Ciara Glennon
Board of Directors of Seven Group Holdings Limited,
And Seven West Media
Owners of:
The Sunday Times, (Perth, WA) PerthNow, The West Australian Newspaper, the Kalgoorlie Miner, the Community Newspaper Group in a joint venture with News Corp Australia, and nine regional radio licences., 50% interest in Yahoo!7, and the Chanel 7 Network, owned by Seven West Media,
http://www.sevenwestmedia.com.au/about-us/board-of-directors/
Kerry Stokes AC
Chairman - Non-Executive Director
Mr Stokes is the Executive Chairman of Seven Group Holdings Limited, a company with a market-leading presence in the resources services sector in Australia and formerly in north east China and a significant investment in energy and also in media in Australia through Seven West Media. Mr Stokes has held this position since April 2010. He is also Chairman of Australian Capital Equity Pty Limited, which has substantial interests in media and entertainment, resources, energy, property, pastoral and industrial activities.
Mr Stokes’ board memberships include Council Member for the Paley Group (formerly the International Council for Museum & Television); Chairman and Fellow (since November 2015) for the Australian War Memorial (previously a Council Member); and a former Chairman of the National Gallery of Australia. Mr Stokes holds professional recognitions which include an Honorary Doctorate in Commerce at Edith Cowan University and an Honorary Fellow of Murdoch University.
Mr Stokes has, throughout his career, been the recipient of awards, including Life Membership of the Returned Services League of Australia; 1994 Paul Harris Rotary Fellow Award; 1994 Citizen of Western Australia for Industry & Commerce; 2002 Gold Medal award from the AIDC for Western Australian Director of the Year; 2007 Fiona Stanley Award for outstanding contribution to Child Health Research; 2009 Richard Pratt Business Arts Leadership Award from the Australian Business Arts Foundation; and 2011 Charles Court Inspiring Leadership Award; 2013 West Australian of the Year; 2014 Awarded Keys to the City of Perth and 2014 Awarded Keys to the City of Melbourne.
Mr Stokes was awarded Australia’s highest honour, the Companion in the General Division in the Order of Australia (AC) in 2008. In 1995, he was recognised as Officer in the General Division of the Order of Australia (AO).
Mr Stokes was appointed to the Board on 25 September 2008, and became Chairman of Seven West Media Limited (formerly West Australian Newspaper Holdings Ltd) on 11 December 2008.
James Warburton
Managing Director & Chief Executive Officer
Mr Warburton is Managing Director & Chief Executive Officer of Seven West Media Limited.
Prior to his appointment as MD & CEO of Seven West Media, Mr Warburton was Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of APN Outdoor where he led a significant transformation and turnaround at the company before departing in late 2018 when APN Outdoor was acquired by JCDecaux for a record valuation. Before his appointment to APN Outdoor, Mr Warburton was the Chief Executive Officer of Supercars for five years.
In this position, Mr Warburton drove significant growth in the sport and delivered unprecedented broadcast, sponsorship and funding deals. Mr Warburton has also held senior leadership roles at media buying company Universal McCann, he was Chief Digital and Sales Officer of the Seven Media Group, and he was the Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Network 10.
Mr Warburton was appointed to the Board on 16 August 2019.
Mr John Alexander
Non-Executive Director
Mr Alexander was the Executive Chairman of Consolidated Media Holdings Limited (CMH) from 2007 to November 2012, when CMH was acquired by News Corporation. Prior to 2007, Mr Alexander was the Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director of Publishing and Broadcasting Limited (PBL) from 2004, the Chief Executive of ACP Magazines Limited from 1999 and PBL’s group media division comprising ACP Magazines Limited and the Nine Network from 2002. Before joining the PBL Group, Mr Alexander was the Editor-in-Chief, Publisher & Editor of The Sydney Morning Herald and Editor-in-Chief of The Australian Financial Review.
Mr Alexander has previously acted as a director of a number of companies including Foxtel Management Pty Limited, Fox Sports Australia Pty Limited, SEEK Limited, Carsales.com Limited, Ninemsn Pty Limited & CrownBet. Mr Alexander is the Executive Chairman of listed company Crown Resorts Limited. He is also the Chairman of Crown Melbourne Limited and Burswood Limited Boards.
Mr Alexander is Chairman of the Remuneration & Nomination Committee.
Mr Alexander was appointed to the Board on 2 May 2013.
Teresa Dyson
Non-Executive Director
Ms Dyson is an experienced company director, with a broad range of experience across public and private sectors. Ms Dyson has been closely involved in strategic decision making in business and organisational structuring, covering the financial services, transport, energy and resources sectors, as well as infrastructure projects.
Ms Dyson is currently a director of Power & Water Corporation (NT), Energy Queensland, Genex Power Limited, Gold Coast Hospital and Health Board, Consolidated Tin Mines Limited, Energy Super, Fare Limited, and is a member of the Foreign Investment Review Board and the Takeovers Panel. She is a former director of UN Women National Committee Australia Ltd and Opera Queensland.
Ms Dyson holds a Masters of Applied Finance from Macquarie University. She graduated with a Bachelor of Laws (Honours), a Bachelor of Arts and Masters of Taxation from the University of Queensland and is a graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors.
Ms Dyson is Chairman of the Audit and Risk Committee.
Ms Dyson was appointed to the Board on 2 November 2017.
David Evans
Non-Executive Director
Mr Evans is the Executive Chairman of Evans Dixon Pty Ltd. Mr Evans established Evans and Partners Pty Ltd, the investment advisory company in June 2007.
Since 1990, he has worked in a variety of roles within JB Were & Son, and then the merged entity Goldman Sachs JBWere Pty Ltd (GSJBW). Prior to establishing Evans and Partners Mr Evans ran Goldman Sachs JBWere’s Private Wealth business and the Institutional Equities business. His most recent role at GSJBW was as Managing Director and Chief of Staff. Mr Evans is a member of the Victorian Police Corporate Advisory Group and Chairman of Cricket Australia’s Investment Committee.
Mr Evans is a member of the Audit & Risk Committee and a member of the Remuneration & Nomination Committee.
Mr Evans was appointed to the Board on 21 August 2012.
Colette Garnsey OAM
Non-Executive Director
Ms Garnsey is currently a non-executive Director of Flight Centre Travel Group, and non-executive Director and Chair of Australian Wool Innovation Limited.
She has over 30 years’ executive experience, having held senior management positions at David Jones, Pacific Brands, and Premier Investments, encompassing strategy, operations, marketing, business planning and business transformation. She spent over 20 years with David Jones Limited rising to become Group General Manager.
Ms Garnsey has served on the board of the Melbourne Fashion Festival. She has also advised the CSIRO, The Federal Innovation Council, and the business advisory boards of various Federal Trade and Investment Ministers and Australian Fashion Week.
Ms Garnsey is a member of the Remuneration & Nomination Committee.
Ms Garnsey was appointed to the Board on 12 December 2018.
Michael Malone, Non-Executive Director
Mr Malone founded iiNet Limited in 1993 and continued as CEO until retiring in 2014. During his tenure, iiNet grew to service one million households and businesses, with revenues of one billion dollars and a market cap of over one billion dollars.
Mr Malone has been recognised with a raft of industry accolades, including 2012 Australian Entrepreneur of the Year, CEO of the Year in the Australian Telecom Awards and National Customer Service CEO of the Year in the CSIA’s Australian Service Excellence Awards.
He presently sits on the board as a non-executive Director of NBN Co and ASX listed SpeedCast Limited and is the Chairman on Superloop Limited. Mr Malone is a founder of Diamond Cyber, an IT security firm in Perth. He is also a Director of Axicom Pty Limited and a member of the Advisory Committee of the Regional and Small Publishers Innovation Fund.
Mr Malone is a member of the Audit & Risk Committee.
Mr Malone was appointed to the Board on 24 June 2015.
Ryan Stokes, Non-Executive Director
Mr Stokes is Managing Director & Chief Executive Officer of Seven Group Holdings Limited (SGH). SGH owns approximately 41 per cent of SWM.
Mr Stokes has been a Director of Seven West Media Limited (SWM) since 2012 and was an Executive Director and then Chairman of Pacific Magazines from 2004 to 2008 and a Director of Yahoo7 from 2005 to 2013. Mr Stokes is a Director of WesTrac, Chairman of Coates Hire, and a Director of Beach Energy.
Mr Stokes is Chief Executive Officer of Australian Capital Equity Pty Limited (ACE). ACE is a private company with its primary investment being an interest in SGH. Mr Stokes was appointed Chairman of the National Gallery of Australia on 9 July 2018.
Mr Stokes is the former Chairman of the National Library of Australia. He is also a member of the Prime Ministerial Advisory Council on Veterans Mental Health established in 2014.
In 2015, he became a Committee member of innovationXchange (within the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade), which provides strategic guidance on innovation in aid programs. He is also a member of the IOC Olympic Education Commission.
Mr Stokes holds a BComm from Curtin University and is a Fellow of the Australian Institute of Management (FAIM).
Mr Stokes is a member of the Remuneration & Nomination Committee.
Mr Stokes was appointed to the Board on 21 August 2012.
Michael Ziegelaar, Non-Executive Director
Mr Ziegelaar is a senior partner of global law firm Herbert Smith Freehills, where he is the Co-Head of Australian Equity Capital Markets. He specialises in corporate, equity capital markets and M&A transactions and has acted for a wide range of clients across various industries.
Mr Ziegelaar is also a non-executive director of the Burnet Institute.
He holds a Bachelor of Laws (Hons), a Bachelor of Economics (majoring in Accounting and Corporate Finance) and a Master of Laws (majoring in Commercial Law) from Monash University.
Mr Ziegelaar is a member of the Audit & Risk Committee
Mr Ziegelaar was appointed to the Board on 2 November 2017.
Management Team
Board of Directors of Seven Group Holdings Limited,
And Seven West Media
James Warburton, Managing Director & Chief Executive Officer
Mr Warburton is Managing Director & Chief Executive Officer of Seven West Media Limited.
Prior to his appointment as CEO of Seven West Media, Mr Warburton was Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of APN Outdoor where he led a significant transformation and turnaround at the company before departing in late 2018 when APN Outdoor was acquired by JCDecaux for a record valuation. Before his appointment to APN Outdoor, Mr Warburton was the Chief Executive Officer of Supercars for five years.
In this position, Mr Warburton drove significant growth in the sport and delivered unprecedented broadcast, sponsorship and funding deals. Mr Warburton has also held senior leadership roles at media buying company Universal McCann, he was Chief Digital and Sales Officer of the Seven Media Group, and he was the Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Network 10.
Bruce McWilliam, Commercial Director
Mr McWilliam was appointed Commercial Director of Seven Network Limited in May 2003 and has been a Director of Seven Network since September 2003, and a Director of SMG since December 2006. Mr McWilliam was a former Director of BSkyB, Executive Director News International Television and General Counsel, News International plc. Previously, Mr McWilliam was a partner of law firms Gilbert & Tobin, Turnbull McWilliam and Allen Allen & Hemsley specialising in media and commercial law.
Warwick Lynch, Chief Financial Officer
Mr Lynch was appointed Chief Financial Officer of Seven West Media in February 2016, following acting in the position since January 2015. His previous roles within SWM include Deputy Chief Financial Officer, Chief Financial Officer of Seven Media Group, and Group Financial Controller of Seven Network. Prior to joining Seven Network he was with the United Kingdom based media company, Chrysalis, and preceding that with Ernst & Young for four years. He holds a Bachelor of Business degree, majoring in Accounting from Charles Sturt University. He is a member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Australia.
Kurt Burnette, Chief Revenue Officer
Mr Burnette is responsible for growing the company’s current revenue streams and establishing new revenue opportunities for Seven West Media. He is also responsible for the company’s business development process including the activation of an ‘incubator’ for new revenue opportunities as the company expands its presence beyond broadcast television and publishing. Prior to his appointment as Chief Revenue Officer was Chief Sales and Digital Officer for Seven West Media. In a twenty year career with the Seven Network, Mr Burnette has also been Sports Sales Manager, Sydney Sales Director and Network Director of Sales.
Katie McGrath
Group Executive, Human Resources
Ms McGrath joined Seven West Media as Group Executive, Human Resources in June 2017 from ASX listed Enero Group where she was Global Human Resources Director.
Prior to joining Enero Group in 2010, Ms McGrath was National Head of Staffing for Bain & Company and has held senior human resources roles for two decades including roles at Commonwealth Bank, SMS Management & Technology and Singtel Optus.
Ms McGrath holds a Bachelor of Commerce from UNSW and a Post Graduate degree in Psychology from the University of Sydney.
Charlotte Valente, Chief Marketing Officer
Ms Valente is Seven West Media’s first Chief Marketing Officer, appointed to the role in October 2019. Ms Valente has over two decades of industry experience, both domestically and internationally across senior marketing roles.
Prior to joining SWM, Ms Valente was General Manager, B2B at Big Red Group, with other roles held including General Manager Marketing at APN Outdoor. Ms Valente has delivered work for globally-regarded brands including the BBC and Guardian Media Group.
Maryna Fewster, Chief Executive Officer - SWM WA
After emigrating to New Zealand in 1997, Ms Fewster was appointed at iHug, a New Zealand internet service provider.
In 2003, iHug was acquired by iiNet, an Australian based Telco. As part of the iiNet leadership group and as Chief Operating Officer of iiNet, Ms Fewster had an integral role in driving organic growth while ensuring the acquisitions undertaken by iiNet were effectively integrated across people, culture and systems.
Following her departure from iiNet in 2015, Ms Fewster took a consulting role reporting to the Board of ASX listed Seven West Media Ltd, on the operational performance of the WA business. This led to Ms Fewster's appointment firstly as COO of SWM WA and then most recently as CEO of SWM WA.
Ms Fewster is a non-executive director of Celebrate WA, Burswood Limited and Edith Cowan College.
Corporate Governance, Board of Directors of Seven Group Holdings Limited,
And Seven West Media
http://www.sevenwestmedia.com.au/about-us/corporate-governance/
Code of Conduct for Employees
http://www.sevenwestmedia.com.au/assets/pdfs/Code-of-Conduct-for-Employees-20-August-2018-website.pdf
Code of Conduct for Employees
Seven West Media Limited ("SWM") is committed to offering its employees an innovative and rewarding environment that encourages and fosters excellence. The company’s Code pf Conduct for Employees help to guide employees on how to act and clarifies how the company expects employees to perform.
This includes:
Work Ethic
Employees are expected to perform their duties to the maximum of their ability and deliver acceptable objectives to the company.
Safety
Employees are expected to follow health and safety guidelines and procedures and to be aware of and report any potential hazards.
Confidentiality
Unauthorised disclosure of company information regarding both the company and its employees is prohibited.
Personal Conduct
Employees are expected to act in a courteous, respectful manner at all times when dealing with fellow employees, suppliers, contractors, customers and the general public. Employees are expected to adhere to dress and presentation standards in accordance with the company guidelines.
Fair Business
Employees are expected to behave honestly and openly and with integrity in their dealings with the company. Employees must not mislead or defraud fellow employees, customers, suppliers, contractors or SWM in general.
Working Environment
Everyone at SWM has a legal obligation not to discriminate or harass any employee, agent, contract worker, supplier or visitor. Employees are not permitted to smoke on company premises, except in designated smoking areas.
Gifts, Conflict of Interest and Ethical Conduct
Other than in the course of routine business, employees must not to accept cash, gifts or gratuities from a supplier, agent, customer or contractor for any reason. Employees must not put themselves in a position where their interests conflict with those of the company.
Obligation to Disclose Relevant Information
Employees are obliged to inform the company of any change in their circumstances that may affect their ability to perform their normal duties.
Use of Company Assets
Employees must not deliberately misuse or damage company property in their possession, care or custody and must not use company assets, intellectual property or the services of other employees (including contractors) for private use or gain.
Change
The company expects employees to remain open-mined about change in the work place and to collaboratively support and embrace new ideas and programs.
Environment
Employees are responsible for maintaining and protecting the environment. Employees are expected to consider the impact of their actions on the environment and local community, including in relation to the disposal of waste, use and storage of chemicals and use of natural resources.
SWM's Employee Assistance Program - EAP
The company offers confidential access to counselling for staff and immediate family members. EAP provides counselling and assistance to help resolve or deal with personal problems and issues which may be affecting their work or home life.
2.50pm on Dec 17, 2019
The cord Bradley Edwards used to tie up his rape victim in 1995.
Detective who re-investigated Karrakatta rape after Jane's death takes the stand
The next witness is Betty Jo Francis, a former detective from the WA Police Sex Abuse Squad.
The 49-year-old has medium-length blonde hair and is wearing a black, patterned blouse.
She said in 1996 she was asked by the homicide squad to reinterview the teenager Bradley Edwards raped at Karrakatta cemetery in 1995. At the time, police did not know who the offender was.
Her evidence forms part of how the exhibits relating to the offence were collected, stored and examined.
The defence alleges at some stage, Mr Edwards' DNA contained on some of the exhibits contaminated the exhibits relating to DNA found under Ciara Glennon's fingernails.
Ms Francis said she created a running sheet to record her tasks relating to the investigation.
"It was a few weeks, possibly two months [that we had the file], then we handed the file back to Macro as it was known," she said.
She is recalling the exhibits relating to the rape were being held at the central exhibits office at police headquarters, in the forensic branch.
"I remember requesting photographs ... that are normally taken at the time of the complaint ... [I requested] any photographs taken at the scene at the time," she said.
She said she requested for the photographs to be developed.
An earlier witness revealed these photosgraphs of the exhibits in situ were either never taken, or lost.
Ms Francis then collected the exhibits including shoes, shorts, underwear, t-shirt, jacket, hospital gown and pants and a white cord from the headquarters, and recorded the collection in a 1995 forensic exhibits registr.
The shorts were originally marked as a skirt, and her denim vest was originally marked as a denim jacket.
"Those exhibits were then taken back to our offices at Curtin House ... they were in brown and green exhibit bags, paper bags," she said.
Ms Francis is recalling reviewing the cord Mr Edwards used to tie up his victim, which was originally thought to be an electrical cord.
"We wanted to ascertain who the manufacturer was, what type of cord it was," she said.
"We ascertained it was actually clothesline or washing line cord ... I believe it was a generic product that came from Melbourne."
Ms Francis is now recalling taking a detailed statement from the victim on June 17, 1996 - a 35 page statement which has already been read to the court.
After the interview, Ms Francis corrected the exhibit named 'skirt' to 'shorts' in the property tracing system on June 26, 1996. She said she did this based on the victim's recollection, and "would never" have opened the exhibit bag to check.
She is now recalling the date she took some of the exhibits to the ChemCentre on June 27, 1996 to request fibre analysis of the items.
The document requesting the forensic testing has been shown to the court. It requested testing for vehicle carpet fibres and vehicle paint traces on the victim's clothing and shoes.
To do the testing, the exhibits were transferred to the possession of the ChemCentre. The court is being shown a document showing the transfer occurred on June 27, 1997.
Ms Francis said she did not have possession of the exhibits after this point and the case file was returned to Macro Taskforce.
Trial of Bradley Robert Edwards
Judge releases photos of cord used in rape, and victim's drag marks through cemetery
https://www.watoday.com.au/national/western-australia/claremont-killer-trial-live-bradley-edwards-faces-third-week-of-witness-evidence-20191209-p53i36.html
9th November, 2019- 12.11pm
Security guard's movements at Karrakatta cemetery reviewed
The next witness statement will be read in by Ms Barbagallo.
It is that of Jennifer Grace, 50, who worked as a dispatch officer, and sometimes a security guard in the mid-1990s.
Her statement includes information about how security guards used portable 'data wands' to communicate where they travelled while on patrol.
A client report was usually generated at the end of the month and sent to clients to show security guard activity and the areas patrolled in a time-stamped format.
She has reviewed a security guard client report for Karrakatta Cemetery from February 1995 which showed three datapoint locations at the cemetery.
"To her knowledge the date and times in the report are accurate," she said.
The report showed there were no patrols of the cemetery between 1.43am and 4.59am on the morning of February 12, 1995 when the teenager was raped.
9th November, 2019 12.15pm
Security officer working at Karrakatta cemetery 'didn't see anything' night of rape
The next witness is Noel Tsalis (spelling yet to be confirmed), a former security guard.
The 56-year-old is bald with a greying beard and is wearing a grey jumper.
He said he worked the morning the teenager was raped at Karrakatta cemetery.
He said he attended the cemetery three times during his 6pm to 6am shift while in his patrol vehicle.
9th November, 2019 12.39pm
Prosecutors call police officer who attended teen rape
The next witness is Mark Emmett.
The Detective Senior Sergeant is bald and is wearing glasses and a grey suit, white collared shirt and tie with an ID tag around his neck.
He said he was called to Hollywood Hospital on February 12, 1995 to meet Mr Edwards' rape victim.
He was a first class constable detective at the time.
Det. Sen Serg. Emmett said he drove the victim around areas in Claremont that morning after the rape, and that he recalled she was wrapped in a blanket.
He said he was driving a blue Commodore sedan and drove from the hospital in an anti-clockwise direction around the streets of Claremont to try to identify the crime scene, which they did around 7.15am.
"We ended up in the north-eastern area of the Karrakatta cemetery," he said.
"I had a look in the area and once there I decided to call the forensic people."
He's recalling finding three items of women's clothing in the area - the victim's skorts, underwear and "maybe a top".
Another officer arrived to take photographs of the clothing "in-situ" around 7.30am, with Det. Sen Serg. Emmitt and the victim leaving the area to return to the hospital at 7.40am, according to his running notes from the day.
He said he then collected some of the victim's other clothing and a telephone cable from the hospital and placed them into paper bags and handed them to a forensic police officer, first class constable McCulloch.
Det. Sen Serg. Emmett then took the victim out on a second occasion that morning to ascertain where she was grabbed from.
Det. Sen Serg. Emmett is now being allowed to refer fully to his running sheet from the day to assist in areas where he doesn't have an independent recollection.
It says the first time he saw Const. McCulloch was at 8.30am when he handed over some exhibits at the Karrakatta cemetery.
Ms Barbagallo is now asking whose role it was to keep a record of the items being seized, he has responded it was the forensic officer's job.
Mr Yovich is now cross-examining Det. Sen Serg. Emmett, reminding him of the time that has passed since the incident.
Det. Sen Serg. Emmett has agreed his memory of the incident was patchy.
Det. Sen Serg. Emmett is also agreeing it's rare for him to have to testify at a trial as a first responder for an incident that occurred so long ago.
He confirmed in those times he often wouldn't write a witness statement unless someone was charged and they pleaded not guilty.
He has also accepted his running sheet of the day showed times all ending in a zero or five.
Mr Yovich: You'd describe yourself as a generally accurate detective?
Det. Sen Serg. Emmett: I'd like to think so.
Mr Yovich: But not perfect?
Det. Sen Serg. Emmett: Nobody's perfect.
9th November, 2019 1.12pm
Court is breaking for lunch
Court has broken for lunch and will resume at 2.15pm with a new witness.
9th November, 2019 2.19pm
Forensic officer from Karrakatta rape scene called
The next witness is Senior Constable Dianne Bickhoff, who is giving evidence via video link from Queensland.
She was one of the forensic officers who attended the Karrakatta rape crime scene on February 12, 1995.
"In 1995, I was a specialist in photography and I went out to major crime jobs. I would take photographs but I was also trained in collecting exhibits as well," she said.
"One this occasion I attended with a forensic officer who specialised in fingerprints and his name was Adam McCulloch ... we were on call that time.
"We received the call around 7 o'clock on that date.
"The scene were were asked to attend was Karrakatta cemetery.
"I recall speaking to Det. Sen Serg. Emmett and the victim.
"The victim was dressed in a hospital gown, she seemed quite distressed, she looked like she had been through something."
Sen. Const. Bickhoff said she was tasked with taking photos of the crime scene and Mr McCulloch was tasked with collecting the exhibits.
"I photographed exhibits insitu ... I took photographs of the drag marks near the sand in the tombstones," she said.
She said Mr McCulloch collected a pair of black shoes, a "skirt or shorts" and a pair of underpants from the scene, as well as a soil sample.
She said all were logged and placed in exhibit bags and given a case number.
The exhibit numbers would be AJM1 onwards, she said.
Sen. Const. Bickhoff is now being shown her photographs from the crime scene.
Of the drag marks, she said they were consistent with a body being dragged.
She is now saying some of her photographs that she recalls taking, including of the items in situ, didn't appear to be in the brief years later when she was shown it again.
She also recalls other exhibits from the hospital, including a jacket, hospital gown, hospital pants and a white cord, were seized and recorded by Mr McCulloch.
They were handed over to Mr McCulloch from Det. Sen Serg. Emmett at 8.45am the morning of the rape, according to the crime scene report.
The Karrakatta crime scene exhibits - including the shorts which are of forensic relevance to the state's case - were seized from the area they were found in at 8.05am.
All the items seized were logged using Mr McCulloch's initials - AJM - followed by a number, starting from '1'. These are the same initials used to number the fingernail exhibits taken from the body of Ciara Glennon in 1997.
Sen. Const. Bickhoff said the exhibits were taken to the forensic branch laboratory for future examination.
The letter police wrote to the state health laboratory requesting analysis stated Mr McCulloch was the only person to collect and handle the exhibits.
Claremont killer trial LIVE: Bradley Edwards' rape victim recounts how she 'thought she was going to die'
By Heather McNeill and Hannah Barry
December 9, 2019
9th November, 2019 3.16pm
Forensic officer being scrutinised over missing crime scene photos
Mr Yovich is now cross-examining Sen. Const. Bickhoff.
She is agreeing she took time with her paper work and that it was important to record everything done at the time, as it may be required as evidence years later in court.
Mr Yovich: When an exhibit is found, it should be photographed where it is found, correct, and where it is collected?
Sen. Const. Bickhoff: Yes
Mr Yovich is saying there are no photographs in the brief of photographs in situ.
She's also agreeing it's her job to record the photographs she took.
He's asked if she would have labelled the photographs, she said she wasn't in a position to do that as she did not develop the photographs.
"I placed the rolls for processing and then when the negatives are returned I label the envelope," she said.
She's confirmed she has never seen that envelope.
Mr Yovich has now asked for the photo job report to be shown in court.
Sen. Const. Bickhoff said she filled the report in on a day soon after the incident.
"That form there is filled out when you process the negative," she said.
"It's really a very brief form.
The job description is "photo scenes", she is saying the exhibits are part of the scene.
Under the photograph section of the report, she has left it blank, saying "the reason for that is because you would have a number of rolls ... you wouldn't have that information at that time".
Mr Yovich has asked if, based on that report, it cannot be confirmed how many photos she took, which she has agreed.
Mr Yovich has now moved on to Sen. Const. Bickhoff's witness statement from June 1995, and is questioning whether it explains everything she did on that job.
Sen. Const. Bickhoff: This would just indicate where I went to take photographs, it's not in detail.
Mr Yovich: So it is not complete?
Sen. Const. Bickhoff: This is an accepted practice that we would outline where the photos were taken. Completeness is when you have the photographs to go with that statements.
Mr Yovich is arguing that it's not clear based on the written statement or report form that Sen. Const. Bickhoff filled out, that she took photos of any of the exhibits insitu at the time.
She said she has never seen the photographs developed, but maintained she took them.
The only photographs in the police case file are generic crime scene images of the cemetery and some drag marks.
Having photographs of the exhibits insitu assists to confirm the integrity of the exhibit was maintained during its collection for examination.
In mid-June 1996, in the days after Jane Rimmer disappeared, someone contacted Sen. Const. Bickhoff and left a message regarding photos. A police entry in relation to that phone call said she returned the call and said she had no information.
It's not clear what job the photos related to, and Sen Const. Bickhoff could not remember what it was in relation to.
The prosecutor is now re-examining the witness.
Sen. Const. Bickhoff said in the 1990s, photographs would only be printed off the negative if they were required for court.
She is further explaining the report she filled out was "purely to give a brief description" so the film could be assigned a number and the negatives returned to Sen. Const. Bickhoff.
9th November, 2019 3.59pm
Sex assault squad police officer called to stand
The last witness for the day is WA Police acting inspector, Paul Lydiate.
He has thinning white hair and is dressed in his police uniform.
He was a detective senior constable with the sex assault squad in 1995 when he was assigned to the Karrakatta rape offence.
During his time on the case, he organised for a sketch to be drawn of a Telstra van based on Mr Wookey's recollection at the time.
9th November, 2019 4.13pm
Proceedings have wrapped up for today
Court has finished for the day.
Justice Hall is now considering media requests for exhibits to be released.
He's agreed for aerial photos of Karrakatta cemetery to be released, as well as a photograph of the cord used to restrain the rape victim.
https://www.watoday.com.au/national/western-australia/claremont-killer-trial-live-bradley-edwards-faces-third-week-of-witness-evidence-20191209-p53i36.html
Judge releases photos of cord used in rape, and victim's drag marks through cemetery
Claremont serial killer trial m
Proceedings have wrapped up for today
Court has finished for the day.
Justice Hall is now considering media requests for exhibits to be released.
He's agreed for aerial photos of Karrakatta cemetery to be released, as well as a photograph of the cord used to restrain the rape victim.
9th November, 2019 3.59pm
Sex assault squad police officer called to stand
The last witness for the day is WA Police acting inspector, Paul Lydiate.
He has thinning white hair and is dressed in his police uniform.
He was a detective senior constable with the sex assault squad in 1995 when he was assigned to the Karrakatta rape offence.
During his time on the case, he organised for a sketch to be drawn of a Telstra van based on Mr Wookey's recollection at the time.
9th November, 2019 3.16pm
Forensic officer being scrutinised over missing crime scene photos
Mr Yovich is now cross-examining Sen. Const. Bickhoff.
She is agreeing she took time with her paper work and that it was important to record everything done at the time, as it may be required as evidence years later in court.
Mr Yovich: When an exhibit is found, it should be photographed where it is found, correct, and where it is collected?
Sen. Const. Bickhoff: Yes
Mr Yovich is saying there are no photographs in the brief of photographs in situ.
She's also agreeing it's her job to record the photographs she took.
He's asked if she would have labelled the photographs, she said she wasn't in a position to do that as she did not develop the photographs.
"I placed the rolls for processing and then when the negatives are returned I label the envelope," she said.
She's confirmed she has never seen that envelope.
Mr Yovich has now asked for the photo job report to be shown in court.
Sen. Const. Bickhoff said she filled the report in on a day soon after the incident.
"That form there is filled out when you process the negative," she said.
"It's really a very brief form.
The job description is "photo scenes", she is saying the exhibits are part of the scene.
Under the photograph section of the report, she has left it blank, saying "the reason for that is because you would have a number of rolls ... you wouldn't have that information at that time".
Mr Yovich has asked if, based on that report, it cannot be confirmed how many photos she took, which she has agreed.
Mr Yovich has now moved on to Sen. Const. Bickhoff's witness statement from June 1995, and is questioning whether it explains everything she did on that job.
Sen. Const. Bickhoff: This would just indicate where I went to take photographs, it's not in detail.
Mr Yovich: So it is not complete?
Sen. Const. Bickhoff: This is an accepted practice that we would outline where the photos were taken. Completeness is when you have the photographs to go with that statements.
Mr Yovich is arguing that it's not clear based on the written statement or report form that Sen. Const. Bickhoff filled out, that she took photos of any of the exhibits insitu at the time.
She said she has never seen the photographs developed, but maintained she took them.
The only photographs in the police case file are generic crime scene images of the cemetery and some drag marks.
Having photographs of the exhibits insitu assists to confirm the integrity of the exhibit was maintained during its collection for examination.
In mid-June 1996, in the days after Jane Rimmer disappeared, someone contacted Sen. Const. Bickhoff and left a message regarding photos. A police entry in relation to that phone call said she returned the call and said she had no information.
It's not clear what job the photos related to, and Sen Const. Bickhoff could not remember what it was in relation to.
The prosecutor is now re-examining the witness.
Sen. Const. Bickhoff said in the 1990s, photographs would only be printed off the negative if they were required for court.
She is further explaining the report she filled out was "purely to give a brief description" so the film could be assigned a number and the negatives returned to Sen. Const. Bickhoff.
9th November, 2019 2.19pm
Forensic officer from Karrakatta rape scene called
The next witness is Senior Constable Dianne Bickhoff, who is giving evidence via video link from Queensland.
She was one of the forensic officers who attended the Karrakatta rape crime scene on February 12, 1995.
"In 1995, I was a specialist in photography and I went out to major crime jobs. I would take photographs but I was also trained in collecting exhibits as well," she said.
"One this occasion I attended with a forensic officer who specialised in fingerprints and his name was Adam McCulloch ... we were on call that time.
"We received the call around 7 o'clock on that date.
"The scene were were asked to attend was Karrakatta cemetery.
"I recall speaking to Det. Sen Serg. Emmett and the victim.
"The victim was dressed in a hospital gown, she seemed quite distressed, she looked like she had been through something."
Sen. Const. Bickhoff said she was tasked with taking photos of the crime scene and Mr McCulloch was tasked with collecting the exhibits.
"I photographed exhibits in situ ... I took photographs of the drag marks near the sand in the tombstones," she said.
She said Mr McCulloch collected a pair of black shoes, a "skirt or shorts" and a pair of underpants from the scene, as well as a soil sample.
She said all were logged and place
The exhibit numbers would be AJM1 onwards, she said.
Sen. Const. Bickhoff is now being shown her photographs from the crime scene.
Of the drag marks, she said they were consistent with a body being dragged.
She is now saying some of her photographs that she recalls taking, including of the items in situ, didn't appear to be in the brief years later when she was shown it again.
She also recalls other exhibits from the hospital, including a jacket, hospital gown, hospital pants and a white cord, were seized and recorded by Mr McCulloch.
They were handed over to Mr McCulloch from Det. Sen Serg. Emmett at 8.45am the morning of the rape, according to the crime scene report.
The Karrakatta crime scene exhibits - including the shorts which are of forensic relevance to the state's case - were seized from the area they were found in at 8.05am.
All the items seized were logged using Mr McCulloch's initials - AJM - followed by a number, starting from '1'. These are the same initials used to number the fingernail exhibits taken from the body of Ciara Glennon in 1997.
Sen. Const. Bickhoff said the exhibits were taken to the forensic branch laboratory for future examination.
The letter police wrote to the state health laboratory requesting analysis stated Mr McCulloch was the only person to collect and handle the exhibits.
9th November, 2019 1.12pm
Court is breaking for lunch
Court has broken for lunch and will resume at 2.15pm with a new witness.
9th November, 2019 12.39pm
Prosecutors call police officer who attended teen rape
The next witness is Mark Emmett.
The Detective Senior Sergeant is bald and is wearing glasses and a grey suit, white collared shirt and tie with an ID tag around his neck.
He said he was called to Hollywood Hospital on February 12, 1995 to meet Mr Edwards' rape victim.
He was a first class constable detective at the time.
Det. Sen Serg. Emmett said he drove the victim around areas in Claremont that morning after the rape, and that he recalled she was wrapped in a blanket.
He said he was driving a blue Commodore sedan and drove from the hospital in an anti-clockwise direction around the streets of Claremont to try to identify the crime scene, which they did around 7.15am.
