Ep.2 It was Personal

Kathleen's doctor proposes a cat attack theory. A summary of the wounds reveals shallow stabs directed at the head and face - was it personal? Issues with the crime scene and an inference of stalking. 

Transcript

MURDER AND THE HELLCATS

EPISODE TWO

Previously on Murder and the Hellcats.

HEATHER LOGOVIK: 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.

JUSTIN MCKELVY: You didn't know whether she's going to 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 and she was just an absolute bitch.

 I'm Catherine McHugh, and this is episode two. 

There are graphic descriptions of violent injuries in this episode that some people may find disturbing. Episode two.   

ACT I 

I travelled to an outer southern suburb of Brisbane to meet Ted Duhs, an elderly man in a buttoned-up suit greeted me. Ted had been studying the Marshall murder and the history of the Queensland Cat Protection Society for years. A section of his book, Crucial Errors in Murder Investigations is devoted to the case.

Rows of Perspex filing trays were stacked high against the wall of a room in his house. He has dedicated to his work. Ted is not just reinvestigating the Kathleen Marshall murder.  You might have heard from Ted on other true crime podcasts in Australia because he is also been investigating some of Queensland's most notorious murders.

TED: My name is Ted Duhs. For about 30 years, I was a professional economist at the Queensland University of Technology and retired in 2007.

CATHERINE: So your interest in the case was triggered by a chance encounter at a social function after retiring. Tell us about that.

TED: The person sitting next to me she told me about a case of a man who was in jail he was in jail for murder, the murder of the vet, Kathleen Marshall, Dr. Kathleen Marshall. There was a lot of evidence that he didn't commit the murder. She referred me to another academic that I knew at QUT, who was, Dr. Lloyd Hamilton. He had organised a Fitzherbert defence support committee and he was the chairman of that particular committee.

CATHERINE: This Dr. Lloyd Hamilton, beside being an associate professor of geology at QUT, the same university as you, he was also a keen palmist.

TED: Lloyd always regarded Fitzherbert as more expert at reading hands than Lloyd himself was, even though Lloyd himself, read hands quite regularly.

CATHERINE: So you started researching the case liaising with Andrew's support group.

TED: I started then to visit Fitzherbert. He was at Woolston Prison. I suppose over a period of five years from 2008 to 2013 I would've visited him on about 40 occasions. On each of those occasions, I always found Fitzherbert very open to answering my question.

CATHERINE: Did Andrew tell you anything that made you think he could be innocent?

TED: He said, you don't know I didn't kill Marshall, but I know I didn't kill Marshall. So there must be something wrong with the DNA. Now, I was quite impressed with that particular statement and it sort of confirmed the feeling that I had that Fitz Herbert wasn't guilty of the murder 

CATHERINE: So what was your motivation to pursue the case and miscarriages of justice generally?

TED: There've been times in my life when, I've actually experienced what I took to be miscarriage of justice. Let me give you one example. In 1985, I was a lecturer and one of my classes was in the field of public administration. And basically, it involved teaching computer work to this class of students, which numbered about 100. One week in March of 1985, I was asked by the head of school to go with him to see the director. So I went over to the director's office and he said you better sit down, there's something serious I've got to talk to you about. You've been accused by a 19-year- old female student in your class of pressurising her for sex and separately, you've been accused of sexually assaulting her in your office.

And I said well it's got nothing to do with me because the dates I was in Sydney for that week on a foreign exchange course. And the director said, well, can you prove that? And I said well of course I can prove it because I've got my plane tickets and there were about 30 people on the foreign exchange course. And the director said, well, we've received from her solicitors uptown a four-page statement that she has made.

CATHERINE: You were advised by your lawyer to start defamation proceedings against the student and her father. Six years later, and that must have been a long six years to have this hanging over you, on the eve of going to court, she admitted she had made it all up. You received a written apology, which was published in the newspaper, as well as damages and costs.

