For two decades the Claremont killings were the subject of one of Australia's biggest murder investigations. Between January 1996 and March 1997 three young women left nights out in Claremont, a well-off suburb of Perth, and did not get home. Two were found dead in bushland weeks later. One has never been found. In December 2016 police arrested a 48-year-old Telstra technician. He was Bradley Robert Edwards.
Sarah Spiers was 18 and worked as a secretary. On the night of January 26, 1996, she celebrated Australia Day with friends at Club Bayview in Claremont. In the early hours of January 27 she told friends she was tired and was going to take a taxi home. She has not been seen since. Her parents, Don and Carol Spiers, said on the 20th anniversary: "It's hard not to wonder what Sarah's life, and ours, could have been had she not been taken from us."
Jane Rimmer, 23, was a childcare worker. On June 9, 1996, after a night at the Continental Hotel in Claremont, she declined to share a taxi with friends and was last seen outside the hotel. Her body was found in bushland at Wellard, south of Perth, on August 3, 1996.
Ciara Glennon, 27, was a solicitor. She was born in Ireland and came to Australia with her family when she was five. On March 15, 1997, after an evening at the Continental Hotel, she was last seen walking along Stirling Highway. Her body was found in bushland at Eglinton, north of Perth, on April 3, 1997. Her father, Denis Glennon, later spoke of remembering her "spirit, her friendship, and above all, her courage."
All three were thought to have been looking for a ride home.
The day after Jane Rimmer disappeared, Western Australia Police set up the Macro Taskforce. Investigators questioned thousands of taxi drivers, searched their vehicles and took DNA samples. By 2008 up to 3,000 people had been investigated. For years senior officers focused publicly on a public servant who lived with his parents in Cottesloe and had been seen driving around Claremont offering lifts to young women. He was followed for about a decade. No forensic evidence ever linked him to the crimes, and he died in 2018. More than ten independent reviews of the case were carried out.
Around 2009 police began seeking DNA from men who had not previously been tested. In October 2015 a Perth newspaper reported a forensic link between Ciara Glennon's killer and an attack in February 1995, in which a 17-year-old girl was abducted from a Claremont park and raped in Karrakatta Cemetery. Police would not confirm it.
The link that finally named a suspect went back to February 15, 1988. That night a man broke into a house in the Perth suburb of Huntingdale and indecently assaulted an 18-year-old woman as she slept. He fled, leaving behind a silk kimono he had stolen from a washing line. It stayed in police storage for nearly 30 years. In November 2016 DNA on the kimono was matched to swabs from the 1995 Karrakatta victim and to material taken from under Ciara Glennon's fingernails.
The kimono had led detectives to the man known as the "Huntingdale prowler." In mid-December 2016 fingerprints from a 1988 attempted break-in in Huntingdale were matched to prints taken from Edwards in 1990. That year, at 21, while working as a Telstra technician at Hollywood Hospital, he had tried to drag a social worker into a toilet block; she broke free, and he was convicted of assault. On December 20, 2016, detectives collected a Sprite bottle he threw away at a cinema. Its DNA matched.
On December 22, 2016, police raided Edwards's home in Kewdale. After a 14-hour interview he was charged with the murders of Jane Rimmer and Ciara Glennon and with the Huntingdale and Karrakatta offenses. On February 22, 2018, he was also charged with murdering Sarah Spiers. He pleaded not guilty to all three murders. In October 2019, a month before trial, he pleaded guilty to the 1988 Huntingdale attack and the 1995 abduction and rape.
The trial began on November 25, 2019, in the Supreme Court of Western Australia before Justice Stephen Hall, sitting without a jury. It ran 95 days over seven months, with more than 200 witnesses and nearly 2,900 exhibits. The prosecutor, Carmel Barbagallo, relied on the DNA, on fibers linking both women to a Telstra uniform and to the VS Holden Commodore work vehicle Edwards drove, and on similarities between the crimes. Edwards did not testify, and his defense called no witnesses. His barrister, Paul Yovich, argued that the DNA could have been contaminated in the laboratory, that many people in Western Australia wore Telstra uniforms, and that without Sarah Spiers's remains intent to murder could not be proved.
On September 24, 2020, Justice Hall found Edwards guilty of murdering Jane Rimmer and Ciara Glennon. He was satisfied that Edwards's DNA was under Glennon's fingernails from a struggle shortly before her death, that fibers placed both women in his work car, and that the similarities proved "beyond reasonable doubt that the same person killed both." He acquitted Edwards of murdering Sarah Spiers. The evidence of his propensity made it more likely that he had killed her, the judge said, but it did not prove it beyond reasonable doubt, and there was no other evidence identifying her killer. "We got the result we wanted," said Lee Rimmer, Jane's sister, "now we just have to keep working for the Spiers family to help find Sarah."
On December 23, 2020, Justice Hall sentenced Edwards, then 52, to life imprisonment with a non-parole period of 40 years. Barbagallo had argued that the case was "so serious, so rare, so exceptional" that he should never be released. The judge declined to make that order but set a minimum term long enough that reports said he would likely die in prison. He called Edwards a dangerous predator who targeted vulnerable young women for his own gratification, and said his propensity for violent abductions made it likely that he had also killed Sarah Spiers.
The two women who survived him gave statements. "He preyed on weak, vulnerable young women who didn't stand a chance," said the woman abducted in 1995. Jennifer Rimmer, Jane's mother, said she missed her daughter every day. The Glennon family did not give a statement; the prosecutor said their suffering was "beyond words." Edwards showed no emotion, and the families in the gallery applauded.
Edwards declined to take part in a psychiatric assessment for sentencing. In 2022 detectives interviewed him in prison in another attempt to find Sarah Spiers, and The West Australian reported that he refused to tell them anything. As of October 2026 he remains in prison serving his life sentence. Sarah Spiers has not been found.