"We ended up in the north-eastern area of the Karrakatta cemetery," he said.
"I had a look in the area and once there I decided to call the forensic people."
He's recalling finding three items of women's clothing in the area - the victim's skorts, underwear and "maybe a top".
Another officer arrived to take photographs of the clothing "in-situ" around 7.30am, with Det. Sen Serg. Emmitt and the victim leaving the area to return to the hospital at 7.40am, according to his running notes from the day.
He said he then collected some of the victim's other clothing and a telephone cable from the hospital and placed them into paper bags and handed them to a forensic police officer, first class constable McCulloch.
Det. Sen Serg. Emmett then took the victim out on a second occasion that morning to ascertain where she was grabbed from.
Det. Sen Serg. Emmett is now being allowed to refer fully to his running sheet from the day to assist in areas where he doesn't have an independent recollection.
It says the first time he saw Const. McCulloch was at 8.30am when he handed over some exhibits at the Karrakatta cemetery.
Ms Barbagallo is now asking whose role it was to keep a record of the items being seized, he has responded it was the forensic officer's job.
Mr Yovich is now cross-examining Det. Sen Serg. Emmett, reminding him of the time that has passed since the incident.
Det. Sen Serg. Emmett has agreed his memory of the incident was patchy.
Det. Sen Serg. Emmett is also agreeing it's rare for him to have to testify at a trial as a first responder for an incident that occurred so long ago.
He confirmed in those times he often wouldn't write a witness statement unless someone was charged and they pleaded not guilty.
He has also accepted his running sheet of the day showed times all ending in a zero or five.
Mr Yovich: You'd describe yourself as a generally accurate detective?
Det. Sen Serg. Emmett: I'd like to think so.
Mr Yovich: But not perfect?
Det. Sen Serg. Emmett: Nobody's perfect.
9th November, 2019 12.15pm
Security officer working at Karrakatta cemetery 'didn't see anything' night of rape
The next witness is Noel Tsalis (spelling yet to be confirmed), a former security guard.
The 56-year-old is bald with a greying beard and is wearing a grey jumper.
He said he worked the morning the teenager was raped at Karrakatta cemetery.
He said he attended the cemetery three times during his 6pm to 6am shift while in his patrol vehicle.
12.11pm
Security guard's movements at Karrakatta cemetery reviewed
The next witness statement will be read in by Ms Barbagallo.
It is that of Jennifer Grace, 50, who worked as a dispatch officer, and sometimes a security guard in the mid-1990s.
Her statement includes information about how security guards used portable 'data wands' to communicate where they travelled while on patrol.
A client report was usually generated at the end of the month and sent to clients to show security guard activity and the areas patrolled in a time-stamped format.
She has reviewed a security guard client report for Karrakatta Cemetery from February 1995 which showed three datapoint locations at the cemetery.
"To her knowledge the date and times in the report are accurate," she said.
The report showed there were no patrols of the cemetery between 1.43am and 4.59am on the morning of February 12, 1995 when the teenager was raped.
The cord Bradley Edwards used to tie up his rape victim in 1995.
The drag marks left in the sand after Bradley Edwards dragged his 17-year-old victim into Karrakatta cemetery to rape her.
Police at Wellard, where Jane Rimmer's body was found
13 Aug 2019, 12:16am
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-02-28/police-at-wellard,-where-jane-rimmers-body-was/9067570
Police comb bushland at Wellard, where the body of Jane Rimmer was found. Jane was a victim of the Claremont serial killer.
Source: ABC News | Duration: 12sec
Topics: crime, murder-and-manslaughter, missing-person, wellard-6170, claremont-6010
'The Bible' ... the Name Given to Perth's West Australian Newspaper,
the only statewide daily newspaper for Western Australia
The West Australian Newspaper published in Perth, Western Australia was described as "The Bible" ... by a girl from the UK who worked in Perth for a couple of years, ...the girl said many others also call the West Australian Newspaper 'The Bible' ..... "because whatever is written in the articles in the West Australian Newspaper is considered by Western Australians as the 'Gospel Truth' and whatever is not written in the West Australian Newspaper is considered by Western Australians as something that did not happen ...".. a clear cut example is the last known sighting of Jane Rimmer before she was abducted and murdered, which the Western Australian Newspaper falsely state was ....'Jane Rimmer talking to the Mystery Man, just before Midnight' .... when it has been publicly reported in a local Perth newspaper. the Community Times, News Chronical, Nedlands Edition ..... Title: 'We Saw Jane Rimmer Hitching - Uni Student says' ,,,,,, that the last known sighting of Jane Rimmer was the sighting by the four University students at around 12.30 am, who saw what had to clearly be Jane Rimmer .... hitchhiking along Stirling Highway, Clarement., near the corner of Loch Street and Stirling Highway ... ... in the direction of Perth City ... they nearly agreed to give her a lift .. but decided not not .. a decision they now say they regret ...... because if they had given Jane Rimmer a lift that early morning of the 9th of June, 1996 .. Jane Rimmer would most likely still be alive today ... 'University student Emma Clayton and her friends almost picked up a blonde girl she is sure was Jane Rimmer early on the Sunday Morning Jane Rimmer disappeared...." ...'..Miss Clayton (21 years old uni student) said she saw the girl staggering along Stirling Highway, thumb out, hitching a lift at 12.30 am. Emma Clayton told police about the incident and her description of the cloths Jane was wearing matched that of a police description which had not been released to the media..' ... Even the Chanel Nine TV Network, also was the Sunday Times, PerthNow, The West Australian Newspaper, the Kalgoorlie Miner, the Community Newspaper Group in a joint venture with News Corp Australia, and nine regional radio licences., 50% interest in Yahoo!7, and the Chanel 7 Network, owned by Seven West Media, and the Fairfax owned WAToday.com.au seem to deliberately falsely promote the wrong last sighting of Jane Rimmer as a result of the Western Australian Newspaper 's claim that the last known sighing of the Jane Rimmer talking to the Mystery Man just before Midnight ....but what is even more surprising the Director of Public Prosecutions for Western Australia and the Western Australian Police Service at the very public trial of Bradley Edwards. have also painted the same false picture of the last known sighing of the Jane Rimmer talking to the Mystery Man just before Midnight .. when it is such an obvious provable lie ... so the question is why?.... The answer to this question should be directed to powerful well connected and respected Kerry Stocks who is the Chairman of Seven West Media is Kerry Stokes AC, who is also chairman of Seven Group Holdings ... there seems no doubt that whatever angle Mr Stokes wants a story written on a particular subject this would be followed .. what journalist or editor working for Seven West Media would be game to go against the wished of Mr Kerry Stokes... there is unending crimes and wrongful actions committed by powerful and well connected people in Western Australia that have been written about on unchallenged public record that the Seven West Media Publications refuse to talk about ...... and because they refuse to publish any mention of any sort of such information, the people of Western Australia are brainwash into believing such unending crimes and wrongful actions committed by powerful and well connected people in Western Australia did and could not have happened... as far as the average Western Australain thinks and believes ...' ..if they were real events then the West Australian Newspaper would have mentioned such information ".....it seems clear that Seven West Media Limited, an ASX-listed media company, is Australia's largest diversified media business, formed by the acquisition by West Australian Newspapers Holdings Limited (WAN) of the Seven Media Group., has a massive control of the news people obtain in Western Australian ...and thus also have a massive control of what Western Australian's believe is the truth ...It is also noted that The McGowan Government in 2017 appointed Carmel Barbagallo SC, who is in charge of the prosecution of Bradley Robert Edwards, as Western Australia's Deputy Director of Public Prosecutions.... Carmel Barbagallo SC should well know that it is a serious contempt of court and breach of her duties as a prosecutor not to put before the court all the possible material evidence regardless if it helps or hinders obtaining guilty verdicts against Bradley Robert Edwards .... such as: the four university students that were the last known people to see Jane Rimmer alive, the other Burger Boys .... because one of them has stated on the www.websleuths.com website that they did not see Ciara Glennon talking to anyone in a car, and only saw the lights of a car pass .....and the evidence that Sarah Anne McMahon provided before she disappeared in 2000, naming well connected people being involved in the Claremont Serial Killings with a senior police officer and a rich well connected powerful Perth Businessman ... in explanation why all the material evidence is not being presented to the court ... we assume Carmel Barbagallo SC, is just a puppet following orders from higher up people pulling the strings,...who will take the fall if there are questions raised as to the integrity of the trial of Bradley Robert Edwards ... who is a self confessed rapist who obviously has to expect the law to punish him to the fullest extent for the serious sexual and abduction crimes he has admitted to .... and it seems that even if there is enough believable evidence produced by the prosecution for Justice Stephen Hall to rule that Bradley Robert Edwards is involved in some way with the Claremont Serial Abductions and Killings ... its seems clear Bradley Robert Edwards did not act alone and involved with others who were powerful enough to keep Bradley Robert Edwards from being flagged as a most obvious suspect when Sarah Spiers disappeared because of his previous serious sexual assault conviction in 1990... the leniency of sentencing of a probation order and no prison time, and the fact that Bradley Robert Edwards did not even lose his job with Telecom/Telstra and was even promoted is more reason to believe that Bradley Robert Edwards was involved with a group of powerful well connected people and/or organisations in Perth ....The NTY CSK Investigation Team
Irishwoman killed in Australia in 90s had cuts consistent with 'sawing', court hears
Ciara Glennon moved to Australia with her Irish family when she was five years old.
https://www.thejournal.ie/ciara-glennon-death-australia-court-4906241-Nov2019/
Nov 26th 2019,
AN IRISHWOMAN KILLED in Australia in 1997 had cuts consistent with “sawing”, a Western Australia court has heard.
50-year-old confessed rapist Bradley Robert Edwards is fighting claims he murdered Irishwoman Ciara Glennon (27), Sarah Spiers (18) and Jane Rimmer (23) after nights out at pubs in 1996 and 1997.
Glennon, who was a lawyer, moved to Australia with her Irish family when she was five years old. She disappeared at the age of 27.
Police initially struggled to pin the blame of the deaths on anyone and followed thousands of leads before arresting Bradley Edwards (48) at a home in a Perth suburb in December 2016.
Glennon and Rimmer were found dumped in bushland, largely hidden under foliage, at opposite ends of Perth.
Both had cuts to their necks and other areas consistent with “sawing”, and also suffered injuries indicating self-defence, prosecutor Carmel Barbagallo told the West Australia Supreme Court during her opening address yesterday.
In court, Edwards confirmed his not guilty pleas to murdering the three women.
The court heard the last recording of Spiers’ voice as she called for a taxi.
It also saw CCTV footage of Rimmer at the Continental Hotel shortly before she was abducted and a blacked out photo of Glennon’s body dumped in bushland.
Glennon was seen walking briskly away from the entertainment district, “anxious to get home” and either accepted a lift or was “abducted in a blitz attack”, the court heard.
The body of the first victim, Sarah Spiers, has never been found.
However, there are other ways to prove Edwards is guilty of the crime, the prosecutor told the trial.
Comments are closed as legal proceedings are ongoing.
With reporting by Hayley Halpin
Exhibit 747-751 – Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_Telstra staff newsletter, “Pulse”, featuring the blue uniforms
“Ciara Glennon was not talking to anyone and no car stoped”
TwistMember
Frankie1972 said: ↑
I know why the driver did not come forward. Because it did not happen like that. CG was not talking to anyone and no car stop
apoptosisfutzMember
Frankie1972 said: ↑
Well if you go back and read the thread you will see what I said about that.
Hi Frankie1972. I looked back and found the post below, might save some comments to and fro...... many thanks for the info you have provided on here.
Ok that night about 12.00am the three of us left the conti and walked to hungry jacks. Then we got our food and sit down at the bus stop. Then the opposite side of the road CG about 12.20 was walking down Stirling Hwy when my friend yelled out to her your crazy for hitchiking (I do not think she was hitchhiking) She just wave her hand in the air and kept on walking down the road. Now when we reported it to the police on the Monday one of my friends talking to the police about a car stopping and maybe talking to her.( Now you would think if he did see a car talking to her he would of said hay guys look at that girl talking to someone in a car) My other friend and me did not see a car stop that night (IMO no car stopped to talk to her that night.<br />
Claremont Serial Killer, 1996 - 1997, Perth, Western Australia - #2 P.49
http://awn.bz/CSK_websleuths.html
http://www.websleuths.com/forums/showthread.php?284695-Claremont-Serial-Killer-1996-1997-Perth-Western-Australia-2/page49
A suspicious man was seen lurking in a side street just metres from a woman matching the description of Ciara Glennon on the night she vanished from the Perth suburb of Claremont, the WA Supreme Court has been told.
Claremont serial killings trial told of mysterious man sighted on night Ciara Glennon vanished
By Andrea Mayes
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-12-13/claremont-serial-killings-trial-mysterious-man-ciara-glennon/11795230
PHOTO: Bradley Edwards is accused of killing Ciara Glennon after abducting her in Claremont. (Fairfax Media)
PHOTO: Bradley Edwards is on trial for the murder of three Perth women. (Supplied: Facebook, Supreme Court of WA)
PHOTO: Sarah Spiers, Ciara Glennon and Jane Rimmer were all last seen alive in the Claremont entertainment precinct. (Fairfax Media)
PHOTO: Bradley Edwards worked for Telstra around the time the three women disappeared. (Facebook: KLAC)
PHOTO: The deserted bush road where Jane Rimmer's body was dumped. (Supplied: Supreme Court of WA)
Key points:
· Bradley Edwards is accused of abducting three women from Claremont
· Ciara Glennon, the third victim, was partying with friends before she vanished
· This sighting of Ms Glennon was inconsistent with other witness testimony
Telstra technician Bradley Robert Edwards, 51, is on trial for Ms Glennon's murder and that of two other women — Sarah Spiers, 18 and Jane Rimmer, 23 — who were all last seen in the Claremont entertainment precinct in Perth's western suburbs between 1996 and 1997.
The previously unknown sighting was made by Karen Mabbott, who was driving along Stirling Highway around midnight on March 14–15, 1997, when she saw the man, who she described as being of Mediterranean appearance, standing behind a white car on Dean Street.
"There didn't seem to be any rhyme nor reason for anyone to be standing there," she told the court.
The man was about 175 centimetres tall, although "he could have been taller" she said, with short dark brown or black hair and of slim-to-medium build.
Just metres away, walking along the western side of Stirling Highway, she saw the young woman, who she described as being about 157 centimetres tall, of small-to-medium build and with curly shoulder-length light hair.
"She didn't look like she was in a particular hurry or that she was scared of anything, just trying to get home," Ms Mabbott said.
Her description of the woman's clothing also matched what the 27-year-old lawyer was wearing at the time — a dark jacket and white t-shirt-style top with a black skirt.
She nitially assumed the man was a taxi driver and that the woman had just got out of his cab .
"My initial impression was that she had been picked up in the taxi, she had got out of the taxi and she was walking towards her house," Ms Mabbott said.
But she did not see any taxi plates or signs on the man's car, which she described as a light-coloured sedan.
Edwards was known to be driving a white Telstra-issued Holden Commodore station wagon at the time
Man missing from first statement
Under cross-examination from defence counsel Paul Yovich SC, Ms Mabbott admitted the man had been omitted from her first statement to police about the incident, made in April 1997
Released on 09.12
Exhibit 1224 – Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_Photo of cord used to tie up Karrakatta rape victim
Serial killer trial: Final movements of murdered Irish woman Ciara Glennon (27) shown to court
Tragic: Irishwoman Ciara Glennon, whose body was found 18 days after she went missing near Perth, Australia
https://www.independent.ie/world-news/australasia/serial-killer-trial-final-movements-of-murdered-irish-woman-ciara-glennon-27-shown-to-court-38724819.html
Claire Murphy - November 25 2019
Denis Glennon has waited over 22 years to face the man accused of his daughter’s murder in Australia.
Ciara (27) disappeared on March 14, 1997 following a night out celebrating St Patrick’s Day in Claremont, Perth.
Her body was found three weeks later in bushland some 50km north of Australia’s third largest city.
It is the prosecution’s case that Ciara along with Sarah Spiers (18) and Jane Rimmer (23) were abducted and murdered by Bradley Robert Edwards - the ‘Claremont Serial Killer’ between 1996 and 1997.
Trial begins in Australia for 1997 murder of Irish woman Ciara Glennon
IrishCentral Staff @IrishCentral
Nov 27, 2019
https://www.irishcentral.com/news/ciara-glennon-australia
Ciara Glennon disappeared on March 14, 1997, after she was out celebrating St. Patrick's Day with friends in AustraliaGLENNON FAMILY
Ciara Glennon, a 27-year-old Irish lawyer, is among three victims that Bradley Robert Edwards is accused of murdering
The trial of the so-called “Claremont Serial Killer” who is accused of murdering Irish woman Ciara Glennon and two other women has begun in Western Australia.
27-year-old Glennon, a native of Westport in Co Mayo who moved to Australia with her family when she was 5 years old, was out celebrating St. Patrick’s Day with friends when she went missing on March 14, 1997. Three weeks later, her partially naked body was discovered in brushland on the outskirts of Perth.
Nearly 20 years after, 50-year-old Bradley Robert Edwards was arrested at his home in the suburbs of Perth in December 2016. In addition to Glennon, Edwards is accused of killing 18-year-old Sarah Spiers in 1996 and 23-year-old Jane Rimmer in 1997.
The bodies of Glennon and Rimmer, whose injuries bore striking similarities, were each found in bush graves on opposite sides of Perth. Spiers’s body has never been located.
ABC News reports that Edwards, who denies the murder charges relating to the three women, confessed in October to five separate offenses including an assault on an 18-year-old woman who was asleep at her parents’ house in February 1998, and the double rape of a 17-year-old girl at Karrakatta cemetery in February 1995.
Prosecutors claim to have linked Edwards to the murders of the three women after DNA taken from the earlier assaults was also found under Ciara Glennon’s fingernails. They also claim that fibers from the same make and model as Edwards’s work van were found on Rimmer and Glennon.
Ciara Glennon’s father Denis was among family members of the three victims who sat in the front row of the gallery during the opening day of the trial on November 24. The trial, which is expected to last about six months, has become one of the most high-profile trials in Australian history and is not being conducted with a jury.
In court, state prosecutor Carmel Barbagallo outlined the similarities between Glennon and Rimmer stating that both incurred injuries to the neck and arms that were consistent with a sawing motion. Both of their bodies were dumped in bushland and while they were found on opposite sides of Perth, both of their bodies were laying in nearly identical positions.
Barbagallo also detailed the last known movements of Glennon, who was out celebrating St. Patrick’s Day with friends at the Continental Hotel before leaving to reportedly hitchhike home.
Seeing the woman walking alone, three men standing nearby warned her that it was "crazy" to hitchhike, but Glennon only "gestured" back to them.
“When she reached a point ... on Stirling Highway ... a white VS Holden Commodore station wagon was seen in close proximity to her,” Barbagallo said.
“It is on this stretch of highway that Ciara Glennon either accepted a lift from the perpetrator or was abducted by the perpetrator in a blitz attack.”
Barbagallo later said: “In fighting for her life, Ciara Glennon scratched or clawed at the accused with her left hand. Ciara Glennon scratched the accused tearing her left thumbnail off in the process.
“The accused is the only person in the last 20 years on the Australian database to have a DNA profile that could not be excluded.”
Paul Yovich, the defense attorney, told the court: “The defense is simple - it wasn’t him.
“We are not pointing the finger at any specific person, all we are saying is the nice, neat picture the state wants to present ... is not the full picture.
“The proper approach, in any case, is to fit the case theory to the evidence, not to try to fit the evidence to the case theory.”
Court hears Australian man who killed Irish woman 22 years ago was 'depraved individual'
https://www.irishexaminer.com/breakingnews/ireland/court-hears-australian-man-who-killed-irish-woman-22-years-ago-was-depraved-individual-905877.html
By Dan Buckley
7NEWS Wide Bay✔@7NewsWideBay
New evidence has been heard in the pre-trial directions hearing of alleged Claremont serial killer Bradley Robert Edwards at WA's Supreme Court. @ElleGeorgiou #TheLatest #7News
9:39 PM - Feb 19, 2019
The West Australian✔@westaustralian
LATEST: The prosecution has set out a timeline of events that they say shows an escalation in offending behaviour by accused Bradley Robert Edwards: http://bit.ly/2GzUkKT #perthnews
3:27 AM - Feb 20, 2019
An Australian man accused of murdering an Irishwoman near the city of Perth 22 years ago has been described as a depraved individual with a fetish for wearing women's clothes.
At a pre-trial hearing in Perth which ended today, prosecutors outlined evidence against Bradley Robert Edwards for the abduction and murder of 27-year-old Ciara Glennon and two young Australian women in the 1990s.
The prosecution alleged that in 1997, Edwards abducted Ms Glennon from the Perth suburb of Claremont and murdered her, before dumping her body, according to a report by ABC News.
Ms Glennon, whose family are from Westport, Co Mayo, disappeared on March 14, 1997, after a night out celebrating St Patrick's Day in Claremont. Her body, which was identified by her parents, was discovered 18 days later in the suburb of Eglington. A post-mortem revealed that her neck had been cut.
Police allegedly found Edward's DNA under Ms Glennon’s fingernails. The court was also told that fibres found in her hair matched those from a car Edwards had access to at the time of her disappearance.
When Edwards was arrested in 2016, police said they discovered “extreme pornography” at his home. The hearing before the Supreme Court of Western Australia began on Monday after a last-minute adjournment when he was hospitalised with self-inflicted stab wounds obtained in prison just hours before he was due to appear.
Edwards has pleaded not guilty to a number of charges, including the murders of Ciara Glennon, Jane Rimmer, 23, and Sarah Spiers, 18, who were abducted from Claremont’s entertainment district in 1996 and 1997.
He is also accused of the sexual assaults of two teenage girls in 1988 and 1995.
State Prosecutor Carmen Barbagallo began proceedings by detailing the alleged attacks carried out by Edwards, which she dubbed the “Huntingdale prowler series”. The court heard he had an obsessive interest in abduction and rape.
Ms Barbagallo told the court that the accused stole women’s underwear from clotheslines, including a silk kimono that he wore while sexually assaulting an 18-year-old girl in her home in 1988.
It is alleged that Edwards, who was 19 at the time, straddled the teenager while trying to shove a piece of fabric into her mouth.
Ms Barbagallo argued that Edwards was "an introverted, socially awkward man… who had a long-standing tendency for the collection and wearing of women's underwear".
She said that pornography and "violent and erotic stories" seized after his arrest, showed he had an "obsessive sexual interest in the abduction, imprisonment and forcible rape of women in degrading and violent circumstances".
Edwards is due to face a non-jury trial on July 22, which is expected to run for nine months.
Murdered Irish woman Ciara Glennon called 'a truly special person' as suspected serial killer charged
Ciara Glennon was just 27 when she disappeared after a night out in 1997
https://www.irishmirror.ie/news/irish-news/crime/murdered-irish-woman-ciara-glennon-9590927
Ciara Glennon
The Glennon family leave St Marys Cathedral after service for their daughter Ciara Eilish Glennon a 28 year old solicitor who may have been abducted from the Calremount suburb of Pearth in western Australia
A heartbroken Irish Dad whose daughter was strangled by a suspected serial killer nearly 20 years ago says it’s “bittersweet” that someone has finally been charged with her death.
Ciara Glennon was just 27 when she disappeared after a night out in her home city of Perth, Australia in March 1997 and tragically her body was discovered in bushland weeks later.
Her death was linked to the disappearances of two other women from the same area in just 15 months and sparked a high profile police hunt, dubbed the Claremont Killings.
On December 23 Bradley Robert Edwards was charged with the murders of Ciara Glennon and Jane Rimmer.
Edwards was also charged with attacks on other women, including two counts of deprivation of liberty, two counts of aggravated sexual penetration without consent, one count of breaking and entering and one count of indecent assault.
Ciara’s devastated dad Denis - who is originally from Westport in Co Mayo - welcomed the development but admitted it’s difficult.
He told Perth Now: “This is a very raw and bittersweet time.
“We are being updated by the WA Police, and hence it is best that I do not comment on the recent developments.”
Ciara - whose mum Una is from Co Monaghan - was a lawyer at Blake Dawson Waldron firm.
She had been out celebrating St Patrick’s Day with three colleagues on the night she disappeared.
One of them was senior partner Neil Fearis, who spoke fondly about Ciara and how her future was snatched from her.
He said: “She was a truly special person, in every respect.
“A gifted young lawyer, a popular and fun-loving workmate, a loyal friend and a devoted daughter and sister.
“It’s difficult to register that had Ciara not been taken from us she would now be 46 and quite possibly a mother to teenage children.
“Rarely do such bright stars cross our firmament; even more rarely is their trajectory cut so tragically short.”
Edwards has been remanded in custody and is due to appear in court again on Wednesday.
This has been one of the longest and most expansive investigations in Australian police history.
Western Australia Police Commissioner Karl O’Callaghan said:
“I should point out that the investigation into the disappearance and suspected murder of Sarah Spiers on January 27, 1996, is ongoing, as are inquiries into other matters.
“So there is still much work to be done, but this has already been the biggest and most complex police investigation in WA history.
“Hundreds of police officers have worked on this case over the 20 years.
“I want to pay tribute to the Sarah Spiers, Ciara Glennon and Jane Rimmer families and the victim of the 1995 attack for their patience and understanding during the investigation.”
The Glennon family leave St Marys Cathedral after service for their daughter Ciara Eilish Glennon a 28 year old solicitor who may have been abducted from the Calremount suburb of Pearth in western Australia
Many different sides of Bradley Edwards have been presented at the Claremont trial. (ABC News, Facebook)
Released on 11.12
Exhibit 7930 – Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_Photograph of Club Bayview in Claremont, circa 1996
Retired detective Jonathan Adams. (9News)
Sarah Spiers
Ciara Glennon was due to be a bridesmaid at her sister's birthday a week after she disappeared. (Supplied)
Claremont serial killings trial: The ‘hoarder’ love rival that made alleged Australian serial killer crack
A picture of the life of accused serial killer Bradley Robert Edwards has started to emerge - including his reaction to his first wife’s affair.
https://www.news.com.au/national/courts-law/claremont-serial-killings-trial-the-hoarder-love-rival-that-made-alleged-australian-serial-killer-crack/news-story/91a4837a7c232db324704bbc224c77ea
Candace Sutton@candacesutton1
Just who is the man accused of the Claremont serial killings?
A terrifying, sexually violent attacker or a family man, deeply emotional with pent-up anger? A computer nerd with the steadiest of jobs, working for one organisation for 29 years, or the face of an eerie phantom circling women on Perth’s streets?
All were allegedly parts of the complex picture of the life of 50-year-old Bradley Robert Edwards that has begun to emerge at his trial in Western Australia.
The Claremont serial killings is a case involving the disappearance of 18-year-old secretary Sarah Spiers, and the killings of two others, childcare worker Jane Rimmer 23, and Ciara Glennon, 27, a lawyer, in 1996-1997.
After attending night spots in Claremont, a wealthy western suburb of Perth, Western Australia, all three women disappeared in similar circumstances leading police to suspect that an unidentified serial killer was the offender. The case, described as the state’s biggest, longest running, and most expensive investigation, remains unsolved.
However, in 2016, a suspect, Bradley Robert Edwards, was arrested and is facing trial for the crimes.
Sitting in the dock of the WA Supreme Court hearings, Edwards pleaded not guilty to three murder charges.
For the first two weeks of what is expected to be a six to nine-month trial, the former Telstra technician and amateur sports official appeared mostly impassive and sometimes took notes.
Along with Edwards came glimmers of the lives of his three alleged victims.
Sometimes the insights were gruesome. Sometimes they were hauntingly sad, like Ms Spiers’ voice in her last telephone call, ordering a taxi from Claremont.
The taxi arrived, but Sarah was gone, never to be seen again.
M.I.A. ON THE NIGHT OF MURDER
The timeline of the three murders known as the Claremont serial killings began with Sarah Spiers disappearing after a night out on Australia Day 1996.
Jane Rimmer vanished on June 6, 1996 and her body was found in bushland at Wellard, 40km south of Perth, almost eight weeks later.
Ciara Glennon disappeared in the early hours of March 15, 1997, and her body was found, also in bushland, almost three weeks later at Eglinton 40km north of Perth.
The bodies of both women were covered with branches and foliage, and discovered by chance.
The court heard that on the night of March 14, a Friday, Edwards was due to have dinner at his friends’ holiday house at Dawesville.
His work colleague and friend, Murray Cook, testified he had invited Mr Edwards to visit him and his wife at their A-framed holiday house, 80km south of Perth.
Mr Cook had just been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and taken time off work.
Edwards had been supportive and his workmate invited him to dine with the couple.
Mr Cook had expected Edwards to drive down after work and he waited up until 10pm or 11pm, but Edwards never made it.
Instead, he showed up about 11am the following day and the pair had a confrontation.
“I said words to effect of ‘what the hell? You were supposed to be here on Friday night’,” Mr Cook told the court.
He said Edwards’ response was: “I was trying to reconcile with my wife”.
When Mr Cook asked him “how did it go?” Edwards “just shook his head”.
Under cross-examination from Paul Yovich, Mr Cook agreed his wife’s existing diary had helped his memory about the exact dates of the Dawesville visit.
THE DAY AFTER SARAH SPIERS’ DISAPPEARANCE
Mr Cook also told the court he had been with Edwards on January 27, 1996, when Sarah Spiers had been drinking at Claremont before vanishing in the early hours of that morning.
The two Telstra workers had gone to work at Dumas House, a building next to Perth’s Parliament House where government ministers had offices.
Mr Cook said he and Edwards turned up for work at 7:55am on that day.
Less than six hours earlier, shortly after 2am, Ms Spiers was last seen in Claremont after she phoned for a taxi.
When it turned up, Sarah was gone, never to be seen alive by her family and friends again.
SARAH’S LAST WORDS
Sarah Spiers spent her last night alive drinking with friends.
They included Emma McCormack, who had met Ms Spiers when they were boarders at Perth’s Iona Presentation College.
The two remained friends after school and on the night in question they went out with a group to the Ocean Beach Hotel at Cottesloe, arriving around 8pm.
Now aged 42, Ms McCormack told the court the friends stayed at the hotel until closing time, at midnight.
She described Sarah’s outfit of beige linen shorts, a white or light-coloured shirt, and a black jacket tied around her waist.
“She was happy, she was talking with friends,” Emma recalled.
Sarah’s sister Amanda picked up some of the friends and drove them over to Club Bayview in Claremont around 12.30am.
The girls chatted with others and around 1.30am, Sarah came up to Ms McCormack on the dance floor and told her she was going home.
Emma encouraged Sarah to stay and leave later with the group, but the teenager said: “No that’s fine, I’m ready to go now, I’m just going to catch a taxi”.
Ms McCormack said: “She spoke to me clearly, she wasn’t upset, she just was going to leave, she seemed normal, there was nothing unusual.”
Asked is that was the last time she saw Sarah, Ms McCormack replied tearfully: “Yes”.
VICTIM RECOUNTS HORROR ATTACK
Edwards’ calm demeanour in court was in contrast to at least one witness so far.
The woman who recounted the terrifying attack on her by Edwards almost 30 years ago was both animated and visibly upset.
On the trial’s seventh day, the woman used her hands to show how Edwards had grabbed her from behind.
At one point during her recreation of the assault, she broke down and apologised for the emotion which had surfaced as she retold her story.
It was May 7, 1990, and the woman had been writing up a report at her desk in Hollywood Hospital, at Nedlands west of the Perth CBD.
She was employed as a social worker and Edwards was at the hospital as the Telstra phone technician assigned to work on the phone lines.
The woman recalled how she had been only dimly aware of Edwards’ presence.
He had asked to use the toilet, and she remembers a quick flush, and then he asked to retrieve his pen.
Edwards then attacked her from behind, putting his hand around her face and stuffing a piece of cloth into her mouth.
“I was trying desperately not to breathe because I thought there was something on the cloth,” the woman told the court
“I honestly thought I was going to die. I breathed in and there was nothing on the cloth so that was when I started to really struggle.
“I thought, ‘I’ve got a chance here’. My feet kept slipping on the carpet. There was a lot of strength but I managed to twist around.”
Pulled towards the toilet on her chair in an ordeal that lasted 10 seconds, the woman felt the fight for her life suddenly stop.
Then she heard her attacker say, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry” before she fled the area, leaving behind one shoe.
Police were called and found cable ties in Edwards’ pocket.
He admitted to the attack and was placed on a two-year probation order for a single charge of common assault.
Edwards later told psychologists sent to assess him he’d had a “distressing week” after his fiancee had informed him of her infidelity with a boarder living at their home.
Dr Paul McEvoy said Edwards had acknowledged he was deeply upset, but unable to explain why his “pent-up anger was released when it was” at the hospital.
In 1990 Bradley Edwards attacked a woman at Perth’s Hollywood Hospital (above) and stuffed cloth into her mouth. Picture: Google.Source:Supplied
PHANTOM IN A CAR
Five women took the stand to describe eerie encounters with a man in a Telstra car, easily mistaken as a taxi.
In the mid-1990s, the unidentified man was driving around Perth streets, “circling” or “doing laps” of hotels, sometimes offering a lift to women.
The testimony of these women, called the “Telstra living witness” evidence by the prosecution, included sightings 3km west of Claremont at an iconic Perth hotel which young people still flock to.
One of those women was Annabelle Bushell, 45, who recalled how she suddenly fled a Telstra station wagon after having a “strong instinct to get out”.
She was 22 years old in late 1996 and she was drinking at the Ocean Beach Hotel (OBH) in Cottesloe with her friend Trilby Winsome Smith.
They headed off from the pub towards the Stirling Highway to hitchhike home when a white station wagon slowed down beside them.
“I can see the Telstra logo on the front right-hand side of the bonnet as I’m looking at the car,” Ms Bushell told the trial.
She said she believes the car then kept on moving, but then a white wagon with a Telstra “T” on it came back and they got in.
She sat in the front passenger seat and Ms Smith in the back.
Ms Bushell said from his side profile the driver appeared to be a man with neat, dark hair, neatly dressed and wearing dark trousers.
They drove to the Claremont intersection of Stirling Highway and Bay View Terrace, which is very near from the locations where Ms Rimmer, Ms Spiers and Ms Glennon were last seen.
“My recollection at that point is looking up and seeing a red traffic light and just wanting to get out,” Ms Bushell said in court.
“I can’t really remember what I said in terms of getting out, I think I suggested we were going to Club Bayview, at which point we got out.
“I pulled Trilby out of the back seat. She was from my memory half asleep on the back seat, I recall opening the passenger back door and reaching in and grabbing her.
“For myself, I just had a strong instinct to get out of the car and I wasn’t in a good spot.”
Ms Bushell reported the incident to police in June 1997, three months after Ciara Glennon disappeared, and again gave them a statement in March 2017.
Under questioning by the state prosecutor, Ms Barbagallo, she described the driver as “middle-aged, 30 to 40” and “didn’t seem to be big or small, he just seemed to be a normal build.”
