Edwards guilty of two Claremont murders
A West Australian Supreme Court judge has found Bradley Robert Edwards guilty of murdering two women in Perth in the 1990s but not guilty of a third killing.
Accused Claremont serial killer Bradley Robert Edwards has been found guilty of murdering two women in Perth in the 1990s but acquitted of slaying a third woman.
Edwards, 51, denied killing secretary Sarah Spiers, 18, childcare worker Jane Rimmer, 23, and solicitor Ciara Glennon, 27, after they each spent a night out with friends in the affluent suburb’s pubs in 1996 and 1997.
The confessed rapist and ex-Telstra technician faced a seven-month trial in the Supreme Court of Western Australia which concluded in late-June.
Justice Stephen Hall on Thursday delivered his long-anticipated verdicts, finding Edwards guilty of murdering Ms Rimmer and Ms Glennon but not guilty of murdering Ms Spiers.
Ms Spiers’ body has never been found.
The former Little Athletics coach shook his head and members of the public gallery gasped when the verdict was delivered.
He will be sentenced at a later date.
Edwards, who called himself the “bogeyman” online and repeatedly lied to detectives about his sex attacks, had insisted he was not the notorious predator who stalked women in Perth’s wealthiest suburbs in the mid-1990s.
Justice Hall spent almost three months considering the evidence which included testimony from more than 200 witnesses as well as DNA and fibre analysis.
The families of the victims watched on as Justice Hall delivered his verdict, while members of the public packed the courtroom and two overflow public galleries.
Edwards was charged with the murder of Ms Rimmer and Ms Glennon after a raid on his Kewdale home in December 2016.
He was charged with Ms Spiers’ murder in February 2018.
The bodies of Ms Rimmer and Ms Glennon were discovered in bushland weeks after they were killed, but Ms Spiers’ body has never been found.
Edwards committed his first known offence against women in 1988, breaking into the Huntingdale home of an 18-year-old acquaintance and indecently assaulting her as she slept.
It provided the crucial piece of evidence homicide detectives needed to arrest him almost 29 years later.
He’d left behind a semen-stained silk kimono stolen from a washing line and when it was finally tested in November 2016, DNA matched swabs taken from a teenager he abducted from Claremont then raped at nearby Karrakatta Cemetery in 1995.
It also matched cellular material found under Ms Glennon’s fingernails.
Edwards didn’t admit the Huntingdale and Karrakatta crimes until the month before his judge-alone trial began.
The defence case lasted mere minutes, with Edwards electing not to take the stand and his barrister calling no witnesses.
But his lawyers suggested throughout the trial that the DNA evidence had been contaminated in the laboratory by samples taken from Edwards’ rape victim.
Prosecutors alleged fibres from Edwards’ work car and clothes were found on Ms Glennon, Ms Rimmer and the rape victim.
