Latest / Crime Incident / Three Women, One Bar Strip, 24 Years: The Claremont Serial Killings

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Three Women, One Bar Strip, 24 Years: The Claremont Serial Killings · Crime Incident

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: Between January 1996 and March 1997, three young women vanished
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: from the same few blocks of nightlife in Claremont, an
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: affluent suburb of Perth, Western Australia. Eighteen months, one small
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: entertainment strip, the same late-night window after the bars closed.
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: It would take 24 years, the biggest and most expensive
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: investigation in the state's history, and a piece of silk
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: left behind at a burglary in 1988 to put a
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: name to what happened there. This is not a story
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: about a brilliant detective closing in on his man. This
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: is the story of the longest hunt Australian policing has
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: ever run. A task force that swelled to more than
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: 100 officers, tested thousands of people, chased the wrong man
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: for a decade, and was reviewed 11 times while the
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: answer sat, quite literally, in an evidence store. And I
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: want you to hold one question in your mind the
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: whole way through, because the ending turns on it. What
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: does it take to prove a murder when there is
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: no body? Keep that question close. It decides how this
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: story ends for one of the three families. First, the place,
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: because you cannot understand the fear without understanding the geography.
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: In the mid-1990s, Claremont was the nightlife hub of Perth's
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: western suburbs, a compact, affluent strip of venues where young
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: professionals ended their Friday and Saturday nights. Club Bayview, the
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: Continental Hotel, the Ocean Beach Hotel. This was not a
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: rough district or a forgotten edge of the city. It
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: was the safe part of town, The postcode where lawyers
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: and secretaries and childcare workers went out precisely because nothing
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: bad happened there. The whole strip could be walked in minutes.
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: Taxes queued nearby. And that is what made what came
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: next so corrosive. The killer was not operating in the
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: shadows at the margin of the city. He was working
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: the brightest, busiest, most respectable few blocks Perth had, and
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: no one ever saw him take anyone.
• 1:53
  Speaker 2: Now the people.
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: Because if you know this case at all, you probably
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: know it by its nickname. The Claremont Serial Killings. and
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: nicknames have a way of swallowing the names that matter.
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: Sarah Spears was 18. She had moved to Perth from Darkin,
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: a small country town in the Wheatbelt, and worked as
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: a secretary, a teenager building a city life, close enough
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: to home to keep it in reach. Everything about her
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: last known movements is ordinary, and that is the point.
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: She did what every safety lecture tells a young woman
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: to do. She did not walk home alone. She did
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: not accept a lift from a stranger. She called a
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: licensed taxi from a public phone, to a well-known intersection.
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: On Australia Day night, the 26th of January 1996, she
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: went out with friends to Club Bayview in Claremont. In
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: the early hours of the 27th, at about 2 in
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: the morning, she walked to a phone box alone and
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: called a taxi. She asked to be picked up at
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: the corner of Stirling Road and Stirling Highway. The taxi
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: arrived minutes later. Sarah was gone.
• 2:51
  Speaker 2: Not late. Not wandered off. Not at another venue. Gone.
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: Her body has never been found. And I am telling
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: you that now, at the beginning, because her absence is
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: the wound this entire case is built around, and it
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: never closes. Jane Rimmer was 23, a childcare worker, someone
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: who spent her days looking after other people's children. On
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: the night of the 8th of June 1996, she was
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: out with friends at the Continental Hotel, another venue on
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: the St.
• 3:18
  Speaker 2: Claremont Strip.
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: Security footage caught her standing outside the hotel at four
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: minutes past midnight on the 9th of June. That grainy
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: frame is the last confirmed sighting of her alive. On
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: the 3rd of August 1996, a family picking flowers in
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: Bushland off Woolcoot Road in Wellard, about 40 kilometers south
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: of Perth, found her body. Chiara Glennon was 27, a
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: solicitor at a major Perth law firm. She had just
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: come back from traveling overseas, the trip of a lifetime, done,
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: home again, career resuming. On Friday the 14th of March 1997,
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: she went for after-work drinks at the same Continental Hotel.