Under cross-examination by Edwards’ counsel, Paul Yovich, Ms Bushell her 1997 statement would be more accurate and that she’d had “a pretty big night” of drinking alcohol.
Lindsay Brennan@lindsayebrennan
Police are responding to a "violent incident" after a woman was refused entry to the #claremont trial. Lots of yelling outside the courtroom. Looks like a security guard has received a minor injury. Police working to determine who the woman is. #perthnews @6PR
6:32 AM - Nov 26, 2019
Prosecutor Carmel Barbagallo arrives at the Supreme Court of Western Australia. CREDIT: AAP
Paul Yovich (centre) cut off Edwards's second wife's testimony. (ABC News: Hugh Sando)
Claremont serial killings trial: The cruel twists of fate behind Claremont murders
Angie Raphael and Rebecca Le MayAAP
December 18, 2019
https://www.perthnow.com.au/news/claremont-serial-killings/claremont-serial-killings-trial-the-cruel-twists-of-fate-behind-claremont-murders-ng-b881415065z
Photos in this article include:
Sarah Spiers went missing following Australia Day festivities in January 1996. Credit: Web
Jane Rimmer was captured on CCTV with an unknown male outside the Claremont Hotel, moments before she was abducted and murdered. Credit: supplied
Bradley Robert Edwards in the late 80s. Credit: Supplied
Bradley Edwards has admitted to abducting and twice raping a 17-year-old girl at Karrakatta Cemetery. Credit: The West Australian
Bradley Robert Edwards has denied all three murders. Credit: Anne Barnetson
Each of the Claremont serial killer’s victims made the fatal decision to leave their friends moments before they were abducted or lured away from the leafy Perth suburb’s entertainment strip.
Had secretary Sarah Spiers, 18, waited about 45 minutes, she could have left Club Bayview with her friends following Australia Day festivities in January 1996.
She went to leave about 1.30am then called for a taxi from a phone box at 2.06am but vanished by the time it arrived minutes later.
Her friends left the club about 2.15am.
Had childcare worker Jane Rimmer, 23, listened to her friends when they urged her to join them in a taxi as they left the Continental Hotel around midnight on June 8, 1996, rather than insisting she wanted to stay out alone, she would likely have been safe.
Instead, she was captured on CCTV about five minutes later, then never seen alive again.
Solicitor Ciara Glennon, 27, had “ummed and ahhed” about going out with colleagues to the same venue less than half an hour before it closed on March 14, 1997.
Had she decided to go home instead, she may still be here.
It was a cruel twist of fate for each woman, but the chance discoveries of Ms Rimmer and Ms Glennon’s bodies in bushland meant their families could at least lay them to rest.
Ms Rimmer was found in Wellard when a rogue rooster ran in front of a car, prompting a family to stop so the children could chase after it and the mother could pick death lillies.
She then discovered the decomposing naked body.
“I felt on the back of my leg it was a stick, but it was a foot,” Tammy Van Raalte-Evans has testified.
Ms Glennon was found in Eglington by a man searching for cannabis plants.
Ms Spiers’ body has never been found.
The Claremont serial killings haunted Perth for more than two decades until ex- Telstra technician Bradley Robert Edwards, 51, was charged in December 2016.
Perth’s so-called “trial of the century” over the first 17 days has heard from witnesses including Edwards’ two ex-wives, his love rival and three women he admits attacking.
In harrowing testimony, the social worker who Edwards assailed from behind at Hollywood Hospital in 1990 said she struggled until he suddenly stopped.
“One minute I was, I felt, fighting for my life and the next minute he’s just saying ’I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry’.”
Security guard Rick Marshall said he found Edwards with his head in his hands, muttering “I don’t know what came over me”.
The 18-year-old woman who Edwards recently admitted attacking as she slept in her Huntingdale home in 1988 was initially unsure if the man straddling her back was her boyfriend.
Edwards hesitated when she told him she loved him, then when she reached behind and realised it was not her partner, she dug her nail into his face.
The 17-year-old girl who he also recently admitted abducting from a park, dragging through Karrakatta Cemetery, then twice raping in 1995 was too frightened to fight or scream.
“I kept my eyes shut - I thought it would be better if he thought I couldn’t see him,” she said in a statement.
“I thought at the end of it all that he was going to kill me.”
The trial has had frustrating moments when witnesses began dropping bombshells but were cut off, with defence counsel swiftly objecting to anything not in statements.
Edwards’ second wife blurted out she was “sick and tired of the lies“, “I feared for my life” and “I was terrified while writing this” when questioned about notes she compiled detailing his ATM transactions.
One statement showed two withdrawals from Claremont in December 1996, despite Edwards claiming he had no association with the area.
The man who had an affair with Edwards’ first wife while living with them was stopped from elaborating when he described the moment the secret lovers were caught hugging and kissing.
The love rival started to pack, telling the woman: “I don’t fancy sleeping here another night knowing what he’s got in his room.”
Trilby Smith was cut off when she testified she and Annabelle Bushell hitched a lift from a man in a white station wagon with a Telstra logo in late 1996, but her friend suddenly pulled her from the vehicle saying “that man was...”
The court has also heard from people who saw the murder victims on the nights they vanished and witnesses who reported being woken by “blood curdling“ screams.
Edwards has showed little emotion during the trial, which is before a judge alone and will resume on January 6.
Comments by the NYT CSK Investigation Team:
1. As a result of Bradley Robert Edwards being an admitted rapist, and as a result of untrustworthy and unsound character, when it comes the females and his desire at certain times for sex with a female who has not consented to such sexual encounter... ... the Western Australian Police, the Director of Public Prosecutions for Western Australia along with the Western Australian Media (which is very much influenced by one man, Kerry Stokes, who is a well known powerful Freemason, who has very strong connections is also areas in Western Australia ) ..... have made a convincing presentation to the Western Australian Public that Bradley Robert Edwards is the sort of person that could well be the sole lone Claremont Serial Killer, who could have abducted and murdered Sarah Spiers, Jane Rimmer and Ciaria Glennon ....
but for some strange reason they are still misrepresenting the truth to the Western Australian Public in various articles like the above, and TV news presentations ....... about the last sighting of Jane Rimmer .... when the article in the local Perth Community Newspaper that provides the witness statement of four University Students that saw a girl that was fairly likely to have been Jane Rimmer hitch hiking at around 12.30 am the 9th June,, 1996, on Stirling Highway, Claremont in the City of Perth direction, and not the Mosman Park direction .... has been republished on the NYT.bz, AWN.bz and Wikipediaexposed.org websites ..... so that such fact of what seems to be the real last known sighting of Jane Rimmer is not overlooked and forgotten about .... as it seems to have been since the disappearance of Jane Rimmer in June 8th/9th , June, 1996 .... by the Western Australian Police and the Western Australian print and TV media .....
2. It seem absolutely ridiculous and impossible with the millions spent on the investigations of the Clarement Serial Cases, the hundreds of police and journalists involved in the investigations of the Clarement Serial Cases, and the thousands of hours of time spent on investigations of the Clarement Serial Cases, that the fact that four University students gave a statement to the Western Australian Police and the local newspaper that they are convinced that they saw a girl that was fairly likely to have been Jane Rimmer, hitch hiking at around 12.30 am the 9th June, 1996., alomng Stirling Highway, Claremont, near the corner of Loch Street, in the City of Perth direction, and not the Mosman Park direction .... have not been noted .... by the Western Australian Police, the Director of Public Prosecutions and the Western Australian Print and TV Media ..... thus the fact that they all have at all times, and even now with the trial of Bradley Robert Edwards is full swing .... completely ignored such most important evidence of the last sighting of Jame Rimmer .... has to have been deliberate ..... and thus there is every reason to accuse the Western Australian Police, the Director of Public Prosecutions,the Western Australian Print and TV Media on conspiring to present a deliberately false impression to the Western Australian Public and His Honour, Justice Stephen Hall as to the last known likely publicly known verifiable sighting of Jane Rimmer...
3. The question is why have the Western Australian Police, the Director of Public Prosecutions for Western Australia, the Western Australian Print and TV Media conspired together to present a deliberately false impression to the Western Australian Public and His Honour, Justice Stephen Hall as to the last known likely publicly known verifiable sighting of Jane Rimmer.?
4. We think that the answer is that the powerful people in the Director of Public Prosecutions, the Western Australian Police, and the Western Australian Print and TV Media .... are doing their part to make sure that the investigations into the Claremont Serial Abductions and Murders, who in the statement made by Sarah Anne McMahon, includes Julie Culter, as being connected to the Claremont Serial Abductions and Murders.... so not lead to powerful and well connected people being accused of being involved in the Claremont Serial Abductions and Murders..... and thus the all out attempt to convince the Western Australian Public and His Honour, Justice Stephen Hall, that Bradley Robert Edwards, is the sole and only person responsible for the Claremont Serial Abductions and Murders .. and has been hiding is plain sight for the last over 20 years ... the statement of Sarah Anne McMahon made before her disappearance, and likely murder on the the 8th November, 2000 ... also name powerful and well connected people in Western Australian Society as being involved in the Claremont Serial Abductions and Murders ..... however the Director of Public Prosecutions for Western Australia, the Western Australian Police, the Western Australian Government and the Western Australian Print and TV Media have never been interested is knowing what the statement made by Sarah Anne McMahon made before her disappearance, and likely murder on the the 8th November, 2000 is .....
5. Kerry Stokes has been described by Wikipedia as:
owning 68% of the Seven Network is a network of commercial free-to-air television stations in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide, as well as regional Queensland and Perth. The platform, as well as a 33 per cent stake in Sky News Australia, now reaches 98 per cent of Australians..
The Seven Network has also established a major magazine publishing business, Pacific Magazines, which now accounts for more than 20 per cent of all magazines sold in Australia.
Also under Stokes's leadership, Seven has established a leading online venture, Yahoo!7, combining Yahoo!'s search and online capabilities with Seven's content and cross marketing. This venture now is Australia's most popular internet portal and the joint venture is driving a range of online and IPTV businesses. Seven built and acquired several broadband businesses, including wireless broadband group Unwired (sold to Optus, now defunct), VOIP operator Engin (now an independent business) and was the Australian licensee for TiVo,[7] launched in 2008 and abandoned in 2014.[8]
In 2006, Seven Network and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co (KKR)[9] created a new joint venture, Seven Media Group, a multi-faceted media company combining a presence in broadcast television, magazine and online applications. West Australian Newspapers Ltd. merged with Seven to form Seven West Media in 2011.
6. This is not the first time that the Director of Public Prosecutions for Western Australia, the Western Australian Police, the Western Australian Government and the Western Australian Print and TV Media have not been interested in information about well connected, influential and powerful people and networks being involved in criminal activity .... including Western Australian Police, well connected, influential business people and people involved in the legal industry.
7. The evidence is clear, that in Western Australia, there is a well established principle that is endemic in the state, which we describe as "Selective Prosecution".... some people are set up on false trumped up charges for various reasons.... and there is no expense speared and unlimited resources made available to made sure that particular person in found guilty of a crime or crimes the police and the prosecution will know that person is not guilty of .. with even going to the extent on occasions to use a specially selected "Packed Jury Panel" who are specially selected by a corrupt District Court Sheriff, to make sure the person is found guilty, regardless of the evidence presented during the court trial .... and there are plenty of examples of where there is ample evidence to charge a person .of as crime or crimes .. however that person is too well connected and protected and the police and prosecution will not proceed to investigate, and/or charge that person of any criminal offence .... then there is the example of a person who has good powerful connections for various reasons .. who is arrested for a crime, he or she is alleged to have committed ... however ... there is a specially selected "Packed Jury Panel" ... who are specially selected by a corrupt District Court Sheriff, to make sure the person is found not guilty of the crime he or she has been charged with ....
EG:
The Late Len Buckeridge, the billionaire building magnate, who was the owner of the BGC Group of Companies ... who had clearly committed a serious assault in front of three witnesses .. two of the witnesses including the person Len Buckeridge bashed over the head with a hot rake ...
who was interviewed by a major Perth TV Network .. being the only Perth TV Network ... game to even report the serious assault committed by Len Buckeridge ... who bashed Ron Minshull over the back of the head with a hot rake after being served a summons to appear in court to be cross examined over clear cut perjury Len Buckeridge has committed in the magistrates court ........ was never charged with assault or perjury.... because in the words of Detective John Hancock .... ...".. I have been instructed by my superior officers that Len Buckeridge is not to be charged with any criminal offence and he is far too powerful and protected ... "....
Then there is another example when Robert John McKechnie QC, who was then the Director of Public |Prosecutions for Western Australia ... was hand a set of affidavits while he was walking up Hay Street, Perth, Western Australia ... the contents of such affidavits proved beyond reasonable doubt that Alistair Castairs Borg and others working for the Public Trustee for Western Australia with others ....... had committed perjury in the Supreme Court and manufactured evidence and conspired to pervert the court of justice .... in a civil case where the Public Trustee for Western Australia and is representatives were being sued for millions of dollars for conspiracy to defraud ..... all this information has been on public record for over 20 years and no one has threatened to sue for defamation .... not even the billionaire Len Buckeridge who well knew about this information about him being on public record for over 10 years before his death ....
Robert John McKechnie QC, who was then the Director of Public |Prosecutions for Western Australia. refused to push an investigation into the perjury set out in the affidavits handed to him while he was walking down Hay Street, Perth .. his reward was to be made a Supreme Court of Western Australia and later the head of the Corruption Commission for Western Australia..
Len Buckeridge was never hesitant about suing anyone that dared to publicly say anything negative about him.... if he threats to break a leg or two did not work as a warning ... there is the true story on public record as told by a concrete worker on a building site.... Len Buckeridge appeared on the building site to deal with complaints made about the quality of the concrete his concrete supply company had delivered to the building site..... the concrete worker stated what Len Buckeridge stated to people at the building site ... " ....If anyone wants to complain about the quality of the concrete my company has supplied to this building site .... I will arrange to have their legs broken .. along with members of their family as well ..."
8. There is of course the now deceased former Western Australian Police, Bernie Johnson and Don Hancock, who have been named at the Inquest of former brothel Madam Shirley Finn ... that they were involved in the murder of former brothel Madam Shirley Finn in the 1970's and that Western Australian Police also knew of this, but would not come forward to tell what they knew until 40 odd years later, when they were retired and former Western Australian Police, Bernie Johnson and Don Hancock were deceased...
9. There are police who have committed criminal offences who have been publicly named on public record ..however .. the Western Australian Police and the Director of Public |Prosecutions for Western Australia are not in the least interested in investigating and prosecuting the,m because they are prortected ....
10. Even the caption under the photo of Jane Rimmer ...in the above article
"Jane Rimmer was captured on CCTV with an unknown male outside the Claremont Hotel, moments before she was abducted and murdered"..
involves the continual lie that Jane Rimmer was abducted and murdered moments after seen on this video footage at just before midnight of the 8th June, 1996 ..... ... when PerthNow which is a publication owned by the Perth Sunday Times, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch's New Limited .. Rupert Murdoch is well known to be connected to the most powerful in Perth, Western Australia and the most powerful people on Planet Earth .... and is a well respected Powerful Freemason and would have is reporters report in any way that his Freemason Brother Kerry Stokes tells him his reporters should report as incident..
".. The Sunday Times launched PerthNow, an online presentation of local news from News Limited. ...
As of March 2016, third-party web analytics provider Alexa, ranked Perthnow.com.au as the 233rd most visited website in Australia, while SimilarWeb rated the site as the 32nd most visited news website in Australia. ..."... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sunday_Times_(Western_Australia)..."...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sunday_Times_(Western_Australia)
The caption under the photo of Jane Rimmer ...in the above article is knowingly and willing false ... being a deliberate cover up of the fact that the last known sighting of Jane Rimmer was at around 12.30 am on the 9th of June, 2019 ... it has been well known by the Western Australian Police, the Director of Public Prosecutions, the Western Australian Government and the Western Australian Print and TV Media since after the disappearance of Jane Rimmer on the 8th/9th of June, 1996 ... that the last known sighting of Jane Rimmer was the sighting by the four University students at around 12.30 am who saw what had to clearly be Jane Rimmer .... hitchhiking along Stirling Highway, Clarement., near the corner of Loch Street and Stirling Highway ... ... in the direction of Perth City ... they nearly agreed to give her a lift .. but decided not not .. a decision they now say they regretted ,, because if they had given Jane Rimmer a life that early morning of the 9th of June, 1996 .. Jane Rimmer may well still be alive today ...
4.54pm on Dec 17, 2019
Court has wrapped up for the year
The state indicates that it has completed the evidence of the majority of its civilian witness, bar a few who will be heard in the New Year.
The list heard to date has included more than 120 witnesses.
The court will now break a few days early for the Christmas period, and will resume on January 6, 2020.
Upon returning, the trial will begin to hear from the police and forensic officers who attended the crime scenes where Jane and Ciara's bodies were found.
Ms Barbagallo has indicated there will be video evidence of the scenes.
Following the police witnesses, the evidence will move to the post-mortems.
By February it is estimated the trial will move onto fibre and DNA expert evidence, with a "significant concentration" on the continuity - or integrity - of that evidence.
Exhibit 730 – 738 – Trial_Bradley_Robert_Order forms and delivery receipts for Mr Edwards’ Telstra workwear
Rupert Murdoch who is in control of News Limited which owns a lions share of print media in Australia
Exhibit 1124 – Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_Identikit sketch produced by one of the ‘Telstra living witnesses’ Julie-Anne Johnstone, after an encounter on January 28, 1996
4.45pm on Dec 17, 2019
First wife's pregnancy medical appointment dates being read in to court
The next witness statement being read in is that of Scott McCarthy, an employee at the Department of Human Services.
He has released a request for Mr Edwards' first wife for her Medicare records.
The record shows on June 4, 1996 and June 12, 1996 - she attended medical appointments relating to her pregnancy.
The state alleges these dates represent when the first wife attended the doctor's to confirm she was pregnant by a man she was having an affair with.
The state alleges she told Mr Edwards in the following days, which resulted in emotional turmoil in his personal life and led him to murder Jane Rimmer on June 9, 1996.
First week of the Claremont serial killer trial grapples with the many faces of Bradley Edwards
By Andrea Mayes
29 Nov 2019
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-11-30/claremont-serial-killer-accused-bradley-edwards-many-faces/11750686
Photos included in this article
PHOTO: Many different sides of Bradley Edwards have been presented at the Claremont trial. (ABC News, Facebook)
PHOTO: People who knew Edwards at the time of the alleged murders have been questioned about his emotional state. (Supplied: WA Supreme Court)
PHOTO: Bradley Edwards blamed emotional distress for his attack on a hospital social worker, his ex-wife said. (Supplied: Supreme Court of WA)
PHOTO: Bradley Robert Edwards belonged to the Kewdale Little Athletics Club in later years. (Facebook: KLAC)
PHOTO: Paul Yovich (centre) cut off Edwards's second wife's testimony. (ABC News: Hugh Sando)
PHOTO: Bradley Edwards was flanked by security in the special courtroom set up to hear the trial. (ABC News: Anne Barnetson)
An uncommunicative and emotionally distant man who showed little reaction to bombshells in his personal life?
Or a romantic and attentive suitor and committed family man who led a normal life in the southern suburbs of Perth?
The many faces of alleged Claremont serial killer Bradley Robert Edwards were set out in the WA Supreme Court this week, where he is on trial for three counts of wilful murder.
The prosecution claims he abducted and violently murdered Sarah Spiers, 18, Jane Rimmer, 23, and Ciara Glennon 27, in 1996 and 1997, likely snatching them from the streets of Claremont after dark and burying them in remote locations.
Only the bodies of Ms Rimmer and Ms Glennon have ever been found. Ms Spiers remains missing, and even though Edwards admits she is dead, he contests the charge of murdering her.
The fact of Ms Spiers's death was one of the 37 admissions his defence counsel, Paul Yovich SC, submitted to court on the first day of the trial, which the prosecution will not be required to prove.
An uncommunicative and emotionally distant man who showed little reaction to bombshells in his personal life?
Or a romantic and attentive suitor and committed family man who led a normal life in the southern suburbs of Perth?
The many faces of alleged Claremont serial killer Bradley Robert Edwards were set out in the WA Supreme Court this week, where he is on trial for three counts of wilful murder.
The prosecution claims he abducted and violently murdered Sarah Spiers, 18, Jane Rimmer, 23, and Ciara Glennon 27, in 1996 and 1997, likely snatching them from the streets of Claremont after dark and burying them in remote locations.
Only the bodies of Ms Rimmer and Ms Glennon have ever been found. Ms Spiers remains missing, and even though Edwards admits she is dead, he contests the charge of murdering her.
The fact of Ms Spiers's death was one of the 37 admissions his defence counsel, Paul Yovich SC, submitted to court on the first day of the trial, which the prosecution will not be required to prove.
Wildly different versions of one man
Two ex-wives, two ex-girlfriends, other friends — both male and female — and work colleagues all gave their versions of Bradley Edwards in court this week, and it was at times a wildly contradictory picture.
The apparently tender side of Edwards was evidenced by the red roses and cards he sent to women he was trying to woo, and in the home video images projected to the court showing Edwards as a doting stepfather to his second wife's young daughter.
In stark contrast was the indifferent and uncommunicative man of which his first wife spoke, who ignored her as he spent long evenings late at night on his computer and never sought to discover why she eventually left him.
The prosecution argues the three alleged murders took place at emotionally volatile periods in Edwards's life, following a pattern it said was already established by his attack on a random woman at Hollywood Hospital in 1990.
This violent assault, which took place as he worked on the hospital's phone lines and to which he immediately confessed, happened the night after he had a row with his then-girlfriend over whether the couple would marry, she told the court.
But there were some inconsistencies in the accounts, with his second wife attributing the attack instead to Edwards's discovery of his first wife's infidelity prior to their marriage.
The second wife told the court Edwards had blamed the assault on a "brain snap" he had after hearing the news.
"She had cheated on him and he couldn't cope with it," she said.
First wife spoke of an emotionally distant partner
Edwards's emotional state was a constant line of questioning as those who knew him best testified before Justice Stephen Hall.
Under examination from prosecutor Carmel Barbagallo SC, his now 50-year-old first wife spoke of Edwards as an emotionally distant man who did not discuss relationship issues, even when their marriage was under extreme stress.
Some examples she recounted included:
· When he discovered her kissing their flatmate — he simply walked out of the room and the trio continued to live under the same roof
· When she moved out of the house some months later — he didn't ask why
· When he met up with her on two subsequent occasions — they did not discuss their relationship at all
· When she tried to raise the subject of their relationship the morning after they had had sex in the former marital home — he remained silent
· And, importantly, when she told him she was pregnant to another man in mid-1996 — he showed no emotion and merely enquired as to whether the baby could be his
The first wife was also not especially useful to the prosecution in establishing timeframes linking his state of mind to the three alleged murders.
While the State argues he murdered Ms Spiers on the night of Australia Day 1996, after his by now estranged ex-wife refused to attend a fireworks display with him, the woman would not be pinned down on dates.
Yes, he did ask her to see some fireworks after turning up to her parents' house unannounced, and yes she did refuse to go, but she could say only that the date was in late 1995 or early 1996.
And she gave no evidence to suggest Edwards was distressed by her rejection — on the contrary, he "did not seem upset" and "he accepted it", she said..
It was his second wife who provided the most explosive testimony.
Partner 'feared for her life'
Animated and seemingly keen to present her version of their relationship to the court, the woman said Edwards was initially attentive and loving, taking her and her young daughter to restaurants and going on picnics.
But by 2014 things had started to go badly wrong, prompting her to start examining his bank statements, and ultimately prompting her to leave the marital home in July 2015, more than a year before his arrest.
The ex-wife testified that she had made the notes after their relationship had "started to escalate" and that she was "sick and tired of the lies".
However, her testimony raised almost as many questions as it answered.
Why did she take meticulous handwritten notes of portions the bank statements, including ATMs from which he apparently withdrew cash during a period from July 1996 to 1998?
And why did she tell the court that she "feared for her life"?
The point was not explored further by either prosecution or defence, and indeed the woman was cut off when she tried to explain further, with Mr Yovich telling her he did not need her "editorial".
Cars, clothes and the crucial DNA evidence
The vehicles Edwards drove were under the spotlight this week, with every witness asked to describe in detail their recollection of which car he drove and what periods of time.
Witnesses were also asked about the type of uniform Edwards — a technician for Telstra — wore and the colour of it.
Forensic evidence could well hold the key to the case and the prosecution will be heavily reliant on a mixed DNA sample obtained from material found underneath Ms Glennon's fingernails.
That sample contained two people's DNA — Ms Glennon's and that of a man who scientists will testify is 80 to 100 million times more likely to be Bradley Edwards than anyone else.
But Mr Yovich flagged in his opening address that the defence would base its argument on four cases of contamination of evidence it said had been recorded.
These were:
· Intimate swabs taken from Ms Rimmer's body for which initial analysis provided no DNA profile, but which analysis in the UK in 2017 found partially matched that of a male scientist working at state forensic lab PathWest.
· Intimate swabs taken from Ms Glennon's body that also initially revealed nothing, then were found to contain DNA from a different male PathWest scientist
· Fingernail samples from Ms Rimmer's body that were found to have a mixed DNA profile — that of Ms Rimmer and another PathWest scientist
· A branch which had been placed on top of Ms Rimmer's body that yielded a partial DNA profile that matched "the profile of a victim of a completely unrelated crime whose samples were processed in the PathWest lab some days on either side" of the branch sample
The trial continues next week, when more of Edwards's friends and associates are expected to testify.
Exhibit 135 – Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_Picture of Bradley Edwards taken by first wife
Exhibit 1312 – Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_1997 street map of Mosman Park
Senior prosecutor Brad Hollingsworth (left) was among DPP staff seen leaving an Officeworks store in East Perth with projector screens. (ABC News)
Exhibit 1161 – Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_Picture of Toyota Camry that Ms Johnstone said was most like the one that approached her.
Some of the secrets of the Claremont serial killings have finally been revealed
By Andrea Mayes
23rd December, 2019
Guilty plea rocks Claremont trial
Bradley Edwards has pleaded guilty to raping a teen girl in a cemetery and attacking an 18-year-old woman in her home.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-12-22/secrets-finally-revealed-about-the-claremont-serial-killings/11813052
PHOTO: Sarah Spiers, Jane Rimmer and Ciara Glennon all went missing from Claremont. (ABC
News)
PHOTO: Sarah Spiers called for a taxi from this phone booth the last night she was seen alive. (ABC
PHOTO: A recording of Sarah Spiers ordering a taxi on the night she vanished was played to the court. (Supplied: Fairfax Media)News)
PHOTO: A cross wrapped in yellow police tape in a bushland setting marking the spot where Jane Rimmer's body was found at Wellard, south of Perth, in 1996. (ABC News)
PHOTO: Ciara Glennon had injuries that showed she fought for her life against her attacker. (Supplied)
PHOTO: Jane Rimmer was last seen standing outside the Continental Hotel in Claremont on June 9, 1996. (Supplied)
PHOTO: Jane Rimmer's body was dumped in bushland off Woolcoot Road in Wellard. (Supplied: Supreme Court of WA)
PHOTO: Club Bay View in Claremont was visited by Sarah Spiers and Jane Rimmer before they disappeared. (Supplied: Supreme Court of WA)
PHOTO: The Continental Hotel in Claremont where Jane Rimmer and Ciara Glennon were last seen. (Supplied: Supreme Court of WA)
PHOTO: Very little is still known about Bradley Edwards. (Facebook: KLAC)
PHOTO: Edwards used this cable to bind the hands and feet of the 17-year-old he raped at Karrakatta Cemetery. (Supplied: Supreme Court of WA
PHOTO: Bradley Edwards and his first wife owned a horse together before their marriage ended. (Supplied: WA Supreme Court)
PHOTO: A Toyota Camry Bradley Edwards was allocated by his employer Telstra between October 26, 1994 and May 1, 1996. (Supplied: Supreme Court of WA)
PHOTO: A Toyota Camry Bradley Edwards was allocated by his employer Telstra between October 26, 1994 and May 1, 1996. (Supplied: Supreme Court of WA)
PHOTO: An identikit drawing from some of the Telstra Living Witness testimony bore little resemblance to Edwards. (Supplied: Supreme Court of WA)
PHOTO: A Telecom van similar to the one issued to Bradley Edwards in the 1990s. (Supplied: Supreme Court of WA)
PHOTO: Telstra kept no record of Bradley Edwards's attack on a woman despite it happening during work time. (Supplied: Supreme Court of WA)
PHOTO: Paul Yovich is planning to target the handling of DNA exhibits in his defence argument. (ABC News: Charlotte Hamlyn)
PHOTO: Edwards's defence team of Paul Yovich and Genevieve Cleary will try to have the "emotional upset" argument ruled out. (ABC News: Andrea Mayes)
The Claremont serial killer mystery that has horrified Perth for more than two decades, traumatising family and friends of the three young victims, has long been shrouded in secrets.
Little was publicly known about how three young women — Sarah Spiers, 18, Jane Rimmer, 23, and Ciara Glennon, 27 — vanished abruptly from the streets of the upmarket Claremont entertainment district in 1996 and 1997, or how they apparently died.
The public's hunger for details about the case has contrasted starkly with the police's refusal to provide much more than scant information, as is common for an ongoing murder investigation.
Rumour and speculation abounded, but no one apart from those involved in the case has been told more than the limited details on the public record.
Until now.
With the first month of the triple-murder trial of 51-year-old former Telstra technician Bradley Robert Edwards in the WA Supreme Court now complete, a much more detailed picture of the women's final nights and what might have happened to them has emerged.
More than 100 civilian witnesses have now testified and the central planks of the prosecution's case have been laid out, throwing new light on a case that has shocked a city for so long.
The new details about Sarah Spiers
One of the most moving moments of the trial so far was hearing Sarah Spiers's voice ring out across the courtroom in a recorded telephone conversation, believed to be her last, to Swan Taxis.
The 18-year-old receptionist's voice sounded young but clear as she told the operator her name, where she was and where she was going.
The call packed a powerful emotional punch as those who heard it grappled with the knowledge that it was the last time the teenager was ever heard alive.
Or was it?
We also heard of how several residents in the wealthy riverside suburb of Mosman Park, located between Claremont and Fremantle, were awoken from their sleep in the early hours of that same night by a series of "desperate", "terrible", "blood-curdling" screams.
Three of these people said the screams had come from the direction of a phone box on Monument Street, where a light-coloured station wagon was seen with its tail lights on.
The prosecution said these screams came from Ms Spiers, who had been driven there by Edwards in his Telstra-issued white Toyota Camry and then murdered.
Ms Spiers's body has never been found.
How Jane Rimmer and Ciara Glennon died
Police have never previously revealed details of how Ms Rimmer and Ms Glennon are believed to have died, nor the conditions of their bodies when they were discovered weeks after their deaths.
But that macabre information was finally outlined in the court by state prosecutor Carmel Barbagallo SC, including details of deep "self-defence-type injuries" both women had suffered to their arms as they tried to fend off their attacker.
The injuries the women suffered were similar, Ms Barbagallo said, and their bodies were found in near-identical poses but in mirror image of each other, lying almost face down and covered in branches and other vegetation.
Both had died as a result of large and traumatic neck wounds, Ms Barbagallo said, that had been inflicted with a "bladed or sharp-edged implement".
There was also evidence about the discovery of the women's bodies from those who made the chance findings, including from Tammy Van Raalte-Evans who found Ms Rimmer.
At times weeping as she gave her evidence, which was still distressing 20 years on, Ms Van Raalte-Evans described how she had climbed through bushes into a clearing to look at a large death lily flower when she felt something brushing the back of her leg.
That thing was Ms Rimmer's "tiny" foot, sticking out from beneath the vegetation that had been dumped on top of the 23-year-old's mutilated body.
The Telecom knife evidence
A brown, wooden-handled, folding knife stamped with a Telecom logo was found on Woolcoot Road in Wellard on August 3, 1996 — the same day Ms Rimmer's body was discovered in bushland further along the same unsealed street.
The court heard from former Telstra employee David Minchin who started his technician apprenticeship with Edwards in 1986, when the company was known as Telecom.
Mr Minchin's statement said he and Edwards had each been issued with a blue toolbox containing a green-handled, locked-blade pocketknife with a pointed tip.
They were subsequently told the knife had been issued by mistake and ordered to hand it back, but Edwards claimed to have lost his and did not hand it in, Mr Minchin said.
All apprentices including Edwards were then given replacement knives — brown, wooden-handled knives with the Telecom logo on them and the word "Shelham" stamped into the stainless steel blade.
A knife with this description was found near the Rimmer crime scene.
The CCTV evidence
Grainy black and white footage of Jane Rimmer standing outside the Continental Hotel, taken from CCTV footage on the night she went missing, is familiar to those who have followed the case over the years.
As she stands on the footpath outside the pub's entrance, her face lights up in a broad smile as a dark-haired man viewed from behind moves towards her.
The video was publicly released by police in 2008, 12 years after Ms Rimmer disappeared, and led to questions over why police had withheld it for so long.
But it turns out this was far from the only CCTV footage police had of that night.
The court was played at least 20 minutes of footage taken from the pub and from cameras at nearby nightclub Club Bay View, which captured Ms Rimmer and her friends in the lead-up to her disappearance.
There were clear images of the young childcare worker stumbling slightly as she walked down the wide staircase that led to the first floor of the Continental and using the wall to help guide her down.
There was several minutes of footage showing Ms Rimmer firstly approaching and then in animated conversation with a group of friends outside the nightclub, as well as vision of her talking to a female friend for an extended period outside the pub.
None of this footage has ever previously been shown in public, and it may never be released as Justice Stephen Hall has not allowed it to be handed to media organisations.
What we've learned about Edwards
We now know much more about the complicated personal life and loves of Bradley Edwards, and the violent offences against women to which he has confessed.
These include:
The 1988 assault of an 18-year-old woman in her bedroom after breaking into her Huntingdale home. We were also told of the manner in which he attacked her, including stuffing cloth in her mouth and straddling her as she lay on her stomach
The assault two years later on a social worker while he was repairing phones at Hollywood Hospital. In this attack he grabbed the 40-year-old from behind as she sat at her desk, forcing material into her mouth and dragging her backwards across the room with his arm hooked across her chest and arms
The abduction and repeated rape of a 17-year-old girl as she walked home from Claremont late at night in 1995. She was forced into his van, had her hands bound and was taken to Karrakatta Cemetery, before being dumped in bushland half-naked following the attack.
Testimony from all three women was heard by the court, with the first two victims confronting Edwards from the witness box, just metres away from where he sat in the dock.
Both displayed obvious distress as they recounted their ordeals to Justice Stephen Hall, with the now 71-year-old social worker telling the court she "thought she was going to die" as the attack took place.
The Karrakatta rape victim's testimony came via police statements that were read out in court, in which she also described being so terrified she thought she was going to die.
Her vivid account included detailing the pain and fear she felt as he tied her wrists and ankles together and put a bag over her head, then raped her twice and dumped her in bushes.
She was present in court as her statements began to be read, but fled the room in tears as the more graphic and disturbing details were heard.
