Ep.3 Death March

Kathleen's house looks like it's been ransacked and police question the placement of a particular piece of sheet music on her grand piano. Time of death doesn't match a number of eye witnesses who saw Kathleen alive when she was supposed to be dead. How reliable was the entomologist's estimate and what was the most likely time Kathleen was killed?

Transcript

MURDER AND THE HELLCATS

EPISODE THREE

Previously on Murder and the Hellcats.

TED DUHS: After studying the police information that he could get about the murder, that perhaps Kathleen Marshall had been killed by a cat.

AI PROFILER: The killer likely knew the layout of the property, including the entrance obscured from the road. This suggests prior surveillance or familiarity, possibly from previous visits or stalking.  

CATHERINE: I'm Catherine McHugh and this is Episode 3. 

ACT I

About six kilometres from the centre of Brisbane, Kathleen's suburb of Wilston was populated by the traditional style of home known as the Queenslander dating back to the mi-1800s. The Queenslander architectural style is a high set house on tall wooden stumps with a single story, tall ceilings and an exterior of horizontal wooden planks with a veranda that wraps around the house sometimes fully or partially enclosed. It has a corrugated gable roof, and the facade is dominated by a set of external stairs that take you to the front door. Kathleen Marshall's house was a typical Queenslander, although its facade was largely hidden behind a jungle of trees, which Kathleen cultivated as a matter of unspoiled green pride.

I asked Ted Duhs to describe the layout of Kathleen's property. 

TED: A typical Queenslander house; it was raised and the floor below had been cemented for two garages and for a small surgery where Marshall did her veterinary work on the cats that she attended to. The front of the house, which was perhaps 10 yards from Main Avenue, could barely be seen from the road because the foliage that Marshall had planted in front of her house was very, very thick. So Marshall was very insistent about, planting trees and shrubs, wherever she could, and even on the footpath.

In front of Marshall's house, there were three very large trees. So the view of Marshall's house from the road was basically non-existent. You couldn't see the house except if you were directly in front of one of the driveways. There were two driveways. One of the driveways, which was slightly to the left of the main stairs, went up to the main house.

And at the top of the stairs there was a door which had a glass window. I think it was frosted glass. And otherwise it was a wooden door. And if you went through that door, you were on Marshall's veranda. And then there was another wooden door leading into the house itself.

CATHERINE: Her home has long since gone after being sold for $170,000 a year after she was killed. The land was subdivided and replaced by two modern family homes positioned for the views. The actual structure was sold and transported to another town further north in Queensland. In media photos taken soon after the crime, you can see the original house looks not exactly run down, but like it is in need of some maintenance. There were abandoned cages around the vet surgery and paint was peeling off the exterior.

Police named the Hunt for Kathleen's killer ‘Operation Leaf’, and it was headed by Detective Geoff Marsh. You can see snippets of the crime scene video by watching a show called Forensic Investigators. It's accessed for free on YouTube, and the true-crime series, made some years ago, was hosted by a young Lisa McCune. If you're old enough, you remember the actresses once played Constable Maggie Doyle in the TV show, Blue Healers, and then went on to police the high seas in a show called Sea Patrol. So she has some crime solving cred. 

We heard from a source that the crime scene video of Kathleen's murder was used as a training video for police recruits. Although I understand that's not the case anymore.

We also put in a request to interview the detectives in the case. That was denied, but you'll find them commenting freely on the investigation in the episode of Forensic Investigators, which seems to have been given all access. The episode devoted to Kathleen's murder was one of the first things I looked at when I started researching this podcast.

It used a combination of some parts of the crime scene, video, animation, news media reports, recreations using actors, along with interviews with the police and some real-life cat ladies and carers associated with Kathleen.

In that episode, they show a piece of sheet music sitting on Kathleen's grand piano. And they do a closeup on it, and the detective tells us that the music was a death march.