TED: So the whole thing was a miscarriage of justice. And because I had a particular interest in miscarriages of justice, it was quite significant for me 

CATHERINE: Now getting back to the Marshall murder. Tell us about a particular line of investigation that you discussed with your doctor, who also knew Kathleen.

TED: When I was writing my Crucial Errors book and concentrating on this couple of chapters about the Marshall murder my dermatologist, whose name was Don Robertson, had been very interested in the Marshall murder and also the fact that I was doing some research on it. So although he was my dermatologist, he was also a friend of mine and often invited me to his place where we would talk. And he said he knew Kathleen Marshall and he knew that she suffered from Cushing’s Syndrome

CATHERINE: Quick lesson in Cushing’s Syndrome. It's a medical condition that makes it a lot easier to be cut and bleed, and wound healing is slow. The ailment is due to too much of the hormone cortisol in a person's system. The condition affects the appearance of the body. Someone with Cushing’s will tend to have a round face. a disproportionately overweight body and often a fatty deposit between the shoulders. They're also likely to have muscle weakness and tend to suffer from anxiety and depression. And according to Dr. Google, they tend to be irritable and have trouble controlling their emotions. Hmm. Sounds like Cushing's might explain or at least have contributed to Kathleen's demeanour.

TED: Don Robertson thought, after studying the police information that he could get about the murder, that perhaps Kathleen Marshall had been killed by a cat. So Don Robertson said to me it could be that Kathleen Marshall, who didn't operate odd cats, but did vaccinate them with a needle in her surgery. She would only hold a cat with one hand, you see, and, and inject the needle with the other. It could be that the needle went in the wrong place and the cat protested and jumped on her and clawed her. And if she held the cat, on her left shoulder, she was right-handed. And the cat could have clawed its way down and caused barks in an upward direction, above the waist, which were consistent with the details. So Don Robinson came up with the theory that she could have been clawed by a cat.

CATHERINE: I've listened to many true crime podcasts over the years, and quite a few seem to have a moment when they explored the theory that an animal was the perpetrator of the crime. A horse was considered a possible culprit in the fantastic podcast, West Cork. But in reality, although these theories might seem farfetched, a person has been killed by an animal, and then a miscarriage of justice has occurred. In fact, Australia's most famous miscarriage of justice was the death by dingo of Azaria Chamberlain. And the mother Lindy ended up wrongly convicted and jailed.

The question of whether a cat did it seemed not completely implausible because the wounds were shallow and concentrated in one particular area of her body. Although we'll be getting into more detail about the injuries later in this episode.

TED: So he and I tried to find out if there were any instances around the world where a cat had attacked a person. And we found an instance in Canada.

CATHERINE: I went hunting for this story online. In 2001, an 80-year-old man was bathing his pet parrot in the shower when his rescue cat was accidentally sprayed with water and attacked him. The elderly man's wife wrestled the cat away, but not before he was badly injured. The cat then turned on her and in her husband's words: tried to eat her too. There was blood everywhere. It covered the floors, ceilings, walls. Four carloads of police attended along with two ambulances and an animal control officer who said at the scene he had never seen anything like it. It was real carnage. I found other stories of cats attacking people..

If you type into your search engine the words: “cat attacking man walking dog” you'll find the one I'm watching now. The background music is a tune played on a tuba, which makes the man seem dopey, but the attack is actually very scary.

The man tries to protect his dog by picking it up. But the cat keeps leaping onto his head and shoulders to get to the dog he has in his arms. He throws the cat off him, but the cat keeps coming. We can see another man steps in to help and tries to stop the cat with a chair, like it's a lion they're trying to fend off. Meanwhile, the dog is being swung around wildly on the lead by the neck, as the man tries to protect it. The man loses his trousers in the process and we get a good look at his naked behind.

I found another cat attack online. A woman, also in Canada, reported a cat attacked her while on a suburban street near her home. Also, while walking her dog, she was scratched and bitten on her legs and head. She required stitches under her eye, and she was left with a lot of bleeding. She posted the result to social media. In the picture, blood is streaming down her face. She looks like Carrie, from the final scenes of the Stephen King movie.

