Current Claremont Murders - Media

Mar 5, 2017
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Front page and pages 6-7 from the West Australian Newspaper 10 August, 2019.
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Sorbet Bliss

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"At a directions hearing on Tuesday, prosecutors made an application for a suppression order, which Justice Stephen Hall begrudgingly granted, saying it "should have been anticipated before now".
"I would ask the state give careful consideration of what is to come," Justice Hall said.

"The reprimand comes four days after Justice Hall reminded prosecutors he had drawn "a line in the sand" regarding new evidence, which will now only be allowed with his approval after a formal application."

"He made the comment after future applications were flagged, warning they may not be granted if they came too late."

 
New ABC podcast. Claremont: the murders that rocked Perth on The History Listen

 
Accused Claremont serial killer Bradley Edwards pleads guilty to two attacks including rape of teen girl

Key points:
  • Bradley Edwards is accused of murdering three women in Claremont in the 1990s
  • He was accused of two other attacks, including raping a teen girl in a cemetery
  • He has admitted the two attacks, but continues to plead not guilty to the murders
 
The start of the trial for the accused Claremont serial killer has been pushed back one week.

 
Mar 5, 2017
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How police used DNA from discarded drink bottle to make arrest
CLAREMONT SERIAL KILLER TRIAL FULL REPORTS PAGES 4-5
  • The West Australian
  • 23 Oct 2019
  • TIM CLARKE
img

Denis Glennon, Ciara Glennon’s father, at court yesterday. Below: The Sprite bottle and pants similar to the Telstra workers’ trousers.
The role that a discarded Sprite bottle played in the incredible arrest of accused Claremont serial killer Bradley Robert Edwards has been revealed for the first time.
In late 2016, the soft drink bottle — replete with Mr Edwards’ DNA — became one of the last pieces of the massive jigsaw of clues which led to the arrest West Australians thought may never happen.
And three years on, as Mr Edwards prepares to go on trial for the murders of Sarah Spiers, Jane Rimmer and Ciara Glennon, the undercover officers who recovered it are also preparing to reveal their part in the operation to catch a potential killer.
During pretrial hearings this week, it emerged that in late 2016, WA
Police surveillance operatives were set to work after the incredible chain of events that led to Mr Edwards’ becoming their No.1 target. The starting point was a discarded kimono which had sat in an evidence box in police custody for more than 30 years, having been collected at a Huntingdale crime scene in 1988.
That scene was a bedroom where an 18-year-old girl had been attacked by a lone intruder, who was wearing a women’s nightie.
And that kimono, when it was re-examined by cold case detectives three decades later, was found to be stained with traceable DNA samples. Those samples matched those taken in two major open cases — an horrific rape in Karrakatta Cemetery in 1995, and the murder of Ciara Glennon two years later. And the Huntingdale assault also connected to a string of bizarre break-ins in the same suburb over 1988, where bras, tights, underwear and nightclothes were stolen from drawers and washing lines all over the neighbour
hood. During one of those break-ins, three partial latent fingerprints and one latent palm impression were left behind on a rear sliding door.
And with there now being a new link between Huntingdale and the Claremont case, the fingerprints were run through the national database. Up popped the name Bradley Robert Edwards.
His conviction in 1990 for an unprovoked attack on a worker at Hollywood Hospital had put his details into the system. And that key breakthrough prompted police to begin their covert surveillance.
As they kept tabs on the long-time Telstra worker, the thrown-away bottle was scooped up and tested. And after Edwards was then arrested, a swab from inside his mouth gave them a much better sample.
When that swab matched to the DNA on the kimono, taken from the Karrakatta rape victim and found under Ms Glennon’s fingernails, police believed they finally had their man.
If those undercover officers are required to give evidence in WA’s Supreme Court in the coming months, it may be done from behind a screen — or even in a closed court — to protect their identity.
But Mr Edwards’ barrister Paul Yovich said they may not be needed at all, as he said the defence had “no issue with the legality of the arrest of the accused”.
What is set to become one of the central issues of the trial are two tiny polyester fibres found on shorts the victim of the horrific rape in Karrakatta Cemetery was wearing on the night she was abducted, bound, assaulted and dumped.
Prosecutors say those blue polyester-4 fibres are common to others found on Ciara Glennon, Jane Rimmer and in the Holden Commodore work car which Mr Edwards was driving at the time.
And the court will also be told those fibres were common to the Telstra-issued blue work trousers worn by Edwards in the late 80s and early 90s.
Those trousers were made and dyed specifically for Telstra at the time. And the discovery of an existing pair this year, opened up interstate inquiries with textile and workwear companies in Victoria — resulting in a delay in the trial starting.
 