The wives, the lovers, the pregnancy
We also learnt much about Edwards's intimate relationships as his former wives and partners testified, including:
The tumultuous nature of his relationship with his first wife, who pressured him to marry her the night before he attacked the hospital social worker
The breakdown of that relationship after she began an affair with the couple's housemate, salacious details of which were revealed in his testimony via video link from the UK
The first wife moving out of the marital home and Edwards's subsequent visit to her parents' home to see her, which the prosecution said was on the night Ms Spiers disappeared
His reaction to the news that she was pregnant to her lover and his behaviour after the baby was born, including confronting and haranguing a friend of his ex-wife after she told him she had not yet visited the baby
The testimony that doesn't add up
More than 20 years on, the recollection of witnesses about what they were doing around the times of the women's disappearances was often vague and sometimes conflicting.
The prosecution said Edwards visited his first wife at her parents' house on the same night Ms Spiers disappeared — Australia Day 1996 — and that her refusal to attend a fireworks display with him led him to murder the 18-year-old receptionist.
But the evidence about what date the visit occurred was not conclusive, and his ex-wife said Edwards did not seem at all upset by her refusal to go out with him.
The accounts of those who are part of the so-called Telstra Living Witness Project — women who either accepted or refused lifts from a man acting suspiciously and driving a light-coloured vehicle late at night in the Claremont or Cottesloe areas — also varied, although Ms Barbagallo maintained they were "broadly consistent".
Some say he drove a station wagon, others a sedan or van.
The vehicle was clearly marked with Telstra logos, or it had no obvious markings.
And the man himself was either clean-shaven, neatly dressed in a uniform or business shirt and with short dark hair, or had longish, fair, curly hair and was wearing a denim shirt.
The gaps in the records
The crimes were committed more than two decades ago, at a time when the use of computers for electronic record keeping was only in its infancy in Western Australia.
Telstra's record-keeping was patchy at best and there were no accurate records kept of which employees drove which cars at any given time, or what jobs they had been assigned.
The telecommunications giant was unable to say when it put in underground cabling at Wellard, where Ms Rimmer's body was found, or if Edwards had any involvement in this work, which could explain the knife discovery.
Telstra also kept no records of Edwards's assault on the Hollywood Hospital social worker, despite it happening while he was on a job.
He appeared to have suffered no consequences at work stemming from the attack, being promoted to a more senior technician position in the years following this.
Banking records for the period in question have also been shown to be uneven, with the Commonwealth Bank unable to produce full records of Edwards's transaction history in 1996 and 1997, part of which his second wife copied down from paper statements she found in his office at their Kewdale home.
Police record-keeping has also been under the spotlight at the trial, with defence counsel Paul Yovich SC homing in on the way officers recorded receiving important exhibits, including those relating to the Karrakatta rape and Ms Rimmer's body, and the way such exhibits were handled and stored.
This line of questioning was expected to intensify when the trial resumes in January, with Mr Yovich looking to cast doubt on the integrity of key pieces of evidence.
What happens next?
The trial has now heard from almost all the civilian witnesses deemed relevant — more than 120 of them.
Ms Barbagallo told the court at the end of proceedings this week the evidence about the accused's life and the Telstra Living Witness Project had now been completed.
She said the trial would now move into the next phase — a much more detailed look at the "disposal" sites where the bodies of Ms Rimmer and Ms Glennon were "left to rot", as well as evidence from their post-mortem examinations.
This would likely involve graphic and gruesome details, plus lengthy questioning of the police and mortuary staff involved.
After that would be the fibre and DNA evidence — crucial pieces of the puzzle the prosecution argued conclusively linked Edwards with the crimes.
Justice Hall is yet to rule on the admissibility of the "emotional upset" argument — the prosecution's case that Edwards committed the crimes at times of significant upheaval in his personal life.
He said he would prefer to rule on that "towards the end" of the prosecution's case and would call on Mr Yovich to make a submission before doing so.
The trial is set to resume on January 6.
Exhibit 48 – Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_Extract of log book written by Bradley Edwards’ second wife, detailing ATM withdrawals – including two in Claremont on the 5th and 12th of December, 1996
Bradley Edwards has admitted to abducting and twice raping a 17-year-old girl at Karrakatta Cemetery.
Credit: The West Australian
Exhibit 1290 – Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_Plan of Karrakatta cemetery
Released on 04.12
Exhibit 757 – Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_Bradley Edwards’ positions at Telstra, with dates
Childcare worker Jane Rimmer was just 23 when she was murdered. Source-Supplied
Exhibit 1405 – Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_Photograph of Jane Rimmer’s watch, found by a horse rider on the day she went missing
Extract from Hansard - [ASSEMBLY - Thursday, 27 November 2008]
p631b-640a
http://www.parliament.wa.gov.au/Hansard%5Chansard.nsf/0/b52e1a6529eecb9a482576e400115ead/$FILE/A38%20S1%2020081127%20p631b-640a.pdf
Mr John Quigley;
Acting Speaker;
Ms Alannah MacTiernan;
Dr Kim Hames
[1] ADDRESS-IN-REPLY Motion Resumed from an earlier stage of the sitting.
Mr J.R. QUIGLEY:
In 1998-99 that peanut Falconer, that little turnip from Victoria, who had been given the job as Commissioner of Police, together with Caporn said, “He’s the man.” I will continue if I may.
The police absolutely convicted Lance in the pages of The West Australian. A decade later it has come out that the police do not believe he is the prime suspect. They advanced that finding on the basis that Lance had failed a lie detector test. They kept from the media and from the press benches the fact that 12 other persons of interest had failed the lie detector test as well because that did not suit their story against Lance. It is absolutely shameful. The police had all of Perth believing that Lance was the murderer.
They destroyed his life just as they destroyed Mallard’s life.
It is no coincidence that after locking up Mallard within two weeks of the death of Mrs Lawrence,
Caporn was considered the whiz-kid.
They sacked a real copper from macro, Detective Sergeant Paul Ferguson, who the member for Murray-Wellington would vouchsafe is a real copper, and put on this impostor who said, “Lance is the man.” Because of his capacity to solve difficult murder cases, he rocketed up through the police force to the rank of assistant commissioner and was eventually in charge of terrorism laws. God help us all that a person such as that could be put in charge! He does not even have the confidence of the Commissioner of Police to have his contract renewed to be an assistant commissioner. That is foreclosing on other consequences he might face. This would never have been exposed had it not been for the decision of the former Attorney General to grant the petition for Mallard to let the matter be litigated before the court. The Attorney General will soon receive a petition from another person who was convicted of murder after a Caporn investigation. I am referring to Gary White, who was convicted of the murder of Anthony Tapley from DNA evidence and statements gathered by David Caporn. We read in The Sunday Times last week that a new DNA expert from Britain has come forward and said that the DNA results that were presented to the jury in White’s case, when read properly, did not even provide evidence that it was the deceased’s DNA. This was kept from the jury. This presents an interesting challenge for the Attorney General, to see whether he does what the former Attorney General did, which was to send it off to the Court of Appeal to let the Court of Appeal decide, or whether the current Attorney General adopts the position adopted by the last conservative Attorney General, Hon Peter Foss, QC, when he knocked back Mallard’s petition and said, “Back to jail for the rest of your life, Mallard.” I hope that when the White petition comes forward to the Attorney General he, having spoken to senior practitioners in this city, gives it due consideration, and finds that it meets with his favour and is not struck down. I appreciate that the current Attorney General comes to this Parliament with a high reputation for integrity and legal knowledge, but he is burdened somewhat by conflict because he comes from the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions: the same DPP, whilst he was in the employment of the office, who went down and opposed these appeals and opposed White’s application for leave to the High Court. It might be seen in some quarters, unfortunately, that if White’s petition were to be rejected by the Attorney General, that this might be some sort of cover-up on behalf of the office of the DPP in not wanting this matter to go forward to be reviewed by the Court of Appeal because it involved work colleagues of the Attorney General.
MR J.R. QUIGLEY (Mindarie) [11.44 am]: In my Address-in-Reply speech I wish to touch on law and order and justice issues particular to my electorate but also of relevance to the whole state of Western Australia. There has been some publicity of recent times concerning a confrontation between me and certain corrupt police officers. The Premier laughed. Of course, the Premier understands that my family was a victim of attack. The Premier understands that my family was a victim of crime, and I was a victim of that crime as a result of my performance as a parliamentarian. Whilst I have been ragged a bit — Mr M.J. Cowper interjected.
Mr J.R. QUIGLEY: Could that copper from Australind just bail out of this argument for a while. Mr M.J. Cowper: What evidence? Mr J.R. QUIGLEY: That copper from Australind is going off again—lazy man. I was under attack. That former policeman from Australind has never said one thing about me being a victim of crime, and has not spoken out against the criminals —
The ACTING SPEAKER (Mr J.M. Francis): Order, member for Mindarie! I ask the member to refer to other members in the house by their seat, in accordance with the standing orders. Mr J.R. QUIGLEY: The member for Murray, being a former policeman, has not expressed —
Point of Order Mr M.J. COWPER: My point of order is that my title is member for Murray-Wellington. The ACTING SPEAKER: There is no point of order. Debate Resumed
Mr J.R. QUIGLEY: The member for Murray-Wellington, that former policeman, has never spoken one word of criticism against the criminals who attacked my family home. All he has done is come into this chamber and rag me. That is all he has done. He is as useless in here as he was in Australind. Following this attack, I was very privileged to receive—I am very grateful for this—communications from the Commissioner of Police over the past week and from the president of the Western Australian Police Union. One of the concerns in my electorate, as the member for Wanneroo knows, was the review by the police service of the Two Rocks Police Station. As I have said on a previous occasion, the member for Wanneroo was present at a public meeting in Two Rocks when this issue was raised and the concerns were raised. Since that time, it is to the Commissioner of Police’s lasting credit that he personally travelled to Two Rocks and, after looking at Two Rocks and Yanchep, paid me the courtesy of a visit at my electorate office to personally reassure me of his commitment to maintain a police station in the Yanchep-Two Rocks locality. It was a very cordial meeting, and a range of matters were discussed. I have also received a number of phone calls from the president of the Police Union over the confrontation I have had with corrupt elements within the police service. They have been very, very fruitful discussions. They asked me why I said there were corrupt elements in the police service, and I said, “Well, I can prove it by documents.” I took them, as I will take the chamber, to a document, being a report written about me and carried in “InsideCover” on 18 October 2006. I will read it. The corrupt officer, who was a gutless corrupt officer because he would not put his name in the newspaper—he went by the pseudonym of Doyle—was criticising the Corruption and Crime Commission, and in the process said that there is no way that the police would trust the CCC, but he went on to say — Doyle claims that two years ago police handed the CCC a file about a serving member of Parliament. It is alleged that the pollie made threats to a third party. “When the file was handed to the CCC, it was at the stage where all that was required was a few people to be interviewed, a few facts firmed up — Whatever that means — and a politician interviewed and charged,” … We know at the time that this corrupt police officer was speaking to The West Australian, the police had already been informed on two separate occasions by none less than the Director of Public Prosecutions of Western Australia that there was no charge to lay. I am sure that the member for Murray-Wellington would agree with me when I say that this was a blatant act of corruption practised against a member of Parliament by a serving police officer. The serving police officer would have had to be one of about five officers who were involved in the corrupt investigation of me on the false allegation that I had committed some offence. As I said, the police had already been told by the DPP that there was no offence to prosecute. Some police want to drag the state of Western Australia into a police state where police can go to the newspaper or any other media outlet and convict anyone that they cannot convict in a court, and destroy their life. This incident did great damage to me and to my family, including my late father, who had to read about it in the paper in 1991. He freaked out that his son was about to be charged. I assured him that there was no offence and another corrupt copper was using the media, as they do in a totalitarian society, to destroy people without any evidence. Another case of that happening involved Andrew Mallard, who was a vulnerable mental patient when the police found him in a mental hospital. The police went on TV and announced that they had got the murderer. We all know now that the person who led that investigation, Caporn, on the finding of the CCC, had nothing or very little and had altered the evidence. He went to witnesses and had them alter their statements, went to the forensic laboratories of Western Australia and had them alter a forensic report and had what is described in this document as “a few facts firmed up”. That is what the police were doing in the Mallard case and what they were going to do to me. They wanted to firm up a few facts, for which we should read “build a false case”. I have given this document to the Commissioner of Police and to the investigating officers. Actually, I did not hand it to Dr O’Callaghan when he came to my office last Friday; I referred him to it. I had given copies to the investigating officers and said, “If you want to find out who put the words ‘child molester’ on my front wall, it was not someone just walking down West Coast Drive, because they went to another street, found my boat and put the same defamatory words on that. It would have to be someone who had access to numberplates and registration details to know who owned that boat; that corrupt no-good copper Doyle or his mates.” I have the privilege of standing in this place and exercising privilege on behalf of the community. There is a wider issue here. A corrupt rogue element exists within the Western Australia Police force. That is beyond doubt. I have shown members the documents. It was an act of blatant corruption. If it was practised against anyone in this chamber, no matter where they sat in relation to the Speaker, I would be just as livid. I am glad it happened to me because at least I have the wherewithal to stand up to the police. As I said to these corrupt coppers on TV, I am no lay-down Sally. We learnt at Aquinas to row out the full 2 000 metres. I am not going to cave in from all this. I will now turn to more hapless people who have been the victims of this rogue element within the police force that is now trying its best to pull us into a state in Western Australia where the police rule that allegation equals conviction and destruction of families. I noticed in media reports last night and today that Lance is no longer the principal suspect in the macro investigation. How could this be? Mr J.E. McGrath: It should never have happened that they named suspects without any proper … Mr J.R. QUIGLEY: I agree. It presents a big challenge to this government. There is a reef of corruption within the police force. Not all police are corrupt. I have publicly apologised. In my anger after my house was defaced, I used language that was too wide and criticised all police. Of course I do not feel that way about all police. I have a lot of friends who are police and who are supporting me at the moment. They are ringing me and offering me support against the corrupt element that exists within their own service. I will take the example of Lance, the man mentioned in the macro case. I spoke to Lance’s father moments before standing to speak in this place. I was given his telephone number by Channel Nine. I did not want to come into this chamber relying on a media organisation for the facts before making a speech in this Parliament. Lance’s father told me that the police assured the father that they did not suspect the son of murder, the major crime attended upon him recently. It is no coincidence that the principal investigating officer of that case is the person who locked up Mallard—Caporn.
The ACTING SPEAKER (Mr J.M. Francis): I take this opportunity to remind the member for Mindarie that while he is obviously protected under parliamentary privilege, I just want to caution him of the consequences of naming people in this Parliament when they are not able to come back here and defend themselves. I am not stopping the member; I am just reminding him. Mr C.C. Porter: Member, just with respect to the Claremont serial killer suspect, was it not the case that the publication of that occurred via a media outlet rather than by the police?
Mr J.R. QUIGLEY: In 1998-99 that peanut Falconer, that little turnip from Victoria, who had been given the job as Commissioner of Police, together with Caporn said, “He’s the man.” I will continue if I may. The police absolutely convicted Lance in the pages of The West Australian. A decade later it has come out that the police do not believe he is the prime suspect. They advanced that finding on the basis that Lance had failed a lie detector test. They kept from the media and from the press benches the fact that 12 other persons of interest had failed the lie detector test as well because that did not suit their story against Lance. It is absolutely shameful. The police had all of Perth believing that Lance was the murderer. They destroyed his life just as they destroyed Mallard’s life. It is no coincidence that after locking up Mallard within two weeks of the death of Mrs Lawrence, Caporn was considered the whiz-kid. They sacked a real copper from macro, Detective Sergeant Paul Ferguson, who the member for Murray-Wellington would vouchsafe is a real copper, and put on this impostor who said, “Lance is the man.” Because of his capacity to solve difficult murder cases, he rocketed up through the police force to the rank of assistant commissioner and was eventually in charge of terrorism laws. God help us all that a person such as that could be put in charge! He does not even have the confidence of the Commissioner of Police to have his contract renewed to be an assistant commissioner. That is foreclosing on other consequences he might face. This would never have been exposed had it not been for the decision of the former Attorney General to grant the petition for Mallard to let the matter be litigated before the court. The Attorney General will soon receive a petition from another person who was convicted of murder after a Caporn investigation. I am referring to Gary White, who was convicted of the murder of Anthony Tapley from DNA evidence and statements gathered by David Caporn. We read in The Sunday Times last week that a new DNA expert from Britain has come forward and said that the DNA results that were presented to the jury in White’s case, when read properly, did not even provide evidence that it was the deceased’s DNA. This was kept from the jury. This presents an interesting challenge for the Attorney General, to see whether he does what the former Attorney General did, which was to send it off to the Court of Appeal to let the Court of Appeal decide, or whether the current Attorney General adopts the position adopted by the last conservative Attorney General, Hon Peter Foss, QC, when he knocked back Mallard’s petition and said, “Back to jail for the rest of your life, Mallard.” I hope that when the White petition comes forward to the Attorney General he, having spoken to senior practitioners in this city, gives it due consideration, and finds that it meets with his favour and is not struck down. I appreciate that the current Attorney General comes to this Parliament with a high reputation for integrity and legal knowledge, but he is burdened somewhat by conflict because he comes from the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions: the same DPP, whilst he was in the employment of the office, who went down and opposed these appeals and opposed White’s application for leave to the High Court. It might be seen in some quarters, unfortunately, that if White’s petition were to be rejected by the Attorney General, that this might be some sort of cover-up on behalf of the office of the DPP in not wanting this matter to go forward to be reviewed by the Court of Appeal because it involved work colleagues of the Attorney General.
Mr C.J. Barnett: That is an appalling claim. The member is a disgrace!
Mr J.R. QUIGLEY:I have not accused him of doing anything wrong, but alerting this chamber — Mr C.J. Barnett: The member has! Too smart, all innuendo.
The ACTING SPEAKER (Mr J.M. Francis): I will repeat the caution again, member for Mindarie, that while you are protected by privilege, some people that you may refer to may not be able to come back into this chamber and defend themselves. I am not stopping the member, I am just cautioning him.
Mr J.R. QUIGLEY: I thank the Acting Speaker for not stopping me. Mr C.C. Porter: Does the member for Mindarie take interjections?
Mr J.R. QUIGLEY: I am not taking interjections now, I have only got about five minutes to go. The minister will interject anyway. Those people that I am talking about are in the chamber and are able to comment. It is a challenging situation for the Attorney General; one that I am sure he will put his mind to. I hope that this matter is referred to the Court of Appeal because this conviction is of great concern to the defence bar of Western Australia, although I understand it is of no concern whatsoever to the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, which has steadfastly, as it did in Mallard’s case, sought to hold the conviction and keep the innocent Mallard in jail. The office of the DPP, by its actions, managed to extend Mallard’s unfair term of imprisonment by a number of years—at least four. The government of the day, including the Premier and the minister, have a challenge before them. It is beyond reasonable doubt on the evidence—at least from what is in “InsideCover”, taken at its lowest—that there is a reef of corrupt officers running through the police force. That is unsurprising. [Member’s time extended.]
Mr J.R. QUIGLEY: When an officer—as lowly as he was; a detective sergeant—starts rocketing up through the police force on the basis of dud investigations, he does not do it by himself. He has to have a team around him and, as he goes forward, that team gets promoted as well. So it is unsurprising that they end up with a little cluster or a reef of corrupt officers around them who knew if they followed and supported Caporn, their careers would elevate and they too would go up in the vortex. There is a challenge for the Commissioner of Police to root these corrupt friends of Caporn right out of the police force. It is going to be very hard. In relation to Doyle, what does the Commissioner of Police do?
We know it is an attack upon a member of Parliament and I know that members opposite do not care because it is only me, but do not forget what they say: first they came for Quigley and I did not speak up, and then they came for me, Quigley, and no-one spoke up for me! He was speaking about the Jews at the time. This is absolutely the soft edge, where the encroaching police state starts to go. The media have a responsibility in this, too. I understand that the Attorney General has under consideration whistleblower legislation in the form of shield laws.
I will make one point in relation to these shield laws. Staff from various media outlets in this city know that in principle I support shield laws. I think at times the media are some of the best people to ferret out information—information that public officials would like to keep from the public. Staff from various media outlets in this city know that in principle I support shield laws. I think at times the media are some of the best people to ferret out information—information that public officials would like to keep from the public.
They are very good at that, but if there were no shield laws, journalists would be exposed. In this particular case, Mr Morfesse wrote this article about me—there is no doubt it was about me—and the next day, the crime reporter Sean Cowan came to this Parliament and put to me that it was me and that they knew it was me. He then published an article the day after this happened. Fair enough, because if this was true and there were agencies, either the Director of Public Prosecutions or the Corruption and Crime Commission, corruptly protecting Quigley from a prosecution he deserved, then it was the right place for the paper to put it out on the table. Now The West Australian is in possession of further facts. The West Australian newspaper, its editor Mr Armstrong and its reporter Mr Morfesse, now know that they have been lied to by Doyle—their secret source. They now know that, by the time Doyle spoke to them accusing a member of Parliament of a criminal offence, the police themselves had been told by the DPP there had been no offence. Doyle did not tell The West Australian that. Doyle was intent on using The West Australian against a member of Parliament for the corrupt police officer’s own purposes. That is evidence of a police state. That is evidence that when a policeman can anonymously go to a media organisation—it could happen to any member—and tell a lie like this, that you are guilty of a criminal offence but no-one will prosecute you, that is evidence of a police state. Investigator, judge and jury—that is how Doyle casts himself.
The West has now got a challenge before it. Is The West Australian going to protect a corrupt police officer? Is the family newspaper going to protect Doyle? Doyle attacked me and my family. Is The West Australian—which holds itself out as the family newspaper—going to protect Doyle’s identity? I can see the member for MurrayWellington shaking his head. The last thing he wants is The West Australian to give up the corrupt officer. The parliamentary secretary for police wants that corrupt officer protected. That is the state this democracy has come to. Look at the member for Murray-Wellington shaking his head, wearing his police badge on his lapel. He is not here as the member for Murray-Wellington; his main concern is to make sure that Doyle’s identity is never flushed out, that one of his mates is never brought to account. That is his concern. His concern was not that Rowtcliff was a corrupt officer, walking around Fremantle assisting Mallard to take drugs; his concern was that Rowtcliff was flushed out. That was his concern and that was his criticism of me because I flushed out a corrupt officer. He forgets to tell this chamber that before I did that I rang the DPP, Robert Cock, QC, and arranged a certificate of immunity for him. I rang Mr Michael Bowden, who was a defence solicitor at the time, before he was a judge, and arranged representation for him and I rang the police union to make sure the funding would flow through to Mr Bowden so that Mr Bowden could accompany Rowtcliff to the police royal commission and tell the truth. If he had told the truth and had not been corrupt, Mr Mallard would have been spared four years’ imprisonment. I did everything I could to look after Mr Rowtcliff in the sense of allowing him to tell the truth without exposing himself to prosecution; in other words, allowing the truth to come out to facilitate the release of a person who was 12 years into a 30-year prison term and who was not eligible for parole. He was not eligible for parole because he would not recant and admit the crime, and he would not go on the violent offenders program. Because he would not admit the crime and go on the violent offenders program, they took him to Graylands Hospital, put him in a straitjacket and injected him with psychotropic drugs. I asked Andrew when everything turned for him. He replied that it was when he was in Graylands Hospital in a straitjacket. He had been injected and he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror with saliva dribbling down his chin and thought, “I’m going to die in here.” That was when it all changed for him. The Attorney General should bear this in mind when he is arranging compensation. I had dinner last night with one of Perth’s leading personal injury lawyers, who practises in both the Court of Appeal and the High Court. He assured me that because of the way the writ is pleaded, Andrew is entitled to a civil jury, which could strike the damages in this case. I will be very interested to see, after the trial with a civil jury, whether the average person in Perth agrees with me that Andrew Mallard is entitled to $10 million for the destruction of his life, and that Lance is entitled to compensation for what the police have done to him and his family. They tore up his backyard, searched for DNA and went to the media saying that Lance was the murderer. They then went quietly to his parents in November 2008 to say, “We’ve looked into this further and we’re satisfied as to his alibis. We think he’s a bit weird and his behaviour is unusual, but we’re satisfied that he’s not the murderer.” What has happened? We have a corrupt police officer running his own agenda, convicting people in the media and destroying families, and because of his success in doing this, he is promoted! They sacked Paul Ferguson. Does the member for Murray-Wellington know Detective Sergeant Paul Ferguson? He is a fine police officer. I know him, his family and all his history. He is a fine police officer, but he was sacked from the case because he was not advancing the case quickly enough. They wanted a quick result, and this Caporn chappie had got a quick result in the Mallard case, so they sooled him onto this case to sink Lance. They could not convict him in court, so they convicted him in the media. I do not know any more about the facts behind Mrs Rayney’s death than anyone else in this house. I am not any better informed, but I do know that what the police did was damnable. It was the same form again. They did what they did to Lance and Mallard. They announced that Mr Rayney was the prime and only suspect.
Mr M.J. Cowper: I will send out 4 500 DVD copies of your speech.
Mr J.R. QUIGLEY: Good! The member for Murray-Wellington wants to send them out, because the people he wants to read that speech are the coppers who were involved in defacing my home, and he wants to ginger them up to do it again! What word of criticism has the member for Murray-Wellington spoken against those foul coppers who put Andrew Mallard away for life? Not one little whisper in this chamber. What word has he spoken against those criminals who graffitied my house—those mongrels who painted “child molester” so that my wife and children would read it in the morning? What word of criticism? Mr R.F. Johnson: Are you accusing police officers of doing that? Mr J.R. QUIGLEY: Absolutely! The minister has woken up—Doyle and his mates. They did not graffiti my wall on this occasion, they graffitied my name and reputation in The West Australian. What is the Minister for Police doing about it? Has he asked the Commissioner of Police what he has done to investigate the identity of Doyle?
Mr M.J. Cowper: Tell us who Doyle is.
Mr J.R. QUIGLEY: The member is the former copper; he is one of his mates. He should ask him. The Minister for Police should ask who this corrupt copper is.
The ACTING SPEAKER (Ms L.L. Baker): Order! Members should be careful.
Mr R.F. Johnson: Will you take an interjection, member?
Mr J.R. QUIGLEY: With two minutes to go, I will take it in the bar. The member is the Minister for Police. I can take it in the bar, because fortunately the bar is still open.
Mr R.F. Johnson: If you truly believe this, have the guts to go outside and repeat everything you have said in this chamber.
Mr J.R. QUIGLEY: That is exactly what I was challenged to do after I made the Mallard speech. The Commissioner of Police challenged me to debate it on the steps of Parliament. I recently asked him whether he still wanted to debate the Mallard case on the steps of Parliament, and he said, “No, thanks very much.” He no longer wants to debate the performance of the police in the Mallard case on the steps of Parliament, but before he found out the truth about it, he wanted a debate. I have a lot of sympathy for the Commissioner of Police because he has around him a number of corrupt officers who are ill-informing and ill-advising him. That is why he ended up in such a puddle, standing down Caporn, bringing him back and standing him down again. He was receiving dud advice; they were lying to him. What did the Minister for Police do to protect a member of Parliament against defamation by a certain police officer? Nothing. He is a typical conservative who says, “Support the gendarmes at any cost, and lock up the poor.” Several members interjected........
Debate continued ......
Debate adjourned, pursuant to standing orders.
Exhibit 699 – Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_Photo of Telstra pants, like the ones worn by Bradley Edwards in 1996 and 1997
4.35pm on Dec 17, 2019
Statement of Telstra knife manufacturer being read into court
The next statement being read in is that of Alexander Angus.
Mr Angus in the mid-1990s was the managing director of Sheldon and Hammond Pty Ltd, based in NSW. The company manufactured knives.
"In the 1990s the company had contracts to supply specific knives, to specific clients," he said.
"I recall in the early 1990s ... Telecom Australia had a requirement for a knife ... to supply to their linesmen and technicians.
He said the knives were made in Japan and had Shelham stamped on the blade and the Telecom label embossed on the handle.
The first batch of 11,000 was shipped in 1993. A number of knives were reordered up to 1996- totalling 58,900. Of those, 4,200 were sent to Western Australia.
"We never produced any copies of the knife to sell separately or independently," Mr Angus said.
The state alleges a Telstra-issued knife was located near Jane Rimmer's body, despite no major telecommunications work having been done in the semi-rural area in recent years.
Mr Edwards was allegedly allocated one of the knives.
Exhibit 15293 - Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_Aerial map of positions of CCTV cameras around Claremont in June 1996
Exhibit 8357 – Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_Second photo of Jane Rimmer’s watch
Kerry Stokes
Edwards was married twice and both of his wives, whose identities are suppressed, have testified at his trial.Source-AAP
Bradley Robert Edwards on day two of his murder trial.
People who knew Edwards at the time of the alleged murders have been questioned about his emotional state. (Supplied: WA Supreme Court)
Bradley Edwards blamed emotional distress for his attack on a hospital social worker, his ex-wife said. (Supplied: Supreme Court of WA)
The court heard the night Ciara Glennon (above) was murdered, Edwards failed to keep a dinner date with friends. Source-Supplied
Michael Kirby says he would support a body to review criminal cases where there are allegations of miscarriage of justice. (ABC News)
Exhibit 746 – Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_Old Telecom logo
Claremont serial killings trial hears how Jane Rimmer's body was discovered in bushland
By Andrea Mayes
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-12-17/claremont-serial-killer-ciara-glennon-seen-talking-to-car-driver/11804108
Edwards was driving a white Telstra-issued Holden Commodore VS station wagon at the time.
The woman who found Jane Rimmer's body has given
Key points:
Jane Rimmer's body was found dumped south of Perth weeks after she vanished
Bradley Edwards is accused of killing her, Sarah Spiers and Ciara Glennon
Several witnesses saw Ms Glennon trying to hitchhike the night she disappeared
emotional testimony at the Claremont serial killings trial of how Ms Rimmer's foot touched the back of her leg as she was out picking flowers in a bush clearing.
Tammy Van Raalte-Evans had been out with her family at their property in Wellard, on Perth's southern outskirts, on August 3, 1997, and had ventured into the clearing off Woolcoot Road after seeing a huge death lily.
"I was in there for I suppose a couple of minutes … and then I felt on the back of my leg … I thought it was a stick and it was a foot," she told the court.
Bradley Robert Edwards is on trial charged with Ms Rimmer's murder, as well as the murders of Ciara Glennon, 27 and Sarah Spiers, 18, who all went missing from the Claremont area in Perth's western suburbs in 1996 and 1997.
Ms Rimmer was last seen outside the Continental Hotel shortly after midnight on June 9 and was captured on the hotel's CCTV cameras around the same time.
Chance stop for a runaway rooster
Ms Van Raalte-Evans told the court she and her husband Michael had been driving home along Woolcoot Road with their children when a rooster ran across their path, causing Mr Evans to slam on the brakes.
The children ran out and "were running around like headless chooks themselves" in search of the animal, so Mr Evans joined them.
Ms Van Raalte-Evans walked further down the unsealed road after something glittering caught her eye and saw a huge lily a couple of metres off the road.
She ducked down and pushed her way through the scrub, and was standing looking at it when she felt the foot rub against her leg.
Tears at disturbing testimony
Ms Van Raalte-Evans cried as she began giving her evidence about the chance discovery of the body and several people in the public gallery, including Ms Rimmer's sister Lee, also broke down in tears.
"When I looked it was a female body," Ms Van Raalte-Evans said.
"All her bottom half was naked. It looked like she was on her tummy."
She did not touch the body but immediately ran out of the clearing, screaming to her husband that there was a body in the bush.
Mr Evans told the court he initially believed the body was that of an animal.
"It looked like an animal carcass, I thought it was a sheep at first," he said
But Ms Van Raalte-Evans said she urged her husband to go back and look again.
"I said 'Look at her foot, she's got a tiny foot'," she said.
"And that's when he said 'Get in the car'."
Ms Van Raalte-Evans remained at the scene with her dog while her husband took the children to the nearby Green Acres Riding School to call police.
'Rotten stench' led to Glennon find
Jason Atkinson, who found Ms Glennon's body at the remote northern Perth suburb of Eglinton on April 3, 1997, told the court he had been looking for cannabis plants in bushland at the time.
As Ms Glennon's father Denis and sister Denise watched from the public gallery, Mr Atkinson said his attention was caught by a "severely rotten stench" coming from an area of bush about 50 metres from Pipidinny Road.
"I'm nosy by nature so, yeah, I had a look and I found her," he said.
"I could only see a bit of cloth or something on the lower half."
He said he had pulled off some of the bushes that were covering Ms Glennon's body but did not touch her at all.
Instead he "backed off", dropping the branches and running away to call police from his fiancee's workplace a short drive away.
'Burger boys' warned Ciara Glennon off hitchhiking
The court earlier heard how a man watched a young woman who resembled Ms Glennon talking to the driver of a white Holden Commodore VS — the same make and model driven by the man accused of her murder — on the night she disappeared.
Troy Bond, who was one of three young men dubbed the "burger boys" by the prosecution because they were eating takeaway food from Hungry Jack's on the night of March 14, 1997, watched the woman as she stood opposite them on the highway as they sat in a bus stop.
Mr Bond said his friend, Brandon Gray, called out to the her because he thought she was hitchhiking.
"Brandon said to her, 'You're stupid for hitchhiking'," he said.
"She stuck her finger up at him."
Mr Gray said the woman was intoxicated and "walked like someone you probably wouldn't let walk like that by themselves".
The woman kept walking along the highway and the men went back to eating their burgers, but when Mr Bond looked up again, he saw the woman talking to the driver of the Commodore that had stopped about 50 to 100 metres down the road.
"I seen her leaning over a car … bending over a car talking to someone," he said.
He said she was leaning through the passenger-side window, but he could not give a good description of the woman other than she was between 20 and 30 years old, about 167 centimetres tall and wearing a white blouse.
Edwards was driving a white Telstra-issued Holden Commodore VS station wagon at the time.
Different make and model given by other witnesses
Earlier, witness Ian Stanford described a young woman loosely matching Ms Glennon's description getting into the back of a different car on Stirling Highway on the same night.
Mr Stanford said he was in the front passenger seat of a car being driven by his then-wife Lisa Mighall along the highway when he noticed a car stopped on the highway with its headlights on.
The car was a white Ford Falcon XG ute with a canopy on the back, Mr Stanford said, and the young woman, who was wearing a black skirt and white shirt or blouse, had one leg up and was climbing into the back.
The woman was young and had long hair that went down her back, he said.
"And I remember saying to Lisa, 'After what's gone on this area, I can't understand why anyone would do that'," he told the court.
Mr Stanford said he was confident about the make and model of the car as he worked for Ford at the time.
His description of the vehicle differed from other witnesses including Ms Mighall, who described Ms Glennon talking to a man in a what looked like a white Commodore sedan.
Another witness, Susan Robinson, also recalled a white sedan.
Ms Robinson had been to see the film The English Patient with her husband in Perth's CBD on the evening of Ms Glennon's disappearance.
She was driving along the highway towards their Fremantle home when she noticed a white car stopped on the left hand lane on Stirling Highway travelling south.