So Ted, how did that theory hold up? 

TED: I wrote to Tony Ansford. 

CATHERINE: You are referring to Professor Anthony Ansford, the person who conducted the post mortem on Kathleen's body.

TED: Tony Ansford wrote back and said as a pathologist he had come across many  cases where animals had clawed people. But he said, no cat, no cat's teeth or cat's claw could have caused the injuries to Kathleen Marshall that he observed in the autopsy. So after that I dropped the cat theory.

CATHERINE: So how was Kathleen Marshall killed?

ACT II

Professor Ansford the forensic pathologist, or what TV crime procedures often call a medical examiner, visited the crime scene at approximately 6:00PM on Sunday, March 1st, 1998, the same day the body was found. He discovered Kathleen's body face down with her dress pulled up to her neck, exposing her bloodstained bra and underpants, both intact and in their normal position implying nothing of a sexual nature had occurred. The body was in a moderately advanced state of decomposition with insect colonisation causing abrasions or what is known as post-mortem insect trauma. The doctor stated at trial that, as a forensic pathologist, he's not able to accurately estimate time of death. Despite what these TV detective shows have us think, the medical examiner does not walk into the scene of a murder and give even an approximate time of death unless maybe the body is still warm. There are too many variables involved and too much science used to determine time of death. And as we will discover, in an upcoming episode of the podcast, there are specific scientists that only deal with time of death. Which in Kathleen's case was questionable.

The location of bloodstains at the back of the underpants and body, even though the body was found lying face down, suggested Kathleen had been turned over by the murderer, or Kathleen had turned herself over before death, but Professor Ansford couldn't say which scenario was more likely.

Professor Ansford said he couldn't call the majority of wounds superficial injuries. But they didn't necessarily involve any vital structures like the airways or the jugular. The wounds were both stabs and incised. An incised wound in forensic parlance is a cut that is longer length waist than it is deep. A stab wound, on the other hand, is small in entry or on the surface, but deep in penetration. There were horizontal and vertical cuts to the face around the eyes and ears.

Of the total of 52 wounds, 18 were made to the head and face area, and 17 to the neck area. Some extended from the side of the head to the mouth and there were others over the voice box. About five centimetres above the left ear he found a cluster of four stab wounds in a circle. Three had touched the skull bone but not penetrated. One of these stabs had penetrated, raising a divot in the skull bone.

Most of the head and face wounds were on her left side. A series of 13 stab wounds at the base of the neck in the left shoulder region were mainly undermined downwards and to the right and between eight to 11 centimetres deep. It was this set of injuries that encouraged the doctor friend of Ted's to posit the cat attack theory.

Some of these wounds travelled in front of the voice box, but did not damage the larynx. There was some damage to the main artery of the brain, the carotid artery. The two main branches of the carotid artery under the left eye had been completely severed, but this wouldn't have killed her instantly. Although Kathleen may have also been rendered unconscious by the force of the stab wound that caused the skull divot.

Dr. Ansford also said none of the injuries would have immobilized her if she had remained conscious. Except for the wounds at the back of the head, all the wounds started from below and were made upwards, and the Dr. Ansford’s words: “somewhat backwards”. He also testified that none of the face and head wounds were deeper than four centimetres. And because no vital structures in Kathleen's body had been damaged, no wound was instantly fatal. 

There were three stab wounds to the left forearm, but there were no injuries to the right arm or forearm. Cuts to both hands and the webbing between the thumb and fingers showed defensive wounds as Kathleen tried to stop or hold the knife. A horizontal stab wound was made to the left chest area between ribs seven and eight, but there was no damage to the abdominal cavity. And a vertical stab wound to the chest cavity did not enter the lung, although it did sever small arteries and led to bleeding into the chest cavity.

It would've taken two to three minutes for the cutting of the carotid artery to cause Kathleen to pass out. The knife was described as being 11 centimetres long and two centimetres wide, with a sharp tip that was likely bent from the injury that caused the divot to the skull. Although Dr. Ansford admitted that the estimation of the blade length was not accurate. 