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November 2, 2019

Letters to the POST

Exonerate and compensate The state government will win significant windfall savings with the three months of reduction to the trial of the Claremont killer suspect. It would be most appropriate to pay such a sum of money as compensation to former Claremont mayor Peter Weygers and the family of deceased civil servant Lance Williams for them each having been identified as prime suspects. Alf Campbell Kenwick Road, Kenwick
 

Willow weeps

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Rundown on the prosecution evidence which we're mostly aware of and the defence.

The defence

Mr Edwards has denied any involvement in the Claremont serial killings, with his lawyer previously indicating at a directions hearing the defence will argue the issue of identity – meaning they will say the state has the wrong man.

Mr Yovich said at an October hearing that he intends to dispute the state’s DNA evidentiary certificate.

The certificate – which is intended to confirm quality assurance – is typically signed by a forensic scientist and states when a sample is received by a lab, when it was examined, and where it is obtained from.

 
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metic

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Interesting that in the young school pic is wearing glasses, also in the latter school pic. Wears glasses now.
As far as I am aware, no witness (Huntingdale, Telstra Living) has reported glasses....When did contacts becomes a thing in Australia???
Yes very interesting.
* This wrong thread to discuss ideas.
 

Eaglette01

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Claremont: 20 years of fear
Bradley Robert Edwards goes to trial on Monday accused of being the Claremont serial killer. Bradley Robert Edwards goes to trial on Monday accused of being the Claremont serial killer.
On January 25, 1996, Telstra technician Bradley Robert Edwards sat down for dinner with his wife and her parents around a table at the home of his in-laws.
The next night, as revellers across Perth celebrated Australia Day, 18-year-old secretary Sarah Spiers was sharing drinks with her friends in the city’s wealthy western suburb of Claremont.
She ordered a taxi but never turned up when it came. She was never seen again.

