Perth 1996 Cold Case Solved – Arrest Shocks Community 

It’s been 26 years since the Claremont serial killings and the body of Sarah Spears still hasn’t been found.  On April 3rd, 1997, a woman’s body was found in scrubland off Pipidinny Road in Eglinton at the northern edge of Perth, Western Australia. She was partially clothed. Two of her fingernails were broken, the left thumb and the left middle finger.

The rest were long and intact. A forensic examiner clipped the end of every nail and sealed each one in a sterile container. She had scratched the man who grabbed her off the street hard enough to trap his DNA under her nails. No laboratory in Australia could read it. The clippings sat in a Perth evidence locker for 11 years before a lab on the other side of the world could process them.

 By the time the DNA had a name, three women had gone missing from the same nightclub strip. The man who took them had already been arrested, convicted, and fingerprinted years before the first one disappeared. Claremont in the mid-90s was one of Perth’s wealthier suburbs, a strip of wine bars and restaurants about 10 km west of the city center, running along the main road between the river and the coast.

 Perth was an isolated city, closer to Jakarta than to Sydney, with the Indian Ocean to the west and thousands of kilometers of desert to the east. On Friday and Saturday nights, the pubs along Bay View Terrace filled with young people from across the western suburbs. The Continental Hotel and Club Bay View were the two main draws, places where university students and young professionals drank together and spilled out onto the pavement in the early hours.

 After closing time on the weekends, people walked to the taxi rank or stood on the curb waiting for a ride home. To the people who lived there, Claremont felt safe.  [music]  Violent crime was something that happened in other suburbs, in other cities, not here. On the night of January 26th, 1996, Australia Day, an 18-year-old secretary named Sarah Spears went out with a group of friends to Club Bayview.

 Sarah had grown up in rural Western Australia and had moved to the city to start her working life. She said goodbye to her friends outside the venue at around 2:00 in the morning and walked down the pavement by herself to a phone booth on Stirling Highway. At 2:06 a.m. she called Swan Taxis and asked for a cab to Mosman Park, a few minutes to the west.

The dispatcher logged the call. The taxi pulled up 3 minutes later at 2:09. Sarah was not there. The driver waited, circled the block once, and moved on to the next fare. Sarah Spears was never seen again. She had been standing on a well-lit highway in one of Perth’s safest suburbs at 2:00 in the morning and she disappeared in the 3 minutes between dialing the taxi and the cab pulling up.

 Nobody could explain how it had happened. No witness reported seeing her leave the phone booth. No witness heard a struggle. Her body has never been found. Five months later, on the night of June 8th, a 23-year-old childcare worker named Jane Rimmer went out to the Continental Hotel with a group of friends. Jane was from Shenton Park, a quiet suburb a few streets west of Claremont.

Security cameras at the pub caught her standing outside on the pavement at 12:04 a.m. on June 9th. In the footage, a man walks up to her. She looks at him. Her face changes. She seems to know him or at least to feel comfortable with whoever he is. They talk for a few seconds. The camera pans away to cover another angle of the street.

 When it swings back, both Jane and the man are gone from the frame. The camera never recorded where they went. Her body was found nearly 2 months later in bushland near Wellard, about 40 km south of Claremont. Nine months after that, on the night of March 14th, 1997, a 27-year-old lawyer named Ciara Glennon went out with friends in Claremont.

Her family was Irish. Her father, Dennis, was from County Mayo in Ireland and had brought the family to Perth when Ciara was young to give his children a chance at a better life. Ciara had studied law, passed the bar, and was working as a solicitor at a law firm in the city. She was building the life her parents had left everything behind to make possible.

 She left the pub on her own at some point after midnight. A witness on the other side of Stirling Highway saw her leaning into the passenger window of a light-colored car that had pulled to the curb beside her. From that distance, the witness could see that the two of them were talking but couldn’t make out what was being said.

 By the time anyone looked again, both Ciara and the car were gone. Three weeks later, on the 3rd of April, her body was found in scrubland north of the city. She was the woman from Pipidinny Road, the woman with the broken fingernails, the woman who had fought back hard enough to trap her attacker’s DNA beneath them.

 Three young women, the same strip of pubs, the same pattern, a night out in Claremont, a disappearance in the early hours, and then nothing. After the third one, something changed. The mood across the western suburbs shifted overnight in a way that didn’t go away when the sun came up. Women stopped going out alone. Parents drove their daughters to and from the nightclub strip and waited in cars outside the pubs until they came out.

Taxi companies reported a spike in bookings. Women who would have walked to the train station or waited on the pavement on any other night now called for a cab from inside the venue and refused to step outside until it pulled up. Somewhere in the city, a man was taking women off the streets and nobody knew who he was.

 Western Australia Police set up a task force called Macro after Jane Rimmer’s disappearance in June 1996. After Ciara Glennon was taken 9 months later, it expanded into the largest, longest, and most expensive criminal investigation in Australian history. The pressure on Western Australia Police from the public and the media was enormous.