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: In the early hours of the 15th, Around half past midnight,
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: witnesses saw her walking south along Stirling Highway, and then
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: saw her lean toward the window of a car that
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: had stopped beside her. That lean, a young woman bending
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: toward a stranger's passenger window on a well-lit highway, is
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: the closest anyone ever came to witnessing the Claremont killer
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: at work. Nineteen days later, on the 3rd of April 1997,
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: a man walking off Pippidini Road in Eglinton, coastal scrub
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: about 40 kilometers north of the city, found her body.
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: Notice the geometries. Because the investigators certainly did. One victim
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: never found. One found 40 kilometers south. One found 40
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: kilometers north. All taken from the same strip of bars.
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: All in the same after-midnight window. All after becoming separated
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: from their friends. By March 1997, the police said publicly
• 4:44
  Speaker 1: what Perth already feared. A serial killer was working Claremont.
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: The Western Australian government put up a $ 250, 000 reward, the
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: largest in the state's history at that time. Parents started
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: driving into the city at closing time to collect their
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: adult daughters. A generation of Perth women grew up on
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: one rule, never take the offer of a lift. Here
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: is where the story becomes what I promised you, the
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: anatomy of the longest investigation. After Jane Rimmer disappeared in
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: June 1996, police formed the Macro Task Force. At its peak,
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: it ran more than 100 officers across 10 teams, and
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: you need to understand the scale of what they tried.
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: because the failure of this task force was not a
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: failure of effort. They fingerprinted and DNA tested thousands of
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: taxi drivers, because who else can idle beside a phone
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: box at 2 in the morning without drawing a second glance?
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: They sent confrontational questionnaires to 110 persons of interest. They
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: imported a polygraph machine. They flew in international experts. They
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: went so far as to consult David Burney, an imprisoned
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: serial killer, on the theory that it takes one to
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: profile one, a decision that remains controversial to this day.
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: The task force was internally reviewed 11 times over its lifetime,
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: 11 reviews. And in September, 2005, after nine years, it
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: was wound down without a single arrest. Nine years is
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: long enough for an investigation to become an institution and
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: institutions develop habits. Ask yourself what it does to a
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: task force to be reviewed 11 times and still have
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: nothing to show a city that is holding its breath.
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: The pressure did not come only from headquarters. It came
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: from every parent idling outside a Claremont venue at midnight,
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: from every front page, from a reward poster promising a
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: quarter of a million dollars that nobody ever successfully claimed.
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: Under that kind of weight, investigations do not usually fail
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: by doing too little. They fail by narrowing, by finding
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: a shape that fits and pressing on it until the
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: pressing feels like progress. Which brings us to the answer,
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: and part of it has a name. The record demands
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: we say it carefully. From April 1998. The task force
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: fixated on Lance Williams, a public servant who drove the
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: Claremont Strip late at night, offering women lifts home. Understand
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: what that looked like from inside an investigation desperate for
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: a suspect. A lone man, circling the exact hunting ground,
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: at the exact hours, making the exact offer investigators believed
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: the killer made. Williams became the prime suspect. He lived
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: for years under overt surveillance. Police cars visibly following him,
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: repeated interviews, his life effectively annexed by the case. He
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: was never charged with anything. In 2008, a decade after
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: the fixation began, police declared he was no longer a
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: person of interest. He died in 2018, cleared but never
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: publicly whole again. Critics regard the Williams years as the
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: central institutional failure of the entire investigation, confirmation bias with
• 7:32
  Speaker 1: a badge, consuming a decade of the task force's energy.
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: And here is the detail that should genuinely unsettle you.
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: Through all those years of following the wrong man, the
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: real killer's DNA was already in police storage. It had
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: been there since before Sarah Spears ever called that taxi.
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: Nobody knew what they were holding. Let me show you
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: what they were holding. Rewind to the 15th of February, 1988,
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: eight years before the first Claremont disappearance. A man broke
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: into a home in Huntingdale, a suburb southeast of Perth,
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: and attempted to attack an 18-year-old woman as she slept.