He actually says these words. Had someone been upstairs and turned the music spec and turned the music specially to those pages. So thinking it might be music that I could use in the sound design of this show. I paused the crime scene video at this point, and I looked up this piece of music which had the title Valse, and in underneath it, it said Posthumus.

Now valse means waltz, and posthumus actually means published after death. So the piece of music was composed by Chopin, and it wasn't a death march. It was a composition that according to Google, was discovered or published after he had passed away. This is the actual piece of music playing right now, and it sounds a little lively for a death march.

The police calling it a death march wasn't something mentioned at trial. And, of course, it wouldn't have made any difference to the outcome of the trial if it had, but we found it unusual that the police would mention this in a TV show about a murder when it's wrong. They didn't seem to have checked their facts before making a public statement about the case. Although from the TV producer's point of view, it certainly would've made for better viewing.

Another thing about the snippets of crime scene video they included in the TV show was that it's possible to see the interior of Kathleen's house and it's a mess. There were chairs overturned files that looked like they've been just dumped or maybe dumped and rifled through, tipped on the floor, and you immediately asked the question: was that the result of someone searching for something? It certainly looked like a robbery. I asked Kathleen's next door neighbour's daughter, Heather Logovik, who you've heard from before in the podcast, how she remembered Kathleen kept the house 

HEATHER: The beds were never made or pulled down to be washed or anything. There was, there was just stuff all left everywhere. Clothes in the bath and the kitchen just full of pots and pans and glasses and dishes.

CATHERINE: Well, that's pretty much how you would describe the state of the house in the video. It seemed hard to reconcile with the woman who thought she was above others, judged people, classified women into tarts, and ladies keeping her house like it had been freshly burgled. It sort of really didn't fit the image, but Heather's mother became well acquainted with Kathleen's housesitter, a person who stayed in her house while she was overseas. His name was Ronald Graham.

HEATHER: If she was going on holiday, she'd pack all her la-de-da stuff and just leave everything else scattered everywhere. And his job was to clean up. Get the house tidy while she was away. He used to polish all the silver in the kitchen. Mum said the place was, when she'd go over, the place was absolutely spotless. He'd clean everything. And she'd mark the bottles of spirits with a line so that she'd know that if he had a mouthful of anything he wasn't to touch any of the alcohol. And, of course, he still did and he'd fill it up with water or something. Because he was a bit of a, bit of a character. He'd come down the side of my mother's house where she was washing underneath the house and then they'd go up and have a cup of tea and he'd tell her all the things that he found and his version was that she was a dirty, filthy bitch. 

Police made tape lifts and looked for fingerprints upstairs at Kathleen's house, but nothing was found, which ruled out burglary as a motive. That was the conclusion of the police, but I can't help thinking that someone who wanted Kathleen dead and also wanted access to Cat Society records or just a plain old burglar, could have gone upstairs wearing gloves and left no trace of themselves because the place was already a mess.

ACT II - WHAT KATHLEEN DID ON FRIDAY

I'm going to spend the rest of this episode talking about the time of Kathleen's death. Time of death is a critically important aspect of a murder investigation because it can rule in or rule out suspects based on an alibi. It makes sense that the narrower the timeframe of death, there are less suspects available to commit the crime.

After the police investigation determined Andrew was the murderer and was charged, the time of death was changed by 12 hours. But let's start at the original time of death calculation and the many problems it raised.

According to the entomology report written by Russell Luke, the government forensic scientist who determined time of death, Kathleen was killed sometime between 9:00PM Thursday the 26th of February, and 3:00AM Friday on the 27th of February, before her body was found two days later, on the Sunday afternoon. 

But five independent witnesses saw Kathleen alive and well during the day on Friday, a total of eight times. These witnesses ranged from neighbours and shopkeepers to an old school friend who noted the sighting in her diary. I'm going to take you through each of these sightings of Kathleen from that Friday when the entomologist said she was already dead. 

Just before I start, I want to remind you that the latest the government entomologist said she could have died was 3:00AM on the Friday.