She said a young woman matching Ms Glennon's description was leaning down talking to the male driver, who had "brownish hair".
"In my mind at the time I thought he was quite handsome," Ms Robinson told the court.
Glennon had come home for sister's wedding
Ms Glennon had returned to Perth a fortnight earlier from a year-long trip around the world and had been due to be a bridesmaid at her sister's wedding the following weekend when she vanished.
She had resumed working for a law firm and had enjoyed after-work drinks with colleagues the night she vanished at the company's premises in Perth's CBD to celebrate St Patrick's Day.
Afterwards, her boss Neil Fearis had driven Ms Glennon and three other workmates to Claremont, where they had drinks at the Continental Hotel.
She was last seen by a number of witnesses, 12 of whom are being called by the prosecution, on Stirling Highway in Claremont apparently seeking a taxi to take her home.
Her body was found in Eglinton on April 3, about 45 kilometres from Claremont on the city's northern outskirts.
Edwards has pleaded not guilty to murdering the three women and the trial, before Justice Stephen Hall, will resume in January.
Ciara Glennon murder in 1997: court hears detail of day she died
Irishwoman, whose family is from Mayo, disappeared in Australia on St Patrick’s Day
Mon, Nov 25, 2019
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/crime-and-law/ciara-glennon-murder-in-1997-court-hears-detail-of-day-she-died-1.4094146
Brendan Foster in Western Australia
A file image of Ciara Glennon whose body was found dumped about 50kms from Perth in March 1997. Photograph: PerthNow,
An Irishwoman killed in Australia in 1997 ignored a warning not to accept a lift from a stranger the night she was murdered, a Western Australia court has heard.
One of Australia’s biggest murder trials began in a Western Australia Supreme Court on Monday, with Bradley Robert Edwards accused of the murder of Ciara Glennon (27) from the suburb of Claremont on March 14th, 1997.
Mr Edwards (51) is also accused of the murders of Jane Rimmer (23) and Sarah Spiers (18), in 1996 and 1997, around the Claremont nightlife area.
He denies the charges.
Ms Glennon, whose family are originally from Wesport, Co Mayo, was out with friends celebrating St Patricks Day when she disappeared.
In her opening address to the court, State Prosecutor Carmel Barbagallo outlined in detail the last day of Ms Glennon’s life before her body was found dumped in bushland, 50km north of Perth.
Ms Barbagallo went through 12 instances where witnesses claim they saw a lone woman matching her description walking near the Continental Hotel after she left to catch a taxi.
Three men, the state dubbed the “Burger Boys”, were the last to see Ms Glennon as she walked towards her home in Mosman Park.
The court heard one of the men who spotted Ms Glennon yelled to her: “You’re crazy to hitch-hike”.
The woman gestured to the men and they later saw her leaning into the window of a car as if she was talking to the driver. It was the last known sighting of Ms Glennon.
The state has previously argued the car was the Holden Commodore Mr Edwards was driving when he was employed as a technician for Telstra at the time.
Perth trial of alleged killer of Irish woman hinges on DNA
Man charged with murder of two women in Perth, Australia, 20 years ago
Family deals with its loss as serial killer still roams free
“When she reached a point ... on Stirling Highway ... a white VS Holden Commodore station wagon was seen in close proximity to her,” Ms Barbagallo said.
“It is on this stretch of highway that Ciara Glennon either accepted a lift from the perpetrator, or was abducted by the perpetrator in a blitz attack.”
Found
The state told the court Ms Glennon’s body was discovered by a 23-year-old man who was walking through bushland, three weeks after she went missing.
“His attention was drawn to a distinct smell,” Ms Barbagallo said. “He observed part of a body, the rest of the body was covered in bush which had been stripped from the local flora and placed over the body to conceal it.”
Ms Barbagallo said during an examination of the body, a large defect was discovered on her neck, and two large defects were found on her upper and lower arms.
She said the defects across her face and neck, which were around 12 to 21 centimetres long, were consistent with a “sawing type action”.
The court heard Ms Glennon’s body was found 50 metres off the road, lying face down and covered in a “strikingly similar manner” to Jane Rimmer’s body.
The defects to the forearm appeared to be cuts and “represented the classic self-defence position” similar to Ms Rimmer’s injury, albeit to the opposite arm.
“Given the positioning of the body, the staining on her T-shirt and bra ... the state’s case is that neck injury to Ms Glennon was inflicted at or very close to the location where her body was found,” Ms Barbagallo said.
The court hear two of Ms Glennon’s fingernails were broken off - the left thumb and left middle finger - while the rest were “relatively long” and well-manicured.
“The ends of Ms Glennon’s fingernails were cut off and placed into individual, pristine, sterile yellow top containers,” Ms Barbagallo said.
The state is expected to rely on DNA found underneath Ms Glennon’s fingernails, in particular her broken fingernails, as a crucial part of its case.
The state is expected to argue Ms Glennon scratched Mr Edwards’s face before he murdered her, with DNA allegedly located underneath her fingernails when her body was found.
“He observed part of a body, the rest of the body was covered in bush which had been stripped from the local flora and placed over the body to conceal it,” Ms Barbagallo said.
Studied law
Early in the proceedings, Ms Barbagallo said Ms Glennon was “a bright, happy and determined young woman” who had studied law at UWA before starting work at a law firm in Perth CBD.
“She came from a close and loving family,” she said. “Ciara took 12 months leave to travel overseas, returning on March 1st, 1997 - 14 days before she disappeared.”
Ms Barbagallo also spoke of the three “young, bright, beautiful women” who abruptly vanished from the streets of Claremont in 1996 and 1997, creating a climate of fear across Perth.
“That fear was caused by an enigma of the dark,” she said.
“Two were found dead, dumped in bushland, covered in foliage and left to rot in the killer’s hope that they would never be found ... so that any evidence that might connect the killer to the crimes would be lost forever - lost in the bush, in the dirt, in the foliage that he left them in,” she said.
“Despite the killer’s best efforts, miraculously the bodies of those two young women were found.”
Ms Glennon’s father Denis Glennon sat in front row of the packed public gallery to hear Mr Edwards plead not guilty at the start of the trial.
Claremont killer trial LIVE: Mother becomes tearful recounting finding Jane Rimmer's body while picking lilies
https://www.watoday.com.au/national/western-australia/claremont-killer-trial-live-bradley-edwards-trial-moves-on-to-last-of-state-civilian-witness-20191217-p53kqi.html
By Heather McNeill and Hannah Barry
December 17, 2019
2.33pm on Dec 17, 2019
'Did you touch the bushes near Ciara's body?': Defence
Mr Yovich is now cross-examining Mr Atkinson, asking what led him to the body.
"I've got a habit, if I do smell it and it is a kangaroo, I check the pouch," Mr Atkinson said.
Mr Yovich is asking if Mr Atkinson pulled bush back to view the body, he has agreed and said he then "dropped them and ran".
Mr Yovich has asked if all the police that attended that he saw were men, and he has agreed.
As Mr Atkinson left the court, he walked past Ciara Glennon's father, Denis, and shook his hand.
Bradley Edwards, above as a young man, was convicted of assaulting a woman in a terrifying attack in 1990.
Picture:-WA Supreme Court.Source-Supplied
The deserted bush road where Jane Rimmer's body was dumped. (Supplied: Supreme Court of WA)
The Claremont Serial Killings - Julie Cutler - Sarah Spiers - Ciara Glennon - Jane Rimmer - Sarah Ann McMahon
A statement was made by Sarah Anne McMahon before she disappeared on the 8th November, 2002, provided the names of powerful well connected people in Perth, Western Australia who were involved in the Claremont Serial Killings, which Sarah Anne McMahon included the disappearance of Julie Cutler in 1988 ..... Sarah Anne McMahon explained one of the reasons why Julie Cutler's car was found in the water at Cottesloe Beach, rather than in the water at some other beach, .... it is noted that for many years the Western Australian Police, the Western Australian Government, and the Director of Public Prosecutions for Western Australia .... have not been interested in the information that Julie Cutler provided about who was involved in the Claremont Serial Killings .... it appears that the Western Australian Police, the Western Australian Government, and the Director of Public Prosecutions for Western Australia are only wanting to spend over $100 million on a public show trial to convince the General Public that Bradley Robert Edwards is the sole person involved in the Claremont Serial Killings .... based on the self confessed criminal behaviour of Bradley Robert Edwards as being a person who has abducted and raped a girl .... and has attempted to do the same on previous occasions ... and thus is the sort of person that the general public would love to hate and would believe is the type of person capable and willing to carry out what is know known world-wide as the Claremont Serial Abductions and Killings ... in the hope that the general public will believe the only and sole person involved in planning and carrying out the Claremont Serial Abductions and Killings ..... and other unsolved similar crimes ...... is Bradley Robert Edwards ...... regardless of whether His Honour Justice Stephen Hall in the end decides to bring down a guilty verdict against Bradley Robert Edwards as being the only and sole person involved in planning and carrying out the Claremont Serial Abductions and Killings ... of Sarah Spiers, Jane Rimmer and Ciara Glennon ..... when the statement made by Sarah Anne McMahon indicates that there were other powerful people involved in planning and carrying out the Claremont Serial Abductions and Killings ... of Sarah Spiers, Jane Rimmer and Ciara Glennon .... regardless of whether enough evidence is provided to His Honour Justice Stephen Hall ... for a beyond reasonable doubt guilty verdict to be handed down by His Honour Justice Stephen Hall that Bradley Robert Edwards was involved in planning and carrying out the Claremont Serial Abductions and Killings ... of Sarah Spiers, Jane Rimmer and Ciara Glennon ...... which will not prove that others were not also involved in planning and carrying out the Claremont Serial Abductions and Killings ... of Sarah Spiers, Jane Rimmer and Ciara Glennon .....
Sarah Anne McMahon was 20 when she disappeared after leaving work in the Perth suburb of Claremont on Wednesday, November 8, 2000. "..Career Criminal and self confessed SAS killer of many people, Donald Morey, aka Matusevich has admitted he was the last person to see or talk to Sarah Anne McMahan alive ... and according to his phone records was in the area of Bassendean the night Sarah Anne McMahon was talking to Donald Morey, aka Matusevich on her telephone and saying she was heading to see a friend in Bassendean .... there was strong evidence that Donald Morey aka Matusevich lied to the coroner about being at his boss Mr Allen's truck yard on the night that Sarah Anne McMahon Disappeared ... and a witness Natasha Tracy-Anne Kendrick, recorded in a statement to the police, dated 11 November 2011, which said she saw a bloodied dead body, with a rope around her neck that looked like Sarah Anne McMahon is his room at his boss Mr Allen's home... ". ... "..That account contained a claim that Ms Kendrick had seen the dead body of a young woman, who she believed to be Saran Ann McMahon. It also contained allegations that comments were made by Mr Morey and another man, Gareth Allen, which if accurate would have certainly implicated Mr Morey in the murder of Ms McMahon and Mr Allen as being an accessory to that crime. https://www.coronerscourt.wa.gov.au/_files/Mcmahon_finding.pdf
Bradley Robert Edwards belonged to the Kewdale Little Athletics Club in later years. (Facebook: KLAC)
Claremont killer trial LIVE: 'State's forensic evidence showed contamination by lab staff': defence
https://www.watoday.com.au/national/western-australia/claremont-killer-trial-live-bradley-edwards-returns-to-custody-after-state-delivers-opening-address-20191126-p53e3m.html
By Heather McNeill and Hannah Barry
November 26, 2019
3.33pm on Nov 26, 2019
Paul Yovich CREDIT:AAP
'The state is trying to make the evidence fit their theory': defence
Mr Yovich claims the prosecution's case will fail to show Mr Edwards is guilty.
"We are not pointing the finger at any specific person [as an alternative suspect], all we are saying is the nice, neat picture the state wants to present ... is not the full picture," he said.
"The defence says the court should be aware of the tendencies to smooth out the rough edges ... the prosecution has acknowledged the evidence it seeks to call is not all consistent.
"We ask Your Honour not to gloss over these inconsistencies and use each to confirm any preconception the state has.
"The proper approach in any case is to fit the case theory to the evidence, not to try fit the evidence to the case theory.
"Our position is none of this evidence ... can take Your Honour one step closer to prove the accused is responsible for any of these crimes, let alone all of it."
Mr Yovich has finished his opening.
3.21pm on Nov 26, 2019
Bradley Edwards on day two of his murder trial.
'DNA was contaminated'
Mr Yovich is claiming some of the forensic evidence examined in relation to Jane and Ciara's crime scenes was proven to be contaminated.
He claims an analysis of one of Ciara's fingernail scrapings uncovered the male DNA profile of a Pathwest scientist.
In relation to Jane's case, another male Pathwest scientist's DNA was also uncovered from intimate swab samples taken from her body.
An internal report into the contamination found there was no direct documentation that the scientist had tested the items.
Another exhibit, a swab taken from a branch at Jane's crime scene, matched a victim of a completely unrelated crime.
3.13pm on Nov 26, 2019
'The defence is simple, it wasn't him': Mr Edwards lawyer begins his opening address
Defence lawyer, Paul Yovich, is now giving his opening address.
"The defence is simple - it wasn't him," he said.
"Mr Edwards' defence in each case is that it wasn't him."
Mr Yovich has flagged he will challenge the integrity of the DNA evidence relating to the DNA found under Ciara's fingernails.
He says if Justice Hall cannot be satisfied that Mr Edwards' DNA was found under Ciara's fingernails, then he cannot conclude Mr Edwards murdered her; and if he cannot conclude Mr Edwards murdered her, then he cannot conclude Mr Edwards murdered Jane or Sarah.
"We accept as well that the scientific literature suggests the chance of contamination is remote but secondary transfer is known and documented in the literature," Mr Yovich said.
3.07pm on Nov 26, 2019
Prosecutor Carmel Barbagallo arrives at the Supreme Court of Western Australia. CREDIT:AAP
The state has finished its opening address
Ms Barbagallo has taken nearly two days to give her opening address.
She concluded by summarising how the prosecution will order its evidence.
"Nearly 22 years have passed since the Claremont serial killer phrase was coined, a reference to the three wilful murders of three young women," Ms Barbagallo said.
She said for the "Claremont serial killer" phrase to be given meaning it needs to be proven there was a serial killer at work in the Claremont area throughout 1996 and 1997.
"This is a roadmap as to how the state plans to give that phrase meaning," she said.
It will begin with evidence about Mr Edwards' life, followed by evidence about his work at Telstra, then the Huntingdale, Hollywood Hospital and Karrakatta offences.
Witnesses will then be called in relation to the state's 'Telstra living witness evidence' about Mr Edwards allegedly offering lifts to women in the western suburbs.
Then the trial will move to the murder of Sarah, followed by Jane and then Ciara.
Forensic experts and DNA evidence will be followed by the playing of Mr Edwards' 2016 police interview.
3.02pm on Nov 26, 2019
Missing persons statistics 'support there was only one killer'
The Continental Hotel
In attempting to increase the likelihood that whoever murdered Jane and Ciara also murdered Sarah, Ms Barbagallo is now going through missing person statistics for Claremont in the mid-1990s.
She said there were seven suspicious deaths or long-term missing persons reported between 1994 and 1997 in Claremont.
All but three remain unresolved, those being the cases of Sarah, Jane and Ciara.
The only long-term missing female from the Claremont area from that period is Sarah.
The state claims the statistics support their case that there was only one offender operating in the area around that time.
2.53pm on Nov 26, 2019
Sarah Spiers
State addressing lack of forensic evidence for Sarah's case
Ms Barbagallo is now summarising the state's evidence to demonstrate the prosecution can prove beyond reasonable doubt that Mr Edwards is the Claremont serial killer.
She claims there is an "inescapable inference" that Ciara and Jane were abducted by the same person due to:
The DNA found under Ciara's fingernails
The common car fibres, allegedly from Mr Edwards' car, found in the hair of Jane and Ciara
The Telstra clothing fibres allegedly found on Jane, Ciara and the Karrakatta rape victim
The description of the car Ciara was last seen leaning into the night she vanished
Mr Edwards' tendency to attack and abduct young women leaving Claremont following his 1995 rape confession
Mr Edwards' tendency to violently attack women not known to him in a particular manner such as he did in the Huntingdale attack, Hollywood Hospital attack and Karrakatta rape
The Telstra knife found near Jane's body
The accuseds' conduct if it is proven he was the Telstra worker offering lifts to women in the western suburbs in the mid-1990s
In relation to the murder of Sarah, the state is relying on the similarities of the three murders including the close proximity of where the three women were last seen alive in Claremont.
"Of striking similarity ... all three offences occurred in a 14-month period... [at the same] time of day in the week.
"All three were of small build, fair complexion and blonde hair ... each were vulnerable ... and alone."
2.38pm on Nov 26, 2019
Police called to incident outside Claremont courtroom
Police have responded to reports of a woman causing a disturbance outside the Perth District Court, where the Claremont serial killer trial is taking place.
WA Police said they received reports about 2pm of a person "creating a disturbance" inside the courthouse.
Officers attended and helped court security subdue a 54-year-old female attempting to try and get inside the court.
Lindsay Brennan@lindsayebrennan
Police are responding to a "violent incident" after a woman was refused entry to the #claremont trial. Lots of yelling outside the courtroom. Looks like a security guard has received a minor injury. Police working to determine who the woman is. #perthnews @6PR
6:32 AM - Nov 26, 2019
2.35pm on Nov 26, 2019
'Women would have trusted driver of a Telstra vehicle more': state
Ms Barbagallo claims the evidence it will present at trial will reasonably show Mr Edwards had the means and motive to abduct and murder the three women.
She said the fact he was allegedly driving his Telstra vehicle at the time of the deaths likely meant the women were more willing to get into his vehicle.
"It provides an explanation as to why and how the victims may have been more willing to get into his vehicle voluntarily and why the accused would be less likely to draw attention to himself if he was in a work vehicle," she said.
"It also demonstrates that the accused operated on the periphery of the Claremont nightlife area and explains why he may not be captured on CCTV footage that was primarily recording in the heart of the nightlife precinct."
2.27pm on Nov 26, 2019
Prosecution claims Mr Edwards' emotional upset drove him to murder
Ms Barbagallo is now rehashing how events in Mr Edwards' personal life were allegedly linked to the murders of the three women.
She claims that "during times of emotional turmoil he is motivated to attack women not known to him".
Shortly after Mr Edwards attacked a woman at Hollywood Hospital in 1990, the then 21-year-old told a court-appointed psychologist he was upset following a fight with his girlfriend the night before, and after recently learning she had cheated on him earlier in their relationship.
The state claims a link can therefore be made that Mr Edwards reacts to emotional upset by violently attacking strangers', and that he was in a state of distress between late 1994 to 1997 as his marriage was breaking down.
The Claremont serial killings - a timeline
February 1988 Huntingdale attack: A 19-year-old Mr Edwards, living in his Huntingdale home with his family, enters a woman’s house and attacks her inside her bedroom by sitting on her back and attempting to force fabric into her mouth. She struggles and he runs from the house.
Evidence: Mr Edwards leaves behind a women’s kimono as he fled the scene. Police reinvestigating cold case sexual assaults using updated technologies retest the garment in 2016 and discover it contains traces of his DNA. The DNA profile allegedly matches that found underneath Ciara Glennon’s fingernails.
May 1990 Hollywood Hospital assault: Mr Edwards confesses to attempting to drag a social worker into a toilet block at Hollywood Hospital, where he was contracted for work at the time. Mr Edwards gagged the woman with a piece of cloth, but she managed to fight him off. Police later found cable ties in his pockets. The incident occurred after Mr Edwards had learned his then-girlfriend had cheated on him.
May 1990 Mr Edwards pleads guilty to the common assault of a social worker. He is sentenced to two years’ probation and his fingerprints are entered into the national database.
February 1995 Karrakatta Cemetery rape: Mr Edwards abducted and raped a 17-year-old girl late at night as she walked to a friend’s house from Club Bayview in Claremont. He bound and gagged the teenager, and placed a hood over her head, before driving her to the cemetery to rape her. The victim had intimate swabs taken in hospital which contained traces of Mr Edwards’ DNA.
January 1996 Mr Edwards’ marriage begins to breakdown and he learns his wife is having an affair. She moves out of their home, leaving him alone.
January 1996 Sarah Spiers murder charge: Sarah Spiers, 18, is last seen leaning on a Telstra bollard waiting for a taxi in Claremont after a night out with friends. The taxi arrives soon after but Sarah is already gone. Around 20 minutes later, witnesses in Mosman Park hear “blood curdling screams” and a car matching the description of Mr Edwards’ is seen in the vicinity parked on the wrong side of the road with its lights on.
May 1996 Mr Edwards learns his wife is pregnant to another man.
June 1996 Jane Rimmer murder charge: Ms Rimmer, 23, is allegedly taken from Claremont by Mr Edwards and murdered in Wellard, where her body was later found in bushland. Her cause of death is unknown as her remains had decomposed, but a post-mortem noted a ‘prominent defect’ to her neck.
Proposed evidence: A Telstra-branded knife was found on the same road as Ms Rimmer’s body. As a Telstra technician, Mr Edwards was issued a Telstra knife prior to the Claremont killings.
Proposed evidence: Fibres found on Ms Rimmer’s body match fibres from Telstra-issued work trousers that were also found on the Karrakatta rape victim and Ciara Glennon.
Proposed evidence: Fibres found in Ms Rimmer’s hair match the car seat fibres in the make and model of car Mr Edwards was driving at the time.
1995/96 The state alleges a man matching Mr Edwards’ description and driving a Telstra car offered young women in the western suburbs lifts home late at night. It’s alleged he picked up women on five occasions and dropped them at their requested destination.
March 1997 Ciara Glennon murder charge: Ms Glennon, 27, is murdered after allegedly being taken by Mr Edwards following a night out with friends in Claremont. The lawyer’s body is later found in bushland in Eglinton, covered in a “strikingly similar way” to Ms Rimmer’s body. Her cause of death is a cut to the throat.
Proposed evidence: The state alleges Mr Edwards’ DNA was found underneath Ms Glennon’s fingernails.
Proposed evidence: Fibres found on Ms Glennon’s body match fibres from Telstra-issued work trousers that were also found on the Karrakatta rape victim and Jane Rimmer.
Proposed evidence: The state alleges fibres found in Ms Glennon’s hair match fibres found in the car seat of the make and model of vehicle Mr Edwards was driving at the time.
Proposed evidence: Mr Edwards was meant to stay over at a friend’s house the night Ms Glennon was murdered, but instead arrived mid-morning the next day. He said he was late because he was trying to reconcile with his wife, which the state claims was a lie.
April 1997 Mr Edwards meets the woman who would go on to become his second wife.
November 2016 Police conducting cold case reviews test a kimono found at the 1988 Huntingdale assault for DNA evidence and allegedly find DNA matching the profile of the Claremont serial killer. The case is reinvestigated and a fingerprint mark is matched to Mr Edwards.
December 2016 Mr Edwards is arrested during a dramatic raid of his Kewdale home and charged with the Huntingdale sex attack, Karrakatta rape, and Ms Rimmer and Ms Glennon's murders. He is later charged with Ms Spiers' murder.
September 2018 Mr Edwards pleads not guilty to all charges against him.
October 2019 After originally denying any involvement, Mr Edwards pleads guilty to the Huntingdale sex assault and Karrakatta rape. His murder trial is scheduled to being in late November.
Exhibit 1778 – Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_A photo of the corner of Stirling Highway and Bay View terrace, circa 1997
Exhibit 15494 - Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_Photograph of the Continental Hotel in Claremont, circa 1996
VIDEO: Police at Wellard, where Jane Rimmer's body was found (ABC News)
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-11-24/jane-rimmer-on-cctv-outside-the-continental-hotel/11222008
Jane Rimmer's body was dumped in bushland off Woolcoot Road in Wellard. (Supplied: Supreme Court of WA)
The Holden hubcap Brandon Gray said resembled the one on the car he saw on Stirling Highway the night Ciara Glennon vanished.
Police 'did not touch' alleged Claremont serial killings victim's body
By AAP, Jan 7, 2020
https://www.9news.com.au/national/claremont-alleged-serial-killings-rapist-bradley-robert-edwards-jane-rimmer-body-perth-news/1418fc97-197e-418f-9d1d-b2e1b404f816
A structure was built inside a Perth court to stop the public from seeing gruesome images of alleged serial killing victim Jane Rimmer's body.
Bradley Robert Edwards pleaded not guilty to murdering three women in 1996 and 1997. (Supplied)
The first police officers to attend the crime scene where Jane Rimmer was allegedly dumped by the Claremont serial killer have told a Perth court they never touched the body.
Ex-Telstra technician and confessed rapist Bradley Robert Edwards, 51, has pleaded not guilty to murdering three women in 1996 and 1997 - secretary Sarah Spiers, 18, childcare worker Ms Rimmer, 23, and solicitor Ciara Glennon, 27.
Ms Rimmer was last seen alive outside the Continental Hotel in Claremont on June 9, 1996 and her decomposing body was found in Wellard bushland 55 days later.
Former police officer Bleddyn Davies told the Western Australia Supreme Court on Monday that he saw a "white, waxy lump" when he arrived at the scene.
He said he stood no closer than 1.5 metres from the body and never touched the victim.
"I remember seeing some white lillies ... you wouldn't identify (it) necessarily as a human body," he said. Former policewoman Michelle Beaman testified she saw a naked body lying face down in scrub, saying she could see an upper thigh, shoulder and foot.
"The deceased person was in a decomposed state ... maybe wildlife had interfered with the body," she said.
Detective Sergeant James Crozier, who kept a running sheet of the crime scene, testified he had a "cursory look" from the road but never got closer than five metres to the body.
He denied he had to get into the bushes to see the body and said he did not get too close because he did not want to risk contaminating the site.
A video showing Ms Rimmer's body in situ was played in court but the public gallery was prevented from viewing it after Justice Stephen Hall earlier on Monday ruled it was unnecessary to publicly show such distressing content.
But photographs were shown in court of Ms Rimmer's home and fingerprint investigator Senior Constable Rhys Stott said there were no signs of a break-in.
y following a two-week adjournment.
But evidence was delayed until the afternoon to give prosecutors time to purchase and erect a shield to block the public gallery from seeing the graphic photographs and videos.
It came after the families of Ms Rimmer and Ms Glennon expressed concern about such images being publicly shown, with Ms Glennon's father even writing a letter to the court.
Justice Hall, who is presiding over the trial without a jury, said he had no intention of releasing any images to the media and did not think it was necessary for anyone other than counsel and himself to see the material.
"It's distressing, I would have thought, to anyone and no doubt would be deeply distressing to the families," he said.
Edwards is permitted to see the images, but defence counsel Paul Yovich previously indicated at a pre-trial hearing that Edwards had not wanted to see some of the sensitive material. © AAP 2020
Former Assistant Western Australian Police Commissioner David John Caporn
Accused cop David Caporn can keep new job
PAIGE TAYLOR, WA POLITICAL REPORTER
The Australian, September 8, 2009
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/archive/news/accused-cop-david-caporn-can-keep-new-job/news-story/5f89de42a24ce4794fb9ff8bdad4a435?nk=e49092919de1cc9c9eec2cbdf9757331-1487185960
AN assistant police commissioner accused by the Corruption and Crime Commission of misconduct in the infamous murder trial of Andrew Mallard can not be disciplined and can keep his new $130,000-a-year job in the public service.
A disciplinary process was underway against David Caporn in February when he quit the West Australian police service for a job as the community development director at the states Fire and Emergency Services Authority.
But a report tabled in parliament today has recommended the Barnett government consider public sector reform to avoid a repeat after finding that Mr Caporns appointment is valid and the process commenced by the Commissioner of Police against Mr Caporn is unable to be completed.
Mr Caporn was a detective sergeant in 1994 when he headed the police investigation that led to the wrongful conviction of Mr Mallard for the murder of Perth mother Pamela Lawrence.
Mr Mallard spent 12 years in jail before the High Court quashed his conviction in 2005.
Retired NSW judge John Dunford QC investigated for the Corruption and Crime Commission and, in his opinions, said Mr Caporn engaged in misconduct in bringing about alterations to the statements of various witnesses without any reference to their earlier recollections.
Mr Dunford also said Mr Caporn provided incorrect and misleading information to a police prosecutor in a letter dated June 17 1994. He recommended disciplinary proceedings but not criminal charges.
The report by the Public Sector Commissioner Mal Wauchope tabled today found the FESA interview panel deliberately decided not to contact Mr Caporns boss, Police Commissioner Karl OCallaghan, when doing referee checks.
The report stated that the head of the interview panel, FESA chief executive Jo Harrison-Ward, had been a work colleague of Mr Caporn for about 28 years and was likely to have been aware of the process commenced by the Commissioner of Police following the recommendations of the CCC (Corruption and Crime Commission).
In the report the Public Sector Commissioner wrote that in situations where the applicant was the subject of adverse opinions by the states corruption watchdog, it could be said to be of particular importance that the opinion of the applicants current boss were sought.
FESA issued a statement this afternoon welcoming the findings of the report which confirm FESAs appointment of Mr David Caporn was valid and that the processes and procedures used by FESA were appropriate and in accordance with public sector recruitment and selection.
"FESA is committed to high ethical standards and has already acknowledged there were additional steps that could have been considered to tighten the procedures and have now incorporated these measures into their processes", the statement reads.
Mr Wauchope's report recommends that the Barnett governments current public sector reform program consider options for dealing with unresolved disciplinary matters where there has been a change of employment from one government agency to another.
Bradley Robert Edwards has denied all three murders. Credit: Anne Barnetson
Exhibit 1330 – Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_Log of the call made to Swan Taxi by Sarah Spiers on the morning of January 27, 1996
Retired detective testifies at Claremont serial murder trial
By AAP
9:38pm Jan 7, 2020
https://www.9news.com.au/national/claremont-trial-jonathan-adams-detective-testifies-about-jane-rimmer-moment/af31367f-615d-410d-8913-b0852465e275
A retired senior detective has told the Claremont serial killings trial the memory of seeing Jane Rimmer's naked and decomposing body dumped in bushes will never leave him, but denies contaminating the crime scene.
"What is burned in my brain is the vision of a rump and the upper part of the body, and that is quite vivid," Jonathan Adams told the Western Australia Supreme Court on Tuesday.
"I think once you see a body in the bush like that, that never leaves you
"I can recall that as clearly as yesterday."
Former Telstra technician Bradley Robert Edwards, 51, is fighting allegations he murdered secretary Sarah Spiers, 18, childcare worker Ms Rimmer, 23, and solicitor Ciara Glennon, 27, in 1996 and 1997.
Ms Rimmer's body was found by a mother picking death lillies in Wellard 55 days after she vanished from outside the Continental Hotel in Claremont.
Mr Adams, who was the senior officer at the scene until homicide squad detectives arrived, testified he stood no closer than four metres from the body and never touched the victim.
He rejected the suggestion of defence counsel that he was "embarrassed" he may have contaminated the crime scene by stepping into the bushes without wearing protective clothing to see the body.
"I've had years of experience ... you do not go anywhere near (the body) because of contamination," he said.
The defence is arguing contamination is a major issue in the case and lawyer Genevieve Cleary grilled Mr Adams on a key piece of evidence - a pair of black shorts - which are from to a separate crime but linked to the murders.
Edwards admits twice raping a 17-year-old girl after dragging her through Karrakatta cemetery in 1995, and another attack on a sleeping 18-year-old woman at her home in Huntingdale in 1988.
The shorts worn by the rape victim are significant because fibres collected from them allegedly came from Edwards' Telstra-issued work clothes, which were also allegedly found on the bodies of Ms Rimmer and Ms Glennon.
The court heard that for about eight months there was no record of where the shorts were before Mr Adams received them as an exhibit manager.
Mr Adams said a "human data entry lag" may be responsible for the discrepancy.
He also revealed exhibits were in a locked room in paper bags that were folded closed but not sealed.
The trial also heard from former funeral worker Peta Page, who testified her company had the Coroner's Court contract and spent about one hour at the Wellard crime scene.
She said staff were required to wear protective clothing, including boots and masks, and used government-issued body bags that were sealed in plastic.
"It was a very busy crime scene," she said.
"We were being mindful and respectful of who we thought it was.
"I just assumed that I would have done the transfer like I would have done other coronial transfers."
Former Detective Superintendent Charles Carver testified he was called to go to bushland in Eglington in April 1997 after a man searching for cannabis plants found Ms Glennon's body.
"You could actually smell the deceased," he said.
"It was in a state of decomposition."
© AAP 2020
Retired detective Jonathan Adams. (9News) Jane Rimmer, 23, the second victim of the Claremont serial killer. (AAP)
Jane Rimmer's silver Guess watch alerted a passer-by to the location of her body. (Supplied) CCTV shown in the courtroom shows Jane Rimmer's final hours. (Supplied)
Bradley Edwards in the 1990s (Supplied)
The couple separated between late 1995 and early 1996 after Edwards' then-wife became close to a boarder and had his child. (Supplied)
The Claremont killings victims: Sarah Spiers, Ciara Glennon and Jane Rimmer. (Graphic: Tara Blancato)
Claremont serial killings trial delayed as screens ordered to shield public from graphic evidence
By Andrea Mayes
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-01-06/claremont-serial-killings-trial-graphic-evidence-screens/11843888
WA's Supreme Court has been forced to take unprecedented measures to shield the public from graphic evidence in the Claremont serial killings trial relating to the burial sites of Jane Rimmer and Ciara Glennon, following a plea from Ms Glennon's father.
Former Telstra technician Bradley Robert Edwards, 51, is charged with the wilful murders of Ms Rimmer, Ms Glennon and Sarah Spiers in 1996 and 1997, but Monday's hearing — the first following a two-week break over Christmas — ran for less than 30 minutes before it was adjourned.
State prosecutor Carmel Barbagallo SC told the court the Rimmer and Glennon families had expressed concern about the evidence to be presented relating to the discovery of their bodies.
This included a large number of photos and videos from the burial sites where they had been found — in Wellard, in Perth's south, in the case of Ms Rimmer, and in Eglinton, north of the city, in the case of Ms Glennon — as well as of the post-mortem examinations conducted on the women's bodies.
The court had already been warned of the "particularly graphic and disturbing" evidence in pre-trial hearings and Justice Stephen Hall cited this as one of the reasons the trial would be heard by a judge alone, instead of a jury.
Ms Barbagallo said Ms Glennon's father, Denis Glennon, was so concerned about the possible public dissemination of the "distressing" images, he had written a letter to the court outlining why it should not be seen.
Justice Hall said while he had no intention of releasing the photos or video footage to the media, he wanted to drastically limit the number of people able to view it.
"In my view it is not necessary for anyone other than counsel and myself to be able to see it," he said, adding that while the material would be distressing for anyone to see, it would be "deeply distressing" for the families and this would be compounded by other people seeing it unnecessarily.
Screens a 'necessary evil'
Justice Hall said he wanted to avoid closing the court if possible because "justice needs to be done and needs to be seen to be done".
Ms Barbagallo proposed erecting masonite screens behind the legal benches and in front of the media section and public gallery, so that only the legal teams, the judge and those giving evidence could see the disturbing images.
