Ep.4 The Watch

Another crime committed close by, muddies the water. Crime scene diagrams created by the police forensic officer contain an item that could be crucial to the case - a detail that seems to have been missed till now. A walk through Eildon Hill Reserve reveals the perfect path for a killer to  pass unnoticed in the suburb. Introducing person of interest: Helen. 

Transcript

MURDER AND THE HELLCATS

EPISODE 4

Previously on Murder and the Hellcats.

HEATHER LOGOVIK: The beds were never made; clothes in the bath and the kitchen just full of pots and pans and glasses and dishes.

PAOLA MAGNI: If the body takes some time to stink, but there is already poo that stinks, there is something that attracts the flies faster or flies are already there because of the animals.

CATHERINE: I'm Catherine McHugh, and this is episode 4 of Murder and the Hellcats. 

About 1.3 kilometres away or a 19-minute walk from Kathleen's house, blood was found on the street. On Sunday evening, not long after Kathleen's body had been discovered, her murder was reported on the nightly news. A member of the public seeing the report called police and told them he had seen blood at the corner of Days Road and Thomas Street in the suburb of Grange.

When police went to the location, they found blood in a phone box, on the footpath bus seat and mailbox. Then later at the mail sorting centre at Northgate, a pair of blood-soaked shoes showed up. They had been collected on the mail run from the mailbox at Grange. 

Because police thought they were likely related to the murder of Kathleen, they were delivered to the John Tonge Centre for testing and labelled with Kathleen's address. One pair of Saucony shoes, item 27. They were handed in for testing with bloodstained socks and an envelope of cigarette butts, along with gloves worn by the male sorter. 

DNA testing soon revealed those items belonged to a man called Donovan Hollidge, who had committed a break and enter at a business on the corner of Day Road and Thomas Street. In the process, he had cut his leg. His DNA did not match any found at the Kathleen Marshall crime scene, and he was ruled out of the investigation.

When I submitted a right to information request with the Queensland government to obtain the crime scene photos at Kathleen's house, I didn't get them, but what I did get were photos of the items found in relation to the break and enter committed by Donovan Hollidge. I cannot tell you If his break-in at another premises was motivated by drugs. And I cannot tell you if the perpetrator of this burglary was charged with any crime. I cannot get access to the record of any official details of this crime, or even if it was prosecuted.

When I asked retired detective Inspector Rod Dayment about another crime having being so close by, he was surprised they weren't linked. Coincidences like that are rare in police work. Having lumped all the evidence from the robbery with the evidence from Kathleen's house, obviously police at the time initially thought so too.

ACT II

In front of me, I have six pages of hand-drawn diagrams of the crime scene. Some of these pages have drawings of the house with measurements of the surgery space and the home's layout. The pages show things like the locations of blood swabs taken, as well as items recovered from the crime scene and sent to the John Tonge Centre for testing. There are notations about the evidence collection and the locations of these are labelled. I'm assuming these diagrams were done by the police scientific officer.

I've looked at these six pages over and over, studying things like the body position in the surgery, seeing where the cardboard boxes that had a drop of Andrew's blood were positioned. checking which way the surgery door opened, where the surgery sink was located relative to Kathleen's body.

There is something that caught my eye in those pages labelled item number 26. It reads: one bloodstained broken watch. It's part of a list of items. The watch appears after the pair of spectacles and the shoe found in the bucket of water with the cleaning rag, which is labelled item 25, and before a list of items that were from the Grange robbery.

The way it is written on the page, I initially thought it could have come from either crime scene, although there was a bracket drawn around Items 27, the Saucony shoes, item 28, the blue socks found in the mailbox, and item 29, the male sorter’s gloves with a notation next to the bracket that read from Trennery, which is referring to Detective Trennery, which makes me think the watch was not collected by Detective Trennery from the robbery.

Another thing that is curious about this watch is that unlike the Saucony shoes and the gloves belonging to the male sorter, there was no photo of this watch in the bundle of crime scene photos I received as part of my right to information request.