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: She fought, he fled, and in his rush he left
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: something behind, a silk kimono he had stolen. Police kept it,
• 8:13
  Speaker 1: A burglary exhibit, bagged and shelved, now jumped to the
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: 12th of February 1995, 11 months before Sarah vanished. A
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: 17-year-old girl was abducted from Rowe Park, near Club Bayview,
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: the very venue Sarah would later leave. She was bound,
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: driven to Caracatta Cemetery, raped twice, and abandoned. She survived,
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: and her attacker left DNA. Two crimes, seven years apart,
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  Speaker 1: both unsolved. A kimono in one evidence bag, a rape
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: kit in another. Hold both of those images, because everything
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: in this case runs through them. And notice where the
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: second crime happened. Rowe Park sits near Club Bayview, the
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: same venue Sarah Spears left 11 months later. The same
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: strip Jane Rimmer and Ciara Glennon walked out of after her.
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  Speaker 1: The Caracatta attack was not some distant prelude in another
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: part of the city. It was a full rehearsal, staged
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: on the exact ground the murders would later occupy. A
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: young woman alone, late at night, near the Claremont bars,
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  Speaker 1: taken into a vehicle and driven away The difference is
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: that in 1995, the attacker let his victim live. Whatever
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: changed in him between February 1995 and January 1996, the
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: hunting ground never did. Now the midpoint of our story,
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: and the moment the machine finally turned. In 2009, four
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: years after the Macro Task Force shutdown, a cold case
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: review re-examined material recovered from under Kiara Glennon's fingernails, samples
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: cataloged as AJM-40 and AJM-42. Think about what those samples are.
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: Kiara Glennon fought her killer. In the last minutes of
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: her life, she scratched him hard enough to carry his
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: DNA under her nails, through 19 days in coastal scrub,
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: onto an examiner's table, and into a freezer for over
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: a decade. The 2009 review matched that DNA to the Karaka.
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: rape kit from 1995. Sit with what that meant. The
• 10:03
  Speaker 1: man who raped a 17-year-old at a cemetery in 1995,
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: and the man who murdered Ciara Glennon in 1997, were
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: the same man. The series now had a genetic signature.
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: What it still did not have was a name. A
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: name came from the kimono. In 2016, that 1988 burglary exhibit,
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: 28 years on a shelf, was retested with modern techniques.
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: Same DNA profile. And unlike the other scenes, the Huntingdale
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: break-in had always been loosely tied to a suspect, a
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: young local named Bradley Robert Edwards. Detectives covertly obtained a
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: fresh sample from Edwards.
• 10:39
  Speaker 2: It matched.
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: On the 22nd of December 2016, police arrested Bradley Robert Edwards,
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: 48 years old, at his home in Kewdale. and charged
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: him with the murders of Jane Rimmer and Ciara Glennon.
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: In February 2018, they added a third charge, the willful
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: murder of Sarah Spears. Twenty years and eleven months after
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: Sarah called her taxi, the state finally said a name
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: out loud.
• 11:03
  Speaker 2: So who was he? Not a drifter, not a stranger
• 11:06
  Speaker 2: to the system.
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: Edwards was a Telstra technician, the telecommunications company, formerly Telecom,
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: a uniformed tradesman with a company vehicle and a reason
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: to be anywhere at any hour.
• 11:17
  Speaker 2: And his record was already blinking.
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: In May 1990, while on a work call at Hollywood
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: Private Hospital, he attacked a social worker. He pleaded guilty
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: to common assault and kept his job. Let me say
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: that again because it is the quiet scandal inside this case.
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: He attacked a woman while working under his employer's name,
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: was convicted, and kept the job and the vehicle that
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: gave him his camouflage. At trial, prosecutors would assemble what
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: became known as the Telstra Living Witness Pattern, testimony that
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: between 1995 and 1997, a man in a Telstra station
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: wagon was repeatedly seen stopping to watch women, or offering
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: them lifts, around Claremont after hours.