SIGHTINGS OF KATHLEEN

NO.1: The first person to see Kathleen on Friday was David Kelly, the local pharmacist who also attended the classical music performances Kathleen held in her home. He saw her between nine and 10:00AM in his pharmacy. 

NO.2: At 10:15AM, a woman called Catherine Stevenson who had known Kathleen when they were at high school together, was sitting in her parked car, killing time, waiting for a shift to start at a nearby shopping centre, when she spotted Kathleen buying a drink at the local news agency, she was able to describe what Kathleen was wearing and recorded the details of the event in her diary that she kept at the time. 

NO.3: The third sighting was at 2:15PM when neighbour Greg Rowe said he had seen Kathleen driving past his apartment and away from her house. He told police she had a male passenger in the car who he recognized as a regular visitor to her home and her two dogs in the back of the car.

Police thought that that regular person might have been Ronald Graham, the same man who house-minded for Kathleen and also occasionally walked her dogs. But Ronald told police he had not seen Kathleen for at least a week before she died.

NO.4: The same neighbour Greg Rowe said he saw Kathleen drive past again between 2:45PM and 2:55PM. This time she had two dogs in the back, but no passengers. She was heading along Main Avenue towards her home.

NO.5: The fifth sighting by the fifth witness was the news agency shop assistant Jessica Dawson, who recalled serving Kathleen at 3:30PM when she bought a Magnum ice cream and a newspaper.

NO.6: The sixth sighting of Kathleen on that day was at 4:00PM when Kathleen was back at the local pharmacy and its owner, David Kelly, said she was collecting an asthma inhaler she had pre-ordered.

Remember Warren Smith who was discussed in the first episode of the podcast. He and Kathleen had a strained relationship, and she suspected he was a drug dealer. 

NO.7: Warren said saw Kathleen at 4:45PM. This is what he said in his police statement. It is not his voice. 

WARREN SMITH: I had finished work at 4:00 PM and drove from Hemmant straight home. I then parked my car out front of my house and walked inside, put the kettle on, and was about to make myself a cup of coffee and realized that I had an off carton of milk. I then drove down Main Avenue, turned left into a side street, and then right. I then parked my car outside a small little shop, which is right beside the Kelly's shops. I then walked inside and ordered a carton of milk and a paper. At the time I saw her at the newsagency and she came in the front door and was, I was just about to be served at the counter. I turned to look at her. I then left the shop and began walking to my car. I looked over and saw Kathleen's vehicle, a dirty white Cressida sedan. I saw it parked facing east opposite the shop on Fifth Avenue. As I was walking back to my car, I looked over and saw Kathleen walking towards her vehicle.

NO.8: CATHERINE: Then he saw her again at 5:00PM when he went to his second property on the street to bring in the bins. With Friday being bin collection day, he saw Kathleen drive around the corner and up the hill back to her home. Warren Smith recalled hearing the distinctive sound of Kathleen's door knocker as her door was closed at 6:00PM and again at 8:00PM on that Friday night. Although he did not sight her at that time. 

You might remember the vet named Purcell that Kathleen had been working with who was mentioned in the first episode. His wife, Enid told police she drove past Kathleen's house with a friend in her car at 6:00PM on Friday night. She did not see Kathleen, but she was able to see that the light was on in her surgery.

Heather Logovik revealed that Kathleen was also due to visit her mother in the early evening of Friday.

HEATHER: Kathleen was going to come over on the Friday night. And the, the cats that, um, were hers originally, and Mum had taken them in. She said that, if she did that and there was any veterinary work needed that she would do it for free because they were her cats to start with. Anyway, she's going to come over and clean the teeth for the, the two cats. Once again, cleaning the teeth for Kathleen was just getting the, an instrument and just doing it; No anaesthetic, no nothing. 

CATHERINE: But Kathleen didn't show.

