Western Australia 1979 Cold Case Solved: Arrest Shocks Community

A man commits a murder in 1979. In the year 2000, quietly he dies. No witnesses, no confession. And in 1979, DNA technology didn’t exist at all. Yet 45 years later, police say his name out loud. How? Because one of his relatives uploaded their DNA to a genealogy website, and the thread connecting them ran all the way back to the 1700s.

The 30th of December 1979, about 40 kilometers southeast of Perth in the dense bushland of Caragullan, forestry department workers arrive to investigate a small fire. What they find instead is a body. From that morning onward, for the next 45 years, this becomes one of the most infamous unsolved murders in Western Australia.

Today we’re going to walk through step by step exactly how that lock was finally opened. Her name was Karen Mary Tate. Born in April 1957 in Victoria. When she was one year old, her family moved to New South Wales and that’s where she grew up and was educated. In 1978, she made a decision that thousands of young Australians were making at the time.

 She left her home state and traveled to the other side of the country to Western Australia. New city, new people, a fresh start. In the single year she spent in Perth, Karen worked in the arts. She had a wide circle of friends and people who knew her remember a sociable, outgoing young woman. There’s one other detail, completely ordinary for that era, that matters here. She often hitchhiked.

 She would stand at the side of the road and ask a passing car for a lift. Today, that makes us flinch. But in 1970s Australia, it wasn’t considered reckless or strange. It was simply how a lot of people got around. Hold on to that detail because we’ll come back to it right at the end. 22 years old, a new city, a life that had barely started.

The night of the 28th of December, 1979, Karen was out with friends in Perth’s coastal suburbs, Cotislow and Swanborn. That evening, there was a dance at the North Cotislow Surf Life-Saving Club. Nothing about it was unusual. It was a summer night at the beach with people she knew.

 The next morning, the 29th of December, at 11:00, a friend dropped her home, Mount Lley on Barley Street. That was the last time Karen Tate was seen alive. According to police, she intended to travel out to Caragullan that same afternoon. Friends had asked her to housesit for them. Caragullan sits about 40 km from Mount Liy up in the hills east of Perth. She never arrived.

 And here we reach the emptiest part of this entire story. from 11:00 in the morning on the 29th of December until the following morning where she went, who she met, whose car she got into. There is no record. Police have never been able to fill in those hours. Nearly half a century later, that 24-hour window is still a blank page.

 The 30th of December, half 10 in the morning. The Canning Dam catchment area, forestry department workers arrive to check on a small bush fire. The bush is thick. They’re roughly 800 m in from Brookton Highway. That’s far enough off the road that nobody stumbles in there by accident. Whoever went in there went in deliberately.

 That’s where they find Karen Tate’s body. The post-mortem revealed two things, and neither is easy to say. The first, she had suffered severe head and facial injuries inflicted with a large piece of wood. The second, afterwards, her body was set on fire. The fire is the crulest part of this case. Whoever did this wasn’t only taking a life, he was destroying evidence.

 And in the dry heat of an Australian summer, that fire spread and swept through the entire area where she lay. Think about what that means. A crime scene burned first by the killer, then by a bushfire. Footprints gone, tire marks gone, fibers, fabric, trace evidence, all of it reduced to ash. He had almost completely erased a forensic scene. Almost.

 Now, here’s the fundamental obstacle in this story, and you have to understand it or nothing that follows will land properly. What did forensic science actually mean in 1979? Fingerprints, blood type, just the group, A, B, or O, witness statements, tire, and shoe impressions. That was it. DNA profiling.

 The technique didn’t exist anywhere in the world. It emerged in the mid 1980s, years after Karen Tate was killed, which means the police working this case in 1979 did not have and could not have had the one tool that would eventually break it open. So, here’s what happened instead. They took statements. They searched the area. They interviewed her friends.

 They worked the hitchhiking angle. The file got thicker and thicker and the results stayed exactly the same. Nothing. But there’s one small decision that would change everything decades later. The forensic material collected at that scene was preserved. Nobody knew what was hidden inside it. The police of that era couldn’t read that sample, but they didn’t throw it away either.

 That choice, routine at the time, became the foundation of this entire story. 45 years on. Now the decades pass and when a case stays unsolved for that long, something strange happens to it. Rumor starts filling the space where evidence should be. For years, a story circulated in Perth that Keran’s murder was connected to some kind of a cult or witchcraft group.

 The fire, the bush land, the unusual circumstances. People wo all of it into a narrative. Police rejected that theory outright. As far as they were concerned, there was nothing to support it. But the damage was already done. When a false story becomes the popular one, the real questions get buried. People stop asking who was actually on that road that night.