• 11:53
  Speaker 2: A predator in a trusted utility vehicle.
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: The most invisible car on any street is the one
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: that looks like it is there to fix something. The
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: physical case tightened around that vehicle. Between April 1996 and
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: December 1998, Edwards drove a white VS Series 1 Holden
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: Commodore station wagon issued by Telstra. Prosecutors matched fibers found
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: on the bodies of both Jane Rimmer and Ciara Glennon,
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: to Telstra-issue work trousers, and to the carpet of that
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: model of Commodore. And a witness described a Series 1
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: Commodore with distinctive teardrop hubcaps cruising past Kiara Glennon shortly
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: before she vanished. The stopped car, the lean toward the window.
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: Stop and take the measure of the arrest itself, because
• 12:33
  Speaker 1: Perth certainly did. For twenty years the Claremont killer had
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: been an abstraction, a silhouette in a stopped car, a
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: monster with no face that an entire city had learned
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: to organize its nights around. And then the face arrived,
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: and it was a middle-aged telecommunications technician from Kewdale, with
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: a lawn and a job history. Not a drifter passing through,
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: not a name from the task force's famous lists. A
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: man who had been inside the system since 1990, convicted,
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: in uniform, on the clock, and who had simply never
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: risen to the top of a pile that contained thousands
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: of names. If you want to know why this case
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: is studied, that is why. The investigation did not fail
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: to gather the killer. It failed, for two decades, to
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: recognize which of the men it had already touched he was.
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: The trial that followed was, fittingly for this case, a record-breaker,
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: the longest and most expensive criminal trial in Western Australian history.
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: Because of saturation publicity and the graphic nature of the evidence,
• 13:28
  Speaker 1: it was heard by a judge alone, Justice Stephen Hall
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: of the WA Supreme Court, no jury. It ran seven months,
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: from the 25th of November 2019 to the 25th of
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: June 2020, with more than 200 witnesses. Before it began,
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: in October 2019, Edwards made a move that reframed everything.
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: He pleaded guilty to five non-murder offenses, including the 1988
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: Huntingdale break-in and the 1995 Caracatta abduction and rapes, while
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: denying the three murders. Absorbed the shape of that defense.
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: He admitted being the man in the kimono house. He
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: admitted being the Caracatta rapist. He was conceding the very
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: crimes whose DNA had identified him and betting everything on
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: a gap. But the state could not carry that DNA
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: across the line from rapist to killer. His lawyers attacked
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: the bridge itself, arguing the fingernail DNA could be the
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: product of laboratory contamination at the Pathwest lab, and that
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: the fibers could have innocent origins. Understand why that contamination
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: argument was the whole ballgame. The Caracatta samples and the
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: Glennon samples had, at various points, passed through the same
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: forensic system. If the defense could show a plausible route
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: by which the rapist's DNA, which Edwards now admitted was his,
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: had migrated in the laboratory onto the material from under
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: Chiara's fingernails, Then the genetic bridge between the confessed rapist
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: and the accused murderer collapsed, and with it the heart
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: of the prosecution. It became the most fought-over scientific question
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: of the entire seven months, litigated witness by witness while
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: the country followed the evidence sessions almost daily. Justice Hall
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: heard all of it, and when the time came, rejected it.
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: On the 24th of September 2020, Justice Hall delivered a
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: 619-page judgment. And here is where I need you to
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: be more precise than most retellings of this case ever are,
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: because the verdict was not one answer. It was three,
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: and they were not the same. Guilty of the willful
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: murder of Jane Rimmer. The fibers, the vehicle, the pattern,
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: proven beyond reasonable doubt. Guilty of the willful murder of
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: Ciara Glennon. The DNA under her fingernails, the fibers, the
• 15:34
  Speaker 1: Commodore seen beside her, proven beyond reasonable doubt. The contamination
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: theory was examined and rejected. not guilty of the murder
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: of Sarah Spears. Not guilty. The first victim, the 18-year-old
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: at the phone box. The girl whose disappearance started it all.
