes roped into helping Kathleen.

JUSTIN MCKELVY: She came up and asked Graham and I if we would move a heap of cat litter because the lady down below was complaining about the smell of urine. So we said, yeah, sure. So we went down with barrows and shovelled it in, brought it back here, put it in the bags, and tipped it in the rubbish bins. No thank you. Kissed me bop for nothing.

GRAHAM STEPHEN: And she was the chairperson of the Cat Protection Society, but she was also the captain of the street.

JUSTIN MCKELVY: Well, she thought she was. That was the sort of person she was. She'd rip into you for no reason at all. You didn't know whether she's going belittle you or whether she's going to have a good crack at you about something that you knew nothing of. She was that sort of person. She was just an absolute bitch. 

CATHERINE: I remember when we first tried to knock on the door at Graham and Justin's house, and we found the front gate locked. They did reveal in the course of that interview, that they were forced to put a lock on the front gate in the aftermath of Kathleen's murder because they wanted to keep out a certain person connected to the case, someone important to this story who I will get to in a later episode. Since providing this interview Graham Steven has passed away.

If real life detectives are like the ones on TV, the first question the cops probably asked when they started to investigate was: who had beef with Kathleen Marshall?

More than just the neighbours? It seems a close relationship with her father was at the exclusion of her three siblings. They had been estranged for more than 20 years before Kathleen died when their parents had passed away. Kathleen had been left the bulk of their estate and the acrimony lasted beyond the grave. 

In a newspaper article published two weeks after Kathleen's death, her sister was quoted as saying she was not allowed to speak at the funeral service because the organiser had told her they didn't want her to cause trouble. I assume the organisers of her funeral were the three executors of her will who were a cousin, a solicitor called Ian Skinner, a friend who was also a solicitor, Ian Galton, and a woman named Daphne George. 

Kathleen's sister also said in the same newspaper article that Kathleen's last words to her, 20 years earlier, were: ‘you killed our father’.

The Queensland University vet school and various friends, including the executors and their children, were the main beneficiaries named in her will. I contacted Kathleen's siblings, but they declined to be interviewed about Kathleen. This is the statement made to the court after Andrew was convicted, although it is not in their voice.  

LETTER FROM KATHLEEN’S SIBLINGS: Kathleen Marshall was our eldest sister, and we lived together with our parents as a family until 1969 when the first family marriage took place. Kathleen was a graduate of the University of Queensland in veterinary science. She was an average student at school and worked relentlessly to achieve her degree. Kathleen was estranged from us for some years. She was an extremely forthright person, and after the death of our parents, we went our separate ways. However, we never wished her any harm or unhappiness. In fact, we prayed that she would in fact, achieve a very happy and harmonious life. Her sister contacted her on several occasions to include her in family life and to introduce her to the next generation. It was our hope that the family would once more be united. And her untimely death has left so many unfinished things to be resolved. She never met nor saw her only nephew and nieces. That was very sad. As a family, we had not only to bear witness to the brutality…

CATHERINE: If you read between the lines of the statement, you'd have to say Kathleen had been dead to her family, or her family had been dead to her for many years before she actually died. Among Cat Society members we managed to speak to, she was well-respected and considered very intelligent.

Cat Society carer, Pauline Licciardi, said this about Kathleen in her police statement. But it's not her voice.

PAULINE LICCIARDI: Kathleen had a very kind expression, especially when studying animals. I would describe her personality as being forthright, strong-minded, and did not suffer fools gladly. My husband and I found her easy to get along with. 

CATHERINE: Friends named in the media at the time or interviewed by police also declined to speak to me about Kathleen. Some of those friends became involved in the Cat Society at Kathleen's invitation, using their professional skills as lawyers or accountants. It's understandable that many, like Kathleen's siblings, didn't appreciate the media attention and don't wish to revisit those dark times. 

I do have some comments made about Kathleen in a statement from one of her closest friends that she made to police. I have not maimed the friend for privacy reasons. These are her words, but not her voice:

FRIEND OF KATHLEEN MARSHALL: I knew Kathleen by her maiden name, Kathleen Lamborne. I have been a close and personal friend of Kathleen's for a period of approximately 40 years. I would describe Kathleen as being forthright, determined, and extraordinarily compassionate, with a great capacity for love of her fellow man, loyal and principled. She didn't give up on things, be they people or beliefs. She was one who was not narrow-minded and was tolerant of eccentricity.

CATHERINE: I think Kathleen Marshall was a complicated character. She was a woman with a professional career in an era where not many women had the opportunity or ambition to do that. But at the same time, coming from a middleclass family and getting a professional qualification probably gave her this sense of intellectual superiority.

Heather, the daughter of Kathleen's nearest neighbour, who I spoke to earlier in the podcast told me that Kathleen classified women into two categories, tarts and ladies, which equated to working class or middle class. Heather was a tart in Kathleen's classification by Heather's own admission, and Kathleen was a lady. 

Class mattered to Kathleen's generation. That class system was, and probably still is to some degree, based on whether you were educated at a private school or a government school. Kathleen felt superior. She was naturally captain of the street, the chairwoman of the Cat Protection Society. She felt entitled and called out other people she thought were not up to her standards. But at the same time, she had this bawdy side to her. Heather mentioned the pornographic calendars, but she also told me that Kathleen loved to tell a dirty joke to shock people. I think she was probably a shit-stirrer; someone who not only spoke her mind to people who annoyed her, but didn't mind antagonising people for her own enjoyment, probably with a more harmless intention.

I think she didn't have much humility. She didn't back down or apologise, and she didn't ever worry about upsetting people, whether it was the little old lady next door or the supposed drug dealer across the road, or the shopper assistant. He certainly wasn't a people pleaser, which I would say was the expectation of most women born in that generation.

Kathleen was the OG Karen. She was confrontational and naturally critical of people. She went out of her way to poke her nose in other people's business. She was a real busy body. 

ACT III

When reporting on a true crime, it has become customary to profile the victim to show respect for the victim. More so now than the way it was done say a decade or more ago before True Crime became a podcasting phenomenon. And being respectful of the victim should be part of every true crime podcast.

Elevating them beyond just another crime statistic is important. In Kathleen's case, I wasn't prepared for the kind of feedback that I got about her. After visiting Heather, the woman I interviewed earlier in this episode, I remember walking away thinking maybe some victims are more ‘murderable’ than others. Not that she deserved to die, but that she behaved in ways that might stir anger in others, and maybe even violence in someone who had no self-control or no compunction to kill. But I also wanted listeners to get an insight into the character of Kathleen. Even the most complimentary descriptions of her appear to acknowledge her ability to be forthright and opinionated. And in later episodes you'll hear other things said about her and admissions she herself made to others that indicated she was a potential target of some kind of reprisal. 

I could have just left out material that was not flattering about Kathleen. But because this investigation is also about the convicted killer possibly being innocent, I felt like it needed to be aired and the audience needed to hear from people who knew her and had been at times on the wrong side of her.

Was there a person she had crossed paths with at some point that may have decided to retaliate?

Often with people living alone, their day-to-day activities and habits go unnoticed. Kathleen Marshall was living alone, but she had big personality, big energy, and routinely rubbed people the wrong way.   

Next Time on Murder and the Hellcats….

ROD DAYMENT: I believe she was struck immediately in or near the doorway. It was a frenzied attack; a frenzied crime of passion type of attack. I think it's highly likely that she knew the person who attacked her.

LAURA-LEIGH CAMERON-DOW: If you had a man with a knife in his hand , you'd expect an up and down thrust, or something heavily Jabbed in and what you've got is lots and lots of little baby stabbing motions into her face, which is really personal.