Defence counsel Paul Yovich SC warned the screens would be "cumbersome" but a "necessary evil".
When Justice Hall said the court would be unable to provide the resources for the job because most of the staff were still on holiday, Ms Barbagallo said the prosecution would organise the arrangements, but warned it could take some time.
"I haven't been to Bunnings in the last little while," she said, adding that all of the necessary materials may not be available in the one store.
Later several Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) staff, including senior prosecutor Brad Hollingsworth, were seen at an Officeworks store in East Perth buying large projector screens.
Four large white partitions were in place when the court resumed, forming a barrier between the senior legal counsel, Justice Hall and those in the witness box on one side, and the junior lawyers, detectives, the public gallery and the media benches on the other.
Edwards could see all the evidence being shown.
Not all of the exhibits were blocked from public view, with the court shown photographs of Ms Rimmer's Wembley flat and her silver Mazda sedan parked outside.
The neatly kept one-bedroom flat had pictures of Elvis and Marilyn Monroe on its brick walls and a blue plush teddy bear on Ms Rimmer's double bed.
First police to arrive describe Rimmer crime scene
Details of Ms Rimmer's burial site were also relayed to the court by a series of police officers, who described it as being located amid dense vegetation and not visible from the road.
Bleddyn Davies, then a junior constable at Kwinana Police Station, said he arrived at the scene with Senior Constable Michelle Beaman and saw a "white waxy lump" amid the bushes.
Senior Constable Beaman said the body "appeared naked, lying face down in the scrub" and was "in a decomposed state".
Possible contamination of Ms Rimmer's burial site was raised several times by the defence team as the witnesses were cross-examined by lawyer Genevieve Cleary.
She asked them detailed questions about what they were wearing and the police vehicle they drove, and both officers said they had been wearing standard issue blue police shirts and navy trousers with black shoes.
The discovery of blue polyester fibres in Ms Rimmer's hair is one of the crucial pieces of evidence in the case, with the prosecution set to argue they could only have come from Telstra work uniforms manufactured specifically for the company in the mid 1990s and worn by Edwards at the time.
The trial continues.
PHOTO: Senior prosecutor Brad Hollingsworth (left) was among DPP staff seen leaving an Officeworks store in East Perth with projector screens. (ABC News)
PHOTO: State prosecutor Carmel Barbagallo told the court screens needed to be erected in the court to shield the public from the distressing images. (ABC News: Carmel Barbagallo)
A man clutching two blue canvas bags, with two women crossing a street.
PHOTO: Members of the prosecution arrive at court holding projector screens to shield the public gallery and media from gruesome evidence. (ABC News: Charlotte Hamlyn)
PHOTO: The deserted bush road where Jane Rimmer's body was dumped. (Supplied: Supreme Court of WA)
Released on 06.12
Exhibit 377 and 378 – Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_ Photos of a Toyota Camry being driven by Bradley Edwards at the time of Sarah Spiers’ disappearance
Michael Evans and Tammy Van Raalte-Evans told the court of the moment they found Ms Rimmer's body. (ABC News: Charlotte Hamlyn)
Bradley Edwards was flanked by security in the special courtroom set up to hear the trial. (ABC News: Anne Barnetson)
Exhibits released on 27.11
Exhibit 24 – Picture of Bradley Edwards with dog Shelby, taken by his first wife
Claremont serial killer trial - Tendered court documents from the Bradley Robert Edwards case. ##NOTE: NAME BLURRED ON LEFT BECAUSE SUPRESSED WITNESS INFORMATION## Source: Supplied by Supreme Court Credit: Supplied by Supreme Court
Troy Bond was one of the "burger boys" — a group of young men who saw Ciara Glennon before she disappeared from Claremont. (ABC News: Charlotte Hamlyn)
Paul Yovich, Barrister representing Bradley Robert Edwards. CREDIT: AAP
Jane Rimmer was captured on CCTV with an unknown male outside the Claremont Hotel, moments before she was abducted and murdered. Credit: supplied
Exhibit 6189 – Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_Photos of Karrakatta cemetery crime scene, showing drag marks
This never-before-seen face of a mystery driver, caught creeping on a young woman the night after Sarah Spiers disappeared, has been shown in the Claremont serial killings trial. (Supplied)
Exhibit 15558 - Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_Aerial photograph of Club Bayview in Claremont, circa 1996
Released on 02.12
Exhibit 517 – Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_Formal bank records of Bradley Edwards’ withdrawals.
Ian Stanford described a young woman loosely matching Ms Glennon's description getting into the back of a different car on Stirling Highway on the same night.
The witness Ian Stanford described a young woman loosely matching Ms Glennon's description getting into the back of a different car on Stirling Highway on the same night.
Mr Stanford said he was in the front passenger seat of a car being driven by his then-wife Lisa Mighall along the highway when he noticed a car stopped on the highway with its headlights on.
The car was a white Ford Falcon XG ute with a canopy on the back, Mr Stanford said, and the young woman, who was wearing a black skirt and white shirt or blouse, had one leg up and was climbing into the back.
The woman was young and had long hair that went down her back, he said.
"And I remember saying to Lisa, 'After what's gone on this area, I can't understand why anyone would do that'," he told the court.
Mr Stanford said he was confident about the make and model of the car as he worked for Ford at the time.
His description of the vehicle differed from other witnesses including Ms Mighall, who described Ms Glennon talking to a man in a what looked like a white Commodore sedan.
Another witness, Susan Robinson, also recalled a white sedan.
Ms Robinson had been to see the film The English Patient with her husband in Perth's CBD on the evening of Ms Glennon's disappearance.
She was driving along the highway towards their Fremantle home when she noticed a white car stopped on the left hand lane on Stirling Highway travelling south.
She said a young woman matching Ms Glennon's description was leaning down talking to the male driver, who had "brownish hair".
"In my mind at the time I thought he was quite handsome," Ms Robinson told the court.
Ciara Glennon’s parents, Una and Denis, at a hearing prior to the trial for the man accused of murdering their daughter. Picture: Colin Murty.Source-News Corp Australia
Claremont serial killings trial: All the exhibits released to the media in Bradley Edwards’ Supreme Court trial
Tim ClarkeThe West Australian
Friday, 20 December 2019
https://thewest.com.au/news/claremont-serial-killings/claremont-serial-killings-trial-all-the-exhibits-released-to-the-media-in-bradley-edwards-supreme-court-trial-ng-b881415460z
Over the course of Bradley Robert Edwards’ Supreme Court trial a number of tendered items of evidence have been released to the media.
From images of the accused to items of clothing and never-before-seen crime scenes relating to the deaths of Sarah Spiers, Jane Rimmer and Ciara Glennon, we take a look at all the exhibits made available to the press.
This will be updated as more evidence is released in the ongoing Claremont serial killings trial.
Exhibits released on 27.11
Exhibit 24 – Picture of Bradley Edwards with dog Shelby, taken by his first wife
Claremont serial killer trial - Tendered court documents from the Bradley Robert Edwards case. ##NOTE: NAME BLURRED ON LEFT BECAUSE SUPRESSED WITNESS INFORMATION## Source: Supplied by Supreme Court Credit: Supplied by Supreme Court
Exhibit 33 – Pictures of a Telstra van of the type that used to be driven by Bradley Edwards
Exhibit 37 – Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_Picture of Bradley Edwards with horse Beau, taken by first wife
Claremont serial killer trial - Tendered court documents from the Bradley Robert Edwards case. Source: Supplied by Supreme Court Credit: Supplied by Supreme Court
Exhibit 135 – Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_Picture of Bradley Edwards taken by first wife
Released on 28.11
Exhibit 48 – Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_Extract of log book written by Bradley Edwards’ second wife, detailing ATM withdrawals – including two in Claremont on the 5th and 12th of December, 1996
Released on 02.12
Exhibit 517 – Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_Formal bank records of Bradley Edwards’ withdrawals
Exhibit 730 – 738 – Trial_Bradley_Robert_Order forms and delivery receipts for Mr Edwards’ Telstra workwear
Exhibit 746 – Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_Old Telecom logo
Exhibit 747-751 – Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_Telstra staff newsletter, “Pulse”, featuring the blue uniforms
Released on 04.12
Exhibit 757 – Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_Bradley Edwards’ positions at Telstra, with dates
Exhibit 778 – Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_Extract of Bradley Edwards’ pay history at Telstra, with dates.
Exhibit 1124 – Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_Identikit sketch produced by one of the ‘Telstra living witnesses’ Julie-Anne Johnstone, after an encounter on January 28, 1996
Exhibit 1128 – Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_Hand drawn map by Ms Johnstone as to where she said her encounter took place
Exhibit 1136/1148 - Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_The station wagon another Telstra Living witness, Annabelle Bushell, said looked most like the Telstra vehicle of a man who offered her a lift in 1996 before her 'instincts' told her to get out.
Exhibit 1161 – Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_Picture of Toyota Camry that Ms Johnstone said was most like the one that approached her.
Released on 05.12
Exhibit 1113/1115 – Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_Pictures marked by Telstra Living Witness Katrina Jones, estimating where she came into contact with the man who picked her up in a white car – and then tried to kiss her.
201 – Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_1995 Aerial map of Rowe Park, Claremont, where the Karrakatta victim was abducted
Exhibit 1312 – Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_1997 street map of Mosman Park
Exhibit 1330 – Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_Log of the call made to Swan Taxi by Sarah Spiers on the morning of January 27, 1996
Exhibit 1331 – Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_Transcript of that call
Released on 06.12
Exhibit 377 and 378 – Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_ Photos of a Toyota Camry being driven by Bradley Edwards at the time of Sarah Spiers’ disappearance
Exhibit 852 – Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_Police photos of the kimono left behind by Bradley Edwards during Huntingdale break-in and attack
Exhibit 1405 – Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_Photograph of Jane Rimmer’s watch, found by a horse rider on the day she went missing
Released on 09.12
Exhibit 1224 – Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_Photo of cord used to tie up Karrakatta rape victim
Exhibit 1251 - Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_Aerial map of Karrakatta cemetery circa 1995
Exhibit 1278 - Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_Aerial map of Hollywood Hospital, with star noting position of security guard who saw white Telstra van on the night of the Karrakatta rape
Exhibit 1290 – Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_Plan of Karrakatta cemetery
Exhibit 6189 – Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_Photos of Karrakatta cemetery crime scene, showing drag marks
Released on 10.12
Exhibit 244 – Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_Photo of Telstra shorts, like the ones worn by Bradley Edwards in 1996 and 1997
Exhibit 699 – Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_Photo of Telstra pants, like the ones worn by Bradley Edwards in 1996 and 1997
Released on 11.12
Exhibit 7930 – Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_Photograph of Club Bayview in Claremont, circa 1996
Exhibit 15293 - Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_Aerial map of positions of CCTV cameras around Claremont in June 1996
Exhibit 15494 - Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_Photograph of the Continental Hotel in Claremont, circa 1996
Exhibit 15558 - Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_Aerial photograph of Club Bayview in Claremont, circa 1996
Exhibit 8357 – Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_Second photo of Jane Rimmer’s watch
Ex xx – Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_Photos of the bush where Jane Rimmer’s body was found
Exhibit 1778 – Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_A photo of the corner of Stirling Highway and Bay View terrace, circa 1997
Exhibit 1806 – Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_A sketch made by a witness who thinks they saw Ciara Glennon talking to a man in a car on March 14, 1997
Exhibit 1830 – Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_Picture of hubcap described by another witness who thinks they saw Ciara Glennon talking to a man in a car on March 14, 1997
Exhibit 15619 – Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_Aerial map of the Eglinton area, including Pipidinny Road where Ms Glennon’s body was found, circa 1997
Exhibit 1251 - Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_Aerial map of Karrakatta cemetery circa 1995
Exhibit 1136/1148 - Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_The station wagon another Telstra Living witness, Annabelle Bushell, said looked most like the Telstra vehicle of a man who offered her a lift in 1996 before her 'instincts' told her to get out.
Bradley Robert Edwards in the late 80s. Credit: Supplied
Photo of Bradley Edwards, whose Telstra file said he enjoyed camping, skin diving and restoring cars.
Picture-WA Supreme Court.Source-AAP
Exhibit 778 – Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_Extract of Bradley Edwards’ pay history at Telstra, with dates.
Exhibit 1806 – Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_A sketch made by a witness who thinks they saw Ciara Glennon
talking to a man in a car on March 14, 1997
Sarah Spiers went missing following Australia Day festivities in January 1996. Credit: Web
Rupert Murdoch und Jerry Hall haben geheiratet – B.Z. Berlin
Released on 10.12
Exhibit 244 – Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_Photo of Telstra shorts, like the ones worn by Bradley Edwards in 1996 and 1997
Accused Claremont killer's defence launches into uncovering how key evidence was 'contaminated'
By Heather McNeill
January 7, 2020
https://www.watoday.com.au/national/western-australia/accused-claremont-killer-s-defence-launches-into-uncovering-how-key-evidence-was-contaminated-20200107-p53pll.html
Lawyers for the accused Claremont serial killer have launched their attack into the credibility of the state’s key forensic evidence as they begin the complex task of uncovering potential opportunities for contamination.
The prosecution is alleging common fibres found on the bodies of Jane Rimmer and Ciara Glennon came from two sources - Bradley Edwards’ Telstra-issued navy trousers, and upholstery from the inside of his 1996 Holden Commodore VS Series 1.
The trouser fibres allegedly also match those found on the shorts of Mr Edwards’ 1995 Karrakatta rape victim – a crime Mr Edwards recently confessed to.
Defence lawyer Genevieve Cleary on Tuesday began to cast doubt over whether the fibres found on the shorts of the Karrakatta victim could have been placed there through contamination.
Retired detective Jonathan Adams was one of the officers from the Child Abuse Squad tasked with securely storing the shorts between June 1999 and July 2001, before they were transferred over to the Special Crimes Squad which housed the Macro Taskforce..
“We were advised we weren’t allowed to talk about what happened and very rarely would any conversation come up about this woman in the last 20 years.”
Former undertaker Peta Page
However during cross-examination by defence lawyer Genevieve Cleary, it was revealed there was no electronic record of the location of the shorts in the eight months prior to Mr Adams receiving them, when they were under the watch of the then-sex assault squad.
Mr Adams said it was likely a delay in someone entering data into the electronic log that caused the discrepancy.
Mr Adams also revealed while the shorts and other exhibits from the rape were in his possession, they were in a locked room in paper bags that were folded closed – but not sealed.
The shorts, which provide the state a crucial link to Mr Edwards, had 11 tape lifts taken from them in July 1996, 17 months after the attack.
In January 2014, further tape lifts were taken from the shorts, revealing one blue polyester fibre. A re-examination of the original tape lifts at the same time revealed another single blue polyester fibre.
A single matching blue polyester fibre found in Jane Rimmer’s hair was discovered by a ChemCentre scientist 13 years after her body was discovered in Wellard bushland on August 3, 1996.
Of the 21 other fibres discovered, 20 grey polyester fibres matching the car seat inserts of Mr Edwards’ car; and one blue-grey polypropylene matching the upholstery in the rear cargo area of same vehicle, were found.
Defence lawyer Genevieve Cleary has this week zeroed in on if those fibres, and has suggested they could have come from the 25+ people who responded to the discovery of Jane Rimmer’s body on August 3, 1996.
During cross-examination of the two uniformed police officers who were the first to the Wellard scene, Ms Cleary asked if they wore navy trousers at the time, to which they confirmed they did.
Both stated they never touched the body, and only got within one metre of it.
The first detective to arrive confirmed police officers at the time either drove Fords or Holden Commodore sedans, although he could not remember which he drove that day.
Ms Cleary also accused the former officer-in-charge of the Kwinana police station of lying while giving evidence that he never went into the bush to closely view Jane’s body when he first arrived at the scene.
She claimed a person couldn’t see the body from the road, as he had claimed he had, and that Mr Adams was lying due to feeling “embarrassed” that he could have contaminated the scene.
“I’ve had years of experience in investigations and the first rule of investigations is don’t go anywhere near the body because of contamination,” he replied.
“There’s certain parts of that day that I recall vividly ... the body in the bush is what was imprinted in my mind and I think once you see a body in the bush like that, that never leaves you, I can recall it as clearly as yesterday.”
Former undertaker Peta Page was also questioned by Ms Cleary about how she and her colleague removed Jane’s body from the site after it had been examined by forensic police officers.
She said the pair wore a full suit of protective clothing including coveralls, boot covers, masks and hair nets and that Ms Rimmer was transferred into a body bag that was zipped up and then she was transferred on a gurney into a Ford vehicle and taken by police escort to the mortuary.
“[The forensic pathologist] told us there was a female deceased person there, she lifted up the tarpaulin for us to see, Dave and I both saw her but only briefly because it’s not something that you do, you don’t just ... look,” she said.
“It was a very busy crime scene, there was a lot going on and [we were] obviously being mindful and respectful of who we thought it was.
“We were advised we weren’t allowed to talk about what happened and very rarely would any conversation come up about this woman in the last 20 years.”
Mr Edwards has pleaded not guilty to the murders of Sarah Spiers, Jane Rimmer and Ciara Glennon.
The trial continues.
Police response to the discovery of Jane Rimmer's body
Arrival time
Responder
Division
Proximity to body
2.30pm: Constable Michelle Beaman, Uniformed police
1.5 metres
2.30pm: First Class Constable Bleddyn Davies, Uniformed police
two metres
3.15pm: Detective James Crozier' Local detective
five metres
3.15pm: Detective Kim Ferguson, Local detective
3.30pm: Sergeant Jonathan Adams, OIC Kwinana police station
four metres
3.46pm: Senior Constable Peter Halliday, N/A
3.46pm: First Class Detective Phil Van Nieuwburg, N/A
4.17pm: Sergeant Barry Mott, Forensics
4.20pm: Detective Bradley Pace, Homicide Squad
four metres
4.20pm: Detective Vicki Young, Homicide Squad
4.30pm: Detective Inspector Paul Ferguson, Macro Taskforce
4.30pm: Detective Inspector John Gibson, Macro Taskforce
4.40pm: Sergeant Lance Connal, Media Liaison
4.53pm: Senior Detective Suthers< N/A
4.53pm: Dr. Karin Margolius, Forensic pathologist
Took swabs
5.07pm: Senior Constable Harbridge, Forensics
5.07pm: First Class Constable Menagh, Forensics
5.15pm: Dr. Stephen Knott, Forensic dentist
5.15pm: Professor Clive Cooke: Chief forensic pathologist
5.25pm: Sergeant Hastie: N/A
5.30pm: First Class Constable Teracci, Video
5.40pm: Detective Sergeant Dave Caporn, Macro Taskforce
5.40pm: Detective Pearsall, Macro Taskforce
8.10pm: Peta Page, Coroner's undertaker
Placed in body bag
8.10pm: David Scott, Coroner's undertaker
Placed in body bag
NB: Some spelling of names yet to be confirmed.
Mr Edwards has pleaded not guilty to the murders of Sarah Spiers, Jane Rimmer and Ciara Glennon.
In 1990 Bradley Edwards attacked a woman at Perth’s Hollywood Hospital (above) and stuffed cloth into her mouth. Picture-Google.Source-Supplied
Ex xx – Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_Photos of the bush where Jane Rimmer’s body was found
Released on 05.12
Exhibit 1113/1115 – Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_Pictures marked by Telstra Living Witness Katrina Jones, estimating where she came into contact with the man who picked her up in a white car – and then tried to kiss her.
Claremont trial: Victim Ciara Glennon potentially seen on side of Perth highway
By AAP Dec 16, 2019
Photos in article
This never-before-seen face of a mystery driver, caught creeping on a young woman the night after Sarah Spiers disappeared, has been shown in the Claremont serial killings trial. (Supplied)
Lawyer Ciara Glennon's body was discovered in bushland weeks after she disappeared. (Supplied)
The Toyota Camry station wagon Bradley Edwards drove around the time of the Claremont murders (Supplied)
https://www.9news.com.au/national/claremont-trial-ciara-glennon-seen-on-perth-highway-before-disappearance/97ed0f35-c1f1-4046-9879-6aaec6eecb94
Two women have told the Claremont serial killings trial they saw a woman matching Ciara Glennon's description leaning into a vehicle on a Perth highway on the night she vanished.
Former Telstra technician Bradley Robert Edwards, 51, maintains he did not murder the 27-year-old solicitor in March 1997, and 18-year-old secretary Sarah Spiers and 23-year-old childcare worker Jane Rimmer in 1996.
Several people saw Ms Glennon walking alone down Stirling Highway on the night she went missing, minutes after she left colleagues at the Continental Hotel.
Susan Robinson testified on Monday that something made her look twice as she and her husband drove past, saying she saw a slight-built woman leaning towards a light coloured vehicle "talking to somebody".
"I'm certain that he had light brown hair," she told the Western Australia Supreme Court.
"In my mind at the time, I thought he was quite handsome."
Ms Robinson provided a description of the man for a police sketch artist the following month.
Lisa Mighall said she glanced at a slim woman standing next to a light coloured vehicle, which may have been a station wagon or ute similar to a Commodore, bending over like she was getting in.
That model has been referred to several times by other witnesses.
"It was definitely between midnight and 12.30am," she said in her statement.
Margaret Rogers said she saw a woman who looked like Ms Glennon in her headlights.
"She was ambling along and appeared to be relaxed," Ms Rogers said in a statement.
She also saw a tall man with dark hair walking behind the woman, but she did not think they were together.
She described the woman as being aged in her mid-20s and just over 150cm tall, while other witnesses including Patricia Mullan reported seeing a smartly dressed female.
Ann Kennerly said the woman was "a little unsteady" on her feet and may have been intoxicated.
But Angela Rainbow testified she believed she saw Ms Glennon walking in a straight line, not swaying.
"She looked like she was on a mission," she said.
Lynette Steenholdt was also adamant who she saw.
"I saw Ciara Glennon. It was about 12.20am," she said.
"She was holding up her bag ... she was trying to get a taxi."
Thai restaurant cook Phetchara Mombao said she had just closed the venue when her colleague commented on the lone woman's appearance, saying "she may be the next to go".
The court has previously heard three men known collectively as "the burger boys" because they were eating outside Hungry Jacks shouted out the woman they saw was "crazy" for hitchhiking.
Ms Glennon and Ms Rimmer's bodies were found in bushland at opposite ends of Perth, but Ms Spiers has never been found.
© AAP 2019
Police search the house of accused killer Bradley Edward Roberts in December 2016 (Getty Images)
Exhibit 1201 – Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_1995 Aerial map of Rowe Park, Claremont, where the Karrakatta victim was abducted
A timeline of the Claremont serial killings | ABC News
ABC News In-depth
Three women disappeared from Claremont in the 1990s. Now 20 years later, a man faces court charged with their murders. For more from ABC News, click here: https://ab.co/2kd3ALi If you're in Australia, you can watch more ABC News content on iview: https://ab.co/2kKaXKn Subscribe to ABC News In-depth: https://www.youtube.com/c/abcnewsindepth For breaking and trending news, subscribe to ABC News on YouTube: http://ab.co/1svxLVE You can also like us on Facebook: http://facebook.com/abcnews.au Or follow us on Instagram: http://instagram.com/abcnews_au Or even on Twitter: http://twitter.com/abcnews
Exhibit 1278 - Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_Aerial map of Hollywood Hospital, with star noting position of security guard who saw white Telstra van on the night of the Karrakatta rape
CCTV cameras record Jane Rimmer outside the Continental Hotel
Posted 23 Nov 2019, 7:10pm
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-11-24/jane-rimmer-on-cctv-outside-the-continental-hotel/11222008
Claremont serial killer victim Jane Rimmer was recorded on CCTV outside the Continental Hotel in Claremont as a dark-haired man approached her.
Source: ABC News | Duration: 11sec
Topics: crime, murder-and-manslaughter, claremont-6010
Exhibit 1331 – Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_Transcript of that call
The identikit made with the help of Karen Mabbott, who drove down Stirling Highway the night Ciara Glennon vanished and said she saw a man standing behind a vehicle up the road from a woman who resembled Ciara.
Ciara Glennon's father Denis arriving at West Australian District Court on November 25 (Getty Images)
The cord Bradley Edwards used to tie up his rape victim in 1995.
Poster of Sarah Spiers after she disappeared in January 1996 from in Perth, WA.Source:News Corp Australia
An aerial photograph of Eglinton in 1997 where Ciara Glennon's body was found off Pipidinny Road.
Kerry Stokes, head of Seven West Media and Packer Head of Chanel Nine Network which has taken over the Fairfax Newspapers and Publications which includes the Sydney Morning Herald and the Melbourne Age Newspapers, and the Financial Review Newspaper ... thus between them and add Rupert Murdoch who is in control of News Limited which owns a lions share of print media in Australia ...... into the mix ... between these three people they effectively control an extremely large part of Australia's Mainstream Media Outlets...
Perth trial of alleged killer of Irish woman hinges on DNA
Bradley Robert Edwards (50) charged over death of Ciara Glennon (27) in March 1997
Sun, Nov 24, 2019
Brendan Foster
Ciara Glennon: was a young lawyer at the Blake Dawson Waldron firm in Perth when she disappeared. File photograph: PerthNow
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/crime-and-law/perth-trial-of-alleged-killer-of-irish-woman-hinges-on-dna-1.4093688
A sole piece of DNA evidence from an Irish woman killed in Australia more than 20 years ago could hold the key to one of the most anticipated trials in the country’s history.
Bradley Robert Edwards (50) will appear before a Western Australian court on Monday charged over the death of Ciara Glennon, whose family are originally from Westport in Co Mayo.
Ms Glennon (27) disappeared on the night of March 14th, 1997, after celebrating St Patrick’s Day with friends in the upmarket suburb of Claremont, Perth.
Her parents, Denis and Una Glennon, identified their daughter’s body three weeks later after it was found in bushland, 50km north of Perth.
A postmortem on her body revealed the cause of death was consistent with a neck injury such as a laceration.
In an update published in early November, Western Australian supreme court justice Stephen Hall allowed state prosecutors to submit late evidence of DNA material found under the fingertips of Ms Glennon.
‘Claremont serial killings’
Prosecutors will allege the DNA belongs to Mr Edwards, who is also accused of the murders of Sarah Spiers (18), and Jane Rimmer (23), who also both vanished from the Claremont area in the mid-1990s. The killings were later dubbed the Claremont serial killings.
The state is expected to argue Ms Glennon scratched Mr Edwards’s face before he murdered her, with the DNA allegedly located underneath her fingernails when her body was found.
The prosecution will call on UK-based Principal Forensic Services scientist Jonathan Whitaker, who will consider whether that DNA was a result of passive social contact, or the scratching of a person.
Mr Edwards’s defence lawyer Paul Yovich has previously stated he would challenge the DNA evidence, claiming it could have been contaminated.
The DNA evidence is expected to form a crucial part of the trial, as it is the single piece of such evidence the state has in relation to Mr Edwards.
Justice Hall – who will preside over the non-jury trial, expected to last six months – also allowed fibres from Ms Glennon’s hair, which prosecutors allege matched those from the same model of Holden Commodore Mr Edwards was driving when he was employed as a technician for Telstra at the time of her death.
Talented lawyer
Ms Glennon was a young lawyer at the Blake Dawson Waldron firm in Perth when she disappeared.
She grew up in the leafy suburb of Mosman Park after her family emigrated to Australia when she was six. Ms Glennon had taken some time off work to travel the world, including visiting relatives in Ireland.
She returned to Perth in February 1997 to be a bridesmaid for her sister Denise, but was killed before the wedding date.
Una and Denis Glennon have attended almost every pre-trial hearing. The Glennon family have been media-shy, but when Mr Edwards was arrested in late 2016 Mr Glennon told Perth media it was a “very bittersweet” moment.
“This is a very raw and bittersweet time,” Mr Glennon said. “We are being updated by the WA Police, and hence it is best that I do not comment on the recent developments.”
Mr Edwards had pleaded not guilty to the murders of Sarah Spiers, Jane Rimmer and Ciara Glennon.
Murdoch's Irish media arm under the spotlight over interference
Pushing political opinion is nothing new for the media mogul as his newspapers put their spin on the amendment debate, writes Liam Collins
https://www.independent.ie/opinion/comment/murdochs-irish-media-arm-under-the-spotlight-over-interference-36666471.html
Liam Collins
March 4 2018
Whether or not newspapers can influence the outcome of an election or a referendum is arguable. But certainly the world's most powerful media mogul Rupert Murdoch believes they can, otherwise why would his newspapers continually intervene in everything from the Brexit referendum in Britain to the looming battle over the Eighth Amendment in Ireland?
Neither Brexit nor the Eighth Amendment are likely to sell a lot of newspapers but by taking a side, The Sunday Times, the Irish edition of The Times and The Sun, have again emphasised the cultural differences between Ireland and Britain.
Taking a side has been historically acceptable in Britain, where Murdoch has shaped the modern political landscape. His media interventions have influenced such diverse political issues as who forms the government to what way people voted on Brexit.
Not over here, though, where we do things differently, maybe not better, but differently.
Reviewing David McKnight's book, Murdoch's Politics, Conor Brady, former editor of the Irish Times, said:
"McKnight paints a deeply disturbing picture of an organisation driven by contrived polarities, half-truths and ideology-based spin." The review continued: "He sees his media empire as shaping key international relationships, in particular strengthening the alliances between the US and Britain at the expense of the latter's relationship with Europe."
Murdoch has enormous power on an international scale and loves to use it.
A recent pro-choice story in The Sunday Times headlined: 'HSE used Eighth to try and force me to have a caesarean', appeared as a sponsored post from the paper in Facebook users' news feeds and has been interpreted by the Pro-life side in the abortion debate in Ireland as another strand of the newspaper's bias in favour of repealing the Eighth Amendment.
Now no one really considers that the billionaire owner of News Corp is actually in any way interested or concerned about whether or not Ireland repeals the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, but his philosophy of taking political stances on national issues has become ingrained in the mindset of his media outlets, and particularly his newspapers.
And he has taken the time and trouble from his international schedule to visit his Dublin outposts, so little escapes his beady-eyed attention.
A Guardian reviewer of the McKnight book told how the Australian tycoon "transmits his political desires" to his media empire.
"The eerily consistent ideology of his newspapers and TV commentators is maintained in a lovely, menacing phrase quoted here from a former Murdoch editor, Eric Beecher,
"by phone and by clone".
Executives are chosen for their ability and willingness to anticipate Murdoch's thinking. On the rare occasions that more direct guidance is needed:
"I give instructions to my editors all around the world," as Murdoch put it in 1982.
The Sun's campaign to "topple the Brussels bureaucrats" in the Brexit referendum is clearly the result of interpreting the proprietor's distrust of the hated EU chiefs, which has led to a long line of half-true stories of the restrictive rules they want to impose on the British - everything from straight bananas to Polish plumbers.
It influenced the outcome of Britain's disastrous decision to leave the European Union, a campaign in which it was aided and abetted, strangely, by the Irish edition of The Sunday Times.
The Sun, as it does, boasted about it afterwards while avoiding responsibility for the misinformation of its simplistic approach and twisted headlines.
Murdoch doesn't do balance and his newspapers (and his other media) toe the political line of their proprietor on a variety of issues, until he changes his mind. Then his media change to suit any new stance he might adopt.
During the Brexit referendum in Britain, Murdoch's favourite tabloid The Sun, along with the Daily Mail, led the charge by posing preposterous headlines to influence readers against the EU.
In what was a narrow victory, this intervention possibly changed the outcome of the referendum, the result of which already means so much to Irish people, north and south of the border and could indeed change our destiny in significant ways.
The Sun went so far as to second-guess Britain's Queen Elizabeth, with a front-page splash headed 'Queen backs Brexit'.
Nick Clegg, then the Liberal Democrat leader and deputy Prime Minister, who was supposed to have been present at a lunch when the Queen vented her ire at the EU, described the story as "nonsense" while Buckingham Palace insisted that the Queen remained "politically neutral as she has for 63 years".
The Irish edition of The Sunday Times took its cue from The Sun, telling readers in its editorial:
" This Thursday, Britain should vote to leave.
Yes, it must be prepared for a bumpy ride, but this vote may be the only opportunity to call a halt to the onward march of the centralising Europe project. Such a state would be neither in Britain's interests, nor Europe's."
Whatever about calling a halt to the "centralising European project" the effect of exiting the EU is looking increasingly like a political and financial fiasco for Britain.
For his more discerning but fewer buyers of the London-based The Times, the bet was hedged.
They were told in an editorial in favour of the 'remain' side that Brexit could have "unknown and alarming consequences for the UK and Europe".
Well, they got that one right.
The question for us on this side of the Irish Sea is do we want Mr Murdoch telling us which way to vote in a general election or in a referendum?
Do discerning and well-informed voters need direction from the media, at home or abroad?
We can make up our minds and indeed change them if we see fit, as happened with the Lisbon Treaty.
But to the Murdoch media, this lack of a 'stiff upper lip' is repugnant, they feel that like Lord Cardigan and the Light Brigade, once the order is given to charge, it must be carried out and to hell with the consequences.
We like to make up our own minds in Ireland.
Both the Irish edition of The Times and The Sunday Times have seemingly decided that we don't.
Repealing the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution is a serious matter and stories favouring one side or the other should not be reduced to sponsored posts from newspapers.
Surely readers deserve better.
Exhibit 15619 – Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_Aerial map of the Eglinton area, including Pipidinny Road
where Ms Glennon’s body was found, circa 1997
Quashed convictions spark calls for legal shake-up
Hagar Cohen- 16 Jul 201
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2010-07-16/quashed-convictions-spark-calls-for-legal-shake-up/907768
http://inlnews.com/ClaremontSerialKillings2.html
PHOTO: Michael Kirby says he would support a body to review criminal cases where there are allegations of miscarriage of justice. (ABC News)
Quashed convictions spark calls for legal shake-up
Hagar Cohen
A recently retired High Court judge has added his voice to calls for a shake-up of the criminal justice system.
Michael Kirby says he would support the establishment of an independent body to review criminal cases where there are allegations of a miscarriage of justice.
"What we need to consider in Australia is a body which is full-time working on examining these cases, so that it doesn't depend upon a letter written to some newspaper that gets people behind it," he said.
"There are too many chance factors in that and too many possibilities of slipping through the floor boards."
A Criminal Case Review Commission in Britain was set up 10 years ago, tasked with investigating prisoners claims of innocence.
In Australia, there have been two recent cases where people convicted of murder have had their convictions quashed after serving lengthy jail terms.
Andrew Mallard in Perth and Graham Stafford in Queensland were released from prison after a team of legal and other experts investigated their cases pro bono for years, and found new evidence in the process.
But these cases may be the tip of an iceberg.
The case attracting the most attention is in the legal fraternity is the Henry Keogh case in South Australia.
Keogh has been in jail in Adelaide for the past 16 years after being found guilty of drowning his fiance, Anna Jane Cheney, in the bath of her Adelaide home.
He was convicted of her murder and sentenced for life.
For the past 10 years a group of lawyers, medical experts, and human rights advocates has been campaigning for the re-opening of Keogh's case.
They say the much of the forensic evidence given by a Crown expert witness at the trial is flawed.