The cutting of the two main branches of the carotid artery would've caused arterial spurting. In addition, any injuries to the face and head tend to bleed profusely. And we know Kathleen had Cushing's disease, which would've made her bleed more easily; all adding up to the killer not easily avoiding Kathleen's blood getting on their person during the attack.

He estimated that Kathleen would have taken 20 minutes to die. He couldn't say if she was conscious for that estimate of 20 minutes. If she had hit her head while falling down, she may have been knocked out right away. And that knife strike to the head, which left the divot in the skull, well that may also have knocked her out.

There is nothing in the police documents or autopsy report that tries to explain how the attack occurred.

LAURA-LEIGH: My name is Dr. Laura Lee Cameron Dow. I came to be involved with the Andrew Fitzherbert case when I was a student at Bond University in the early 2000s in the miscarriages of justice subject where Andrew's case was one of the cases we looked at. And I got quite involved and then carried on doing some work on it when I left as being a student. And then I've dipped into it on and off over the years since trying to see what we can do.

CATHERINE: I first met you when you were a lecturer at Bond University, which was the location of our first meeting, and that was quite a few years back during COVID when the Gold Coast campus was largely a ghost town. You studied criminology and you were doing a master's in criminology until one of your lecturers told you to go and study law. For my purposes for this episode, what's so great about being able to interview you is you have a good understanding about the science of violent crime. And you had an opportunity to study the crime scene video. So can you share with us your observations about the crime scene?.

LAURA-LEIGH: There were a lot of issues with the crime scene and the events were not very clear. The police had turned up and opened the door upstairs and let the dogs in and people that were present were cutting up meat using knives in the kitchen. While it was a stabbing, the cause of death was stabbing. So there were issues there. There was blood on the door into the crime scene on both sides of the door, but then the sprinkler system turned on and the blood stains on the door got washed away. So nobody really had a record of whether the fight was going into the door or out the door. And the evidence got washed and off by that. So there were just issues all over the place. And nobody really worked out how Kathleen's body ended up in the position it was in.  

CATHERINE: From what we can see on the crime scene diagram made by the police scientific officer, she was found lying at an angle on her front, just inside the doorway near one corner of the room with her face up against the wall tightly jammed into the wall, and her legs sort of splayed quite far apart sitting under the examination table. So how do you think the body ended up in that position?

LAURA-LEIGH: We can work out, looking at the evidence, she fell with her head and her upper torso inside the room and her hips and her legs outside the doorway. So she fell across the doorway with the bottom half of her outside the door and the top, half of her in, on her back. So the conclusion, having tried to stage this numerous times over the years, is that the only way whoever killed her could shut the door, which was visible from the road if the light was on, they would've been able to see into the room was if they moved her body into the surgery and then shut the door. And in order to do that, they folded her legs up and over her and tucked into the corner. So her head was buried against the wall and her body was folded over itself. She bled out and her dress was pulled up over her.

There's blood in the back of her bra and there's blood, to sort of the top of her pants. So that's where the blood flowed under her body till it got to the doorway where it then dropped into the drain.

CATHERINE: So that explains why she was found face down, but she had bloodstains on the back of her body, we know from the neighbour, Heather Logovik, that normally when Kathleen fell down she had trouble getting back up. But if she was stabbed, even in a shallow manner, once she was down and injured she was probably unlikely to be able to get back up easily and the attacker could then stab her more deeply while she was prostrate. That's consistent with comments made by Professor Ansford in his statutory declaration when he said: “The injuries to the front of the chest and neck were angled upwards at about 45 degrees and could have been inflicted with the deceased on the floor and the assailant standing at her head.”  

I entered the autopsy report and Professor Anford's statutory declaration into AI hoping it might give me a crime sequence, and this is what it concluded. I've used an AI-generated voice to read the findings.