HEATHER: Mum just thought, oh, well, typical Kathleen. says she's coming and then she doesn't and doesn't let you know. That's nothing unusual.

CATHERINE: and Justin McKelvy, the neighbour who lived across the road, who he heard from also in the first episode, said he heard a scream in the early evening of Friday.

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.

CATHERINE: Heather's mother, Gertrude Gwynne, said she heard noises coming from Kathleen's house at about 9:00 PM on Friday night.

HEATHER: She said that night when she was locking up, the front of the house was all windows, and she'd go and lock up all the windows,  she thought she heard a bit of a moaning sound, she sort of stopped and listened, she didn't hear anything else, so she just continued locking the windows and went to bed.

CATHERINE: Kathleen's movements attracted particular attention because of the long and loud door knocker at her front door and her car, which made a distinctive sound because of a broken muffler. Some of the neighbours saw Kathleen's car or heard sounds of activity at her house on the Saturday and Sunday morning, but no one actually said they saw her

I'm just going to recap the sightings of Kathleen on Friday during the day. The first was David Kelly at his pharmacy between 9:00AM and 10:00AM. 

Then at 10:15, a woman who went to school with Kathleen saw her at the local news agency, which was next door to the chemist at the time.

At 2:15PM neighbour Greg Rowe saw Kathleen driving away from her house with her dogs and a man in the car.

Half an hour later at 2:45PM he saw her with only the dogs, no man drive back towards her house 

At 3:30PM Shop assistant Jessica Dawson said she served Kathleen at the newsagency 

And at 4:00PM David Kelly said Kathleen was in his pharmacy again to collect an inhaler. 

At 4: 45 neighbour Warren Smith saw her at the newsagency.

And then at 5:00 PM he saw her in her car as she drove past his second property on Main Avenue towards her house.

ACT III 

Remembering that Russell Luke, the government entomologist, arrived at a time of death between 9:0 PM Thursday and 3:00AM Friday, and yet we have numerous sightings of Kathleen on Friday during the day, with the last sighting around 5:00PM, I decided to take a closer look at the entomology report.

Now, Russell, Luke stated at trial that there were only two factors that determine the development of the fly lifecycle; the temperature in the environment and the availability of food, namely the dead body. In the early stages of maggot growth, there was plentiful food. So the only variable, according to Luke, was the temperature. The higher the temperature, the faster the growth to determine the surgery's temperature.

Over that period before Kathleen's body was found, Luke took the official data collected at Brisbane airport, then an instrument was placed in the surgery for a 24-hour period to compare the temperature in Kathleen's surgery to the official airport temperatures.

Temperatures in the vet surgery showed very little fluctuation between minimums and maximums, which were 22 to 26 degrees celsius. And even though the ranges at the airport were more extreme between 19 and 30 degrees, the average of 24.5 to 25 degrees at the airport and in the vet surgery were the same. 

Luke relied on existing laboratory data, which gave development times at various temperatures at an average temperature of 25 degrees. He calculated time of death at 65 to 76 hours before the body was found and maggots taken, leading to the conclusion that Kathleen could not have been killed later than 3:00AM Friday.

This time of death is what Russell Luke testified at the committal hearing, and in case you don't know, a committal hearing happens before the murder trial. It's held in a magistrate's court to determine if there is a case to answer, and if the matter will proceed to trial. The prosecution lays out its case, and the defence can ask witnesses questions, but at the actual trial. Russell Luke changed his time of death estimate instead of 3:00AM Friday being the latest time Kathleen could have been killed. It became 3:00PM Friday, 12 hours later.

The revision, he said, was due to new calculations based on the light switched on in the surgery, which had not been factored into the original calculation. He said, because maggot development does not occur in the dark, when the light is brought into the equation it means the maggots continue to develop at night.

Therefore, the maggots mature faster and we get to the 3:00PM time. It is also interesting to note that the entomologist testified at trial that he found it impossible to extend the timeline beyond 3:00PM Friday. In fact, he said that to get to a later time of death, the surgery temperature would need to have been four to five degrees centigrade warmer.  