Whether Edwards played any role in her disappearance is the subject of a murder trial, starting on Monday, that will be the most closely watched criminal trial the city has seen.
Edwards stands accused of the murder of Spiers and two other young women who had everything to live for — 23-year-old childcare worker Jane Rimmer and 27-year-old lawyer Ciara Glennon, both of whose bodies, unlike Spiers’s, were later found.
Edwards’s defence team will deny he is the person that, for two decades and in the absence of any known suspect, the media dubbed “the Claremont serial killer”.
Prosecutors will argue Edwards is indeed responsible for the abduction and murder of the three women.
A supplied triptych of victims of the Claremont serial killer (L-R) Jane Rimmer, 23, Ciara Glennon, 27, and Sarah Spiers, 18. Picture: AAP A supplied triptych of victims of the Claremont serial killer (L-R) Jane Rimmer, 23, Ciara Glennon, 27, and Sarah Spiers, 18. Picture: AAP
Supreme Court judge Stephen Hall will hear the case alone. Given the intense public scrutiny and years of media commentary, it was agreed a trial by jury was simply not feasible.
Even before the trial begins, much of the prosecution case against Edwards has been laid out in six pre-trial judgments delivered by Hall over the admissibility of certain evidence.
And then Edwards himself made a shock decision late last month, just weeks before his trial was due to start, to change some of his earlier pleas.
While he maintains he is not guilty of the three murders for which he will stand trial, he switched his plea to guilty on other charges relating to brutal attacks on women in the years before the three Claremont killings.
By his own admission, Edwards perpetrated three separate attacks between 1988 and 1995. In one case, he admitted it had coincided with a period of turmoil in his personal life.
The trial is likely to hear prosecution argument that, from that earliest episode of violence as a 19-year-old telephone technician, Edwards’s personal life continued to spiral into turmoil and that increasingly violent aggression spilled over into multiple murders. His defence team will argue against such linkages, or that his admitted attacks on women ever escalated into multiple murder.
Whatever the outcome of the trial, it will bring back memories of a long terrible summer more than 20 years ago in Australia’s most isolated capital city.
A kind of collective paranoia took hold from late 1996 on as, one after another, the three women went out with friends in Claremont’s fashionable night-life district, only 10 minutes from Perth’s CBD, and disappeared into the darkness.
Don Spiers (cap) father of Sarah who was a victim leaves the District court after the pre trial hearing of the Claremont serial killer case in August. Picture: Colin Murty Don Spiers (cap) father of Sarah who was a victim leaves the District court after the pre trial hearing of the Claremont serial killer case in August. Picture: Colin Murty
Spiers had left her friends late on January 26, 1996, and ordered a taxi to go home. She had told one friend’s mother they were going out to a concert that night and would probably end up at the Club Bayview. A happy, responsible person who, her sister said, would always let people know where she was going, she was last seen leaning against a Telstra bollard in Stirling Street.
Rimmer disappeared five months later, on June 8, after a Saturday night out with her friends at the Continental Hotel. She opted not to get into a taxi with her friends, who last saw her standing on the footpath.
Two months later, on August 3, her naked body was found concealed by branches at Wellard, 35km south of Perth. A knife with the Telecom logo was found on a road nearby.
And then it happened again after New Year, just when everyone prayed it had ended. On March 14, 1997, Glennon disappeared after leaving the Continental Hotel just before midnight. After bidding her workmates goodnight, she walked down the street to find a taxi. Two witnesses say they later saw her talking through the passenger window of a white Holden Commodore station wagon. Three weeks later, bushwalkers came across her fully clothed body off a lonely track 50km north of the city.
Three victims had vanished from busy streets amid thronging crowds, and from adequately lit footpaths. The “nice” Claremont suburb became a place pervaded by a menace nobody could see.
The Macro Taskforce was set up. People responded overwhelmingly and in numbers unprecedented for any state; Crime Stoppers received 35,000 calls in four weeks, the equivalent of two years’ worth.
Taxi drivers became prime suspects and — as if to save their industry’s reputation — hundreds of drivers lined up to be fingerprinted and saliva-tested for DNA. Workers and employers were even asked to look for odd behavioural patterns among colleagues and report them. A handful of suspects were identified and put under surveillance — in the case of an innocent and now deceased public servant, Macro Taskforce detectives shadowed him for years.
Months merged into years of blanket media coverage of each gruesome find, every short-lived rumour, the use of advanced British computer data-linking technology, even the importation of several British criminologists and an FBI-trained profiler.
The police were criticised for their singular pursuit of certain “persons of interest”, which it was claimed might have distracted them — for several years — from pursuing clues that might lie in other areas.
