For two decades the Claremont killings were the subject of the longest-running murder investigation in Australia. Between January 1996 and March 1997 three young women left nights out in Claremont, a well-off suburb in Perth's west, and did not get home. Two were found dead in bushland weeks later. One has never been found. A taskforce worked its way through thousands of names. In December 2016 police arrested a 48-year-old Telstra technician who had never been among the suspects the public put forward. He was Bradley Robert Edwards.
Edwards was born on December 7, 1968. When he was sentenced, the judge noted that he had come from a secure home with supportive parents and that there was little sign of any significant trauma in his childhood. He went to work for Telstra, the national telephone company, as a technician, and at one stage coached Little Athletics. Neighbors later told reporters they had found him creepy. Nothing in his public life marked him out.
His private life was another matter. On the night of February 15, 1988, when he was 19, a man broke into a house in the Perth suburb of Huntingdale where an 18-year-old woman he knew lived with her parents. Wearing women's sleepwear, he attacked her in her bed while her parents slept nearby. She fought him, and he fled. He left behind a silk kimono he had taken from a washing line, stained with his semen. The police kept it. For nearly three decades it sat in storage, unmatched to anyone.
On May 7, 1990, he was working a Telstra shift at Hollywood Hospital when he came up behind a social worker, covered her mouth and tried to drag her toward a toilet block. She broke free. Cable ties were later found in his pocket. Edwards, then 21, pleaded guilty to common assault and was given two years' probation and ordered to complete a sex offender program. Police took his fingerprints. They went into the records, where they stayed unmatched to the Huntingdale break-ins for 26 years.
By the mid-1990s Edwards was married. Prosecutors would later argue that his violence escalated as that marriage came apart. On the night of February 12, 1995, a 17-year-old girl was walking through a dark park in Claremont when a man seized her, bound and gagged her, put a hood over her head and drove her to Karrakatta Cemetery, where he dragged her among the graves and raped her twice. She survived and went to police. Her attacker was not identified.
Sarah Spiers was 18 and worked as a secretary. Her parents, Don and Carol Spiers, described her as "so full of life" and said she had "a great love of family." She had a sister, Amanda. On January 26, 1996, Australia Day, she went out with friends in Claremont and ended the night at Club Bay View. In the early hours of January 27 she told friends she was tired and wanted to go home. She walked to a telephone booth nearby and called a taxi. It arrived within minutes. She was gone.
At first police handled her case as a missing person inquiry. Her family and friends put up posters and made public appeals, and their pressure pushed the case toward a homicide response. Sarah Spiers has never been found.
Years later prosecutors would tell a court what Edwards had done that Australia Day. They alleged that he went to the home of his first wife's parents, where she was then living apart from him, and asked her to come with him to the fireworks on the foreshore at Mandurah. She refused. His first wife, whose identity was suppressed, could not remember the date of the visit but thought it was in late 1995 or early 1996. A detective, Ian Berry, later combed the Mandurah local paper and found a fireworks display on the foreshore on Australia Day 1996. The prosecution alleged that Sarah Spiers was taken later that night.
Jane Rimmer was 23 and worked in childcare. She was remembered as happy and vibrant, and devoted to her family and friends. On the night of June 8, 1996, she went out for drinks with friends in Claremont, then the busiest nightspot for young people in Perth, and ended up at the Continental Hotel. In the early hours of June 9 her friends shared a taxi home. She did not go with them. Security cameras recorded her outside the hotel, smiling at a man she seemed to know and chatting with him briefly. His back was to the camera. When police released the footage in 2008 they called him a person of interest rather than a suspect, and he was never identified.
Fifty-five days later, on August 3, 1996, her body was found in bushland at Wellard, south of Perth. A pocket knife lay near her. Five months after Sarah Spiers had vanished, the words "serial killer" were now in common use in Perth. The day after Jane disappeared, Western Australia Police had set up a special unit, the Macro Taskforce.
Prosecutors later linked her death, too, to the collapse of Edwards's marriage: shortly before she was killed, his wife told him she was pregnant by another man.
Ciara Glennon was 27 and a solicitor. She was born in Ireland and came to Western Australia with her family when she was five. Her father, Denis Glennon, was from Westport in County Mayo; her mother is Una Glennon. On the night of March 14, 1997, she went out with work colleagues and later visited the Continental Hotel. In the early hours of March 15 she was seen walking along Stirling Highway, planning to catch a taxi, and was seen talking to someone in a car.
Her body was found on April 3, 1997, in bushland at Eglinton, at the opposite end of the city from Wellard. Both women had been covered with vegetation. Her injuries were so severe that her family was never allowed to see her. She had fought her attacker, and the material under her fingernails would one day name him. Days before she was killed, prosecutors said, Edwards's matrimonial home had been sold.