I did some more digging. I went to the statutory declaration by the DNA scientist, Ken Cox. In that he lists which items on which dates were delivered from the crime scene to the John Tonge Centre by the police. The stat dec includes all the deliveries to the JTC from Kathleen's house and everything from the Grange robbery as either a blood swab or the item itself.

As I mentioned, the robbery items were labelled with Kathleen's address and handed in as part of her murder investigation even though ultimately, they were not connected to her murder. There is no watch mentioned in these lists of items in Ken Cox's stat dec. According to him, he never received a broken bloodstained watch.

Then I found another police document which lists all the items taken from both crime scenes and given to the JTC, but this time they have been typed up and at the bottom of each listing there is a location of where they were obtained, either Main Avenue Wilston, Kathleen's address, or Days and Thomas Street at the Grange, the robbery. And the watch is there. Consistent with the police scientific officer's handwritten six pages of diagrams, it's been given the number 26. The description of this item, on this typed police list, is: ‘watch from floor of surgery’. 

There is one final document that I think proves this watch was from the surgery  the Police Scientific Officer, Sergeant Michael Holohan's own police statement. In that record of his involvement in the case,

He outlines every item collected from the crime scene and the premises of suspects, items collected from other police involved in the case, and the dates these items were handed to the JTC. There in black and white is item 26 and the description, a watch from the floor of the surgery.  Then at the back of his police statement is a list of crime scene photographs. Every photograph listed is given a number and a description of the actual items or scenes of interest in the photograph. This is the item entry for the watch made by Sergeant Holohan on his statement, but it's not his voice.

SERGEANT HOLOHAN: Photograph 87 shows a watch located on the surgery floor near the front door. 

CATHERINE: As I mentioned earlier, Sergeant Michael Holahan’s statement lists the items collected and details their delivery to the JTC. In page five of this statement, he says, and this is not his voice,

SERGEANT HOLOHAN: On the 3rd of March, 1998, I lodged items one to 25, 27 to 29 and 32 at the laboratory of microbiology and pathology forensic laboratory, kessel Road, Cooper Plains.

CATHERINE: The lab he's referring to is the JTC and what is conspicuous in this statement made by Sergeant Holohan is that he lodged items one to 25 and items 27 to 29, but there is no item 26. Item 26. The watch was never given to the JTC for testing. 

 Why is this watch so important? Why have I spent so much time trying to discover what happened to it? The watch was discovered on the floor of Kathleen's surgery and from what paper trail we do have. It was bloody and broken and found near the front door.

We know that Kathleen was found just inside the surgery's front door, and we have worked out that she was likely attacked at the front door, so we can assume the watch was removed in the attack, in the struggle that we know occurred because Kathleen had defensive injuries.

 If the watch had been found in Kathleen's surgery, it could be the smoking gun on her time of death.  The watch would show the time when it broke and stopped keeping time. That would tell us exactly when Kathleen was being attacked.

I've looked at old media photos of Kathleen, and it looks like she wore a simple watch with a leather band and only a clock face and not a date function.

Not only would this watch be critical in determining time of death, it could also have DNA on it from the killer. Maybe it belonged to the killer, but even if it belonged to Kathleen being broken in the struggle and landing on the floor bloodstained, it's possible both the killers and Kathleen's DNA were on it.

 It did occur to me that the description by the police of a broken watch might mean only the band was broken, and that the watch itself was still keeping time when Kathleen's body was found. But I think that distinction would've been detailed. And anyway, a broken watchband implies it was damaged in a struggle and could still have both Kathleen's and the killer's DNA. 

 Given The watch appeared on the list right above the items from the robbery in the police crime scene diagrams. It's easy to see how it's been overlooked. Anyone going back over this material would probably have dismissed it as unrelated to her murder and from the robbery, but I'd like to know where is the watch? Why didn't the watch make it to the JTC or if it was received by the JTC, why didn't it get logged with the other evidence for DNA testing?

 I am not able to view actual evidence from the trial, but if the watch could be located, could it confirm time of death based on the likely window of time of her killing, which was just after 5:00PM and before 6:30PM on Friday. An analogue watch that is broken and stopped could prove this theory and provide an exact or pretty good approximation of when the attack was going on. 

