Western Australia 1979 Cold Case Solved – Arrest Shocks Community
Detectives have recovered male DNA from the murder crime scene of Karen Tate, a cold case that’s been shrouded in rumors and conspiracy theories. Police are renewing their offer of a $1 million reward to help crack the 43-year-old murder mystery. She carried a black motorcycle helmet with her almost everywhere she went.
She didn’t own a motorcycle. She didn’t even own a car. But in Perth in the summer of 1979, a young woman standing on the side of the road with a helmet in her hand had a much better chance of catching a ride. And Karen Tate got around almost entirely on rides that other people gave her. She was 22 years old, new to the city, and on the last Saturday morning of December, she stood on a curb in Mount Lawley with that helmet in her hand waiting to be picked up.
She had somewhere to be, 40 km away in the hills outside Perth. She never arrived. Less than 30 hours later, her body was found in the bush, burned beyond recognition, identified only by a pendant her friends remembered her wearing at Christmas. For 45 years, the man responsible had a name that nobody knew.
The evidence that could have identified him sat sealed in storage waiting for forensic science to catch up to the crime. It finally did, not through a confession, not through a witness, but through a family tree that grew to more than 10,000 names before it narrowed down to one. Karen Mary Tate was born in Victoria in April 1957 and raised across the country in New South Wales.
In 1978, she gave birth to twins. One of them died. Not long after, she left the East Coast behind, crossed more than 3,000 km of desert, and arrived in Perth completely alone, 22 years old, and starting over in a city that felt like the edge of the world. Perth in the late 1970s sat closer to Singapore than to Sydney.
Cut off from the rest of the country by a thousand kilometers of nothing. The population had only just passed a million. Summers were warm, front doors went unlocked, and hitchhiking wasn’t considered reckless. It was simply how people got around, especially people like Karen who moved through the city on whatever ride happened to come past.
By the summer of 1979, she’d been in Perth about a year, renting a room on Barley Street in Mount Lawley, a neighborhood of wide streets and Edwardian houses just north of the city center. Her friends were scattered across the suburbs, and most weekends found her hitching one ride after another between them. On Friday the 28th of December, she went to a dance at the North Cottesloe Surf Life Saving Club out on the coast.
She stayed the night at a friend’s place in Swanbourne, and the next morning that same friend drove her back to Mount Lawley and dropped her on Barley Street a little after 11. She had plans for the rest of the day. A family she knew was going away, and she’d agreed to look after their property in Karagullen, a small settlement in the hills about 40 kilometers southeast of the city.
Five days earlier, on Christmas Day, she’d shared a drink with that same family at the house, and they’d noticed the jewelry she had on, a watch, an earring, a bangle, a pendant, a ring. Small details that, within days, would matter more than anyone could have known. How Karen planned to get from Mount Lawley to Karagullen was never recorded, but anyone who knew her could guess.
She stood on the curb with her helmet, and she waited. A woman later told police she’d seen a young woman riding on the back of a motorcycle with a man heading toward the hills that afternoon. Whether it was Karen has never been confirmed. She was never seen alive again. Just before 6:00 that evening, a forestry worker spotted smoke rising from the bush south of Brookton Highway.
By the time anyone reached it, the flames had burned out and the ground was still warm. The following morning, forestry workers went back in. Off a gravel track at a clearing locals knew as Boulder Rock, hemmed in on every side by jarrah trunks, out of sight of any road or door, they found her.
She was slumped over a smoldering tree stump, the ground around her blackened, the air still holding the smell of burnt eucalyptus. She had been beaten with a heavy piece of wood. Then, after she was already dead, someone had built a fire around her body and fed it with whatever the forest floor offered: bark, dry leaves, fallen branches.
The flames had scorched her remains but hadn’t consumed them, and it was the pendant her friends remembered from Christmas that finally confirmed who she was. Whoever left her there had chosen the spot with care. It was 800 m of gravel off the highway, far enough into the jarrah forest that nobody would stumble onto it by accident.
Western Australia police detectives arrived to process the scene and begin reconstructing Karen’s final hours. They could account for her movements up until 11:00 that Saturday morning. After that, every lead went cold. Officers canvassed Mount Lawley and the suburbs along the route to the hills. They spoke to her friends, to the people who’d been with her at the surf club dance, to anyone who knew her from the share houses and the arts community of inner city Perth.
On the 3rd of January 1980, a young woman called Crime Stoppers. She said she’d been walking with her boyfriend when she saw a girl on the back of a motorcycle with a man across the road from where they stood. She wouldn’t give her name. She never called back and the rider was never identified. Then a second, stranger lead emerged.