At her grave, Denis Glennon made her a promise. "I told her I would do all in my power to find the person or persons responsible for killing her," he later said, "or I would die trying." Una Glennon later wrote a book about her daughter, "Ciara's Gift."
The Macro Taskforce began with the idea that a rogue or bogus taxi driver had picked up the women. Thousands of taxi drivers were questioned, had their cars inspected and gave saliva samples. One driver refused to give a sample; he and a friend who was then mayor of Claremont became persons of interest and were later cleared. In those years women also reported a man in a Telstra vehicle, or a man who said he worked for Telstra, offering lifts in Claremont and Cottesloe.
For about a decade senior officers concentrated on a public servant who lived with his parents in Cottesloe and drove around Claremont at night. He offered a lift to an undercover policewoman acting as a decoy. He was kept under surveillance for more than ten years and his homes were raided, but no forensic evidence ever tied him to the killings. He was cleared in 2008 and died of cancer in 2018, aged 61. A former police commissioner, Karl O'Callaghan, later conceded that his family deserved an apology. By 2008 up to 3,000 people had been investigated, and by the end of the case the taskforce had dealt with almost 18,000 suspects, including men screened for DNA and names put forward by the public. More than ten independent reviews by investigators from the eastern states and overseas looked at the work.
The forensic science moved faster than the investigation. According to the journalist Bret Christian, editor of The Post, a tiny trace of DNA from under Ciara Glennon's fingernail was matched in 2008 to DNA from the 1995 Karrakatta attack, but police did not make the link public for seven years. From about 2009 detectives began seeking DNA from men who had never been tested. In October 2015 Christian's paper reported the link between Glennon's killer and the Karrakatta rape. Police refused to confirm or deny it. Christian has said that the report led police to form two new squads to reinvestigate the case. In January 2016, on the 20th anniversary, the Spiers family said through police that time had not healed their loss and that they still had confidence in the Macro team.
The answer had been in a police store since 1988. In November 2016 scientists tested the Huntingdale kimono and obtained a DNA profile. It matched the swabs taken from the Karrakatta victim in 1995 and the material from under Ciara Glennon's fingernails. One man had broken into the Huntingdale house, raped a girl at Karrakatta and fought with Ciara Glennon before her death. He was still not on any database.
The kimono pointed detectives back to the late 1980s, and to the man known as the "Huntingdale prowler," who had broken into homes in the area, often wearing or stealing women's nightwear. On December 16, 2016, fingerprints from an attempted break-in at a Huntingdale house in 1988 were run through the national database. They matched prints taken in 1990 from a Telstra technician convicted of an assault at Hollywood Hospital. Detectives began following him. On December 20 they watched him drink from a Sprite bottle at a cinema and leave it behind. They collected it, and its DNA matched.
On the morning of December 22, 2016, the police Tactical Response Group forced its way into Edwards's house in Kewdale. Detective Senior Constable Ian Berry arrived at about 7:40 and Edwards was taken to the Cold Case Homicide Squad. Police spent two days searching the house, seizing electronic devices and a notebook of bank transactions believed to have been kept by his second wife. In a 14-hour interview Edwards was polite and cooperative, and he denied everything. Investigators would later show that his denials were lies. On December 23 he was charged in Perth Magistrates Court with the murders of Jane Rimmer and Ciara Glennon and with the Huntingdale and Karrakatta offenses. He was held on remand at Hakea Prison. On February 22, 2018, he was also charged with murdering Sarah Spiers.
The months before trial were long. In December 2018 prosecutor Carmel Barbagallo told the court that four or five "stories of interest," written or downloaded by Edwards, had been found on his devices; Justice Stephen Hall pushed the trial date back to July 2019 to give the lawyers more time. In February 2019 Edwards was found alone in a prison shower block with an injury to his ear and a pencil nearby. Police later said the injury was likely self-inflicted. On October 21, 2019, at the final pretrial hearing, he pleaded guilty to five charges covering the 1988 Huntingdale attack and the 1995 Karrakatta abduction and rapes, including aggravated burglary and two counts of deprivation of liberty. He continued to deny the murders. Barbagallo said the pleas showed that his earlier denials to police had been lies.
The trial began on November 25, 2019, in the Supreme Court of Western Australia before Justice Hall, sitting without a jury because of the graphic evidence, including photographs of the women where they were found and at autopsy. Justice Hall ruled that a violent pornographic film, thousands of images and written stories about abducting women found on Edwards's devices were irrelevant and would not be used.
