BRINGING THE CLAREMONT KILLER TO JUSTICE
A new book shares more horrific details from the case
It took more than two decades for the families and friends of the Claremont serial killer’s victims to learn what happened to their loved ones. Last December, they finally had some closure when Bradley Edwards was handed a 40-year sentence that will likely see him die in prison.
Perth newspaper editor Bret Christian’s book Stalking Claremont: Inside The Hunt For A Serial Killer covers what became Australia’s longest and most expensive murder investigation and eventual court case. He recalls the charged atmosphere in court when the victims’ families heard the judge’s ruling.
“You could cut it with a knife,” Bret tells Woman’s Day. “Most people were expecting guilty verdicts but it was still a massive moment.”
After evading detection for years, the 52-year-old former Telstra technician was found guilty of the murders, in 1996 and 1997, of Jane Rimmer, 23, and Ciara Glennon, 27, plus two earlier sex attacks.
“But the relatives will never recover from it – even catching Edwards and seeing him sentenced, it doesn’t take away the pain or bring their daughters back,” says Bret.
As well as being a local reporter and living in the area for many years, he has a chilling personal connection to the case. One Sunday morning in February 1995, Bret watched his wife’s reaction on learning a family member had been out partying with one of Edwards’ victims just before she was abducted and assaulted.
“She was on the landline, tears running down her face.
It was a particularly horrible moment – it showed how close to home it all was.”
While this woman survived Edwards’ attack, over the next few years, others would not. And years later, during his seven-month-long trial, a number of brave survivors found the strength to relive their ordeals in court.
The following is an extract from Stalking Claremont...
WITNESS ACCOUNTS
From the witness box came harrowing first-hand accounts of Edwards’ surviving victims, bravely facing their attacker in court.
“A hand came around my face with a cloth on it,” Wendy Davis recalled, her memories still raw. “It pressed me back.” It was the moment she thought she was going to die.
Wendy, a grief counsellor at Perth’s Hollywood Hospital, had been sitting in her office writing when she was attacked in May 1990.
Bradley Edwards had been repairing the hospital’s PABX telephone exchange not far from Wendy’s office.
When Edwards shoved the cloth into Wendy’s mouth, she had stopped breathing, fearing there was a chemical on the fabric. Then, realising she could breathe, she started to fight. “I began to really struggle,” she said.
The attack was “the strangest thing. All of a sudden, it just kind of stopped. Edwards apologised profusely.”
Police were called and Edwards was charged but escaped a prison sentence, instead being put on probation for two years.
Lisa’s* statements to police from 1995 and 1996 about being abducted, raped and left for dead in Perth’s Karrakatta Cemetery, were read into the record with stunning power.
Lisa sat stoically in the courtroom’s public gallery, surrounded by supporters and other surviving victims. She heard how, as she walked towards her friend’s house, head down and arms folded, the unseen man jumped her from behind in dimly lit Rowe Park.
“I kept my eyes shut –
I thought it would be better if he thought I didn’t see him.”
Edwards listened from the dock, not looking at Lisa, his face immobile, sometimes rested on his right hand.
“He didn’t speak at all. I felt a lot of pain,” she said of her ordeal in the cemetery. “I was in a state of shock. I remember repeating, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe this is happening.’ It was very painful.”
After the sexual assaults, the man “chucked me in some scrub”, returning five minutes later to lift her again and drop her in more dense bushes.
Chilling also were the stories of other young women who had accepted lifts in Cottesloe and Claremont from a lone, dark-haired driver of a Telstra vehicle. These women shuddered in the witness box to think how narrowly they may have escaped the fate that befell Jane Rimmer and Ciara Glennon.
‘He didn’t speak at all. I felt a lot of pain. I was in a state of shock’