News

Bradley Edwards Charged With the Murder of Sarah Spiers, Missing From Claremont Since 1996

A third Claremont murder charge for the man accused over Jane Rimmer and Ciara Glennon. In 2020 a judge acquitted him of this one.

Published

Illustration of an empty police press room with a lectern bunched with microphones and television cameras on tripods. Not the actual room.

Sarah Spiers was 18 when she left a nightclub in Claremont, Perth, in the early hours of January 27, 1996, at the end of an Australia Day night out. She called a taxi. When it arrived she was gone, and in the twenty-two years that followed no trace of her body was ever found.

On Thursday, February 22, 2018, Western Australia Police charged Bradley Robert Edwards, 49, with her wilful murder. Edwards was already in custody. In December 2016 he had been charged with the murders of Jane Rimmer, who vanished from the same Claremont nightspot in June 1996 and was found in bushland near Wellard two months later, and Ciara Glennon, who disappeared in March 1997 and was found at Eglinton about a month after that. The new charge meant he was accused of all three of the disappearances that had haunted Perth for two decades.

Police Commissioner Chris Dawson called it a significant development, one that "follows extensive inquiries by the Macro investigation team within the cold case homicide squad." Police renewed their appeal for anyone with information about a white 1992 Toyota Camry station wagon. The Spiers family asked to be left in private, and Edwards was due to face court the following Wednesday on all three murder charges.

What this story covers. It draws on ABC News's report of February 22, 2018. Edwards was accused, not convicted, when it was written. At his trial, Justice Stephen Hall found him guilty on September 24, 2020, of murdering Jane Rimmer and Ciara Glennon, and not guilty of murdering Sarah Spiers. No one has been convicted of her murder, and she is not presented here as his victim.

Sources

Related News