Barbagallo's case rested on physical evidence and pattern. She told the court that the 1990 hospital attack, the Huntingdale break-in and the Karrakatta rapes shared a method: the man grabbed women from behind, covered their mouths with cloth, and tied them or seemed ready to, without speaking. She argued that he was obsessed with women's undergarments and that his offending escalated. She tied each disappearance to a turning point in the breakdown of his first marriage, the refused fireworks, the news of the pregnancy and the sale of the house, and said the killings stopped after he met his second wife.
The forensic evidence came in three strands. There was the DNA under Ciara Glennon's fingernails. There were fibers: fibers matching Telstra work trousers, prosecutors said, had been found on Jane Rimmer, Ciara Glennon and the clothes of the Karrakatta victim, and fibers consistent with the make and model of his work car, a VS Holden Commodore station wagon of the kind Telstra issued, had been found on both murdered women. And there was the pocket knife from Wellard; prosecutors alleged that Edwards had been issued a Telstra work knife of that type. A PathWest scientist, Louise King, who examined it in 2003, found no blood on it.
More than 200 witnesses gave evidence. Edwards's second wife told the court she had grown "sick and tired of the lies" and had feared for her life when she began going through his bank statements; she could not find one for the day Ciara Glennon disappeared. Records showed he had used a cash machine in Claremont in December 1996, though he had told police he had no connection to the suburb. In court, Jane Rimmer's mother watched the security footage of her daughter's last minutes outside the Continental.
The defense, led by Paul Yovich, argued that Edwards "didn't do it." Yovich attacked the forensic work, suggesting the DNA under Glennon's nails could have come from contamination in the laboratory by samples from the Karrakatta case, and pressing scientists on their procedures. When he pointed out that King's own DNA had been found on some vegetation samples, she replied: "I don't recall any lapse of my procedures." He argued that Edwards could have been just one of many people wearing a Telstra uniform in Western Australia at the time, and that without Sarah Spiers's remains an intent to murder could not be proved. The prosecution closed its case on May 6, 2020. The defense case took minutes: Edwards did not testify and called no witnesses. The trial ended on June 25, 2020, after 95 days of hearings over seven months, delayed at one point by the prosecutor's illness. It produced 10,828 pages of transcript and 2,879 exhibits and cost more than $11 million; reports called it the most expensive criminal trial in the state's history.
Justice Hall spent almost three months on his decision. On September 24, 2020, he called it a trial "like no other" and said the killings had "haunted the memory of many people" and left a "real and pervasive sense of fear" in Perth. He was satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that Edwards's DNA was under Ciara Glennon's left-hand fingernails and had got there during a violent struggle shortly before her death. He found that fibers showed both Rimmer and Glennon had been in a VS Holden Commodore habitually driven by a Telstra employee shortly before they died, and that Edwards drove such a car at the time. He found that Edwards had abducted both women from Claremont in that car, driven them to bushland outside the city, killed them and covered their bodies with vegetation, and that the similarities established "beyond reasonable doubt that the same person killed both."
He found Edwards guilty of murdering Jane Rimmer and Ciara Glennon. On Sarah Spiers he reached a different result. He was satisfied she had been abducted and killed, and the evidence of Edwards's propensity for violent abductions made it more likely that he was the killer, but there was no other evidence identifying who had taken her. That could not prove his guilt beyond reasonable doubt. He acquitted Edwards of her murder. Edwards sat still through the reading, sometimes looking down or shaking his head.
The families had entered the courtroom before him under tight security. Barbagallo wept alongside them. Police Commissioner Chris Dawson embraced Don and Carol Spiers, who left the court in silence. "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." The Rimmer family said that after 24 years of anguish, "the healing process can begin." In a statement read by police, Denis Glennon said that crimes like these "inflict unforeseeable collateral damage," that his daughter had fought to save her life and left "vital DNA clues," and that the family would remember her "spirit, her friendship, and above all, her courage." He had attended the trial for seven months; now, he said, he would step back. Premier Mark McGowan said what happened to the women "changed our State," and appealed to Edwards directly: "If you know where Sarah Spiers is, can you please tell us. Please tell the family. Let them bury their daughter." Dawson called Edwards "an evil murderer and rapist" and noted what he called a curious fact: Edwards had never been among the thousands of suspects nominated by the public. "We will never give up trying to locate Sarah," he said.
At the sentencing hearing in December, the two women who survived Edwards gave statements. "He preyed on weak, vulnerable young women who didn't stand a chance," said the woman abducted in 1995. "Something can break you but you can still survive it and you can thrive, as I have." The woman attacked in Huntingdale in 1988 said her trauma had grown worse since his arrest. Barbagallo read a statement from Jennifer Rimmer, who said she missed Jane every day and wished her daughter could have become a mother herself. The Glennon family chose not to give a statement; Barbagallo said their suffering was "beyond words." Edwards had declined to take part in a psychiatric assessment that might have explained him.