 They start talking about mystery instead of evidence. Through all of it, Karen’s family waited. And that sample sat in an evidence store, silent, waiting for a technology that hadn’t been invented yet. The year 2023, more than four decades have gone by. WA police make an announcement that brings the case roaring back to life.

 An unknown male DNA profile has been recovered from the crime scene. A complete genetic profile belonging to a man, and police believe it belongs to the person who killed Karen Tate. But there was a problem, and it’s the single biggest problem in the entire forensic system. A DNA profile only works if you have something to match it against, and you only get a match in a police database if that person has been arrested at some point and had their DNA taken.

 Terren John Fischer’s DNA was not in any police database, and he had died in the year 2000. There was no way to get a sample from him. So, police had the killer’s complete genetic map, but there was no name written on it. They had a key with no lock. And this is the exact moment where the story stops being an ordinary murder investigation and turns into something else entirely.

That profile was handed to the WA Police Investigative Genetic Genealogy Team, IGG for short. And the core idea behind it is so simple it’s almost startling nobody got there sooner. If the killer’s DNA isn’t in a database, fine. His relatives DNA might be. Over the last decade, millions of people around the world have sent their DNA off to ancestry websites.

 Why? To find out where their ancestors came from, what their heritage is, whether there’s a long lost cousin out there somewhere. It’s a hobby, a family curiosity. Some of those websites, Gead Match and Family Tree DNA among them, give users the option to make their data available to law enforcement as well. It is strictly optin.

 Unless you actively say yes, police cannot look at your data. And according to WA police’s own IGG specialists, only around 10% of the people in those databases have opted in. So, police took that unknown profile and ran it against the public genealogy databases and matches came back. But, and this is the crucial part, not a match to the killer, matches to his relatives, people who had never heard Karen Tate’s name in their lives.

 People who had no idea their DNA was sitting inside a murder investigation. Geneticist Dr. Gemma Bry explains it this way. This isn’t some brand new breakthrough in DNA technology. The analysis and the websites have both existed for a long time. What’s new is the angle you look from. Instead of searching that DNA for the individual, you search it for family relationships.

Now, here’s the part that made this case famous around the world. The relatives who came back weren’t close. No brother, no son, no first cousin. These were distant relatives. Distant enough that the common ancestor between them and the killer sat many generations back. And the rule in genetics is this.

 You can only prove a relationship between two people once you climb back to the shared point where their bloodlines were one. So the team started climbing. One generation, two, three. And according to WA police’s own account, in this case, they had to go back into the 1700s. Stop and sit with that for a second.

 The era they climbed back to predates European settlement in Australia. This is a century where births and deaths were recorded by hand on paper in church registers. At this point, the work stops being about test tubes. It becomes about records, birth certificates, death certificates, marriage records, parish registers, shipping manifests, the documents that recorded which family came out to Australia on which vessel, census entries, old death notices printed in newspapers.

That’s what investigative genetic genealogy actually is. Half genetics, half historical research. a laboratory on one side, an archive on the other. The team found that ancestor who was alive in the 1700s, and then they turned around and traveled back down. That ancestors children, their children, every branch, every generation, working downward, and a tree grew, a family tree that eventually contained more than 10,000 people, 10,000 names.

 Every single one of them needing a birth, a marriage, a death confirmed. Every branch attached in the right place. One wrong connection. And the whole tree points in the wrong direction. So now picture it. A tree with 10,000 people on it. And somewhere in there is one man, exactly one, who killed Karen Tate in the Caragullan bush in 1979.

The question is, how do you eliminate the other 9,999? This is where the genetics stops and old-fashioned detective work begins. Cold case investigations detectives started applying filters to that tree. The first filter, sex. The profile from the crime scene belonged to a man. Roughly half the tree fell away immediately. The second age.

 The killer had to be old enough in 1979 to have committed the crime. Anyone who was a child at the time or who hadn’t been born yet was gone. The third date of death. Anyone who had already died before 1979 was impossible. The fourth, and the most important, geography. He had to be in Western Australia on that particular day.

 Not just in Australia, in that specific part of Perth, at that specific time, every branch of the tree sitting in another country or another state was cut away. Filter after filter, the number began collapsing. 10,000, a thousand, 100, 10, and then one name was left. Terrence John Fischer. The 13th of March 2025. WA police call a press conference.

 45 years on, a name is attached to this murder for the first time. Police name Terrence John Fischer as a suspect in the killing of Karen Tate. Acting assistant commissioner Paul Kums delivered the message that really sums up the whole story. Western Australia police never give up. Across those 45 years, countless investigators worked this case and the effort never stopped.