 More recently, I applied for the crime scene photos again, hoping that I will get the right ones this time and not the photos of the robbery. I have specifically asked for photo number 87 that was listed at the back of Sergeant Holohan’s statement. I'll keep you posted on the outcome of that right to information request.

ACT III

CATHERINE: Overgrown trees and shrubbery obscured the full view of Kathleen's house from the road and from what Heather Logovik, the next door neighbour's daughter, told us in a previous episode, the backyard was thick with trees too. That made it possible for the murderer to access Kathleen's backyard via a place called Eildon Hill Reserve by simply jumping Kathleen's back fence undetected from this bushy tract of land. Exiting her property the same way would mean Kathleen's killer could easily have accessed her home and indeed passed through her suburb without detection.

The reserve rises to a peak where there is a reservoir. It was built in the 1930s and still supplies water to the surrounding suburbs. With its sweeping views, the promontory was said to be a favourite vantage point for local indigenous groups. After colonisation, it became dairy farming land. These days, there are landscaped walking paths and it attracts locals exercising and people walking their dogs.From the police logs, we also know there were drug users in the reserve, and it was used as a lover's lane. 

Eildon Hill Reserve went from Kathleen's backyard at one end, reached Paling Avenue and is flanked by a large section of Constitution Road in the next suburb of Windsor. Police asked SES volunteers to search this area the day after Kathleen's body was discovered.

IN CAR: Okay, so I am currently, I'm currently in my car and I'm driving around Kathleen's suburb of Wilston. One thing you'll notice about this suburb is it's nicely gentrified. I don't think it was ever a poor area, but it was certainly more of a working class suburb than which it is now. The houses on Kathleen’s Street and many surrounding suburbs have really fantastic views of the city, and yet it's still quite close to the city. So I think it would be a quite a sought-after area, which is reflected in the median house price of Wilston, which is 1.8 million. And Brisbane's median house price generally is 1.1 million.

So yes, people are paying a premium to live in this area. The local shopping village, which I've just turned into Kedron Brook Road now. Kathleen visited these shops almost every day to get her newspaper and ice cream, and next door was her friendly pharmacist. The newsagent is still here, but the pharmacist is gone.

The whole of this little shopping village looks quite upmarket. I wouldn't say it's ritzy, but it's firmly middle class. And yes, that's confirmed by the fact I've just seen a teenager in a private school uniform walking a Cavoodle. I'm just driving back to Sylvester Street and then I'll go up to Fifth Avenue on my way to the entrance of Eildon Hill Reserve. 

So I am just about to walk through Alden Hill Reserve. I don't know if I'm going be retracing the steps of a killer. But I particularly wanted to explore the reserve on foot at the same time of year, at the same time of day, I had determined Kathleen was likely killed, which is late afternoon, early evening, on Friday, in late February.

Just, uh, checking my phone. Um, it's 29.6 degrees Celsius, a good five degrees higher than the average temperature of the surgery, uh, and it's 5:30PM there's no daylight savings in Queensland, so I would describe the light as dusk. Um, so not completely dark, but it would be easy to move around in the reserve and not be seen.

But you certainly don't need to torch. I'm just walking up to the top where the reservoir is, and there's a lookout platform here. Looks like there's a car here with tourists, so obviously some people do drive into the top. Um, but so far, I haven't seen anyone else apart from this car. Looks like a show driven car with some tourists, but being late Friday afternoon, um, it's probably quieter than usual.

And back in 1998, I think that this area would've been very quiet this time of day, even quieter than it sort of is now. It is quite still. I'm just going to walk down here. 

It's steep, but then you probably wouldn't be moving too quickly because of the terrain. So you could definitely go unseen here, but it's also quite easy to kind of go arse over tit. I suppose, if you lived around here in 1998 you'd probably walk through here regularly and you would know the terrain. It wouldn't be difficult to find the quickest and most discreet path. 