But the revised time of death of 3:00 PM Friday still doesn't account for three of the eight sightings of Kathleen that were reported at 4,  4:455, and 5:00 PM.

ACT IV 

In TV crime procedurals, it's often a woman that gets cast as a brainy forensic expert . These television shows have normalised the idea that a forensic scientist can pinpoint the time of death quickly and accurately after a body is discovered. The expert Russell Luke from the government forensic lab, the John Tonge Center, changed the time of death from the maximum of 3:0 AM Friday morning to 3:00PM Friday afternoon.

The time of death calculation changing, even to an amateur sleuth like myself, was the first red flag raised in the era of forensic science in Kathleen's case. But when I spoke to my own forensic entomologist, and yes, I did find a brainy real life female scientist, I discovered just how complicated the time of death science really is.

PAOLA: My name is Paola Magni. I'm an Associate Professor of Forensic Science and Forensic Entomologist based at Murdoch University.

CATHERINE: I'm just going to run through a few of your credentials here. You've represented Australia at the Cheltenham Science Fair in the UK. You're inducted into the Western Australian Women's Hall of Fame in 2022, and in your home country of Italy, you are considered well a bit of a rock star in forensics, not just because you've got a high profile, but you've actually solved some pretty hard to solve cases over there.

PAOLA: Well, I would love to say yes. Let's say I'm part of the team that achieved the resolution of the case. The resolution of a case is always a puzzle, you know, maybe your piece is a pretty important piece, but it's always a puzzle. 

CATHERINE: The other thing was the Italian version of CSI.

PAOLA: Yeah, I was the scientific advisor for the various stories of a number of series and I also gave them some possible stories that they can develop based on my cases, cases of colleagues, and research has been performed by myself or my colleagues so that we could work, you know, a case around it.

CATHERINE: So coming to the Marshall case, this particular scientist at the Queensland Laboratory, I think you told me he was a parasitologist.

PAOLA: On Google Search or ResearchGate, it's pretty easy to see what is the curriculum of the people and yeah, as far as I saw, and I cannot be sure a hundred percent because the research was done very quickly, was not for a typical forensic entomologist of, let's say, our tribe of the people that we know.

CATHERINE: Well, actually at trial he was asked how long he'd been practicing as a forensic entomologist, and he said he'd been doing it for 20 years.  I would say that's enough in the eyes of the law. But obviously there's some distinction between entomology and parasitology.

PAOLA: There is one thing that happened all the time to me, especially when I come across cases as second person on the case, is that the first person was a person that knew what kind of bugs was. So able to identify, yes, it's a maggot, yes, it's a beetle, yes, it's a butterfly, but we're not able to provide any information around the ecology of this species and an understanding of what is the role of this insect at that age in the specific environment in the specific case.

CATHERINE: Now, I sent you the entomologist report and some of his testimony at trial. Can you tell us what comes to mind when you looked at those documents?

PAOLA: What stuck to me was the understanding that at some point, the information about entomology were changed at some point. So he said something, and then something else. You can't change the cards just because someone said, Oh, I actually saw her yesterday. Doesn't work like that.

CATHERINE: The first thing that struck me when I read the material was the government entomologist was asked what factors come into play when you're working out time of death? And he basically said it's the availability of food, which is the body and it's the temperature. There are, there are just two things. He didn't mention light at that time. That's like entomology 101, right?