Dennis Glennon, father of Ciara who was a victim leaves the Supreme court after the Pre trial hearing in the Claremont serial killer case. Picture: Colin Murty Dennis Glennon, father of Ciara who was a victim leaves the Supreme court after the Pre trial hearing in the Claremont serial killer case. Picture: Colin Murty
Pre-trial hearings have already heard that in May 1990, Edwards had been repairing a telephone system at Hollywood Hospital when he attacked a 40-year-old social worker. He approached her from behind, put a piece of material over her nose and mouth, and began dragging her towards a toilet. She kicked him and broke free. Edwards pleaded guilty to common assault, was sentenced to two years’ probation and ordered to undergo a sex offender treatment program.
“From his own admission, he tends to control his emotions and tries to suppress his anger, as he feels he has a bad temper,” a psychologist wrote in her sentencing report, which noted the contrast between Edwards’s outward behaviour and his internal emotions.
Two years earlier, in February 1988, a prowler had been observed sneaking into back yards and homes in the area and stealing women’s underwear.
He was spotted wearing women’s silk kimonos and nighties, and in one case attacked a woman while wearing women’s underpants over his head.
An 18-year-old woman was attacked in her home one night after the prowler entered through an unlocked door, closed the bedroom doors of the victim’s family members and unplugged the telephone. He then entered the woman’s bedroom where she was sleeping and straddled her, pinning her down with his knees and stuffing a piece of material into her mouth. She managed to scratch him and he fled, leaving behind a kimono and a pair of knitted stockings.
In 1995, 11 months before the Claremont murders, a 17-year-old girl was abducted and raped in Karrakatta cemetery, not far from Claremont. She ran away to a nearby hospital emergency department. A security guard at Hollywood Hospital saw a white van with Telecom markings drive past the hospital towards the cemetery.
In an image acquired from social media in 2016 shows Bradley Edwards in an undated photograph. Picture: AAP In an image acquired from social media in 2016 shows Bradley Edwards in an undated photograph. Picture: AAP
Twenty years later, on December 22, 2016, Edwards was arrested. He was charged with three counts of murder, but he was also charged with the Karrakatta rape and the “prowler” attacks on women in Huntingdale. Edwards, now 51, denied all charges. His “not guilty” plea to the three murders stands, but last month he admitted to guilt on all the other counts.
The prosecution case will seek to link evidence of those crimes he has admitted to with the alleged crimes he denies; Edwards’s defence team will dispute both the links and the use of that evidence. Much argument will revolve around two aspects: a combination of DNA and forensic evidence and an argument that the offending and the alleged crimes coincided with periods of deep emotional turmoil in Edwards’s private life.
It has already emerged in pre-trial hearings that Edwards’s DNA was found under the fingernails of Glennon’s left hand.
Prosecutors have lined up Jonathan Whitaker, a forensic scientist based in Britain, to provide a report considering whether the DNA could have come from passive social contact rather than scratching.
DNA also links Edwards to the February 1988 attack on the 18-year-old woman in Huntingdale. The kimono that a fleeing Edwards left behind contained sperm that matched his DNA.
It will be argued that fibres found in the hair of Rimmer are consistent with fibres from a 1996 VS Series 1 Holden Commodore or the equivalent Toyota Lexcen. Telstra records indicate that Edwards was allocated a VS Series 1 as his work car at that date.
Similarly, it will be argued that fibres found on the shorts of the Karrakatta rape victim and the bodies of Rimmer and Glennon match blue work trousers issued to Edwards and other Telstra employees in the mid-1990s.
But already, much of the pre-trial legal argument between prosecutor Carmel Barbagallo and Edwards’s lawyer, Paul Yovich, has focused on the alleged killer’s state of mind at the time of the crimes.
Could the end of Edwards’s marriage to his first wife, after her infidelity and pregnancy to a lover who had moved into the family house, have possibly driven him to kill? Was his obsession with staying on the computer until the early hours, and his massive stock of pornographic material, credible evidence of a propensity to extreme violence?
The prosecution is likely to try to link each of the disappearances of the three young women to major upheavals in Edwards’s life.
Yet in April 1997, less than a month after Glennon’s murder, he had started a relationship with a woman he would marry.
The defence will undoubtedly point out he helped raise a stepdaughter in a stable marital relationship that lasted 18 years; he held down a steady job and was admired as an enthusiastic volunteer in junior sporting circles.
And on the night before Spiers disappeared, hadn’t he been sitting down companionably with his estranged first wife and her parents eating dinner?
Coincidentally, Edwards’s personal life took an optimistic and productive turn as the horror was setting in for the family and friends of Spiers, Rimmer and Glennon.
Many of them will be in the public gallery on Monday. They have spent the past two decades haunted by a lack of answers about their loved ones’ deaths. They will be praying that the trial — albeit a long and agonising one — will deliver some answers.
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