In the months before her death, Karen had been attending introductory talks on witchcraft, 13 of them over roughly a quarter of the year, though she’d never been initiated into a coven, and the clearing where she was found happened to be a site local Wiccan groups used for rituals. Perth’s tabloids ran with it for weeks. A self-described warlock from a Freemantle coven called the Daily News to publicly deny any connection.
Police investigated the lecture attendees, found nothing, and closed the line of inquiry. But the story kept running in the papers for months anyway. What detectives actually had, the whole time, was something far more useful than a theory, biological material recovered from the clearing, an unknown male DNA profile pulled from what the fire hadn’t destroyed.
In 1979, that profile was worthless. DNA fingerprinting didn’t exist yet as a forensic tool. So, officers did the only thing they could. They sealed the evidence, logged it, and put it into storage. Years passed. The file moved from one generation of cold case detectives to the next. Each new team read the same interview notes, studied the same crime scene photographs, and asked the same question, had science caught up yet? For a long time, the answer was always no.
It finally started to change in 1984, when geneticist Alec Jeffreys developed DNA fingerprinting at the University of Leicester in England. Three years later, English police used the technique to identify a man named Colin Pitchfork as the killer of two teenage girls, the first time DNA evidence had ever solved a murder anywhere in the world.
Australian police forces adopted the method gradually through the early 1990s, and when the sample from the Karrakatta clearing was finally tested, it came back clean. Strong enough for comparison, strong enough, detectives hoped, to finally give the case a name. They ran it through the Western Australia database, nothing.
They ran it through the national database, which held the profile of anyone ever convicted of a serious offense, still nothing. Every fresh entry added to the system in the years that followed came back the same way. A reward of $1 million was posted for information that could identify him. It brought a wave of media coverage.
It brought no name. 45 years of freedom for the man responsible. A woman dead in the bushland southeast of Perth, and a brother and sister still waiting to hear who had done this to their sister. The case never fully left the public consciousness. It resurfaced every few years in anniversary stories, in podcasts, in television specials that came back to it again and again, always ending the same way.
During one of those rounds of coverage, the Tate family released a statement. Hearing Karen’s name and seeing her face, they said, still brought them to their knees. They asked anyone who knew anything to come forward so they could finally understand what had happened. In January 2024, the official cold case Western Australia podcast, produced by the state police force itself, featured an episode on her murder.
The host, Neil Poe, interviewed her siblings about their memories of Karen and what they still hoped for. By the time it aired, the case was 44 years cold. Her DNA profile was still sitting in the state database, matched to no one. But elsewhere in the world, cold cases exactly like this one had already started falling, not through new suspects, but through a technique that looked nothing like traditional police work.
It’s called investigative genetic genealogy, and it works entirely outside police databases. Instead of searching criminal records, investigators compare a crime scene profile against the DNA of ordinary people. People who sent in a cheek swab to a commercial ancestry site hoping to trace their family tree or find long-lost cousins. If anyone in that database turns out to be a close enough biological relative of the person police are searching for, the system flags it.
From there, investigators build outward, branch by branch, until the tree leads them to one person. It’s the same method that identified California’s Golden State Killer in 2018. Western Australia’s cold case unit had used it since to close several historic sexual and missing persons cases.
In 2024, the profile recovered from the Karagullen clearing went to the unit’s genealogy team. It worked. The search returned hits, genetic relatives of the man they were looking for, sitting in the database. Detectives began building his family tree. It grew past 10,000 people, parents, children, siblings, cousins, branches stretching across generations and across the country.
Then it started shrinking. Every man of the right age had to be checked against residential records, employment history, proof of where he’d been in December 1979. Men too young were eliminated. Men too old were eliminated. Men living interstate, men with alibis, men confirmed to have been somewhere else entirely, gone. 10,000 became 1,000.
1,000 became 100. And then the branches ran out and one name was left standing. Terence John Fisher. He’d been born on the 11th of February, 1950, in Mount Lawley. The same suburb where Karen had been dropped off on the last morning of her life. In December 1979, he was 29 years old, living across the Swan River in Rivervale and Manning.
He’d served in the Australian Army from 1970 to 1972, mostly stationed in Townsville, and married in 1973. His mother died earlier that same year Karen was killed. Roughly 2 years after the murder, he and his wife separated. They’d had no children. By trade, Fisher was a carpenter employed by the public works department on government building projects across Perth and regional Western Australia.
At some point, he took a voluntary redundancy and ran his own business until he died. Away from work, he was a member of the Fremantle Sailing Club where he raced offshore and socialized with the regulars. Through the early 1980s, in a warehouse in Carlisle, he spent years building a yacht of his own and launched it in 1985. When he wasn’t at the club, he drank at pubs around Manning, Victoria Park, and Carlisle.
