Claremont Serial Killer: A Monster Hiding in Plain Sight

For Western Australians, Claremont is more than an affluent Perth suburb. Its name carries a deep, dark shadow.

Between January 1996 and March 1997, three young women disappeared after spending an evening in Claremont’s busy entertainment precinct. Sarah Spiers was eighteen. Jane Rimmer was twenty-three. Ciara Glennon was twenty-seven.

Sarah vanished after calling a taxi from a public telephone. Her body has never been found. Jane disappeared several months later, and her body was discovered in bushland near Wellard. The following year, Ciara vanished after leaving the Continental Hotel. Her body was later found north of Perth at Eglinton.

Three women left ordinary social gatherings and never made it home.

That knowledge changed Perth.

Claremont had been considered safe. It was fashionable, busy and familiar. Suddenly, women reconsidered how they travelled home. Parents waited for telephone calls. Friends watched one another more closely. Somewhere in the city, a predator appeared to be moving through the same streets as everyone else.

Police formed Taskforce Macro, beginning what became one of Western Australia’s longest and most expensive murder investigations. Leads were followed. Suspects came and went. Thousands of people were interviewed, and enormous volumes of evidence accumulated.

Still, the Claremont Serial Killer case remained unsolved for two decades.

Then, on 22 December 2016, police arrested Bradley Robert Edwards at his Kewdale home. An all-concealing marquee appeared outside the property while investigators searched the house and sifted the surrounding soil. The sudden activity made it look as though police had cracked the case overnight.

They had not.

What looked swift from the outside was the final movement of an investigation that had crawled forward for years. Improved forensic testing detected a tiny trace of Edwards’ DNA beneath Ciara Glennon’s fingernails. Fibres associated with vehicles used by Edwards in his work as a Telstra technician also helped connect him to Jane and Ciara.

The apparently ordinary technician had hidden behind employment, routine, and familiarity. That is what many people misunderstand about the mind of a serial killer. We expect obvious instability. We look for a monster and overlook the person who turns up for work on time.

Edwards was convicted in September 2020 of murdering Jane Rimmer and Ciara Glennon. He was also convicted of earlier attacks against two other women. In December 2020, he received a life sentence with a minimum of forty years before becoming eligible for parole.

He was found not guilty of murdering Sarah Spiers because the evidence could not establish that charge beyond reasonable doubt. Her remains are still missing.

That means the Claremont story cannot be neatly labelled “case closed.” Justice reached Jane and Ciara’s murderer, but one family continues to wait for the answer only Edwards may be able to provide.

Another detail has stayed with me.

Some years ago, I attended a private dinner where the Claremont murders entered the conversation. That was hardly unusual. People in Perth had discussed the case for years, passing around theories, rumours and fragments of information.

This conversation was different.

One of the guests had been “familiar” with Edwards through their workplace. I won’t identify the person or the workplace. The guest did not claim to know what Edwards was doing, nor did they suggest they had a vital piece of evidence that could have stopped him.

What disturbed me was the familiarity itself.

He had been a recognisable person in an ordinary working environment. Someone employees saw, spoke about and accepted as part of the scenery. He was not a creature living beneath the city. He had a job. He travelled its roads. He interacted with people. He occupied the same unremarkable spaces the rest of us do.

That is where darkness works best.

It does not always announce itself with threats, rage or suspicious behaviour. Sometimes it arrives for work, performs its duties and goes home again. It understands the required social expressions. It knows when to smile and how long to maintain eye contact. The line between instinct and civility can be frighteningly thin.

The dangerous person becomes familiar.

That uncomfortable idea lies beneath my SEETHINGS psychological thriller trilogy.

Five murders unfold beneath violent thunderstorms, but the novels are not merely concerned with finding a killer. They examine how someone capable of terrible things can continue moving through a marriage, a workplace and a circle of friends without being recognised for what they are.

Mitchell Felding is a photographer, a husband and a man others believe they know. He photographs storms, waiting for a flash of lightning to illuminate what the darkness has concealed. That relationship between the camera, the storm and the story runs throughout the novels.

The Claremont murders caused real suffering that fiction cannot and should not imitate. But they leave behind a disturbing question that dark fiction is willing to examine:

How well do we truly know the familiar person standing beside us?

Perhaps monsters do not hide in shadows.

Perhaps they survive by standing in plain sight.

–Michael (Dark Fiction. Author of SEETHINGS (the first book), free for a limited time)

—Michael Forman
Author of Dark Fiction

“Forman’s writing style is artful, with the protagonist Mitchell’s warped thought processes masterfully exposed. The author has a powerful and vivid command of language and his word pictures are stark and disturbingly real.”

– Linda J Bettenay, author of ‘Secrets Mothers Keep’ and ‘Wishes For Starlight’.