There are two types of paths here. There are some paths that are paths and stairs that have recently been landscaped, and there are those that look like unofficial paths. In fact, there is a sign. Okay, so I'm just going to try and cross the reserve through here. It definitely looks like an unofficial path. It's following this massive pipe, which is obviously carrying water from the reserve. Um, it's very steep. I'm having to hang on to trees as I walk, try and walk down it. 

I think I read that the summit to the top of Eildon Hill is 75 meters. Yeah, so even if you're sticking to the landscape path; it's pretty hard going, going from bottom to top, especially in this kind of heat and humidity.

So being so hot and humid. Even at this time of night, which is, as I said, it's 5:30PM going towards six o'clock, You'd have to wear proper footwear. It's slow going. And if you travel off the path, then, you definitely had to be well prepared.

I'm just going to speculate on how the killer may have used the reserved to access Kathleen's house. So, um, I came in on Constitution Road, but at the main entrance, um, which is upstairs and then upper path. Um, I think you could really get in at any point on Constitution Road if you were determined enough, if you wanted to be discreet.

The stairs entrances is on Constitution Road, Windsor, but I think they could also enter via Bert Hinkler Park, which is on the corner of Main Avenue and Sylvester Street and quite close to Kathleen's house. Then the killer could walk past the park and then up the hillside into the reserve, which is not too steep in that stretch. And there is an unofficial path, although I can't say what the state of that path would've been back in 1988, that would lead the killer to another track. A bit steep and not easy to traverse, but certainly not impossible for someone like myself, who is 50 something, and I would say not athletic at all.

If the killer had left the property the same way, I think it would've been tricky for them to leave without having some blood on them, even if they clean themselves up at the sink and the surgery. Maybe they left a change of clothes in the reserve, or maybe they hid in Kathleen's backyard, and then when it was dark, they left via the reserve. 

So let's say the killer, after they attacked Kathleen made their way to Constitution Road, they would exit at Constitution Rd and they could have left their car parked there and then, you know, look like they were any other walker coming out of the park.

Or the other option is to slip into the reserve at Paling Avenue. If you're going to pick a street to exit from the Reserve Constitution Road, I think is busier than Paling, which is only servicing local residents. It's not a thoroughfare. So being a quiet street, I think a neighbour will be more likely to notice you in Paling Avenue exiting from Kathleen's backyard. I think it would only have taken a few minutes. Whereas I think going through the reserve from Kathleen's backyard to Constitution Road, which would be uphill, would be more like 10 minutes.

If you wanted to go sort of east to west  across the reserve to really kind of throw any scent off, would take like 25 minutes. I'm not really a great map reader and I have a terrible sense of direction, so maybe it's just me, but I found it very easy to lose my bearings. The bush is dense and there are quite a few houses that back into the reserve, including part of Main Avenue, Fifth Avenue, and Paling Avenue. Therefore, I would say Eildon Hill Reserve is a place you would either have to know well or plan out your entry and exit of Kathleen's Backyard very well, and I don't think you could do it without having walked through it first if you, if you didn't know the area.

Sunset on the 27th of March, 1998 was at 5:52PM. There would've been a period of twilight until the reserve became completely dark, when you could still move around without a torch. 

Since I've been walking through the reserve, I've only passed literally one person apart from the car at the top. Friday afternoon would be the perfect time to attack Kathleen, if you were going to use Eildon Hill Reserve as your entry exit point. I think overall it's a very easy area to hide in, to traverse it discreetly, to hide something like a bag of clothes if you needed to get changed, to hide there until it's dark. Cause literally, I think I did see someone shortly after I arrived, but then there was literally no one. So I would say that it would be very easy to hide, to move discreetly through Alden Hill Reserve. And if you'd planned a murder, this is the entry and exit point that I think makes the most sense.

