Perth 1979 Cold Case Solved – Arrest Shocks Community

Potential serial killer has tonight been unmasked 45 years after the murder of Mount Lawley woman Karen Tate. Police today put a face to DNA found at the Karagullen crime scene.  On the morning of December 30th, 1979, forestry workers in the bushland south of Brookton Highway came across the remains of a fire.

 The clearing was at Boulder Rock near Karagullen in the hills southeast of Perth. A woman’s body lay slumped over a smoldering tree stump. She had been beaten with a piece of wood and then set alight. A friend had dropped her off in Mount Lawley the morning before and she had not been seen since. She was 22 years old.

 She hitchhiked everywhere she went and carried a black motorcycle helmet with her in case someone on a bike offered her a ride. In 1979, no forensic lab in the world could read the male DNA the killer had left behind. The samples were sealed and put into storage. It took 45 years to find out who had stopped for her. Her name was Karen Mary Tate.

Born in Victoria in April 1957, she had been raised in New South Wales. In 1978, she gave birth to twins. One of them died. Not long after, Karen left the east coast, crossed the Nullarbor, and arrived  in Perth alone 3,000 km from everywhere she knew. She was 22 years old  and starting again. Perth in the late ’70s felt a long way from anywhere else.

 Closer to Singapore than to Sydney, it was separated from the rest of the country by a thousand kilometers of desert. The population had just passed a million. The city ran along the Swan River from the port of Fremantle in the west to the foothills of the Darling Range in the east. The summers were warm. People left their doors unlocked and women hitchhiked alone.

A young woman could stand on the side of a road with her thumb out and get into a stranger’s car and nobody thought she was being reckless. It was how everyone got around, especially Karen, who did not own a car and moved through the world on whatever ride came past. By the summer of 1979, Karen had been in Perth for about a year.

She was renting on Barley Street in Mount Lawley, a neighborhood of Edwardian houses and wide streets just north of the city center. Her friends were spread across the suburbs, and most weekends she was on the move between them. On the evening of Friday, December 28th, 1979, Karen went to a dance at the North Cottesloe Surf Life Saving Club on the coast  west of the city.

She spent the night at a friend’s place in Swanbourne. The next morning, Saturday, December 29th, that friend drove her back to Mount Lawley and dropped her on Barley Street around 11:00 a.m. Karen had plans for the rest of the day. She was going to travel south to look after a property for a family who were away.

The house was at Karagullen, a small settlement about 40 km southeast of Perth in the foothills of the Darling Range. Five days earlier, on Christmas Day, she had shared a drink with that family at the house. They had noticed the jewelry she was wearing, a watch, an earring, a bangle, a pendant, and a ring. How Karen planned to get from Mount Lawley to Karagullen is not recorded, but anyone who knew her could guess.

She stood on the curb with her helmet and waited. A witness later told police she’d seen a young woman on the back of a motorcycle with a man heading toward the hills that afternoon. Whether it was Karen has never been confirmed. She never reached the house she was meant to be looking after. Around 6:00 p.m.

 that evening, a forestry worker reported smoke in the bush south of Brookton Highway. By the time anyone got to it, the flames were out and the ground was warm. The body was formally located the next morning. She was identified by the pendant the family had seen her wearing at Christmas. The clearing was small, hemmed in by jarrah trunks on all sides.

The ground blackened and the smell of burnt eucalyptus oil hanging in the still air. The post-mortem found severe head and facial injuries from a heavy piece of wood. After Karen had been killed, someone had built a fire around her body in the clearing. They fed it with whatever was at hand, bark, fallen branches, dry leaves from the forest floor.

The flames had charred her remains but had not consumed them. The remains had been left at Boulder Rock, a formation in the jarrah forest that the locals knew by name. The track in was 800 m of gravel off Brookton Highway and no house lay within sight of it. Whoever had brought her there had taken her far enough into the bush to reach somewhere out of view from any road and any door.

Western Australia police detectives processed the scene and began reconstructing Karen’s final hours.    They could account for her movements up to 11:00 a.m. Saturday. After that, every line of inquiry came up short. Officers canvassed Mount Lawley and the suburbs along the route to the hills.

 They interviewed her friends and acquaintances, the people she had been with at the surf club dance,    anyone who knew her from the arts community and the share houses of inner city Perth. On January 3rd, 1980, a young woman called Crime Stoppers anonymously. She had been walking with her boyfriend, she said, when she saw the girl on a motorbike with a man across the road in the bush.

 The caller would not give her name. She did not call back  and the rider was never identified. A separate line of inquiry took time and attention. In the months before her death, Karen had been attending introductory talks on witchcraft. She had been to 13 of them over about a quarter of the year, although she had never been initiated into a coven.