The Keogh team says the autopsy conducted by then-chief forensic pathologist in Adelaide Doctor Colin Manock was incomplete, and that some of his expert advice was wrong.
'Miscarriage of justice'
One of the people who has been working on the Keogh case is Doctor Byron Collins, a Melbourne based forensic pathologist.
He says Doctor Manock had diagnosed non-accidental drowning as the cause of death, without excluding conditions like epilepsy, heart infection or sudden unexpected collapse.
"In this case where the autopsy is incomplete, I think it's really inappropriate to say that this is homicide from the witness box," Dr Collins said.
In a rare interview, Dr Manock told ABC1's Background Briefing program that he rejects the criticism and stands by his autopsy report.
"At the time it was an obvious case of drowning and I felt that the findings that I described were sufficient to support drowning," he said.
The Keogh case is closed, so the South Australian Attorney General must approve the re-opening of the case for new evidence to be heard in court.
But former attorney-general Michael Atkinson has already refused three petitions from Keogh's lawyers asking for the evidence to be re-examined.
They are now in the process of submitting a fourth petition.
Keogh's barrister Kevin Borick and the other legal experts working on the Keogh case have been pushing for the establishment of an independent criminal case review commission, that could assess the new evidence in the Keogh case.
"There's a very powerful case that there was a miscarriage of justice, that the trial process was totally unfair," he said.
Former Assistant Western Australian Police Commissioner David John Caporn
Former Assistant Western Australian Police Commissioner David John Caporn was originally a Detective Sergeant and a member of the Major Crime Squad who worked on the Pamela Lawrence Homicide Investigation in May 1994, who was appointed the head of the Macro Task Force in investigate the Claremont Serial Killings, and became as high as an Assistant Commissioner of Police of Western Australia..... was being groomed by his senior Freemason Brothers in the Western Australian Police Force to be the next Freemason Police Commissioner for Western Australia ... until things suddenly changed in the police career of the then Assistant Western Australian Police Commissioner David John Caporn .. the High Court of Australia set aside the murder conviction of Andrew Mallard, on the grounds that the High Court of Australia felt that the then Assistant Western Australian Police Commissioner David John Caporn and other Western Australian Police Officers, and the Director of Western Australian Public Prosecutions including the prosecutor handling the Andrew Mallard prosecution. Kenneth Paul Bates did not present the full relevant material evidence to the jury and in fact tampered and manipualted the evidence to help obtain the murder conviction against Andrew Mallard for the murder of Pamela Lawrence ....
a subsequent inquiry into the case by the Corruption and Crime Commission for Western Australia supported the High Courts ruling....
CORRUPTION AND CRIME COMMISSION REPORT ON THE INQUIRY INTO ALLEGED MISCONDUCT BY PUBLIC OFFICERS IN CONNECTION WITH THE INVESTIGATION OF THE MURDER OF MRS PAMELA LAWRENCE, THE PROSECUTION AND APPEALS OF MR ANDREW MARK MALLARD, AND OTHER RELATED MATTERS ...
7 October 2008
ISBN: 978 0 9805050 6 1 -2008
This report and further information about the Corruption and Crime Commission can be found on the Commission Website at www.ccc.wa.gov.au.
Corruption and Crime Commission Postal Address PO Box 7667 Cloisters Square PERTH WA 6850
Telephone (08) 9215 4888 1800 809 000 (Toll Free for callers outside the Perth metropolitan area.)
Facsimile (08) 9215 4884 Email info@ccc.wa.gov.au Office Hours 8.30 a.m. to 5.00 p.m., Monday to Friday
[75] The Commission has formed a number of opinions as to misconduct and made a number of recommendations which are set out in Chapter 14 of the Report.
[76] The opinions as to misconduct may be summarised as follows.
1. That Det Sgt Caporn engaged in misconduct in writing the letter to the Police Prosecutor dated 17 June 1994 containing incorrect and misleading information.
2. That Det Sgt Shervill engaged in misconduct in requesting Mr Lynch to amend his reports by deleting all reference to the salt water testing. 3. That Det Sgt Shervill engaged in misconduct in bringing about the alterations to the statements of various witnesses without any reference to their earlier recollections.
4. That Det Sgt Caporn engaged in misconduct in bringing about the alterations to the statements of various witnesses without any reference to their earlier recollections.
5. That Det Sgt Shervill engaged in misconduct in making false entries in the Running Sheets relating to the amendments to the witnesses’ statements.
6. That Det Sgt Shervill engaged in misconduct in failing to disclose to the defence the original statements of the witnesses including Mr Lynch’s original report and details of the unsuccessful attempts to locate a weapon capable of inflicting wounds similar to those found on Mrs Lawrence. 7. That Mr Kenneth Bates engaged in misconduct in running the trial on the basis that a wrench as drawn by Andrew Mallard was the murder weapon,but, at the same time, failing to put Andrew Mallard’s drawing to Dr Cooke and asking whether the deceased’s injuries were consistent with the use of such an instrument.
8. That Mr Kenneth Bates engaged in misconduct in failing to disclose to the defence the pig’s head testing of the wrench or ensuring that it had been disclosed by the police.
[77] The recommendations are detailed below.
1. That the Commissioner of Police give consideration to the taking of disciplinary action against Assistant Commissioner Malcolm William Shervill and Assistant Commissioner David John Caporn.
2. That the Director of Public Prosecutions gives consideration to the taking of disciplinary action against Mr Kenneth Paul Bates.
3. That consideration is given by the Commissioner of Police to making special provision for the interviewing by investigating police of mentally ill suspects.
4. That whenever there is legislation, fresh authoritative case law, or DPP guidelines which relate to the conduct of criminal investigation or the admissibility of evidence in such cases, senior police officers affected by such matters be required to attend formal seminars or meetings at which they can be made familiar with such matters.
5. That whenever the police obtain advice from the Office of the Director of Public Prosecution such advice be furnished in writing setting out, at least, the material considered, the opinion and the grounds upon which such opinion is based; or in cases of urgency, a detailed contemporary note should be made, preferably by the DPP officer or his secretary, and also by the police, setting out the matters specified.
6. That Mr Andrew Mallard gives consideration to raising a complaint with the Legal Practitioners Complaints Committee (LPCC) regarding the conduct of the trial by Mr Bates. [Division 3 of the Legal Practice Act 2003 deals with complaints made about legal practitioners. Section 175(2) specifies who can make a complaint to the LPCC including the Attorney General, the Legal Practice Board, the Executive Director of the Law Society, any legal practitioner or any other person who has had a direct personal interest in the matter].
[78] Finally the Commission acknowledges the efforts and expertise of those persons who were instrumental in securing justice and vindication for Andrew Mallard, especially Ms Colleen Egan, journalist, Mr Quigley MLA, Mr Malcolm McCusker QC, and Clayton Utz, solicitors, who acted pro bono.
Exhibit 37 – Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_Picture of Bradley Edwards with horse Beau, taken by first wife
A man clutching two blue canvas bags, with two women crossing a street.
Members of the prosecution arrive at court holding projector screens to shield the public gallery and media from gruesome evidence. (ABC News: Charlotte Hamlyn)
Exhibit 1830 – Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_Picture of hubcap described by another witness who thinks they saw Ciara Glennon
talking to a man in a car on March 14, 1997
David John Caporn who was the Former head of the Macro Task Force and a Former Assistant Western Australian Police Commissioner
Exhibit 852 – Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_Police photos of the kimono left behind by Bradley Edwards during Huntingdale break-in and attack
Sarah Spiers’s last words to her friend Emma were recounted tearfully in court. Source Supplied
Exhibit 33 – Pictures of a Telstra van of the type that used to be driven by Bradley Edwards
A Holden Commodore station wagon similar to that issued to Bradley Edwards in the mid-1990s. (Supplied: Supreme Court of WA)
5.07pm on Dec 17, 2019
Justice Stephen Hall, Justice Hall considering media requests to release some exhibits
Justice Stephen Hall is now considering media requests for some of the trial's exhibits to be made public.
He has agreed to release the identikit from yesterday's evidence of a man standing by a vehicle along Stirling Highway the night Ciara disappeared.
He has also agreed to release an aerial photo of Eglinton, where Ciara's body was found.
A photo of the hubcap Mr Gray said resembled the one on the white station wagon he saw the night Ciara disappeared will also been released.
He has indicated he will not be releasing any CCTV footage from Claremont on the nights the women disappeared.
The released exhibits will be placed on the blog when they are made available.
6.00pm on Dec 17, 2019
Judge releases identikit, aerial map and Holden hubcap
The identikit made with the help of Karen Mabbott, who drove down Stirling Highway the night Ciara Glennon vanished and said she saw a man standing behind a vehicle up the road from a woman who resembled Ciara.
The Holden hubcap Brandon Gray said resembled the one on the car he saw on Stirling Highway the night Ciara Glennon vanished.
An aerial photograph of Eglinton in 1997 where Ciara Glennon's body was found off Pipidinny Road.
3.38pm on Dec 17, 2019
Defence questions the continuity of the Karrakatta rape exhibits
Mr Yovich is now cross-examining Ms Francis, pointing out she made her first witness statement relating to her involvement in the Karrakatta rape case in 2009.
She again made a more detailed statement in 2014 and was allowed to see her running sheet and documentation she filed around the time.
"There are many things I explicitly remember and then there are things I remember because of the notes," she said.
Mr Yovich has asked if it was practice to fill out the running sheet, as the thing was happening.
She has agreed sometimes it was filled out right away, and sometimes at a later stage soon after if they were "on the road".
"Where there are approximate times, it would have been filled out back at the office," she said.
Mr Yovich is now referring to Ms Francis' request for photographs forensic police took of the rape exhibits at the scene to be developed - which is referenced on the running sheet.
"I can remember photographs of a sandy area and some bushes, I don't recall any other photographs. I don't recall seeing [any photographs of the exhibits]," she said.
Mr Yovich is now asking if when she collected the exhibits, if she would have asked for all of the exhibits.
She has agreed.
Mr Yovich: Did you check the exhibit register to ensure you were getting all the items?
Ms Francis: I recall there were a number of items and a number of bags that matched. I didn't initial each item, nor did I look into the bags and tick off each item.
Originally the victim's underwear and shorts were listed as one exhibit in one bag and called 'skirt and panties'.
Mr Yovich: When you saw that two items were listed together, did you check to see that they were separately bagged?
Ms Francis: I don't recall looking into any of the bags.
Mr Yovich has now asked if the bags were sealed, and Ms Francis has replied she "can't imagine them being unsealed".
Mr Yovich is now reminding Ms Francis that during her 2014 police statement she was asked why there was no record of the cord being recorded in the property tracing receipt.
"I went on to explain it wasn't analysed because we took the cord to other places to determine the manufacturer," she said.
"That was the only item that was opened up that we took with us."
Mr Yovich has also pointed out the soil sample taken from the rape scene was also not entered by Ms Francis on the property tracing receipt.
"I don't believe it was provided to me," she said.
She has reiterated she never opened any of the exhibit bags, except the cord bag.
Mr Yovich has read aloud from her 2014 statement from relation to changing the exhibit name from 'skirt' to 'shorts' which said: "At some point, I must have removed the item from its packaging and noticed it was shorts".
"In all of the investigations I've done I don't recall ever opening an exhbit bag that's been sealed," she has replied.
She said in the statement, it was a suggestion by the detective interviewing her that she must have opened the bag, but having had more time to consider it and review her documents, she believes she got that information through interviewing the victim.
Mr Yovich is now showing Ms Francis a document that shows she requested the ChemCentre to "package, label and sign for items individually" when she handed over the exhibits.
He has suggested she must have opened one of the exhibit bags to see the items originally listed 'skirt and panties' were in one bag.
She has reiterated again, she did not open any of the sealed bags.
The endless reign of Rupert Murdoch
After decades of influence, the media mogul isn’t so much a person as an epoch
Richard Cooke
https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2018/july/1530367200/richard-cooke/endless-reign-rupert-murdoch
“Those who say they give the public what it wants begin by underestimating public taste, and end by debauching it.”
– T.S. Eliot (attrib), The Pilkington Report on Broadcasting, 1962
“Privacy is for paedos.”
– Paul McMullan, former News of the World journalist, in evidence to the Leveson Inquiry into the culture, practices and ethics of the press, 2011
The fall
A man falling down, especially an important man, has been considered an ill omen since ancient times. It is somehow intuitive – no special explanation is needed for the origin of fallen angels, or the expression “pride goeth before a fall”. It is not mere superstition either. In older adults, falls really are a harbinger of senescence and death, and geriatric patients will often hide these events from their doctors and their families, recognising what they represent in terms of fading life force. The most dangerous type of ground-level fall involves white males over the age of 85, especially those who break a bone. When Rupert Murdoch slipped and severely injured his back on the deck of a yacht somewhere in the Caribbean, he was 86.
Those who watch Murdoch, many of whom wish him ill, noted the significances. The yacht was owned by Lachlan Murdoch, one of several prospective dynastic heirs to the family companies, and Murdoch senior stumbled in the fresh hours of 2018, not long after New Year’s Eve. “I hope you all are having a great start to 2018,” he wrote to his staff later. “I suspect it has been better than mine. I am writing to tell you that last week I had a sailing accident and suffered a painful back injury. While I am well on the road to recovery, I have to work from home for some weeks.”
The some weeks became some months, and rumours circulated that the injuries were more serious than a bad back. The tycoon, it was said, had hit his head. In public, he had been rambly and vague for a while. Some thought this was an act: at the Leveson Inquiry into press malpractice in 2012, his dotty demeanour was compared to the pseudo-dementia of the arraigned Junior Soprano in The Sopranos. Now apparently it was for real.
Few executives are as synonymous with their companies as Rupert Murdoch is with his. News Corp, he had said in the past, “for better or worse, is a reflection of my thinking, my character, my values”. Not only does he govern them by fiat, stacking boards with lackeys, consulting little further than his gut, he also has not much life outside the office. He has few friends and virtually no hobbies. (His biographer Michael Wolff noted that “he may be the only Australian man not interested in sports” – he is said to have purchased the Los Angeles Dodgers franchise without ever having seen a live game of baseball.) He has struck the balance between work and family life by bringing his children to work.
It seemed natural, then, that as Rupert Murdoch lay in bed his company was in the balance as well, not bankrupted but in the process of being broken up. It had already been split into two in 2013, and in December 2017, Disney announced it was seeking to buy the entertainment assets of 21st Century Fox, leaving the news concerns to the Murdochs. Some tried to paint this divestment as a failure, just as in the past Murdoch has been accused of failures that reap him tens of millions of dollars. This time it was an overall deal worth more than $US50 billion. The arrival of another possible buyer in Comcast seemed to confirm the irresistible prospect that Murdoch and Murdoch Inc. were reaching the end of the line, even if it did also mean a bigger payday for the old fox.
Pundits began the dangerous business of peering into the future. Possibilities were war-gamed: the sons, James and Lachlan, would take over, or at least Lachlan would. (By April, he was already taking Rupert’s empty chair at meetings.) These changes would supposedly stem the destructive rage at the US cable network Fox News, long rumoured to be an embarrassment to the young scions, and possibly Murdoch himself. The Australian and The Times newspapers, reliant on subsidy, would be wound up and sold off. There was speculation about resignation, succession and even death. (A year before, former ABC presenter Quentin Dempster had called on Murdoch to resign for the good of journalism.) Instead, Rupert Murdoch did what he always does, and recovered and went back to work.
His first real public appearance was at the Trump White House’s inaugural state dinner in April, where he was one of the only civilian attendees. (Donald Trump speaks to Murdoch regularly, and calls him “Rupie”; according to Wolff, in return Murdoch thinks Trump is a “fucking idiot”.)Murdoch is close to Trump’s son-in-law,Jared Kushner, and reportedly pressed him for an invitation.
The same month Murdoch hosted a dinner for Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who was visiting the United States. Bin Salman is one of the world’s richest men – he began his tour by booking all 285 rooms at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills – and together he and Murdoch have a net worth roughly equivalent to the gross domestic product of Mongolia. They sparred lightly in a genteel Q&A session, where the sharia-mania of Murdoch’s media properties seemed a long way away, as did premonitions of demise.
In late June, it was announced that Disney had offered $US71.3 billion to buy most of Fox’s entertainment assets – beating Comcast’s previous bid of $US65 billion. In the months of Murdoch’s recuperation, his price had risen by $20 billion, and the bidding wouldn’t stop there.
Accumulations
It is not too soon to start countenancing legacy, though. Murdoch is a legacy unto himself, at least in the sense of something left over from a previous era, but still in active existence. Within the Murdoch companies, plans for his succession are made on the assumptions of something like immortality. “Don’t you know my dad’s never going to die?” his son Lachlan said once. When a Wall Street Journal editor asked his boss, Robert Thomson, about pre-preparing an obituary for Murdoch (a standard newspaper practice), he was told, “Rupert is not going to die.” “In the event he does?” the editor asked. “Rupert is not going to die,” he was told again. Murdoch once rejected 10-year and 20-year contingencies for his replacement, finally settling on a 30-year plan he was comfortable with. He was then 76. He likes to point out that his mother, Dame Elisabeth Murdoch, lived until 104. She did not, though, run a major international company as a centenarian.
Murdoch had already survived prostate cancer 18 years ago, and a fall from a horse before that. Business-wise, he had shrugged off the UK phone-hacking scandal, the advent of the internet, attempts at regulation, private debt crises, delayed satellite launches. After five decades of writing him off, Murdoch watchers should have been more careful. Tom Shales, the TV critic at The Washington Post, once told PBS’s Frontline that “Murdoch is someone who seems to have been allowed to grow unchecked, like – you know, like some sort of monster in a science fiction movie, The Blob or something. And you keep waiting for somebody to sort of shape him up and push him back in, but it doesn’t happen.” Shales said that in 1995, and neither age nor circumstance have changed its pertinence.
There is something deeply unsatisfactory about the Rupert Murdoch story – the lack of consequences, the triumph of cynicism – and it trips those who tell it into making the same mistakes over and over again. He has attracted a coterie of chroniclers, many of very high quality, who are tempted to contrive comeuppances for him. “You have to write something at the end,” one biographer told me, so they suggest that his journalists might stand up to their boss (this has happened a couple of times, but not for decades), that he might be spayed by regulators (never happened), that he might be overcome by second thoughts. All wishful thinking. “If I was going to be shot tomorrow morning, I bet I could get out of it,” Murdoch said once, and he does.
There is no happy ending, and hardly even any character development. Instead, Murdoch seems to exist in his own time, an era rather than a character.
“What does Rupert Murdoch want?” the now deceased Christopher Hitchens asked, 28 years ago.
He was already part of the fourth decade of Murdoch observers, and the library trying to answer this question stretches and swells to the present day. Delving into it finds almost spooky continuities. Reading The Australian, I thought “vendetta journalism” seemed a concise, if obvious, description of the paper’s style, and wondered if anyone had used it before. Donald Horne had, in 1975, years before I was born. In 1969, Murdoch and the then editor, Larry Lamb, redesigned The Sun, inventing the enduring form of the modern tabloid – right down to the red top. Murdoch was then, as now, in competition with a new technology threatening the print media. It was colour television.
The spear
Events that might have been career or life defining to anyone else are half-remembered in Murdoch’s, miniaturised by the scale of his events. There was a kidnapping attempt on Anna Murdoch, Rupert’s second wife, not long after the couple moved to the UK. Muriel McKay, the wife of one of Murdoch’s senior executives, was murdered as a result. It was a case of mistaken identity: the McKays had borrowed the Murdoch family car. Anna said in 2001 it was like something that “happened to someone else. That sort of period was somebody else … another lifetime.” Part of the tension in their marriage reportedly came from a belief Rupert might finally retire when he hit his 60s. That was almost 30 years ago.
The Murdoch epoch was also supposed to end, or at least begin to end, on July 19, 2011, the self-described “most humble day” of Murdoch’s life. The News man, called before the UK House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee, did his best impression of a human being, a bumbling, forelock-tugging old man with an Anglospheric mongrel accent. He was there to explain the apparent fact that he was running what one MP called a “criminal enterprise”: his newspapers were illegally hacking thousands of people’s phones, alongside bribing police officers and public servants.
However, he had an accidental ally. An activist and failed stand-up comedian (code name: Jonnie Marbles; real name: Jonathan May-Bowles) had hidden a pie made from shaving foam in the hearing room. At the right moment he would thrust it into Murdoch’s face, shouting “You naughty billionaire!”, and turn humility into humiliation. Instead, Marbles missed with most of the pie, Murdoch’s third wife, Wendi Deng, punched him in the face, he was arrested (and later sentenced to six weeks in jail, inevitably announcing outside the courtroom “This is the most humble day of my life”), and Murdoch barely changed posture.
The mood in the room changed. It had become a joke. “Don’t worry, this will play well,” the MP Tom Watson overheard one of Murdoch’s crew saying. “Rupert must have fixed that,” someone from the press muttered as they were ushered out of the room. “We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality,” Baron Macaulay wrote a long time ago. Rupert Murdoch might know more about those fits than anyone else who has ever lived, and he had outlived another one.
Some journalists went to jail, Murdoch’s son James was forced to step down from News International, but the measures to further investigate widespread criminality on Fleet Street never materialised. A cross-party parliamentary committee determined Rupert Murdoch was “not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company”, but so what? It added to a pile of ineffectual establishment condemnation and naysaying. It was really language aimed at assisting the regulator, Ofcom, but that had never worked in the past either. The secretary for culture and media, Jeremy Hunt, had once been nicknamed “The Minister for Murdoch”.
There was always something that was supposed to bring about his downfall. He didn’t understand the internet. He didn’t even know how to use email. The purchase of MySpace had bloodied his nose. Print newspapers were dead. His reputation as a CEO was in the doldrums. He was not the man to manage in the digital age. Tabloid dinosaurs were on the brink of extinction. But the downfalls always seemed to happen to other people. Rupert Murdoch had fared better than his direct competitors. Robert Maxwell had disappeared off his yacht. Conrad Black went to jail. Ted Turner challenged him to two televised fist fights that never transpired. The others – it was hard to even remember their names.
When Rupert Murdoch’s father, Keith, bequeathed him a small Adelaide-based press consortium in his will, he wrote, “I desire that my said son Keith Rupert Murdoch shall have the great opportunity of spending a useful altruistic and full life in newspaper and broadcasting activities and of ultimately occupying a position of high responsibility.” He hoped, he wrote in an accompanying letter, that Murdoch might use the company to “do some good”.
The “full life” and “position of high responsibility” have transpired. But how many people not employed by him would describe Keith Rupert Murdoch as an altruist?
Lachlan Murdoch’s yacht is called Sarissa, the name of an ancient Greek spear. James Murdoch studied history at Harvard, and often draws on this knowledge to name things. (One of James’s pet projects inside News Corp was called “Project Rubicon”.) He must know there is a special exception to the rule that a fallen leader presages disaster. The sarissa was introduced to the armies of antiquity by Philip II of Macedon, who once tried to kill his son Alexander the Great in a drunken wedding fight, but slipped and fell instead. When Julius Caesar arrived at Hadrumetum to attack Carthage, he landed face-first on the sand, and a murmur went through his army that this was fatal, but he laughed and said, “Oh Africa, I have you!” And at Pevensey in 1066, the man then called William the Bastard tripped off the boat.
The exception to the superstition is conquerors.
Raw power
Rupert Murdoch believes that the press is not as powerful as people think, that it follows the public, not the other way around, and that its influence is overstated. At least, this is his line when talking to a judge. “If these lies are repeated again and again they catch on,” he told Lord Leveson. “But they just aren’t true … We don’t have that sort of power.” He was referring to the power to swing elections. He has been careful to maintain this stance, at least most of the time. Privately he did tell Harold Evans that he was more powerful than the government.
But he does not look powerful, and did not look any more powerful when he was younger. He is self-deprecating, even self-effacing, a cheapskate who used to have a Hong Kong tailor make knock-off suits, before Wendi Deng gave him a makeover. He is cheeky in interviews, and over the years has made the transition from boyish to avuncular without much in between, though his tentative smile and darting eyes have grown less self-conscious.
He emanates reasonableness, not sulphur. He makes few gestures of dominance, though he does have a habit of tapping his palm or his watch on the surface in front of him when he talks. (There was a moment during the Leveson Inquiry, a tense moment, when his wife, sitting behind him, reached out a staying hand to his elbow – he was doing it again.) Overall, this anodyne, rather dorky presence is hard to square with the Rupert Murdoch that his peers describe. This is no doubt part of the danger.
The words they use – mogul, empire, fiefdom, dynasty, properties – are the language of territorial, even imperial, power, although this transposition between the feudal realm and the financial realm is commonplace. Less common is the response others have to Murdoch. Other formidable people not only respect him but are also afraid of him. They note that his influence is transcontinental, ranging from Australia to the United Kingdom to the United States. It is more lasting than political power: during his career, he has enjoyed access to nine US presidents, nine British prime ministers and nine Australian prime ministers. It is not just his current power but his aggregate power over time that produces velocity.
Both his enemies and those who work for him paint him as an almost supernatural figure. Beyond critics calling him “the Supreme Satan”, or “Dracula”, or the “Prince of Darkness” are eyewitnesses to Murdoch’s uniquely insinuative and wily approach.
In Australia, Kevin Rudd’s former campaign manager Bruce Hawker wrote that News Corp is “easily the most powerful political force in Australia, bigger than the major parties or the combined weight of the unions … I saw how, on a daily basis, the storm of negative stories that emanated from News Corp papers blew our campaign off course.”
In the UK, Murdoch’s tabloids were at one time the most feared political force in the country. This is partly due to their concentration – they are national tabloids, not city-based – and also their supreme nastiness. The former director general of the BBC John Birt once met a government minister who was physically shaking at the prospect of an imminent meeting with Murdoch.
“I have never met Mr Murdoch,” the former Tony Blair communications deputy Lance Price wrote for The Guardian, “but at times when I worked at Downing Street he seemed like the 24th member of the cabinet. His voice was rarely heard … but his presence was always felt. No big decision could ever be made inside No 10 without taking account of the likely reaction of three men – Gordon Brown, John Prescott and Rupert Murdoch.”
There is a temptation to play out counterfactuals and counter-histories. Would Margaret Thatcher have been PM without The Sun? Would the Iraq War have happened without Rupert Murdoch? For a man invested in a lot, he was unusually invested in this disgrace, and in the lead-up to invasion Tony Blair spoke with him almost as often as he spoke with his generals. The thought experiment is not interesting so much for its result but for its difficulty. Murdoch media properties were so synonymous with the call to arms it is hard to imagine the clamour in a different voice.
That indivisibility extends to the rest of our cultural reality. Murdoch’s close association with Fox News and The Wall Street Journal are obvious, but he is just as responsible for Harlequin romance novels, realtor.com, and Married at First Sight Australia. It is easy to underestimate the scale of his cultural impact: The Simpsons, Avatar, the format of the modern tabloid newspaper and cable television sports coverage would not exist without Rupert Murdoch. We can play this game with whole countries. Today’s Australia feels more insular, völkisch and hostile in character than its near neighbour New Zealand. Is this just an accident of history or the end product of strong Murdoch influence in one place and weak Murdoch influence in the other?
If you bought Harper Lee’s second novel, you gave money to Rupert Murdoch. It is possible to work for him without really realising it – partway through writing this piece I remembered that I had once worked for The Sunday Times in the UK and then remembered that Factiva, the research tool I was relying on, is a Murdoch property as well. Even Michael Moore, Murdoch critic extraordinaire, is a sometime Murdoch employee, and his Stupid White Men was published, albeit reluctantly, by the Murdoch-owned HarperCollins.
News’s ambitions are not confined to Earth either. Andrew Neil, a former editor of The Sunday Times, said that Murdoch once told him he had bet the entire company on the launch of a satellite. Like many of those close to Murdoch – Harold Evans, the former editor of The Sunday Times; Les Hinton, the former Dow Jones CEO; even Philip, Murdoch’s former butler – Neil felt compelled to write about his relationship with his boss, perhaps to say that he had survived it.
The Sun King
It was Neil who first gave Murdoch one of his most durable nicknames – the Sun King – and made one of the most influential descriptions of him. In his book Full Disclosure, he wrote:
When you work for Rupert Murdoch you do not work for a company chairman or chief executive: you work for a Sun King. You are not a director or a manager or an editor: you are a courtier at the court of the Sun King … All life revolves around the Sun King: all authority comes from him. He is the only one to whom allegiance must be owed and he expects his remit to run everywhere, his word to be final. There are no other references but him. He is the only benchmark and anybody of importance reports direct to him. Normal management structures – all the traditional lines of authority, communication and decision-taking in the modern business corporation – do not matter. The Sun King is all that matters.
This understanding has been endorsed by others close to the throne. One executive admitted to Neil that he had dreamed about Murdoch for years after he left his employ. David Yelland, the former editor of The Sun, likened his boss’s mindset to a “prism” through which News editors saw the world. “Most Murdoch editors wake up in the morning, switch on the radio, hear that something has happened and think ‘what would Rupert think about this?’ It’s like a mantra inside your head,” he said. “You look at the world through Rupert’s eyes.” Another Sun editor, the legendary Kelvin MacKenzie, once said that if the boss told him to print the paper in Sanskrit, he would do so without question.
MacKenzie himself was a tyrannical man – Murdoch affectionately called him “my little Hitler” – and along with Paul Dacre, the editor of the Daily Mail, he personified the ugly, hectoring soul of British tabloid journalism. ‘‘Look at you lot, eh?” began a typical MacKenzie pep talk. “Useless load of fuckers, aren’t you, eh? Right load of wankers, eh, eh?” Bullying was so endemic at News’s Wapping compound that The Sun once published a staff member’s phone extension in the paper, inviting readers to abuse him, under the headline “RING HIGGY THE HUMAN SPONGE, HE’LL SOAK IT UP”.
But Murdoch was the biggest bully of all. After a million-pound libel settlement to Elton John, MacKenzie was subjected to 42 minutes of non-stop abuse – “the bollocking of a lifetime”, he called it. Other times it would be more studied psychological disintegration: “You’re losing your touch, Kelvin. [Pause] Your paper is pathetic. [Pause] You’re losing your touch, Kelvin.” A favourite Murdoch tactic was silence over the phone, lengthy enough to induce the other person to crack, and over time MacKenzie would learn to keep shtum as well, locking the two in unspoken brinksmanship. Staff joked about the thousands of pounds spent conveying silence over the Atlantic.
Broadsheet editors, in whom Murdoch feels less invested, receive a more icy disdain. Neil was given the silence, but not the performative abuse. Still, the calls left him “angry and depressed”, he said, until he tried MacKenzie’s tactic. Neil answered silence with a silence so long he “could have gone and made a cup of tea”.
“Just as I was about to crack,” Neil wrote in Full Disclosure, “he finally said, ‘Are you still there?’” Murdoch then excused himself – he had to go.
Eric Beecher, a former Murdoch executive, once said that the empire was ruled “by phone and by clone”. The intimacy of these relationships with his editors – Murdoch, jet-lagged or up late, freshly landed or in the office in person, asking after the front page, the editorial line, the gossip – provoke an old question: how much direct editorial influence does the proprietor wield? “He has said he never interferes with his editors’ editorial decisions,” the correspondent Phillip Knightley said. “Absolutely true, because he is careful to choose editors whose views agree with his.”
A former News employee put it this way: “To be honest, I think Murdoch’s presence was a less important feature of the environment at News than the character of the fairly idiosyncratic editors he appointed to represent him. The most charismatic of those editors, Paul Kelly, told me that Murdoch brought no influence to bear on his commissioning or story selection. I’ve often wondered if this was a hollow boast, but I believe it was largely true, or true at the time. Kelly was later removed by Murdoch, so I wonder if the game had changed by then.”
The editors are more “idiosyncratic” at The Australian than anywhere else. It has none of the prestige of The Times or the tradition of The Wall Street Journal, and a cousin-marriage ideological relationship with the Liberal Party. Apart from a handful of talents who might be spirited to the higher echelons of News itself, most Australian senior editorial staff find there is nowhere to go, no other paper to poach them, no organisation (apart from the Liberal Party again) keen for their talents. They are lifers, and express their gratitude with a loyalty that borders on the obsequious.
Happily, as the paper’s hard-copy readership has settled into old age, the proclivities of its readers and its proprietor have become more symbiotic. Did The Australian’s bizarre jihad against wind farms stem from Murdoch’s frequently voiced disdain for them? Hard to prove, and there is no special conspiracy required: the paper’s readers cling to the same topic, perhaps the only time they express concern for native birdlife.
Christopher Hitchens wrote that when politicians said they were afraid of Rupert Murdoch what they were really saying was that they were afraid of his readers. But this misses the intensely personal presence of Murdoch in the political world, where he is not a proxy for his readers but for his businesses. For a free-marketeer, he has been adroit at fostering regulatory capture. He is not shy about lying, or confessing to this lying.
“You tell these bloody politicians whatever they want to hear,” he told his biographer Thomas Kiernan, “and once the deal is done you don’t worry about it. They’re not going to chase after you later if they suddenly decide what you said wasn’t what they wanted to hear. Otherwise they’re made to look bad, and they can’t abide that. So they just stick their heads up their asses and wait for the blow to pass.”
He is more patient than politicians, and more cunning. There is something about Murdoch’s insistency that seems to change the conduits of time: he forgives no transgression, while his transgressions are forgiven. Politicians manage to persuade themselves they can use him to their benefit, but find out the hard way who is in charge. “It is better to ride the tiger’s back than let it rip your throat out,” Tony Blair once said. It is hard not to see in Blair’s rumoured affair with Murdoch’s wife some cold revenge. (Post-divorce, the Murdoch camp stopped denying these rumours, and even leaked an embarrassing mash note Deng wrote about Blair: “I’m so so missing Tony,” she wrote. “Because he is so so charming and his clothes are so good. He has such good body and he has really really good legs Butt . . . And he is slim tall and good skin. Pierce blue eyes which I love. Love his eyes. Also I love his power on the stage …”)
Former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd is more indicative of how these tiger rides usually end. He was so poorly treated by Murdoch’s Australian newspapers that in a recent interview with The Saturday Paper he called News Corp a “cancer” on democracy and suggested it should be the subject of a royal commission. “They go after people who have the audacity to raise a question about their behaviour,” Rudd said. He added, “It’s one of the reasons I’m speaking out directly, so that people can have a normal national conversation rather than a continued national embarrassed silence about this.”
Rudd’s sense of wounding was understandable. Less so was his decision to write for The Australian shortly afterwards – six days after The Saturday Paper interview, the national broadsheet ran a piece called “What We Got Right: Kevin Rudd’s Top 10 Labor Triumphs in Office”, by Kevin Rudd. The cancer was seemingly inoperable.
Why didn’t we think of that?
Former politicians seeking rapprochement with the Murdoch media are relatively rare. Usually, it is a hopeful opposition leader, or a grateful incumbent, who tries to accommodate themselves. Murdoch is a right-wing ideologue, but not the most doctrinaire kind. His papers editorialised in favour of the Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd, supported Tony Blair extensively, and launched the career of the Democratic New York mayor Ed Koch in such one-eyed fashion that New York Post reporters complained. This history means that left-wing parties (unless they are, say, the Australian Greens or UK Labour under Jeremy Corbyn) can be seduced into thinking they may get a fair hearing.