ACT IV

When SES volunteers were dispatched to search the local area on Monday, the day after Kathleen's body was found, a knife was recovered from a drain on the corner of Paling Avenue and Horton Street. That drain was a 250-metre walk from the very accessible backyard of Kathleen's house, and half of such a walk could have been taken through Eildon Hill Reserve. A knife put into a drain after a crime is committed is probably the only way knives get into drains. I don't have any stats on this, but it's easy to find news articles showing cops finding knives and drains, linking criminals to crimes. Here's one from 2021 in the Sydney Morning Herald. In Doonside, a knife was recovered from a drain after a 15-year-old boy was allegedly stabbed, following a verbal altercation with a young man known to him. Here's one from 2020 on news.com au.

Detectives suspect a knife found in a Canberra drain this week is connected to the murder of a senior motorcycle gang member in the middle of the city last month. You could suggest that a motorcycle gang murderer having more experience than most in crime would know better than to put a knife in a drain. And another from 2019 from the UK, the world capital of Knife Crime. Fulham stabbing: knife found in drain after teen, killed in sixth murder in seven days.

 You'd have to think that a knife found in a drain on probability will be connected to a crime. A regular person wouldn't just have a knife and go, I don't like this knife, I think I'll go outside and find a drain and throw it in there. Would you?

The wooden handled knife, found just 250 meters away from Kathleen's backyard, was photographed and taken to the John Tonge Centre for testing. Police logs indicate that an officer went to JTC to have the knife inspected by the forensic pathologist, Dr. Ansford and the DNA scientist Ken Cox.

In the statutory declaration of Ken Cox, the knife given reference F17270-1 amd written next to it: bloodstains not detected. In Ken Cox's notes, the knife was described as 33 and a half centimetres long with a 22-centimetre long blade and a blade width of 27 millimetres at the hilt with adherent dirt and soil. The TMB or Tetramethylbenzidine tests of blade and handle were negative.

TMB only tests for presence of blood, not other DNA material. Could the killer have used the knife, wiped it of blood and fingerprints, rubbed it in dirt to make it look like it had been abandoned long ago and stuck it in the drain. And could there still be a trace of the killer or even the victim to link it to the murder?

I asked Ted Duhs about his thoughts on the knife.

TED: It was never tested and, it was rusty and there was no connection to the murder. And it was 500 yards away from Kathleen Marshall's house.

CATHERINE: Do you know why it wasn't tested further?

TED: That's a question for Ken Cox. 

CATHERINE:  The drain where the knife was found on Paling Avenue is footsteps away from Eildon Hill Reserve. It linked Kathleen's suburb of Wilston with Windsor. And in Windsor, walking distance through dark bushland on a late summer, early evening, lived a person of interest to the police, someone who had lived a few doors down from the Eildon Hill Reserve on and off since 1979.

Remember when the Cat Society members waited outside Kathleen's house the day her body was discovered? Another member of the Cat Protection Society drove past Kathleen's house very slowly staring blankly at the scene as she drove, but she didn't stop. The woman who introduced Kathleen to the Cat Society was the same woman driving past Kathleen's house that day.

She lived on Constitution Road. I'm not going to give you her real name for privacy reasons, but for the sake of this podcast, I am going to call her Helen. This is the description of herself that Helen gave in her police statement, but it is not her voice.

HELEN: I am a divorced female. Studied as an accountant through Queensland University and received a Bachelor of Commerce. I reside at Constitution Road, Windsor. I was previously a captain in the Australian regular Army being discharged in 1978. Since then, I've studied and worked in the tax office in Brisbane. 

TED: When I was investigating the Marshall murder, I came in contact with _______ and _______  at that stage she was quite open with me. Her interest, her strong interest when she was treasurer from 1991 right through to 1997, was to root out the corruption that she saw which was related to bequests, which would be made to the Cat Protection Society, but wouldn't appear on the books.

CATHERINE: The relationship between Ted and Helen eventually soured, like most of her dealings with people in this story. But let's start from the beginning. 

Helen said she encountered Kathleen for the first time in the mid-1980s, but got to know her from August 1996 when they met again at the Friends of Eildon Hill Action Group. Helen also happened to be a director of the Cat Society, which was already in the midst of a factional war, so acrimonious the schism. The society directors had not conducted an official board meeting since 1994.

