Summary: The Queensland Cat Protection Society (QCPS) president was gruesomely murdered in 1998 and everyone assumed it was her arch enemy in the society. No one thought it was a random attack. MURDER AND THE HELLCATS investigates this bizarre true crime, full of characters too strange to be true, and a justice system quick to convict on DNA evidence alone.

When the victim, middle-aged veterinarian Kathleen Marshall, wasn’t helping animals she was defending Brisbane’s heritage architecture, the arts, green spaces or any other worthy cause she turned her attention to. She was the kind of neighbour if you lopped a tree, she‘d likely abuse you and then report you to council. With a sense of superiority and do-goodery, she was known in the neighbourhood as “an absolute bitch”.

It wasn’t surprising when she joined the QCPS that she muscled her way to the top job. But even before her ascendency, the Cat Society was not a cozy club of matronly women bottle-feeding orphaned kitties. With large bequests at stake, it had long been a hotbed of infighting with a history of coups, dodgy accounting, an ASIC investigation, an animal cruelty prosecution, a private detective hired to spy on members, and a prior unsolved murder linked to the group.

Kathleen complained of being stalked and, weeks before her murder, was involved in a physical altercation with another member of the Cat Society — Kathleen’s nemesis and the original person of interest in the case.

Everyone was surprised when Andrew Fitzherbert was arrested for her murder. This slightly built, quiet, middle-aged man who restored books and read palms for a living, was a pacifist and conscientious objector in the Vietnam War. There was no eyewitness, no murder weapon found, no motive established. Yet with just five drops of blood at the scene that matched Andrew’s, the fledgling forensic science of DNA led to his conviction and life sentence. This was the first case in Australian history where DNA evidence alone led to a conviction.