 Over the next two decades, detectives canvassed every bar and restaurant along the Claremont strip. They pulled taxi records, reviewed security footage from businesses along Bay View Terrace and Stirling Highway, and ran background checks on men seen near the Continental on the relevant nights. Detectives went through the records of every known sex offender across the area and carefully compared them against the dates and locations of each of the three disappearances.

 The records covered Telstra, taxi companies, and parking stations. Over the course of the investigation, detectives collected and tested DNA samples from more than 100 men. Every sample was compared to whatever trace evidence existed from the crime scenes. A few of the men were suspects. Others were people the victims had known personally.

 The rest were men who had simply been in the wrong place on the wrong night and whose names had come up during the canvas. Thousands of individual tips and leads came in from the public over the years, each one checked, logged, and filed. For years, detectives focused on a public servant from a nearby suburb whose late-night patterns had caught their eye.

 He was surveilled, interviewed six times, and eventually cleared. From the very start, the man said he had nothing to do with any of it. He died years later without ever being charged. His entire life had been upended by a suspicion that turned out to be wrong. The actual killer was never on any of those lists.

 In 2008, 12 years after Jane Rimmer’s death, the CCTV footage of her standing outside the Continental was released to the public for the first time. The footage was broadcast on television and published in newspapers across the state. Crime Stoppers received 150 calls in response. None of the callers identified the man on the tape.

 Not a single one of them moved the investigation even one step forward. From Jane Rimmer’s body, investigators had recovered tiny synthetic fibers caught in her hair and on her clothing that didn’t match anything she had been wearing that night. The fibers were eventually identified as carpet from a specific model of car, a VS Holden Commodore station wagon.

 Telstra, the national phone company, issued that model to its field technicians across Western Australia. The killer drove a Telstra work car, but there were thousands of technicians driving those cars on the road every single day, and no way to narrow the list without more evidence. The task force had physical evidence, fibers, clippings, samples.

 What it still didn’t have after all of that was a name. Don Spears, Ciara’s father, was a shearing contractor from the pastoral country east of Perth. After his daughter disappeared without a trace, he became the public face of the search. He stood in front of cameras year after year asking anyone with information about Ciara to come forward.

 False leads came in waves over the years, each one raising hope before going nowhere. Don never got the answer he was looking for. He sat through dozens of briefings with police and carried that weight for more than two decades without a single real break in the case. Jane Rimmer’s family grieved quietly in Shenton Park, just a few streets from the suburb where she had been taken.

 Dennis Glennon, Ciara’s father, never stopped pushing. He wrote letters to politicians, spoke at every press conference he could get to, and challenged the government to keep the task force funded and staffed. For years, he pressed publicly for the investigation to continue. Even when decades passed without a suspect being named, he wanted the investigation funded properly, the resources to match the scale of what had happened, and above all else, he wanted to know who had taken his daughter off a Claremont street and why. The fingernail clippings

from Ciara Glennon had been in storage since April 1997. For 11 years, no testing method could extract a usable profile from the microscopic traces trapped beneath them. In 2008, the clippings were sent to the Forensic Science Service in London, more than 14,000 km away. The FSS had developed a technique called low copy number analysis, a method designed to amplify and read DNA from quantities so small that any other facility would have missed them.

 A scientist named Jonathan Whitaker processed the Claremont samples. He found a male DNA profile in the material from beneath Ciara Glennon’s nails. It was the very first time a usable male profile had been pulled from any piece of evidence connected to any of the three victims. In 2009, detectives matched the profile to DNA from an unsolved case that had been filed separately 14 years earlier.

 Back in February 1995, a full year before Sarah Spears vanished, a 17-year-old had been grabbed from a Claremont street, forced into a vehicle, and sexually assaulted at Karrakatta Cemetery, about 3 km from the nightclub strip. The same man who had attacked a teenager among the graves, 12 months before Sarah Spears vanished, had left his DNA on Ciara Glennon.

 After 14 years apart, the two cases were now linked. The profile wasn’t in any Australian database. The man had never been convicted of an offense serious enough to put his DNA in the system. He existed only through what he’d left behind, skin under a dead woman’s fingernails, and semen on a stolen kimono. Then, in November 2016, detectives went back to a silk kimono recovered from a residential break-in in 1988 in the Perth suburb of Huntingdale.

The attacker had left his semen on it. The garment had gone untested for 28 years. When the lab finally ran the comparison, the DNA on the kimono matched the Karrakatta sample. It also matched what had been found under Ciara’s nails. The 1988 break-in, the 1995 cemetery rape, and the 1997 murder of Ciara Glennon had all been done by one person.