Kathleen was duly recruited into the Cat Protection Society by Helen as part of the vote stacking she had been pursuing for years, but Helen's attempted coup backfired. By installing Kathleen as a director, she quickly imposed herself as leader, literally from the first meeting, and no one else seemed to mind given Kathleen brought her qualifications as a vet and her connections to the University Vet School where students might be used to desex the animals.

The Cat Society had been at war for years before Kathleen joined, and it was all generally about one thing: money. The Cat Society was the beneficiary of large sums from the estates of cat lovers. Tens of thousands of dollars and on several occasions, amounts numbering hundreds of thousands at a time were bequeathed.

TED: Now, Kathleen Marshall her interest as now the president of the Cat Protection Society wasn't in old fights. That might have happened years ago and had the origins years ago between ____________ and Glenda Whitmore and, and whoever else. Kathleen Marshall's interest was in making the Queensland Cat Protection Society the best in Australia, which meant that her interest was in caring for stray cats, finding homes for them, and putting the directors of the Cat Protection Society on a much firmer discipline about what they should do for the society.

CATHERINE: Kathleen also had one other skillset Helen had not counted on: her years of experience politicking in, and wrangling, a number of other volunteer organizations. She had outsmarted Helen and built support to start changing the Constitution to implement her own ideas about how the Cat Society should be run.  

As a registered charity, the accounts were required to be lodged with the ASC, which is now known as ASIC, or the Australian Securities and Investment Commission. Helen made complaints to the ASC asking them to investigate fraud and vote rigging among directors. Helen, who was still a director at this time, did her best to sabotage Kathleen's efforts by freezing bank accounts and not attending director's meetings, meaning the group lacked a quorum and normal business could not be enacted without it. The fly in the ointment for Kathleen's leadership was Helen's refusal to relinquish her control of the money, a responsibility she'd had since becoming treasurer.

Rhoda Hall became involved in the Cat Society when she contacted Helen in March, 1996, trying to find a home for a stray cat that she had found at her church. In Helen's opinion at the time, churchgoing Rhoda and her husband Ed were of good character, so she recruited both of them into the society in another attempt to build her faction. This is what wrote Rhoda Hall said in her police statement about Helen, but it is not her voice.

RHODA: Initially we found _______ quite amicable, but it was not long before we became directors that our problems with her began as a rule. She's quite plausible and approachable until crossed by someone. Once this happens, she becomes aggressive and unresponsive to reasoning.

CATHERINE: One heated incident occurred in June,1997. 

RHODA: An ordinary board meeting was held at Kathleen's house to discuss new members and other general issues. We did not get required numbers to conduct business, and the meeting was called off about 10 minutes before the due starting time. Kathleen, myself, and Lee Henry were at her house on our own. _______ turned up with two members, Corine Welsh and Ruth Bennett. Kathleen had rung Corine earlier and told her the meeting was not on. We decided not to answer the door because Kathleen and I did not want a confrontation. _______ was hammering on the door and yelling, let us in, we've got every right to be in there. _______ was of the opinion that we were conducting a meeting without her present.

CATHERINE: Corinne Welsh was one of Helen's most loyal supporters, often attending meetings with Helen and helping her to oppose the actions of the other directors. We will get to Ruth Bennett, the other supporter of Helen and another important person in this story, later in the podcast. The three women sat outside Kathleen's house for two and a half hours while Kathleen dead bolted her door to keep them out.

The next day, an anonymous letter appeared in Kathleen's letter box written in red ink. She suspected it had been written by Helen or under Helen's influence by one of her supporters, since it contained details that only Helen would've known.

I have a copy of the letter. It's not in red pen because it's a black and white photocopy I obtained from the police, but it is in all caps.

Next time on Murder and the Hellcats.

HELEN: Kath Marshall then started pushing me out of the house. I was just inside the door and she was trying to push me out, not with her hands, but her whole body. She then grabbed my hair.

TED: A number of people in the Cat Protection Society believe that she killed Kathleen Marshall.

This episode was written and produced by Catherine McHugh. Theme music by Sasha Louis Leger and additional track by Lunar Years.