But there was a bitter edge to that announcement because Fiser had died in the year 2000. He was 50 years old, which means, and this has to stay absolutely clear, he was never charged. There was never a trial. No court ever found him guilty of anything. He is a suspect named by police. That’s the whole of it.

 There’s another side to it, though. For 45 years, what happened in that bush land had no face at all. Now it does. So, who was Terrence John Fischer? From the details WA police released, what emerges is an unremarkable life. He served in the Australian Army from 1970 to 1972, based mostly in Townsville. By trade, he was a carpenter.

 He married in 1973 and separated from his wife around 8 years later. His mother died in 1979, the same year Karen Tate was killed. He was a member of the Fremantle Sailing Club. He was a regular at liquor outlets around Manning, Victoria Park, and Carile. And in 1979, the year of the murder, he was living in the Riverale and Manning areas.

Detective acting senior sergeant Dion Selby made a point at the time that matters. Police know a great deal about this man, but they want to know more. So immediately after the announcement, they did two things. First, they searched a house in Manning where Fischer had lived as a child and where he was also living from 1979.

A search that involved excavation equipment, including a small bobcat. Second, they set up a mobile police facility on Brookton Highway at Caragullan near where Karen Tate was found so that anyone who knew anything about Fischer could come forward. 45 years later, police were back on that road asking questions.

 And then they said something else that changed the scale of this entirely. If Terrence John Fischer were alive today, they said he could have assisted with two other investigations. Barbara Anne Weston, who died in 1986, and Kerry Suzanne Turner, who died in 1991. Pay close attention to the language there because police chose it very carefully.

 They did not say Fischer committed those murders. They said he would be a person of interest, someone they would want to question. That distinction is not a technicality. A dead man cannot defend himself. Declaring someone a killer outside a courtroom, no matter how strong the suspicion, isn’t justice. But one thing is clear, police are no longer looking only at the 1979 file.

 They’ve reopened 1986 and 1991 as well. And they’ve appealed to the public. Any information about Terrence John Fischer, however small, should be brought forward, which means this story isn’t finished. Now, the part of this that tends to get forgotten. Karen Tate’s relative, Anarie Tate, responded to the breakthrough with two things sitting side by side.

 On one side, disappointment. The man police were naming as a suspect was already dead. On the other relief, she said it meant a great deal to them. Across more than 40 years, so many investigators had worked this case and the family’s faith in them had only grown. And there was some peace in knowing that this man could never hurt anyone else.

 But she refused to use one particular word, closure. In her view, it simply doesn’t fit here. That’s worth sitting with. We watch crime documentaries and we come away believing that once the offender is named, the story is complete. For a family, it doesn’t work like that. A name cannot fill the space that’s been empty for 45 years.

 Anmarie Tate also made an appeal of her own. If anyone ever had even the slightest suspicion about Fischer, tell police. Because if he did this to somebody else, those families deserve to know. So where does that leave us? In 1979, by his own reckoning, this man did everything right. He chose a stretch of bush nobody walks through.

 He burned the evidence. He was never arrested, so his DNA never entered a police database. And then he died in the year 2000 completely free. He defeated every single tool the police of 1979 had. But there was one thing he could never control. His relatives DNA. He had probably never met these people.

 They lived in other cities, other countries. Some of them weren’t even born until after he was dead. And one of them on some ordinary day purely out of curiosity about their own family history spat into a tube and posted it off to a website. That one small act opened a lock that had been sealed for 45 years.

 And that’s the real lesson buried in all of this. Modern genetic genealogy can dig through 300 years of history to expose a secret that’s been buried for 45. an anonymous ancestor from the 1700s, someone whose name nobody remembers, whose face nobody has ever seen, and a line running forward from them, arrives at a patch of bush land in 1979.

There’s a flip side to this that’s being argued over around the world right now. When you send your DNA off to a website, you aren’t only handing over information about yourself. You’re revealing something about your siblings, your cousins, and about people who haven’t even been born yet.

 For some, that’s a path to justice. For others, it’s a serious question about privacy. Both of those things can be true at once. But for Karen Tate’s family, the question was never that complicated. Their question was only ever this. Who was out there in that bush on that night? And 45 years later, they finally have an answer.

 If this story has made you wonder how many other old cases could open up the same way, subscribe to the channel because this is not where the series stops and tell me in the comments. Would you send your DNA to an ancestry website, a stretch of bush land, a burned crime scene, and a sample that nobody could read for 40 years? The way to read it was finally found in the 1700s.