The place she had been left was a rock formation that local Wicca groups used for rituals. Perth tabloids ran with the angle for weeks. A self-described warlock from a Freemantle coven called the Daily News to deny any link. Police pursued the lead, looked at the people involved in the lectures, and rejected the theory.

The story ran anyway, for months. What detectives did have was biological material from the clearing. The fire had not finished its work. Crime scene officers recovered an unknown male DNA profile from what was left. In 1979, that profile was useless. DNA fingerprinting did not exist as a forensic tool.

 The science that could extract a genetic signature from biological material was five years from being invented at a university in England. The first criminal case it would solve was seven years away. Officers sealed the evidence and put it into storage. Years passed. The file moved from one generation of cold case detectives to the next.

 New officers came in. They read through the original interview notes, looked at the crime scene photographs,    and asked whether forensic science had advanced far enough to do something with the male profile in evidence storage. Each generation got the same answer. In the United Kingdom in 1984, the geneticist Alec Jeffreys  developed DNA fingerprinting at the University of Leicester.

Two years later, the technique was used to identify a man called Colin Pitchfork as the killer of two teenage girls. Australian police forces adopted the method gradually through the early ’90s. When the biological material from the Karrakatta clearing was finally tested, a clean male DNA profile came back from the lab.

 It was strong enough for forensic comparison. Detectives ran it through the Western Australia DNA database. They tried the national one next, which held profiles from anyone convicted of an offense serious enough to require a sample. The search returned nothing. Every fresh entry added to the system across the decades that followed came back the same.

A reward of $1 million was posted for information that would lead to his identification. It produced fresh media coverage and a wave of public attention. It produced no name. 45 years of freedom for the killer, a dead woman in the bushland southeast of Perth, and her brother and sister still waiting on a name.

Karen’s death stayed in Perth’s public consciousness through anniversaries, podcasts, and television features that returned to it year after year. The Tate family released a statement during one of those rounds of media coverage. Hearing Karen’s name and seeing her face still brought them to their knees and broke their hearts, they said.

They asked anyone who knew something to please come forward so that they could at least understand what had happened. In January 2024, the official Cold Case Western Australia podcast, produced by the state police force, featured an episode on Karen’s murder. The host, Neil Poe, interviewed her siblings about their memories of Karen and what they still hoped for.

By the time the episode aired, the case was 44 years cold. The DNA profile was still sitting in the state database with no match. In the early 2020s, the Cold Case Unit turned to investigative genetic genealogy, a technique that had been transforming unsolved cases across the world.

 It worked outside law enforcement databases. A crime scene profile was compared against the DNA of ordinary people who had sent samples to commercial ancestry sites to trace their family lines and find distant cousins. If anyone in the database was a close enough biological relative to the man whose DNA had been left in the clearing, the system would flag the match.

 From there, investigators could build a family tree and work backward through the branches until they arrived at the person himself. The technique had identified the Golden State Killer in California in 2018. Western Australia detectives had used it since to solve several historic sex offenses and missing persons cases.

In 2024, the Karrakatta profile was handed to the unit’s genealogy team and uploaded. The search returned hits and the killer’s biological relatives were in the database. Detectives began building the tree. It grew to more than 10,000 people. Parents, children, siblings, cousins, distant relatives branching across generations and across the country.

Each male in the relevant age range had to be checked against residential records, employment history, and proximity to Perth in December 1979. Men who were too young, too old, living interstate, or confirmed to have been elsewhere on the day of the murder were eliminated. 10,000 became 1,000. 1,000 became  100.

The branches were cut until one name remained. His name was Terrence John Fisher. Fisher had been born on February 11th, 1950 in Mount Lawley. The same suburb where Karen Tait was dropped off on Barley Street on the last morning of her life. In December 1979, Fisher was 29 years old living in Rivervale and Manning just across the Swan River from Mount Lawley.

He had served in the Australian Army from 1970 to 1972, mostly based in Townsville. He had married in 1973. His mother had died earlier in 1979, the same year Karen was killed. Two years after the murder, Fisher separated from his wife. The pair had no children. By trade, Fisher was a carpenter employed by the Public Works Department on the construction of government buildings across Perth and regional Western Australia.

He took a voluntary redundancy at some point and ran his own business until he died. Fisher was also 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 built a yacht of his own. The project took years and he launched it in 1985.

When he was not at the Sailing Club, Fisher drank at pubs around Manning, Victoria Park, and Carlisle. He lived with his father in Manning until August 27th, 2000, when he died of natural causes in a Perth hospital. He was 50 years old. Fisher had never been questioned about Karen Tite.