It is nearly forgotten now, but Murdoch’s earliest serious politicking was his support for Gough Whitlam. He even instructed Evan Williams to write a speech for Whitlam in 1972; Whitlam wouldn’t give it. “In every basic area of human need,” Williams wrote, “the Australian people are deprived and wanting, and lagging behind other comparable nations.” The speech takes aim at private health insurance and private schools, and advocates efficient public transport, unpolluted cities, and equality of access to services. Most notable is the language. “Australians are entitled to them – as a right. We will provide them – as a right.” Murdoch would go on to attack this idea of “entitlement” more than almost any other person. By 1975 he was instructing his editors to “kill Whitlam”.
There is a half-believed explanation for this turnaround. Once elected, Whitlam didn’t give Murdoch the credit he anticipated, and compounded the insult by ditching him for a dinner with English television host David Frost. If Whitlam had been more grateful, the story goes, perhaps Murdoch would have been a lion for the left instead. This overlooks how thin Murdoch’s views are, and how capricious. He has supported candidates as outlandish as Ross Perot and Ben Carson. His ideas are skittish and shallow, and he has the easily bored political positioning of a rich man with no fixed abode.
“I don’t know that my views are as right wing as they’re painted to be,” Murdoch once said, but Andrew Neil countered that his former boss is much more right wing than he first appears. Perhaps what Murdoch means is that he is a social moderate: years ago, he dabbled with the candidacy of the televangelist Pat Robertson, but now cultivates only a garden-variety homophobia, which he has the sense to keep quiet about. “I’m considered homophobic and crazy about these things and old-fashioned” was his take on same-sex marriage.
On foreign policy, though, few are more belligerent. When Margaret Thatcher was negotiating with the Chinese over Hong Kong’s sovereignty, Murdoch suggested dropping an atomic bomb on Beijing should they invade, conceding that “I suppose we could fire a warning nuke into a desert first”. His most significant falling out with Thatcher came when she refused to back Ronald Reagan’s invasion of Grenada. During the Falklands War, The Sun’s coverage was so jingoistic that Private Eye parodied it with a headline reading “KILL AN ARGIE AND WIN A METRO”. Service personnel thought the offer of a car was real. “Why didn’t we think of that?” Kelvin MacKenzie is said to have responded.
Someone in a time machine pressing Gough Whitlam towards a dreary dinner would be making a more fundamental mistake: misunderstanding the role of the media in a Western society. Bellicosity is virtually a prerequisite for becoming a popular press baron. War feeds the interests of proprietors as well as their readers – and this function of power dates back centuries. In 1776 Adam Smith could note that
the people who live in the capital … feel, many of them, scarce any inconveniency from the war; but enjoy, at their ease, the amusement of reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies … They are commonly dissatisfied with the return of peace, which puts an end to their amusement, and to a thousand visionary hopes of conquest and national glory from a longer continuance of the war.
This warmongering is only a single element in a set of selection biases. Alongside William Randolph Hearst or Lord Northcliffe, Murdoch looks unexceptional, no longer one of a kind. A News underling writing today could note a “volcanic intolerance of slipshod work”, outline Murdoch’s enthusiasm for “fact before argument”, or argue that he “had little concern for the abstract … was not a thinker … was mainly emotional … was more interested in people than in things” – but these are descriptions of the father of popular journalism, Lord Northcliffe, written in 1931. As Guardian writer Ian Jack pointed out, they applied equally to Paul Dacre. A gambler in business who always wins, someone with an uncanny ability to divine the tastes of the public – so many of the conditions of Murdoch’s career are pre-conditions for survivorship, not deep insights into his character.
Bloody press lords
One thing that did make Murdoch exceptional was his lack of care for social graces. This, set against the stiff propriety of upper-class Britain, is perhaps his most Australian quality. “I’m quite ashamed,” he said. “I enjoy popular journalism. I must say I enjoy it more than what you would call quality journalism.” But he wasn’t really ashamed at all. When Watergate happened, Murdoch’s response broke with the rest of the journalistic class. “The American press might get their pleasure in successfully crucifying Nixon,” he said, “but the last laugh could be on them. See how they like it when the Commies take over the West.” He would be in the business of speaking power to truth instead.
Before he railed against Commies, Murdoch was one. One of the key props of his life is a bust of Lenin kept in his rooms at Oxford, to which he would drink toasts and recite Russian poetry. This relic of “Red Rupe” is supposed to show the extremity of his evolution: from undergraduate Marxist in the Labour Club to a union-breaker and Thatcherite-in-chief. It was, he said, his tussle with the printing union chapels of Fleet Street – “the most searing experience of my life” – that repelled him from labour politics forever. He repaid the chapels by disbanding them for good, with the assistance of Margaret Thatcher and her police.
The printing unions in the 1970s were an almost parodic expression of the inefficiencies of “Winter of Discontent” British labourism. Sexist, corrupt, rife with go-slows and no-shows, they took The Times, never a profit-making newspaper, to the absolute brink of bankruptcy. (In an irony that would be noted later, The Times was unable to report on Thatcher’s ascension to 10 Downing Street because of a year-long industrial action.) But Murdoch’s easy transition to the side of capital, shedding his undergraduate state socialism in the process, glosses over something more fundamental. He has never stopped being a Leninist, at least in the Steve Bannon–like sense of wanting to destroy the contemporary establishment.
The ready psychological explanation for this is his status as a perpetual outsider. At Geelong Grammar he was the son of a press baron, not the offspring of landed gentry, and was bullied accordingly. He was a colonial in Great Britain, and a man of initiative in the stuffy languor of Menzies’ Australia. In the United States he was a foreigner trying to do business in New York City with no connections (a category previously considered ripe for fleecing), and a newspaper proprietor who did not share America’s sacral view of the press. He hated all of these incumbent attitudes, and not only sought revenge on them but also saw them as opportunities for arbitrage. They were different, but also fundamentally the same: flabby, mistaken and patronising enclaves, ripe for attack from real competition. He has called these people many names – Commies, and poofters, and limp liberals – but one particular epithet is most salient: “the bishops”.
The ur-establishment Murdoch set himself against, the template for all the others, was Establishment Britain after the Second World War. He encountered it twice, first in 1950 as a student at Oxford, then again when he started his British newspaper empire, beginning with the purchase of the News of the World in 1969. In Australia, the Murdochs were unusual among establishment families for their Anglophobia (partly driven by Sir Keith Murdoch’s experiences at Gallipoli), and Rupert reserved special hostility for English snobbery. The hostility was reciprocated – at Oxford, a magazine described him as a “brilliant betting man with the individual Billingsgate touch”, a reference to the coarse, working-class fish market known for its foul language.
There is a British tradition of colonial subjects, especially Canadians, gaining peerages through owning newspapers, and at first Murdoch seemed to be joining it. Roy Herbert Thomson, the son of a barber, became Lord Thomson of Fleet. William Maxwell Aitken, one of 10 children, became Lord Beaverbrook. Conrad Black became Lord Black of Crossharbour. These men put on airs, and renounced their own citizenships, and bought into the deference and ludicrousness of the English aristocracy. (In return, hereditary peers considered them the apogee of vulgarity.)
But Murdoch’s key advantage, apart from being sober (he once said that on Fleet Street this made him a comparative genius after lunchtime), was that he wasn’t interested in any kind of social esteem. Not from those people, anyway. The press wasn’t a route to anything else, it was the final destination. “When people start taking knighthoods and peerages,” he told one of his biographers, “it really is telling the world you’ve sold out.” Worse than being obsequious, it was a mistake.
The establishment attacked Murdoch with gusto from the beginning. He serialised a Christine Keeler book when former minister John Profumo’s reputation was being rehabilitated, and David Frost prepared a hostile reception for him on television, complete with booing audience. (David Frost has a lot to answer for.) Murdoch, uncowed, suggested Britain was under the thumb of its upper classes, and Frost said with disdain, “That’s an Australian view of England … I mean, of course there’s a lot of daft old-school ties in this country and so on but it doesn’t work like that – the establishment are not as well organised as that.” Murdoch replied, “You reckon?”
Not long afterwards, he bought the production company responsible for the show.
“The British always thought in terms of their empire and were pretty patronising toward us Australians,” Murdoch recalled in a 2005 interview. “Pat you on your head and say ‘You’ll do well,’ and when you do well they kick you to death.” Not only would he not succumb to this attitude, or try to ignore it, he would attack it. “The Sun has no party politics,” ran a front-page manifesto in its first week proper under Murdoch management. “The Sun is a radical newspaper. We are not going to bow to the establishment in any of its privileged enclaves. Ever.” Impervious to the need for honours, Murdoch was going to kick the establishment to death instead.
Hey sonny, you can’t park here
In 1953, when Murdoch took over his father’s business, he was only 22, and so green that when he pulled his car into the Adelaide News garage that he owned, an attendant called, “Hey sonny, you can’t park here.” He had watched his father carefully, though, and had also worked as a sub-editor on Lord Beaverbrook’s Daily Express, then an influential and popular newspaper. This tutelage means that Murdoch is probably the only press baron in the world who could, if necessary, perform almost any of the jobs on any of his news titles.
He has excellent editorial judgement. Once, counselling Piers Morgan not to splash with an image of Ronnie Kray’s corpse, he told him that “stiffs don’t sell papers, they sell American magazines”. (He was right.) He can sub-edit in a way that is now almost extinct – when he took over The Wall Street Journal, he dictated the new look of the front page with a Magic Marker, right down to the size of the picture boxes. Post-takeover, the paper became the highest selling national paper in America.
He can report. Michael Wolff found him on the phone, note-pad working, calling sources and making corroborations. (Typically, this industry was for a New York Post gossip story smearing Hillary Clinton; it never ran.) He can write. In 1974, the founder of Rolling Stone, Jann Wenner, told Murdoch how much he loved the National Star’s political column. Who wrote it? Murdoch did, under a pseudonym.
He also has an uncanny eye for detail. Proofreading his wife Anna’s novel, a rural romance, he clocked that she had the Murrumbidgee River flowing the wrong way.
When he bought the News of the World, it published on the weekend; he bought The Sun so that the expensive presses would not be dormant during the week. One was broadsheet format, and one was tabloid format, and the printers told him printing these on the same press was impossible. His biographer William Shawcross described what happened next:
He informed the printers that their presses had originally been supplied with bars which would fold the pages to tabloid size. The head printer denied it. So Murdoch took off his jacket and climbed onto a press. In a box at the top of the machine he found the bar in question wrapped in sacking and covered in ink and grime.
Murdoch combines his intelligences with this kind of ready reckoning, some of it quite philistine. Like many gamblers he reads the horoscopes. (The Sun’s editors were always trying to get him in a good mood by cooking the entry for Pisces.) Anna Murdoch tried to get him interested in the arts, but he didn’t care if it was Carmen or Camelot. He wears a transparently quackish brand of watch that provides a “constant supply of natural frequencies that circle the earth”; it is supposed to be good for his jetlag. The criticism that he dumbs down every media property he purchases is largely true. Even when taking over TV Guide, he complained that it was “far too cerebral”.
Together, his aptitude and his tastes combine into something one of his editors, Sam Hall Kaplan, called “crassmanship”. “When it comes to headlines, as well as the play of stories, Rupert sheds with ease, if not relief, his Oxford prejudices, intellectual pretensions and the mannerisms of his wealth,” Kaplan wrote in a 1985 review of Michael Leapman’s Arrogant Aussie: The Rupert Murdoch Story. The proprietor’s talent is “uniquely geared to attract the lowest common denominator of reader”. This unique gearing never made the New York Post a profit, but it worked in Australia and on Fleet Street, and it clearly informed the thinking behind Fox News too.
Looking back, it is difficult to appreciate the contrast. At the end of the 1960s, tabloid proprietors still had a naive, almost pathetic sense of stewardship; it was still possible to hear them talk about a “mission to educate”. The Sun itself was pro Labor. The Daily Mirror ran an ambitious supplement called Mirrorscope, aimed at educating its readers on world affairs in a lively way. When planning his redesign of The Sun, Murdoch once picked up a copy of Mirrorscope and put it into the bin. “If you think we’re going to have any of that upmarket shit in our paper,” he told Godfrey Hodgson of The Sunday Times, “you’re very much mistaken.”
The relaunched Sun crushed the Mirror instantly and permanently. Mirrorscope was gone by 1974. The Mirror was forced to ape its every move – especially the introduction of bingo – or die trying. Murdoch’s mother disapproved of the crass and sexual nature of The Sun (this objection is often cited as the reason his Australian newspapers had no Page 3 girls), but he had explained his reasoning about the popular press to her: “Look, Mum, in Britain there are hundreds of thousands of people who are living in miserable postwar tenement places. They have nothing in the world but the Pools and, you know, this is the sort of thing that they [want].”
At its peak in the early 1990s, The Sun was selling four million copies a day in a country of 55 million people, and it wasn’t just read in the tenements.
Funny, hypocritical, racist, jingoist, homophobic and leering, and with a new disdain for the royal family generally and their privacy in particular, together The Sun and the News of the World transformed the United Kingdom, and in the process degraded it. It was the ultimate form of colonial revenge. Britain, not Australia, Murdoch seemed to say, was the crass and ugly place, with the coarse and common people with the insatiably lurid tastes. Just look at its press. Christopher Hitchens called the process “the replacement of gutter journalism by sewer journalism”. Instead of repudiating this sort of charge, Murdoch and his employees revelled in it. Kelvin MacKenzie later suggested that his own epitaph should read, “He lived and died in the gutter.”
Bringing the tone down
What unites Murdoch’s “crassmanship” and his business sense is an eye for human weakness. When Murdoch bought the News of the World, for example, he realised that its establishment owners would be reluctant to sell to his competitor, Robert Maxwell, because he was Jewish. Murdoch drank tea from a china set to impress them, and ordered some uncharacteristic champagne. This pantomime display of gentlemanly manners made them sign an agreement they shouldn’t have, and he quickly undermined them.
The same instinct is expressed in the people he hires. Nick Davies described this synergy between company and product in Hack Attack:
“He loves thugs,” as one of his senior executives puts it. Roger Ailes at Fox TV; Kelvin MacKenzie at The Sun; Col Allan at the New York Post; Sam Chisholm at Sky TV: they all came out of the same box, marked “bully”. And when Murdoch’s men bully, their victims really feel it. All these members of the power elite have seen what Murdoch’s news outlets can do, using their stories in the same way muggers in back alleys use their boots, to kick a victim to pulp. “Monstering”, they call it – a savage and prolonged public attack on a target’s life, often aimed at the most private and sensitive part of their existence, their sexual behaviour, inflicting maximum pain, maximum humiliation.
You would anticipate then that the Murdoch media arm that does the most bullying externally does the most bullying internally, and that is so.
Creeps
Not long ago, the management at Fox News put up wall posters extolling staff to speak up about improper behaviour. This marked the establishment of a Workplace Professionalism and Inclusion Council, which would report independently to the 21st Century Fox board. This body, as incongruous as an ice-cream shop in hell, exists in a workplace antithetical to diversity and professionalism. It is there only because it was mandated as part of a suit settlement, and has its work cut out. The same month the council launched, Fox News presenter Sean Hannity, himself accused of sexual harassment, ran a series of segments claiming women invent stories of workplace mistreatment for the money.
Curious about this development, I contacted one of the council members, the former vice president of litigation at NBC, Brande Stellings, to find out what her job was like. It was the only interview I have ever conducted where I did not even hear the subject’s voice: her communications person jumped in at every question, before ending the call. She then referred me instead to Irena Briganti, Fox’s executive vice president for corporate communications. Several Fox women told New York magazine in 2016 that “one of the reasons they did not speak up about sexual harassment in the past was that they were terrified Briganti would find out and smear them in the press”.
Few expected Briganti to survive the 2016 firing of Roger Ailes, the founder of Fox News, and one of the worst prolific sexual abusers in American corporate history. “[Briganti’s] departure would send a powerful signal of just how dramatically the Murdochs intend to change Fox News post-Ailes,” New York magazine wrote. What her retention might mean it did not say, but the council’s report should be good.
When Murdoch himself was asked in December 2017 if the Ailes issue had hurt Fox’s bottom line, he replied, “It’s all nonsense. There was a problem with our chief executive. Sort of, over the years. But isolated incidents. As soon as we investigated it he was out of the place in hours – well, three or four days. And there’s been nothing else since then.”
Douglas Wigdor, a lawyer who filed a number of actions on behalf of alleged Fox News harassment and discrimination victims, so many that he had to make a spreadsheet to stay on top of all the allegations, has described both 21st Century Fox and Fox News as having a top-to-bottom “systemic culture of not only discriminating against people based on their gender and color, but also of retaliating against them when they stand up to voice complaints”.
The Murdoch sons are said to be genuinely invested in institutional change at the company, though it seldom seems to arrive. Recently the brothers, in a meeting with the British communications regulator, stressed that “no individual working for Fox News could now be under the impression that sexual harassment is acceptable … having seen the sacking of Mr Ailes, [Bill] O’Reilly and a number of other employees including very senior managers.” Lachlan appointed a female CEO, Suzanne Scott, and pointed to this as a sign of difference. The Washington Post noted that Scott had been named in one complaint as “a member of a team of senior executives who ‘retaliated’ against employees or contributors who complained about Ailes’ alleged harassment”.
Thinking some wall posters change Fox News fundamentally misunderstands what Fox is. The harassment is not an unfortunate by-product of some “big personalities”. It did not become what was described as a “breeding ground for sexual misconduct” by accident. Fox News is itself a form of harassment, aimed at critics and liberal politicians, civilians and reporters, especially if they are persons of colour, especially if they are young women. This applies not just to the content but also to the structure of the organisation.
Erik Wemple, a Washington Post reporter who has covered the scandal extensively, wrote, “Ailes managed to construct a legal-institutional complex at Fox News – complete with a compliant HR apparatus and extensive use of non-disclosure and arbitration agreements – designed to facilitate the sexual harassment of women.” He made multimillion-dollar hush payments with negligible oversight. He had critics followed by private detectives. The look of the network from the very beginning, was, as USA Today put it, “blustery male commentators and women, just as qualified, who were showcased for their looks with revealing clothes and camera shots”.
A combination of angry men and attractive women, and sometimes angry attractive women, is, when you think about it, not an obvious formula for television success. Its invention is usually credited to Roger Ailes, and partly explained by his habit of watching TV with the sound off. He explained this approach in a 1989 book called You Are the Message: Getting What You Want by Being Who You Are. Television is a visual medium, so the best way to rate an anchor was to watch them for 10 minutes on mute. “If nothing moved me toward that sound knob,” he wrote, “I would often recommend terminating the contract of that performer.”
A compelling origin story, but one that overlooks the influence of Rupert Murdoch.
Campaigning journalism
Perhaps Murdoch’s key innovation as a media proprietor has been permanently welding right-wing politics to sexual prurience. This moral deregulation dates all the way back to The Sun – a “tear-away paper with a lot of tit in it” was his blueprint – where he recognised that a conservative periodical printing Page 3 girls and simultaneously complaining about filth on TV wasn’t a problem but a plus. Breaking this ground didn’t stop him getting a papal knighthood (for those of “blameless character”) years later. This tabloid hypocrisy is now uniform and often noted – if you want to experience its most repellent exemplar, search the paedophilia-obsessed Daily Mail website for the phrase “all grown up” – but Murdoch was the person who cemented it, if not invented it.
This investiture in hypocritical sex immediately captures an audience in an act of exclusion, even collusion. Kelvin MacKenzie once barked at one of his staff, “You just don’t understand the readers, do you, eh? He’s the bloke you see in a pub – a right old fascist, wants to send the wogs back, buy his poxy council house, he’s afraid of the unions, afraid of the Russians, hates the queers, weirdos and drug dealers. He doesn’t want to hear about that stuff [serious news].” He is also, it goes without saying, the kind of bloke who is interested in tits and doesn’t mind bandying this interest about in the course of his chronic low-level harassment, under the guise of a “bit of banter”. Media products are also conditioning tools, and Murdoch recognised the potent multiplier effect of feeding xenophobia to a reader with a hard-on.
His targets internationally are the same: nefarious, cosmopolitan and multicultural “elites”.
Murdoch, his immediate family and his executives are elite by any measure of the word, sometimes comically so. Lachlan studied at Princeton, where he wrote a thesis on Kantian ethics. Rebekah Wade, the former editor of The Sun, went to the Sorbonne, and shares the Murdochian taste for yachting and horseback riding. The Australian’s Nick Cater, who made the awkward coinage “the bunyip alumni” to describe the bien pensant tertiary educated, lives in a multimillion-dollar harbour-front apartment in Kirribilli. None of these are impediments to an anti-elitist posture.
What it really means is the endorsement of capital over concern, the lionisation of “fact over feeling”, where the facts are dubious and themselves vehicles for rage, sometimes sadistic rage. The “new establishment” is not really a class so much as a set of ideas, the already beleaguered remains of the postwar social democratic institutions: public universities, public servants, public broadcasters, public transport, and occasionally public health. Anyone who defends them, especially anyone with a degree or a non-white face, is a target. In Murdoch-land, a wealthy lawyer would never be described as elitist unless they worked in human rights. Fighting racism is the real racism. Fighting sexism is the real sexism. Fighting elitism is the real elitism. A multinational media company is not globalist though, because Murdoch believes in sovereignty. Particularly his own.
Take The Australian, supposedly launched after his mother said Murdoch “must publish something decent for a change”. The result is now, 54 years later, one of the most repetitive newspapers in the free world. It is hard to explain to a foreigner just how singular its obsessions are, or to exactly describe the strange manner in which it prosecutes them.
After the News Corp Australia columnist Andrew Bolt was prosecuted under section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, The Australian mentioned the legislation more than a hundred thousand times in a campaign to have it scrapped. The campaign failed, although victory was declared. But the main effect was opportunity cost: a significant player in the national conversation couldn’t seem to change the subject.
As Benjamin Law itemised in his Quarterly Essay Moral Panic 101, The Australian’s obsession with the Safe Schools sex-education story ran to 90,000 words across almost 200 stories, an average of a story every two days. The Australian responded to this critique with multiple articles critical of Law.
This monomania extends to the other people The Australian pursues most fanatically as well. Julie Posetti, Yassmin Abdel-Magied, Emma Alberici, Larissa Behrendt, Gillian Triggs – they are often relatively marginal public figures hounded with a creepy, stalkerish intensity where anything they say or do can be grounds for criticism, vilification or (this is a favourite) calls for their resignation. It is not an accident that this treatment centres on women, and The Australian’s commenters, many of whom apparently go on to troll the targets on social media, take a pleasure in the treatment that borders on the masturbatory. This is the Murdoch version of “something decent”.
The wedding
Despite what Lachlan Murdoch and Robert Thomson say, Rupert Murdoch will die, but he has already lived more than one life. “The Murdoch-ization of America has never felt so irreversible,” Jonathan Mahler wrote in 2005, in a prescient piece that described how Rupert Murdoch had changed New York City. “On the ashes of the social-democratic city, he built a capitalist utopia where corporate lawyers live in the Soho lofts once occupied by garment workers; where Trump and Diller have replaced Shanker and Gotbaum as icons; where the mayor isn’t just a Republican, he’s a billionaire.” That process has now been repeated across the world, with Donald Trump playing a role grander than even Rupert Murdoch could hope for. Still, Murdoch can hardly complain. Both men share the trait of underestimating the intelligence of the general public, and not going broke.
In the theatre, and this is a kind of theatre, stories that don’t end with retribution end with a wedding. So picture this scene.
Murdoch, age 85, already grandfather to Sigmund Freud’s great-great-grandchildren, has become step-father to Mick Jagger’s daughters as well. Murdoch’s sons are there, as are their model wives, his four daughters, and a selection of his 13 grandchildren. His new wife is Jerry Hall, best known as a former supermodel. She is also rumoured to have been one of the first ever victims of tabloid voicemail hacking, a test case. How else did The Sun manage such precise, gruelling coverage of her split from Mick Jagger in 1999?
One of Hall’s bridesmaids is her daughter Elizabeth Jagger. When Elizabeth was 21, one of Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper published CCTV stills of her “engaged in sexual activities” in a nightclub, and paid her lover for a tell-all interview.
Now take a look at the reception venue. The celebration of Rupert Murdoch’s fourth marriage is taking place inside Spencer House, owned by Charles Spencer, the 9th Earl Spencer, brother of Diana, Princess of Wales. At her funeral, he said: “[Diana] talked endlessly of getting away from England, mainly because of the treatment that she received at the hands of the newspapers. I don’t think she ever understood why her genuinely good intentions were sneered at by the media, why there appeared to be a permanent quest on their behalf to bring her down. It is baffling. My own and only explanation is that genuine goodness is threatening to those at the opposite end of the moral spectrum.”
You know who he’s talking about.
Thanks to Marcia Robiou and Katherine Noel for research assistance with this essay.
RICHARD COOKE
Richard Cooke is The Monthly’s contributing editor.
"If you told the authorities the information in my statement I have just given you as to who was involved in the Claremont Serial Killings ...... I would be dead in a week ... these people are simply too powerful to fight and try to expose ... "... the chilling words of Sarah Anne McMahon before she disappeared on 8th October, 2000...... because of what Sarah Anne McMahon knew about who was involved in the Claremont Serial Killings and how and why they happened ...... A N HOPE WA STATE CORONER -stated on the 17 January 2013 that ..."I am satisfied that the death (of Sarah Anne McMahon) arose by way of Homicide."
"...The even more disturbing and strange situation that neither the Western Australian Police, Government, Director of Public Prosecutions or even the legal team representing Bradley Robert Edwards have been wanting to have the information that Sarah Anne McMahon provided regarding who was involved in the Claremont Serial Abductions and Murders ....many attempts have been made to provide this and other information from the NYT CSK Investiigation Files to all of the aforementioned but none of them were interested see: http://www.wikipediaexposed.org/claremont_serial_killings.html ... just as they are not interesting investigating all the criminal, wrongful and immoral behaviour by people in the police, legal system, politics, powerful business people, the Western Australian Media, The Public Trustee for Western Australia and others set out in the 13 volumes of the series of books titled The Triumph of Truth (Who Is Watching The Watches ?) .....for of them in the National Library of Australia and the Western Australian State Library....... certain police are chosen to make sure those responsible for serious crimes are not investigated and charged .. other police are chosen to make sure a person is charged for crimes they have not committed and thus are told to set that person up on a charge or charges ..... even the MI6/CIA run Wikipedia.org made sure that the Wikipedia Page created for the 13 volumes of the series of books titled The Triumph of Truth (Who Is Watching The Watches?) was completely removed from Wikipedia by Wikipedia Editors paid to control what information relating to Perth and Western Australia is on Wikipedia and what is written on Wikipedia about other places, people and subjects ...also in around 2001, powerful barristers working for the State of Western Australia demanded that the head librarian at the Western Australian State Library to "...completely remove all mention and existence of the volumes of The Triumph of Truth (Who Is Watching The Watches ?) from the library's index, and put all of the library's copies through the paper shredder" ...... he did at the time, remove all mention of these books from the library's computer index and pretended to have put all the library's copies in the paper shredder ... but the truth is that he hid and the library's copies of The Triumph of Truth (Who Is Watching The Watches ?) in a box in the library's storeroom ...in recent year they were found and put back on the shelves of Western Australian State Reference Library .for everyone interested to read ....... see: http://www.wikipediaexposed.org/who-is-looking-at-wikipediaexposed.org.html ... but the Authorities and the Western Australian Media continue to completely ignore these books and the unchallenged and undisputed facts set out in these books ..... people and organisations would have sued the author and publisher for defamation within the last 20 years these series of books have been on public record if anyone mentioned in a negative light was upset by what has been written in the series of books titled The Triumph of Truth (Who Is Watching The Watches?) ...........Nothing short of a Royal Commission with no restrictions as to what and who can be investigated ..... into the Western Australian Legal, Police , Government and Semi Government Bodies and Organisations, Political, Business, Media, Public Trustee, Criminal World and System headed by an independent QC from overseas for the years 1970 to 2020 ... will bring to public light all the criminal, wrongful and immoral behaviour by people and organisations in the Western Australian Police, Legal Political System, Public Trustee, Media. Business and Criminal System, Networks and Organisations and powerful business people living and deceased in Western Australia ... and make sure people and organisations are accountable for such criminal, wrongful and immoral behaviour .. so that there is a clear message given that any such criminal, wrongful and immoral behaviour carried out by people that have powerful positions in the Western Australian Legal, Police , Political, Business, Media, Public Trustee, World and System will not be tolerated in any shape or form ...... "NYT> CSK Investigation Team
Claremont serial killer trial set to resume amid unprecedented public interest
January 6, 2020
https://www.watoday.com.au/national/western-australia/claremont-serial-killer-trial-set-to-resume-amid-unprecedented-public-interest-20200106-p53p5j.html
Bradley Robert Edwards is facing trial over the Claremont serial killings.
After garnering unprecedented public interest in Western Australia, the Claremont serial killer trial is set to resume in Perth following a two-week recess.
Ex-Telstra technician and confessed rapist Bradley Edwards, 51, has pleaded not guilty to murdering secretary Sarah Spiers, 18, childcare worker Jane Rimmer, 23, and solicitor Ciara Glennon, 27, in 1996 and 1997.
The bodies of Ms Rimmer and Ms Glennon were found in bushland at opposite ends of Perth, but Ms Spiers' body has never been located.
The Western Australia Supreme Court trial has so far heard from more than 100 civilian witnesses.
The next phase of the case will focus on the testimony of police and forensic officers, before moving on to the post-mortem examinations.
Only a few more civilians are expected to testify, including funeral directors.
Edwards previously pleaded guilty to five unrelated charges stemming from an attack on an 18-year-old woman in her bed in Huntingdale in 1988, and the abduction and double rape of a 17-year-old girl at Karrakatta cemetery in 1995.
Both victims, now aged in their 40s, gave harrowing evidence at the trial.
Other witnesses so far have included the woman Edwards was convicted of attacking at Hollywood Hospital in 1990, his first and second wives, his love rival, Telstra workers and former friends. AAP RELATED ARTICLES
Retired detective testifies at Claremont serial murder trial
Woman weeps recalling discovery of Claremont victim's body
Claremont trial: Victim Ciara Glennon potentially seen on side of Perth highway
A structure was built inside a Perth court to stop the public from seeing gruesome images of alleged serial killing victim Jane Rimmer's body
Justice Hall, who is presiding over the trial
A timeline of the Claremont serial killings
Posted 16 Nov 2019, 7:08pm
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-11-17/a-timeline-of-the-claremont-serial-killings/11701542
Three women disappeared from Claremont in the 1990s. Now 20 years later, a man faces court charged with their murders.
Source: ABC News | Duration: 3min 59sec
Topics: crime, murder-and-manslaughter, claremont-6010
Court hears details of massive police operation that unfolded after discovery of Jane Rimmer's body
By Heather McNeill
January 6, 2020 —
https://www.watoday.com.au/national/western-australia/court-hears-details-of-massive-police-operation-that-unfolded-after-discovery-of-jane-rimmer-s-body-20200106-p53pck.html
The Claremont serial killer trial has been taken back to the massive police operation that unfolded within hours of Jane Rimmer’s body being discovered in Wellard bushland.
The 23-year-old was the first of Bradley Edwards’ three alleged murder victims to be located after a woman picking lilies made the grim find on August 3, 1996 – 55 days after Jane vanished off the streets of Claremont.
A police running sheet of the operation, which commenced around 3pm, revealed more than 20 police officers including first responders, homicide detectives, Macro taskforce investigators and forensic officers had descended onto the scene within three hours.
Prosecutor Carmel Barbagallo on Monday began questioning each police officer on their movements that day to establish how close they came to the body.
The two responding officers, Bleddyn Davies and Michelle Beaman, said they entered the dense shrub off the side of Woolcoot Road and came within one metre of the body to confirm its existence.
Constable Beaman recalled how the pair were then asked on their police radios to see if they could determine its gender.
“I could only see parts of the body, the upper thigh, shoulder and foot,” she said.
“It was at that stage that I was asked if I could tell the sex of the deceased person, which at that stage I couldn’t ... because the body was lying face down.
“We exited the bush area and stayed at the roadside ... [police communications] instructed us to guard the scene until the arrival of the detectives.”
A cordon was set up by the pair once then-Detective Senior Constable Jim Crozier arrived at the scene and began a running sheet to track the movements of police.
Det. Crozier said he and another detective observed a torso about five or six metres from the road through the bushes, but did not enter the shrub so as not to contaminate the scene.
Mr Edwards’ defence team has previously indicated it would be looking to uncover potential sources of contamination that could have occurred during the recovery and examination of Jane Rimmer and Ciara Glennon’s bodies.
Prosecutors allege common blue polyester fibres found in Jane’s hair and on Ciara’s body match fibres from the Telstra-issued navy trousers Mr Edwards wore for work in the mid-90s.
It also alleges common grey fibres found on both women match the upholstery from the same make and model of car Mr Edwards drove -
a 1996 Holden Commodore VS Series 1.
During cross-examination, lawyer Genevieve Cleary asked the two uniformed police officers whether they attended the site in their police-issued navy trousers, to which both replied yes.
She also asked Detective Crozier what car he drove to the site, to which he confirmed police at the time either drove Fords or Holdens, and if it were a Holden vehicle, it would have been a Commodore sedan, although he could not recall.
The trial is expected to continue hearing from police officers who attended the scene this week.
In an unprecedented move, Justice Stephen Hall allowed the prosecution to make an eleventh-hour dash to Officeworks during proceedings on Monday to erect make-shift screening behind the bar table to prevent the media and public gallery from being able to see the distressing photographs and vision taken from the crime scene.
The decision was made out of respect for the victims' families.
Edwards’ defence counsel, Paul Yovich, at the trial of his client in Perth. Picture-Ian Munro.Source-Supplied
Exhibit 1128 – Trial_Bradley_Robert_Edwards_Hand drawn map by Ms Johnstone as to where she said her encounter took place
Police near the Continental Hotel in Claremont, after Ciara Glennon’s 1997 disappearance seemed to confirm fears a serial killer was at large.Source-News Corp Australia
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Edwards's defence team of Paul Yovich and Genevieve Cleary will try to have the "emotional upset" argument ruled out. (ABC News: Andrea Mayes)
Rupert_Murdoch_and-his-New-Wife_Jerry_Hall_The endless reign of Rupert Murdoch-After decades of influence
Rupert Murdoch and Jerry Hall, March 2016.- Max Mumby / Indigo / Getty Images
https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2018/july/1530367200/richard-cooke/endless-reign-rupert-murdoch
After decades of influence, the media ogul isn’t so much a person as an epoch
“Those who say they give the public what it wants begin by underestimating public taste, and end by debauching it.”
– T.S. Eliot (attrib), The Pilkington Report on Broadcasting, 1962
“Privacy is for paedos.”
– Paul McMullan, former News of the World journalist, in evidence to the Leveson Inquiry into the culture, practices and ethics of the press, 2011
The Continental Hotel, Claremont, Perth, Western Australia
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