Barbagallo argued that the case was "so serious, so rare, so exceptional" that Edwards should never be released, which would have made him only the second person in Western Australia denied any possibility of parole. Yovich argued that the features of the killings were not unique. On December 23, 2020, Justice Hall imposed life imprisonment for the two murders with a minimum term of 40 years, the longest ever set in the state, and a total of 33 years for the Huntingdale and Karrakatta crimes, all to run concurrently. He declined to make the never-release order, but said Edwards would likely die in prison; he will be 88 before he is first eligible for parole. He called Edwards a "dangerous predator who sought out vulnerable young women for his own gratification" and said: "Your actions were premeditated and executed with pitiless determination and remorselessness for the pain caused." He described him as "stoic and controlled," his ordinary appearance hiding what he wanted, and said that his propensity for violent abductions made it likely he had also killed Sarah Spiers. The packed public gallery applauded. Edwards showed no emotion.
Edwards had a limited time to appeal, and reports said his family consulted several senior Perth barristers. By February 2021 it was reported that he had not appealed against his convictions or his sentence within time, and that Legal Aid had declined to help with a proposed appeal. No appeal was found in later reports.
Detectives had said they would keep trying to talk to him about Sarah Spiers. In 2022 they interviewed him in prison; The West Australian reported that he refused to tell them anything. In 2025 he was reported to be held at Casuarina Prison, south of Perth. As of October 2026 he remains in prison serving his life sentence. Sarah Spiers has not been found.
The West Australian produced a podcast, "Claremont Serial Killings," that followed the trial. Bret Christian, whose newspaper first reported the forensic link in 2015, wrote "Stalking Claremont: Inside the Hunt for a Serial Killer" (2021). Una Glennon's book about her daughter, "Ciara's Gift," gave a mother's account.
Proven in court: the murders of Jane Rimmer and Ciara Glennon, found by a judge sitting alone after a 95-day trial. Admitted by guilty plea: the 1988 Huntingdale attack and the 1995 Karrakatta abduction and rapes. Convicted earlier: the 1990 assault at Hollywood Hospital. Not proven: the murder of Sarah Spiers. Edwards was acquitted, and the judge's view that he likely killed her is a comment on the evidence, not a finding of guilt. Her family still does not know where she is.
Other points remain open or disputed. The man seen talking with Jane Rimmer outside the Continental in 1996 was never identified. The reports of a man in a Telstra vehicle offering lifts were never publicly tied to a particular driver. Bret Christian's account that the decisive DNA match existed from 2008 and was not released for seven years is his reporting, not an official finding. Sources disagree on when Edwards pleaded guilty to the sexual offenses: one SBS timeline says October 2018, while AAP and his December 2018 court appearance, at which he was described as pleading not guilty to eight charges, point to October 2019. Dawson declined to say whether Edwards was a suspect in any other unsolved case, and no other charge has been brought. Edwards has never explained himself.
December 7, 1968: Bradley Robert Edwards born.
February 15, 1988: Huntingdale attack on an 18-year-old woman; the kimono is left behind.
May 7, 1990: Attack on a social worker at Hollywood Hospital; later convicted of common assault and fingerprinted.
February 12, 1995: A 17-year-old is abducted in Claremont and raped at Karrakatta Cemetery.
January 27, 1996: Sarah Spiers, 18, disappears after leaving Club Bay View.
June 9, 1996: Jane Rimmer, 23, last seen outside the Continental Hotel. The Macro Taskforce is formed the next day.
August 3, 1996: Jane Rimmer's body found at Wellard.
March 15, 1997: Ciara Glennon, 27, last seen on Stirling Highway.
April 3, 1997: Ciara Glennon's body found at Eglinton.
2008: Police release footage of Jane Rimmer outside the Continental; the long-time suspect is cleared.
October 2015: The Post reports a forensic link between the Glennon killing and the Karrakatta rape.
November 2016: The kimono DNA matches the Karrakatta and Glennon samples.
December 16, 2016: Huntingdale fingerprints matched to Edwards.
December 20, 2016: Detectives collect his discarded Sprite bottle.
December 22 and 23, 2016: Arrested at Kewdale and charged with the Rimmer and Glennon murders and the 1988 and 1995 offenses.
February 22, 2018: Charged with the murder of Sarah Spiers.
February 18, 2019: Found injured in a prison shower block.
October 21, 2019: Pleads guilty to the Huntingdale and Karrakatta offenses.
November 25, 2019: Trial begins.
June 25, 2020: Trial ends after 95 days.
September 24, 2020: Guilty of murdering Jane Rimmer and Ciara Glennon; acquitted of murdering Sarah Spiers.
December 23, 2020: Life imprisonment with a 40-year minimum.
Early 2021: No appeal lodged within time.
July 2022: Refuses to help police find Sarah Spiers.