He lived with his father in Manning until the 27th of August 2000 when he died of natural causes in a Perth hospital. He was 50 years old. Fisher had never been questioned about Karen Tate. He had never been listed as a person of interest. No arrest in his entire life had ever put his DNA into a police database. His family, his friends, the men he’d raced alongside for years at the sailing club, none of them had any reason to think he was anything other than the ordinary man they’d known.
But Fisher’s name didn’t end with Karen Tate. Detectives had two other case files open. Two other women whose bodies had turned up in that same stretch of Jarrah country southeast of Perth. If Fisher were alive today, they’d be questioning him about both. The first was Barbara Anne Weston, a 38-year-old mother of two from East Victoria Park.
On the night of Friday, June 27th, 1986, she’d been out drinking at the Balmoral Hotel and Irene’s Park Tavern along Albany Highway wearing a distinctive orange parka. She left around 11:30 p.m. She never made it home. Her remains weren’t found until March 1991 when two people out collecting firewood stumbled onto a small clearing off a sand track near Canning Dam, 15 m into the bush.
Her personal items recovered from under a fallen tree trunk nearby. She’d been left in the same forest where Karen was killed 7 years earlier, just 500 m from where Karen was found. For years, suspicion in Barbara’s case had fallen on Catherine and David Birnie, the couple who abducted and murdered four young women across 5 weeks in 1986.
Detectives even walked David Birnie through the Carabooda bush themselves. Forensically, the Birnies were never connected to her death, and while public attention stayed fixed on the country’s most notorious killers, the man whose DNA had been sitting in evidence storage since 1979 was at the sailing club in Fremantle, racing offshore.
The second was Kerry Suzanne Turner, 18 years old, still living at home with her parents in Beckenham, working part-time as a shop assistant. In the early hours of Sunday, June 30th, 1991, she left a Perth nightclub called Pinocchio’s and caught a taxi home. Partway through the trip, the driver realized she couldn’t cover the fare and put her out on the Causeway in East Perth.
A second taxi picked her up, drove her as far as the corner of Shepperton Road and Miller Street, and did the same thing. A witness at a nearby takeaway shop watched a dark blue car, possibly a Datsun 260C, with distinctive spoked wheels pull up behind her. The driver called out. She walked over, got in, and the car drove off.
Her body was found 4 weeks later in bushland at Bedfordale, south of the city. Three women, three decades, each one last seen alive on the streets of inner-city Perth. Each one found dead in the same stretch of Jarrah forest south of Brookton Highway, or just beyond it. Detectives believe Fisher may have been responsible for all three deaths, but he can’t be questioned.
He can’t be charged. He can’t be tried. Whatever he did to Barbara Weston and Kerry Turner has never come to light, and now it may never. On the 12th of March, 2025, Western Australia Police held a press conference and formally named Terrence John Fisher as a suspect in the 1979 murder of Corrine Mary Tate. The genetic evidence connecting him to the crime scene, they said, was strong.
His family had been told and were cooperating with the investigation. Acting Assistant Commissioner Paul Cooms spoke first. In the 45 years since Corrine’s death, he said, police had never stopped trying to find the person responsible. Countless investigators had worked the case, one generation after another.
They might never know why it happened. But with the public’s help, he hoped they could still bring the family some measure of comfort. Detective Acting Senior Sergeant Dion Selby, the investigations lead, asked anyone with memories of Fisher’s routines and movements to come forward. Detectives already knew a great deal about him, he said.
They wanted to know more. Police set up a mobile facility at 12 Tain 87 Brookton Highway in Karagullen, close to where Corrine’s body had been found 45 years earlier, and stayed there for the day, asking the public for anything they could remember. Corrine’s sister, Anne-Marie, spoke to the Cold Case Western Australia podcast afterward.
It meant a great deal, she said. It gave her more faith in the detectives and in everyone who’d worked the case over the decades. And there was something else, too, a kind of peace. He was already dead. He wasn’t going to hurt anyone else. Her brother, Matt, spoke as well. There was something strange about the whole thing, he said. Somebody doesn’t just kill somebody for any odd reason.
There will be no trial, no sentencing, no moment in a courtroom where Karen’s family gets to watch the person responsible face what he did. The man who killed her was already in the ground 25 years before anyone learned his name. He’d worked his trade, built his yacht, raced it out of Fremantle, and died in a hospital bed like anyone else.
He never answered for what he did to Karen Tate. And if detectives are right about Barbara Weston and Kerry Turner, he never answered for what he did to them, either. A 22-year-old woman once stood on a curb in Mount Lawley with a black motorcycle helmet in her hand, waiting for whatever ride came next.
The DNA left behind in the clearing where she was found sat in an evidence room for 45 years. By the time anyone finally read the name attached to it, the man who owned it had been dead for a quarter of a century, born in the very same suburb where she’d last been seen alive. If this case has stayed with you, let us know in the comments.
More solved cases are waiting in the playlist below.