AI VOICE: The initial attack likely began as front facing strikes inflicted on the face and neck while Kathleen was upright. These injuries included the severance of the left carotid arteries. The depth and precision shows the attacker was physically close to Kathleen. Some of the face and scalp wounds may have been delivered while Kathleen was trying to turn away defensively. The hand and left arm injuries would've occurred while Kathleen was upright.

After collapsing from blood loss or shock, the attacker continued stabbing Kathleen, focusing on the back of her head and torso. The angle and depth of the upper chest and left flank wounds imply Kathleen was already on the ground while the attacker stood over her driving the blade inward. This was when her head suffered the divot and the knife used in the attack likely bent.

If the victim was right-handed, you'd expect to see more defensive injuries to the right hand or arm. Therefore, the attacker may have grabbed or pinned Kathleen, forcing her to defend herself with her left hand, or it suggests close proximity in a face-to-face confrontation and a degree of control or physical dominance by the attacker.

It's also possible that a surprise attack meant Kathleen raised her left arm first, especially if the attacker came from her right side. 

CATHERINE: Do you think the injuries and the crime scene give us any insight into the killer?

LAURA-LEIGH: I used to describe it to students as a woman being really nasty, going, I hate you, jab, jab, jab. It's that kind of crime scene. I guess if you, if you go stereotypically, if you had a man with a knife in his hat, you'd expect an up and down thrust, um, or something heavily jabbed in. And what you've got is lots and lots of little baby, um, stabbing motions into her face, which is really personal. So they really didn't like her.

ACT III 

If you own a dog as opposed to a cat, you know it's easy to get into conversations with strangers. I was visiting the New South Wales mid-north Coast, walking my two dogs on the beach, when I came across an older couple with their dog; another small, energetic foxy like my dog Hank. Naturally, when you have similar breeds, there's a moment of connection and a bit of a dog breed appreciation conversation that takes place. And then usually after you've let the dogs play for a while together, you part ways. But if you're a stranger in a small beach community, that's not always the way it goes. On this occasion, the owner of Alfie the Fox terrier was Rod and his partner Jenny. And the conversation didn't end with a polite goodbye. Rod was surprisingly nosy for a stranger. He asked me why I was in town and what I was doing for a job. And when I told him I was making a podcast about a true crime, it just so happened Rod was exactly the man I had been looking for.

ROD: My name's Rod Dayment, actually Roderick Dayment. I was a police officer for 36 years. I joined the New South Wales Police in 1969. Straight out of school, 18-year-old. I went into plain clothes policing in 1979. Then I was selected to go to the homicide squad in 1988 and I was lucky enough to have 10 years at homicide. Then back to Mount Druitt as a chief inspector and retired in 2005.  

CATHERINE: That covers the period of policing, even though in New South Wales and Kathleen's murder was committed in Queensland. That covers the period of 1998 when the crime occurred, and I'd assume the policing or the process would've been the same.

ROD: Oh, definitely, definitely the same. I liaised with Queensland Police on a number of occasions into investigations and their procedure was very much the same. Attending serious crime scenes, the preservation of the crime scene.

CATHERINE: Can you kind of talk us through then what you think happened based on the way, you know, crime scene investigations were done back then?

ROD: They recorded people entering the crime scene and they established, you know, a team to work on the investigation at an early stage, which is important.

CATHERINE: As soon as the upstairs of the house was opened, people went into the kitchen and used knives to cut up meat for the victim's pets. And as soon as they police were downstairs and actually found the body, they got them out. It may have compromised the crime scene, do you think?

ROD: Certainly, at that stage, any person who wasn't directly connected with the investigation, you know, should not have ended the scene. And it's hard to stop, you know, people who come to the, the house and they find a body, and in this case they found dogs and, uh, cats in distress and being cat people, they immediately want to look after them. Something like, that's hard to stop. But the important thing is to identify the people who did go into the crime scene,  

CATHERINE: Did anything stand out for you in that crime scene?

ROD: Well, certainly the crime scene they secured was purely the house. If we go to the crime scene, we extend, extend it out, because you can always reduce that area. They just cordoned it off. And tragically, I think the sprinklers went off in the garden, which destroyed blood evidence on plants and, and on the door and near the door.