PAOLA: Yes and no. It is entomology 101 from the point of view of the fact that there are some insects that are active during the day and active during the night, or insects that are active during the night because there is an artificial light present, or because some insects run away from the light. But, there are also pretty, in forensic entomology, there is a pretty confusing light research done so far. And, and when I say confusing, it's more like contradicting. Some, some research say not absolutely during the night flies do not fly. Some other research say yes, they can fly if there is like a big artificial light; there is a big night, moon, that is, you know, shining and the flies are around. And if there is a body that is very stinky, it doesn't really matter if there is light or not. But yeah, light can make some difference because if there is light, there is normally more temperature. If there is more temperature, there is more movement of light. So light should be taken into consideration from different point of view. When you talk about temperature and forensic entomology, you have to consider that the environmental temperature is a thing. The body temperature is a different thing. The micro environmental temperature is a more different thing. What we call the maggot masses or more than 1000 animals that can make their own temperature. So the temperature has to be taken properly and more than, more than one device has to be placed in place.

CATHERINE: Tell us about temperature and light and, and what difference that might have made.

PAOLA: It all depends on the species of flies. some species, um, have very different grow rates for the different temperatures. So some, they stay pretty similar between a range of temperatures. Sometimes, we have species that are more famous, that are more studied, that you have every single temperature. So it all depends what kind of degree of certainty he had in terms of the species identification was identified by him or by a taxonomist. Is it the right species? Does it have the correct table of growth? 

CATHERINE: And science has moved on since 1998?

PAOLA: Oh yeah, absolutely.

CATHERINE: Another thing I wondered about with temperature is that I think the temperature comparison with the sort of benchmark temperature, which was the airport, and I think you said to me when we first chatted that, the difference now is that you would leave a thermometer in there for longer. You wouldn't just have it in there for a day. How long would you have put a thermometer in the surgery to get a comparison.

PAOLA: So the best practice says that in the place or in the location of our criminal investigation, you have to leave a device that recorded temperature and possibly humidity, for five to 10 days. And then you compare the range of temperature and humidity with the closest meteor station, even better if you had two or three more meteor stations just to see what is the closest or what is, you know the, the range of differences between the different places.

CATHERINE: Brisbane's very humid and the room that she was found in as you said, the airport is open place, but we didn't see any measurement for humidity in the records, so that would be something.

PAOLA: This person had lots of animals. How was their hygienic condition? Do you have lots of, um, cat, uh, litters with poo? Because the poo will call the flies. The flies will be. coming faster, closer.

CATHERINE: I think she had about 16 cats in her vet surgery in cages, and they would've been producing faeces for a period of time.

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

CATHERINE:  There was a lot of blood draining outside the surgery too, coming outside the door. There's two factors that might have affected the colonisation of her body. It took 20 minutes to die with all these injuries. I don't know if 20 minutes makes a difference. And secondly, she had Cushing’s disease, which is this thin-skinned bleed more easily condition.

PAOLA: The flies, they don't care if the body's alive or not, nobody's doing shoe fly, so they just go there and they can start feeding on the blood and then lay the eggs or just feed on the blood.

CATHERINE: Okay, that leads me to another question. If I'm being stabbed many, many times. The flies are going to come to me more quickly because there's more wounds for them to be attracted to and to enter the body?

PAOLA: Yeah, there is a possibility for more location for colonisation if you ask that. If you, if you have more, uh, clusters of, of eggs or flies, you can speed up the decomposition process because there is no competition. Like, there are not all the flies on the mouth, but there are flies pretty much everywhere. So they start eating everywhere, not just from the head. 

 CATHERINE: I just wanted to go over some of the things Paola said. She was very careful not to personally criticise the entomologist, Russell Luke, although she did reveal he was a parasitologist, which I've discovered are quite different from entomologists. She also revealed there was no register or minimum standards required to call yourself a forensic entomologist.

And she told me the best in the field are engaged, not just in the forensic work itself, which is the case work, but also teaching further training and research. Busy crime labs, like the John Tonge Centre was back then, were unlikely to allow its scientists to spend much time on activities, extracurricular to their casework. It seems like the secondment or corporation of university laboratories and commercial or government forensic labs is probably the ideal situation to get accurate, consistent science into the criminal justice system.

Paola also thought the change in time of death between the committal and the trial was not normal, and I would say not professional, although she didn't use those words. It seems it's normal practice for an entomologist to identify the time of death using all the available data, and it doesn't change. 

