Perth Man Charged With Two Claremont Murders After a 20-Year Hunt
Police arrested Bradley Robert Edwards at his Kewdale home and charged him with the wilful murders of Jane Rimmer and Ciara Glennon.
Published
Neighbors in Kewdale, an eastern suburb of Perth, heard the yelling at about half past six on the morning of Thursday, December 22, 2016. "I heard a real loud yell and it sounded like a scream," Jim Sheffield said. "I didn't think all that much about it." When he came back out an hour later the street was full of police cars and officers in heavy armor. Officers from the Tactical Response Group had gone to the house across the road at around 7 a.m. and taken a man into custody. A younger woman was later driven away by police as well, and forensic officers spent the rest of the day at the property, carrying out large plastic bags. A police spokesman would say only that they were there "in relation to an ongoing investigation."
The next day the Western Australia Police Commissioner, Karl O'Callaghan, gave the man's name. Bradley Robert Edwards, 48, of Kewdale, had been charged early on Friday, December 23, with two counts of wilful murder: of Jane Rimmer and of Ciara Glennon, two of the three young women who had vanished after nights out in Claremont, an upmarket Perth suburb, between January 1996 and March 1997. It was the first time anyone had been charged in the Claremont serial killings, an investigation that had run for 20 years and become the longest and most expensive in Australian police history.
Police would allege that Edwards abducted Jane Rimmer, 23, in the early hours of June 9, 1996, after she had been out with friends in Claremont. Her body was found in bushland at Wellard, south of Perth, on August 3. They would allege that he abducted Ciara Glennon, 27, on March 14, 1997, after another night out in Claremont. She was found in bushland at Eglinton, north of the city, on April 3.
Edwards was also charged over two earlier attacks that had never been tied publicly to the case. In February 1995, police alleged, he abducted a 17-year-old girl as she walked through Rowe Park in Claremont, forced her into a vehicle, drove her to a cemetery and sexually assaulted her. In 1988, they alleged, he broke into a home in Huntingdale and attacked an 18-year-old woman in her bedroom as she slept. Altogether he faced two counts of wilful murder, one of deprivation of liberty and two of aggravated sexual penetration. He appeared in Perth Magistrates Court on Friday and was remanded in custody, to appear again on January 11. According to the ABC, he had not previously been linked to the case.
The first of the Claremont women was not part of the charges. Sarah Spiers, 18, disappeared on January 27, 1996, and her body has never been found. O'Callaghan said the investigation into her disappearance and suspected murder was continuing.
Edwards was charged with murdering Sarah Spiers in February 2018. At his trial, Justice Stephen Hall found him guilty of murdering Jane Rimmer and Ciara Glennon on September 24, 2020, and not guilty of murdering Sarah Spiers.
What this story covers. The arrest, the neighbors' accounts, the police spokesman's comment, the charges, the commissioner's announcement, the allegations about each woman and the earlier attacks, and the court appearance come from the ABC's reports of December 22 and 23, 2016, as republished by The New Daily. No police statement from 2016 could be retrieved. That report dates the Huntingdale attack once as February 1988 and once as 1998; the specific February 1988 account is followed here. On the day of this story Edwards was accused, not convicted, and every account of the crimes is the police allegation. The 2018 Spiers charge and the 2020 verdicts, including his acquittal of her murder, are covered in later stories; Sarah Spiers's age is from the ABC's report of February 22, 2018.
Sources
- Charges laid in Perth's Claremont serial killings, The New Daily (ABC report)