 He had never been listed as a person of interest. No arrest in his life had ever put his DNA into a police database. His family, his friends, and the men of the Fremantle Sailing Club, who had raced alongside him for years, had no reason to think he was anything other than the man they had known. Fisher’s name did not stop with Karen Tite.

Detectives had two other case files open on women whose bodies had been found in the Jarrah country southeast of Perth. If Fisher were alive today, they would have been questioning him about both. The first was Barbara Ann Weston. She was a 38-year-old mother of two from East Victoria Park. On the night of Friday, June 27th, 1986, Barbara had been drinking at the Balmoral Hotel and Irene’s Park Tavern along Albany Highway, wearing a distinctive orange parka.

She left the tavern around 11:30 p.m. She did not return home. In March 1991, two people collecting firewood off a sand track near Canning Dam, Caragullen, found her bones in a small clearing 15 m into the bush. Personal items belonging to her were recovered under a fallen tree trunk nearby.

 Barbara had been left in the same stretch of Jarrah forest where Karen Tate had been killed 7 years earlier, 500 m from the spot where Karen was found. For years, suspicion in the Western case had fallen on Catherine and David Birnie, the Perth couple who had abducted and murdered four young women across 5 weeks in 1986. Detectives took David Birnie to Karrakatta and walked him through the area.

 Forensically, the Birnies had never been linked to Barbara’s death. While public attention focused on the country’s most notorious killers, the man whose DNA had been sitting in evidence storage from a Karrakatta clearing 7 years earlier was at the sailing club in Fremantle racing offshore. The second was Kerry Suzanne Turner, an 18-year-old who lived with her parents in Beckenham and worked part-time as a shop assistant.

In the early hours of Sunday, June 30th, 1991, Kerry left a Perth nightclub called Pinocchio’s and took a taxi to head home. The driver realized mid-trip that she could not pay the fare and put her out on the Causeway in East Perth. A second taxi picked her up, took her as far as the corner of Shepperton Road and Miller Street in East Victoria Park, and dropped her off for the same reason.

 A witness at a nearby takeaway shop saw a dark blue car, possibly a Datsun 260C with spoked wheels, pull up behind Kerry. The driver called out. She walked over, got in, and the car drove away.    Her body was found 4 weeks later in bushland at Bedfordale, south of Perth. Three women, three decades.

Each one last seen alive on the streets of inner-city Perth. Each one found dead in the bushland southeast of the city in the same stretch of Jarrah country south of Brookton Highway or just beyond it. Detectives believe Fisher may have been responsible for all three of those deaths.

 He cannot be questioned, charged, or tried. Whatever he did to Barbara Weston and Kerry Turner has never come to light. On March 12th, 2025, Western Australia Police held a press conference and named Terrence John Fisher as a suspect in the 1979 murder of Karen Mary Tate. The genetic evidence linking him to the crime scene, they said, was strong.

Fisher’s family had been informed and were cooperating with the investigation.    Acting Assistant Commissioner Paul Coombes spoke first. In the 45 years since the tragic death of Karen Tate, he said,    we have never stopped trying to find the person responsible. Countless investigators have worked tirelessly on this case.

 We may never know the motivations for this horrific crime, but with the public’s help, we may be able to bring some comfort to the Tate family. Leading investigator  Detective Acting Senior Sergeant Dion Selby asked the public to come forward with anything they could remember about Fisher’s regular movements.

 The team knew a great deal about him already, Selby said, but they wanted to know more. Detectives set up a mobile police facility at 1287 Brookton Highway, Karagullen,  near the spot where Karen had been found. They stayed there for the day, asking the public for help. Karen’s sister, Anne Marie, spoke to the Cold Case Western Australia podcast.

 “It meant a great deal,” she said, “because it gave her more faith in the detectives and all the people who had worked together over the years.” The other thing she felt was peace of mind. He was obviously deceased. He was not going to hurt anybody else. Her brother, Matt, spoke too.

 “There was something strange about the whole thing,” he said. “Somebody doesn’t just kill somebody for any odd reason.” The announcement came 45 years after Karen’s body had been found in the bush and 25 years after Fisher’s death.    No arrest could be made. The killer was already in the ground. He had worked his trade, built his yacht, sailed for the club, and died in a hospital bed.

 He had never answered for what he had done to Karen Tate. And if police are right about Barbara Weston and Kerry Turner, he had never answered for what he had done to them, either. A 22-year-old woman carried a black motorcycle helmet with her everywhere she went, ready for whatever ride came next.

 The day NA left in the clearing where she was found sat in evidence storage for 45 years. The man it belonged to had been dead for a quarter of a century by the time anyone learned his name. He had been born in the same suburb where she was last seen alive. If this case stayed with you, leave your thoughts in the comments.

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