Bradley Edwards Found Guilty of Two Claremont Murders but Acquitted of Killing Sarah Spiers
A Perth judge convicted the former Telstra technician of murdering Jane Rimmer and Ciara Glennon. Sarah Spiers's killer, he ruled, could not be proved beyond reasonable doubt.
Published
For almost twenty-five years Perth had lived without an answer. On Thursday, September 24, 2020, in a hushed courtroom, Justice Stephen Hall of the Supreme Court of Western Australia gave one, but only part of one. He found Bradley Robert Edwards, a 51-year-old former Telstra technician, guilty of the wilful murders of Jane Rimmer and Ciara Glennon. He found him not guilty of murdering Sarah Spiers.
All three young women had vanished after nights out with friends in Claremont's entertainment district over fourteen months in 1996 and 1997. Sarah Spiers, an 18-year-old receptionist, went first. She left a Claremont nightclub at around 2 a.m. on January 27, 1996, called a taxi from a phone box to take her to Mosman Park, and was never found. Jane Rimmer, 23, a childcare worker, disappeared in June 1996 and was reported missing when she did not turn up for work. Ciara Glennon, 27, a lawyer, left drinks with colleagues at the Continental Hotel in March 1997 and was trying to get home to her parents.
Justice Hall found that Edwards took Rimmer and Glennon from Claremont, though he said it was impossible to know exactly how he got them into his Telstra-issued car. He drove each to remote bushland on the city's edge, Rimmer to Wellard in the south and Glennon to Eglinton in the north. Both women fought him; both had defensive wounds to their arms. He cut their throats and covered their bodies with branches stripped from the nearby trees so they would not be found. The judge found that Rimmer's abduction and murder were sexually motivated. Her body was found naked, and her watch, which he seems to have dropped as he carried her clothes away, turned up on a nearby road.
The case against him rested on science. Out of tens of thousands of samples, Edwards's DNA appeared in just one, scrapings taken from two of Glennon's fingernails. His barrister, Paul Yovich SC, called it a speck "in the order of one fifth of one billionth of one gram" and argued it could have come from contamination at the state pathology laboratory, a theory forensic scientists rejected. The fibers were just as damning. Blue polyester fibers matching Telstra uniforms, made in a dye known as Telstra Navy, were found on both women, and on the shorts of a 17-year-old girl Edwards had admitted abducting from Claremont in 1995 and raping at Karrakatta Cemetery. Other fibers matched the interior of his work car, a Holden Commodore.
Sarah Spiers was different. Her body has never been found, and the evidence was thin: high-pitched screams heard in Mosman Park in the hour after she called her taxi, which prosecutors said were hers, and a witness who saw a white Toyota station wagon, like the one Edwards drove then, parked by a phone box nearby. Prosecutors leaned on Edwards's record of attacking young women. It was not enough. "The propensity evidence makes it more likely that the accused was the killer of Sarah Spiers, but it cannot prove beyond reasonable doubt, in the absence of any other evidence, as to the identity of her killer," Justice Hall ruled. His judgment ran to 619 pages.
The families were subdued as the verdicts were read and embraced in tears once the judge had left. "I think you get some closure, but it's always going to be the same. No-one's ever going to bring her back," said Jane Rimmer's sister, Lee. Don and Carol Spiers left without speaking. Police Commissioner Chris Dawson said police would never stop looking for their daughter, and Premier Mark McGowan appealed to Edwards directly: "If you know where Sarah Spiers is, can you please tell us."
Edwards had maintained his innocence since his arrest in December 2016. The judge-only trial lasted seven months and heard more than 200 witnesses. Edwards was to be sentenced on December 23 for the two murders and for the two attacks he had already admitted, the Karrakatta rape and a 1988 attack on an 18-year-old woman in her bed at her family's home in Huntingdale.
The verdicts on September 24, 2020, are findings of the court. Edwards was acquitted of murdering Sarah Spiers; the judge found it more likely than not that he killed her but that it could not be proved beyond reasonable doubt, and in law he is not her killer. Accounts of the evidence come from the trial as reported on the day of the verdict. The woman raped at Karrakatta and the woman attacked at Huntingdale are not named.
Sources
- Claremont killer Bradley Edwards found guilty of Jane Rimmer and Ciara Glennon murders but not Sarah Spiers, ABC News, Australia (Andrea Mayes)