It is the case that shocked Western Australia and shattered the safety of one of Perth’s most well-to-do suburbs. In the late 1990s, three women – all young, all blonde – disappeared from the streets of Claremont, a sleepy enclave wedged between the University of Western Australia and Cottesloe beach.
All three were last seen leaving one of two well-loved drinking holes in Claremont and walking a block towards the Stirling Highway in search of a lift. In the space of 14 months, within an area smaller than 4 sq km, all three disappeared. The bodies of two of the women were found dumped in bushland within months.
For two decades, the identity of the so-called Claremont serial killer has been a subject of public speculation and police investigation. On Friday, police charged 48-year-old Bradley Robert Edwards with two counts of murder over the deaths of Jane Rimmer and Ciara Glennon. The investigation into the disappearance and suspected murder of Sarah Spiers, the first of the three women to disappear, was declared “ongoing”.
Edwards was also charged with abducting a 17-year-old girl from the streets of Claremont in 1995 and raping her in a nearby cemetery, and with breaking into a house in Huntingdale in 1988 and indecently assaulting an 18-year-old woman.
The police commissioner, Karl O’Callaghan, said the arrest was the result of the “biggest and most complex police investigation in WA history”. The investigation began 20 years ago under the name Taskforce Macro, established after Rimmer disappeared.
Jane Rimmer
Grainy CCTV footage of the footpath outside the Continental Hotel, now the Claremont Hotel, contains the biggest unanswered clue to Rimmer’s disappearance. The minute-long video shows the 23-year-old leaning against a pole outside the hotel after midnight on 9 June 1996, apparently waiting for a ride. The childcare worker’s friends later told police she had declined to share a taxi home.
Her jacket is slung over her arms. At one point she can be seen to acknowledge a man who is also standing outside the hotel, before the camera changes view. When it moves back, she is gone.
That footage was shown to more than 700 people in the initial investigation, but was not publicly released until 2008, when WA police were forced to defend the decision to withhold the video. At the time, they said they didn’t want to risk public reaction to the “underwhelming” grainy footage narrowing the focus of their investigation.
Rimmer’s body was found in bushland near Woolcoot Road at Wellard, 45km away in Perth’s southern suburbs, two months after she disappeared.
Her parents, Trevor and Jenny Rimmer, told Australian Story in 2004 that until that point, they had held out hope their daughter was alive.
“You wonder, when it happens, ‘Why was it my daughter that night?’ I mean, which is not a very nice thing to say, but you naturally think that,” Jenny Rimmer said. “And I think she just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. You know, it could’ve been anyone. I just couldn’t believe it.”
Seven months later, it happened to Glennon.
Ciara Glennon
By the time 27-year-old Glennon disappeared, young women in Claremont were warned not to go out alone. But Glennon didn’t intend to go far.
It was Friday, 14 March 1997, and the young lawyer had been drinking with colleagues at the Continental. About midnight, she announced she was heading home and walked towards the Stirling Highway – just 180m away – to hail a taxi.
A group of young men sitting at a bus stop on the highway told police they saw her leaning through the window of a light-coloured car, the West Australian reported. When they looked back, both she and the car were gone.
She had been due to attend her sister Donna’s hen party the next afternoon. When she didn’t show, her parents, Denis and Una Glennon, raised the alarm.
Glennon’s disappearance forced police to make the announcement they had been avoiding. Two days later, the state crime commander, Bob Ibbotson, held a press conference.
“I think it’s fair to say that we certainly have fears that there is a serial killer at loose in Perth,” he said.
Eighteen days later, on 3 April, a bushwalker discovered Glennon’s dumped body near Pipidinny Road in Eglinton.
The suburb was then the northernmost fringe of Perth, near the end of the Mitchell Freeway. Rimmer’s body had been discovered near the end of the Kwinana Freeway, to the south. Both suburbs have now been swallowed by housing developments, but were then covered in thick scrub.
Both bodies were dumped in the bushland with no attempt to conceal or bury them. Rimmer was reportedly naked, Glennon reportedly clothed.
Within days of Glennon’s disappearance, the then WA premier, Richard Court, announced a $250,000 reward for information leading to the killer’s arrest. Within a month, a hotline set up by police had received more than 15,000 calls.
The disappearance of Sarah Spiers
Five months before Rimmer was killed, another woman, Sarah Spiers, disappeared from the street outside a Claremont hotel called Club Bayview. The club was on St Quentin Avenue, just 150m from the Continental Hotel.
The 18-year-old secretary had been out celebrating Australia Day with a group of friends and was returning to the home she shared with her parents, Don and Carol.
Phone records showed her calling a taxi at 2.06am, but by the time the taxi arrived at 2.14am, she had gone. She has not been seen since.
In the weeks that followed, missing posters were plastered around Perth. They asked: “Have you seen Sarah? She was last seen at 2am, wearing a black denim jacket, beige shorts and a white T-shirt. Blonde hair, blue eyes, 5ft 4in.”
Don Spiers told the West Australian he and his wife had been bombarded with tip-offs and theories about his daughter’s disappearance for 20 years. One anonymous phone call, which he believed was from someone who knew what had happened to her directed him to a patch of bushland. He searched, but found nothing.
Edwards has not been charged over Spiers’s disapperance and her case remains unsolved.
The investigation
The man put in charge of the investigation into the suspected killings was inspector Paul Ferguson, the head of the homicide squad. Ferguson pulled other detectives into Taskforce Macro, and in the following 20 years hundreds of detectives took thousands of statements and examined more than 50 persons of interest, some of whom were named publicly.
Police conducted DNA and background checks for all 2,700 licensed taxi drivers in WA, causing some to lose their licences.
The list of suspects was lengthy. It included Mark Dixie, a British man who is serving a 34-year sentence for the rape and murder of model Sally Anne Bowman in London in 2005, and Bradley John Murdoch, now serving a life sentence for the 2001 murder of the British backpacker Peter Falconio. Both have since been ruled out.
In 2014, police tried the controversial tactic of asking persons of interest to fill out a questionnaire and provide DNA as part of a “process of elimination”, PerthNow reported at the time.
But it was not until Friday that O’Callaghan was able to announce the charging of Edwards, who appeared in court later in the day. He was remanded in custody and will appear again on 11 January.