Claremont Killer Bradley Edwards Sentenced to Life With a 40-Year Minimum for Two Perth Murders
Justice Stephen Hall ordered Edwards to serve at least 40 years for murdering Jane Rimmer and Ciara Glennon, a Western Australia record, and said he would likely die in prison.
Published
"I recognise that there is a high likelihood that you will die in prison," Justice Stephen Hall told Bradley Robert Edwards in Perth on Wednesday, December 23, 2020, as the Supreme Court of Western Australia judge sentenced the 52-year-old to life imprisonment for the wilful murders of Jane Rimmer and Ciara Glennon, with a non-parole period of 40 years. Applause broke out in the public gallery. ABC News reported, and Police Commissioner Chris Dawson said outside court, that no court in the state had ever set a longer minimum term.
Hall spoke directly to the man in the dock. "You were a dangerous predator who sought out vulnerable young women and attacked them for your own gratification," he said. "You targeted unsuspecting women who were usually completely unknown to you. Your actions were premeditated, executed with pitiless determination and you were remorseless in your disregard for the pain and suffering that you caused." Both women, he said, had loving families and good jobs and much to live for. "By your actions, you robbed [the victims] of their lives, their hopes, their dreams and the dreams others had for them."
Jane Rimmer, a 23-year-old childcare worker, was killed in 1996. Ciara Glennon, a 27-year-old lawyer, was killed in 1997. Each was taken from the streets of Claremont, the Perth suburb known for its nightlife, late at night and in strikingly similar circumstances, which Hall said had "inspired a real and pervasive sense of fear" in the community. Edwards, a technician, drove each woman in his work car, a Telstra-issued Holden Commodore station wagon, to a separate remote spot on the city's fringe, stabbed her repeatedly in the neck and upper body and partly covered her body with branches stripped from nearby trees. Both bodies lay undiscovered for weeks and were found only by chance, ABC News reported.
The case against him rested on fragments. The most important was a speck of his DNA lodged under Glennon's fingernails as she tried to fight him off, found in 2009 by specialists at the United Kingdom's Forensic Science Service, where Western Australia Police had sent the samples in search of a breakthrough. Fiber evidence showed that both women had been in his car shortly before they died. The judge-alone trial began in November 2019 and ran for seven months, through hundreds of witnesses and thousands of exhibits. In September 2020, Hall found Edwards guilty of both murders.
He was not convicted of the third. Sarah Spiers, an 18-year-old secretary, had been taken from Claremont late at night in January 1996, and her body has never been found. Hall found the evidence insufficient to convict Edwards of her murder and acquitted him on that count. Dawson said police would never stop trying to solve her killing and would keep questioning Edwards about it. "The quest for justice for Sarah will continue," he said.
The sentence also covered two attacks Edwards had denied for years and admitted only on the eve of his murder trial. Sixteen months before he killed Rimmer, he snatched a 17-year-old from Claremont as she walked home alone at night, bound her hands and feet with cables, covered her head with a hood, put her in the back of a van and drove her to Karrakatta Cemetery, where he raped her repeatedly. He had also broken into the Huntingdale home of an 18-year-old and assaulted her as she lay in her bed, with her parents in the next room. His terms for those crimes will run concurrently with the life sentence.
Edwards had refused to take part in a psychiatric assessment. "I can only assume you retain a stance of denial," Hall said of the murders, describing a "stoic and controlled person" who had kept a calm and unemotional demeanor throughout the trial. Even so, the judge found too little evidence that Edwards would remain a threat to the community to justify a "drastic and exceptional" order that he never be released. The families of the women did not speak outside court. Dawson said they were satisfied that justice had been done, and he was blunt about the man himself. "Edwards is a killer, a sadistic rapist who preyed on innocent women," he said. "It is my sincere hope … that Edwards will never be released from prison."
What was settled on December 23, 2020. Edwards stood convicted of two murders, those of Jane Rimmer and Ciara Glennon. He was acquitted of murdering Sarah Spiers, and nothing in this story should be read as a finding that he killed her. The description of the 40-year minimum as a state record comes from ABC News and Commissioner Dawson. The two surviving women were not named in the coverage, and his lawyers had until February 3, 2021, to lodge an appeal.
Sources
- Claremont killer Bradley Edwards gets life sentence for murder of Jane Rimmer and Ciara Glennon, ABC News (Australia)
- Australia's Claremont killer sentenced to 40 years in prison for two murders, CNN