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: Remember the question I asked you to carry at the start.
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: What does it take to prove a murder when there
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: is no body? Here is the answer the law gave.
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: With no body, no crime scene, no fibers, no DNA,
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: nothing of Sarah ever recovered. The count could not be
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: proven beyond reasonable doubt. and then Justice Hall added a
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: sentence that the Spears family has had to live inside
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: ever since. He stated it was more likely than not
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: that Edwards was responsible for Sarah's disappearance.
• 16:16
  Speaker 2: Read that carefully.
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: The judge who acquitted him said he probably did it.
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: That is not a contradiction. It is the criminal standard
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: of proof working exactly as designed. Probably is not enough
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: to convict a man of murder. But probably is not
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: enough to convict a man of murder. On the 23rd
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: of December 2020, Justice Hall sentenced Edwards to life imprisonment
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: with a minimum of 40 years, before he can even
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: be considered for parole, observing there was a high likelihood
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: he would die in prison. Edwards was 52, and then
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: came the silence that sealed it. Edwards did not appeal.
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: The deadline passed in 2021 with no notice lodged, and
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: legal aid later refused to fund any potential challenge. Prosecutors,
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: for their part, announced they would not challenge the Spears acquittal.
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: No appeal was ever filed by either side. The convictions
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: stand unaltered. Legally, the Claremont case is finished. The case
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: never really left Australian public life. It had dominated the
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: country's media for a quarter of a century. Years of
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: explanatory coverage, near daily trial reporting through the DNA and
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: fiber sessions, and, in 2023, a national television miniseries that
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: dramatized it for a generation too young to remember the
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: original fear. Researchers have since studied the way Perth journalism
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: itself shaped the public reality of the killings. How a
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: city's understanding of its own safest suburb was rebuilt, story
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: by story, over 24 years. Media speculation has periodically tried
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: to attach other missing persons cases to the Claremont killer.
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: For the record, no other case has ever been officially
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: attributed to Edwards.
• 17:49
  Speaker 2: Two murders proven. One acquittal.
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: That is the full, precise ledger. And precision is the
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: least this case has earned. Humanly, though, the ledger does
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: not balance. And you already know why. Sarah Spears' remains
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: have never been located. Her murder is, formally, unsolved. Her
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: family and the Western Australian police have repeatedly appealed to Edwards,
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: the man a judge called more likely than not responsible,
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: to say anything he knows about where she is. He
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: has said nothing. He sits in prison with a 40-year
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: minimum and the one piece of information the Spears family
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: wants more than justice, a place to stand and grieve.
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: Every year he stays silent is a choice he makes again.
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: And spare a final thought for two women whose names
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: most retellings skip entirely. the 18-year-old from Huntingdale who fought
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: off an intruder in 1988, and the 17-year-old who survived
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: Karakata in 1995. They are usually treated as evidence, the kimono,
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: the rape kit. They were the survivors whose cases carried
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: the DNA that solved the murders. Two young women who
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: lived through the early violence of a man still learning
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: what he was, and whose ordeals, preserved in evidence bags
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: for decades, became the thread that finally pulled him out
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: of the dark. The task force ran nine years, a
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: hundred officers, eleven reviews, and thousands of tests. What broke
• 19:08
  Speaker 1: the case was the fingernails of a woman who fought back,
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: and a burglary exhibit nobody had thrown away. The longest
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: investigation in Western Australian history was ultimately won by its
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: own storage room.
• 19:19
  Speaker 2: 24 years. Start to sentence. Three families. Two convictions.
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: One young woman still out there, somewhere between a phone
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: box and Claremont, and a place only one living man
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: can name. Next time, we leave Australia for a case
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: that inverts everything you just heard, where the problem was
• 19:38
  Speaker 1: never finding the killer, because he confessed almost immediately, and
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: the real investigation was into whether a single word of
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: his confession.
• 19:45
  Speaker 2: Could be trusted. Thank you for listening.