Paola said the normal procedure to work out temperature for a comparison is to place multiple measuring instruments for temperature over five to 10 days, and then compare those temperatures and humidity to the airport or multiple surrounding weather stations. And something as obvious as humidity was never taken into account. But we know in Kathleen's murder, there was only one day of comparative data collected and no measure at all of humidity. 

I found it fascinating that the mass of maggots can create their own temperature. So does that mean the forensic entomologist takes body temperature of the maggot site? That's something I didn't think of when I was talking to Paola, so I didn't get to ask her that question. But it certainly wasn't recorded in the entomologists or the police scientific officer's documents.

Paola also mentioned that a large number of maggot and fly materials should be taken to the lab from the crime scene, not just a few samples, which is the impression I got from the records of the police scientific officer. 

Paola s comments about factors that need to be considered in forensic entomology directly contradicted Russell Luke's testimony that only two factors affect the lifecycle of a maggot, which is heat and available food source. Although, maybe back in the late 1990s, that's all they used to determine lifecycle calculations of insects on dead bodies. In fact, the array of variables used to determine time of death is numerous. Paola told me that a fan in the room or a breeze can affect the fly's ability to fly in, whether it rains or not, after the attack, if there is clothing covering the wounds, and how thick or tight that clothing is worn. The amount of open wounds, even the position of the house relative to the sun's movement can affect a time of death calculation, and that doesn't even take into account the humidity, or the presence of cat faeces.

Even if you accept Russell Luke's revised calculation of time of death, we know it was likely wrong based on the sightings of independent witnesses after 3:00PM Friday.

The interview with Paola made me wonder what other cases where the forensic entomology at the John Tonge Centre on time of death was wrong and either help someone guilty go free, or contributed to a potential miscarriage of justice.

Paola also offered to take a look at the material in the Marshall murder pro bono, which was a wonderful offer, but as you'll find out later in the podcast in more detail, access to any original samples from the case, isn't possible at this stage.

ACT V

When I went back over Kathleen's timeline on Friday based on independent eyewitnesses, the only time Kathleen could have been killed can be limited to a very narrow period. Keep in mind, Russell Luke, the entomologist told police initially that she was killed no later than 3:00AM Friday. The police investigated her murder and a prosecution case was built around Andrew Fitzherbert based on that timeframe. It was only after Andrew had been charged and after the committal that Luke changed his time of death calculation to 3:00PM Friday.

The last reliable independent sighting of Kathleen was at 5:00PM Friday and that was when she drove past a neighbour's property on Main Avenue. So we can add at least five minutes to that time for her to park her car at her home, go inside, collect the surgery keys, and go downstairs to the surgery. We can't say for sure she could have spent more time at her home before she got to the surgery.

Kathleen was due at a restaurant called Lisa's in Milton at 7:00PM for the singles club dinner, she herself had arranged. But her body was found in the clothes she was dressed in on Friday during the day. That exact outfit, a short sleeve dress with light blue stripes, was confirmed by the old school friend who sighted her that morning at the newsagents.

The restaurant where she was due to attend the L’Epicure dinner was about a 15-minute drive from her home, and she likely took at least 15 minutes to get ready to go out. That puts her time of death between shortly after 5:00PM when neighbour Warren Smith saw her drive back home and before 6:30 when she would've had to leave the surgery to go upstairs and get ready to go out and travel to her dinner, that started at 7:00PM. So, Kathleen was most likely attacked on Friday, March 27th, 1998, sometime shortly after five in the afternoon, and at the latest 6:30 PM.

But there's something I found in the police files that might give an even more accurate time of death, something that appears to have been overlooked.

Next time on Murder and the Hellcats. 

TED DUHS: Her interest, strong interest when she was treasurer from 1991, right through to 1997, was to root out the corruption that she saw, 

RHODA HALL: 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.

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