CATHERINE: So talk us through how do you think the crime unfolded?

ROD: 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 was an opportunist robbery they would've struck her where she fell. Depending on the situation, they could have murdered there, then gone through the house if they thought they were going to find money or drugs which with a vet would be highly likely. 

CATHERINE: So what you're saying is that because it was frenzied, if you're a drug addict or a thief, you're not going to waste time stabbing someone that many times 

ROD: You're going to be confronted by the owner of the house. You remove her from the scene, whether you tire up, or in the extreme case, murderer, you know. You then go about searching for whatever you'd gone in there for. I think it's highly likely that she knew the person who attacked her a deep hatred of that person. 

CATHERINE: How long do you think it would take to kill someone in that way and then sort of do a bit of a clean-up afterwards?

ROD: Well obviously it wasn't a very good clean-up. So it's not going to take too long. You know, if you just do a re-enactment of coming to the door, boom. So and so, so, and so, stabbing, stabbing. One goes through the 52 times. Yes. One goes through the carotid artery, falls to the floor. Oh geez, what have I done? Look, I'll do a quick; there's blood here, I'll do a quick clean-up, out the door.  

CATHERINE: She had fights with neighbours. She had these verbal fights with people, and I always think to myself, well, it doesn't take much to retaliate for someone to store up their anger and then retaliate.

ROD: Yes, obviously the person had been antagonised by something. People can store a grudge up for a long, long time and then it just like finally blows. 

CAT HERINE: After talking to Rod, the retired detective, I really felt like I wanted to talk to a criminal profiler, but they're not that easy to find in Australia. Criminal profilers might seem like a common part of the investigation team if you watch detective shows. But in Australia, as far as I can find out, they're not used by police to find a perpetrator, much less by the justice system to show likelihood of guilt.

Both the academic Laura-Leigh Cameron-Dow and the retired detective Rod Dayment felt that the attack on Kathleen was personal rather than random or drug motivated. I wondered if AI could give me any insight into the attacker. Could I use it as my proxy criminal profiler? I plugged in the information, and this is what I got.

AI PROFILER: Based on the direction and placement of many wounds, namely downward and to the right means, the attacker was likely right-handed. The emotional intensity and close-range nature of the attack suggests the perpetrator likely knew the victim personally. The sheer number of stab wounds, especially concentrated around the emotionally symbolic areas of the face, neck and chest, suggests intense rage or emotional involvement. This suggests a personal fixation and is often seen in crimes of passion or personal vendetta. This level of violence often stems from obsession, rejection, or perceived betrayal, all of which are common in stalking related homicides. The focus on the face and neck may indicate a desire to silence or dehumanise the victim. The attack required proximity and time indicating the killer was comfortable being near the victim and possibly familiar with her routines.

CATHERINE: When I added that the crime scene was a vet surgery that housed rescue cats, and the victim was the head of a cat rescue organization. The AI concluded this:

AI PROFILER: Attacking the victim in her sanctuary for vulnerable animals adds a layer of psychological cruelty. It suggests the killer wanted to desecrate not just the victim's body, but her identity and purpose. If the killer viewed the victim as morally superior or socially admired, this setting may have been chosen to undermine her legacy.

CATHERINE: Kathleen had reported feeling stalked. She had already had a physical altercation with a rival at the Cat Society and told a fellow Cat Society director she thought that rival was capable of taking a knife to her.

Next time on Murder and the Hellcats. 

JUSTIN: People who have just sold the house up on the top road, they've got a swimming pool and being summer like it was, it was still summer. Right on six o'clock I heard a scream and I automat looked up, thinking was their two kids at the time. Cause they were still going to school, playing in the pool. There was no one in the pool. And I realized it came from down the road. Now the police never took any notice of that.

HEATHER: Kathleen was going to come over on the Friday night. She's going to come over and clean the teeth for the, the two cats.  Well, typical Kathleen, says she's coming and then she doesn't and doesn't let you know. That's nothing unusual.  

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