 From there, detectives looked at other unsolved cases in the Huntingdale area from the same period. Fingerprints had been pulled from a doorknob at one of the properties years earlier. On the 16th of December, 2016, those prints were finally run through the national database. They came back to a man whose prints had been sitting in the system since 1990 after he was convicted of assaulting a woman at a hospital.

 To be certain, detectives confirmed the DNA match by collecting and testing DNA from a Sprite bottle the man had thrown away at a cinema. 3 days before Christmas Day, on the morning of December 22nd, detectives and tactical officers drove to a house on a quiet street in the suburb of Kewdale, south of the river.

 They entered the property and arrested the man inside. He was calm when they came through the door and did not resist or try to run. Officers handcuffed him and placed him in the back of an unmarked police car while his neighbors watched from behind their curtains. His name was Bradley Robert Edwards. Edwards was 48 years old. For most of his adult life, he had worked for Telstra as a field technician driving a company vehicle through the suburbs repairing telephone lines.

 He had been married twice and had no criminal history that anyone around him knew about. On the weekends, he coached children at his stepdaughter’s little athletics club. He owned a house, kept his lawn trimmed, and paid his bills on time. To the people around him, he was just another middle-aged man with a steady job and a quiet life.

 For the better part of 20 years, he had been living his life in the same city where detectives were spending millions of dollars trying to find the man who killed three women from Claremont. His name had not appeared on a single suspect list the entire time. Nobody knew it at the time, but Edwards had been breaking into homes and attacking women since he was 19 years old.

 In February 1988, he broke into a house in Huntingdale wearing a stolen silk kimono and entered a sleeping woman’s bedroom. She was 18 years old. She woke up to find him standing in her room, screamed, and he ran. The kimono stayed behind on the bedroom floor. It was collected as evidence by the responding officers, but the case went cold and the garment was filed away and never tested.

 2 years later, while on a job at Hollywood Hospital, he grabbed a female social worker from behind in a corridor, covered her mouth with his hand, and tried to drag her toward a toilet block. She fought him off with everything she had and managed to break free. When they searched him afterward, he had cable ties in his pocket.

 Edwards was arrested, convicted of the assault, and ordered to complete a sex offender treatment program. After he finished the program, Edwards kept his job at Telstra, went back to work, and went on living as if nothing had happened. Five years after that, in February 1995, came the Karrakatta Cemetery assault. He snatched a 17-year-old off a street near the nightclub strip, tied her wrists, blindfolded her, forced her into his vehicle, and drove her to the cemetery.

He raped her there among the headstones, then left her and drove away. The Karrakatta assault was reported to police and investigated, but in 1995, nobody connected it to the kimono from Huntingdale or the hospital attack. Each one of those attacks sat in a different case file, handled by different officers in different units across the police system.

 Nobody in the system ever put the three together or saw the pattern that was right in front of them. Within two years of the Karrakatta rape, all three women were gone, and the man who took them had already been arrested, convicted, fingerprinted, and put through treatment by the same system that was now spending tens of millions of dollars trying to find him.

 The trial began in November 2019 before Justice Stephen Hall in the Supreme Court of Western Australia. There was no jury. Hall heard the entire case on his own over seven months, with more than 200 witnesses called to the stand. Prosecution and defense fought over every single piece of forensic evidence in the case file.

 Edwards had pleaded guilty to the Huntingdale and Karrakatta attacks before the trial began, but he denied the murders. He said nothing at all in his own defense and never once took the stand. The prosecution laid out the DNA evidence, the fiber match to a Telstra vehicle, and the pattern of escalation.

 The defense argued that the DNA could have gotten there through contamination at the lab, that the samples had been stored improperly over the years, and that the DNA couldn’t be trusted. On September 24th, 2020, after months of deliberation, Justice Hall delivered a 619-page written verdict. He found Edwards guilty of the murders of Jane Rimmer and Ciara Glennon.

 He found him not guilty of Sarah Spears, not because he believed Edwards was innocent, but because there wasn’t enough physical evidence to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt. In his written reasons, the judge noted that it was more likely Edwards was responsible for what happened to Sarah than not. But in a criminal trial, more likely is not enough.

 The judge gave Edwards a life sentence with a minimum non-parole period of 40 years. He was 52 years old. Under the terms of the sentence, he would not be eligible for parole until he was 92. Justice Hall told the court that Edwards would almost certainly die behind bars. Edwards appealed, but the Western Australia Court of Appeal dismissed it in July 2021.

 The conviction stood. Sarah’s case remains open. Her body has never been found. The entire case had taken 24 years from Sarah Spears’ disappearance to the final verdict. One full generation of silence, three families left waiting, and three young women whose names had become part of the city that lost them. A 27-year-old lawyer scratched the man who grabbed her off a Claremont street.

 The DNA under her nails sat in an evidence locker for 11 years before a lab on the other side of the world could read it. That fight is what named him. If this case stayed with you, leave your thoughts in the comments. More solved cases in the playlist.