Ciara Glennon’s father denounces ‘abominable’ Claremont TV drama series

The father of Claremont serial killer victim Ciara Glennon has labelled a dramatised series on the tragedy “unnecessary” and “insensitive”.

Denis Glennon, whose 27-year-old daughter was the third young woman to vanish off the streets of Claremont in 1997, made the comments on Monday during an ABC Radio interview about his new book on grief.

Denis Glennon reading a family statement after the conviction of his daughter’s killer in 2020. Credit: Peter de Kruijff

“[The two-part series was] abominable, unnecessary, insensitive and served no public value at all in my view. And I’m not alone in having that view about such screenings,” he said.

The Claremont Murders aired on Seven Network over two nights in April and was spruiked as an unmissable drama event.

At times, miniseries actors repeated comments made by the grieving parents of the women word-for-word, while at other times, the storylines were fictional or only partly based on true events.

The series was created by the same team behind Catching Milat, which dramatised a spate of backpacker murders between 1989 and 1993.

The lead detective in the investigation that caught Milat, Clive Small, slammed that miniseries when it aired in 2015.

“I can tell you that quite a number of the people on the taskforce and quite a lot of other people that were associated were very upset,” he said at the time.

“And I think the show has also shown a fair deal of disrespect to the family and friends of the victims and I think that’s a bit unnecessary and upsetting.”

Claremont serial killer Bradley Robert Edwards was convicted of the murders of Ciara Glennon and Jane Rimmer in 2020, following his arrest in 2016 – two decades after the killings.

Erik Thomson and Kate Ritchie as Don and Carol Spiers in Seven’s The Claremont Murders.

Glennon revealed that during his 25-year journey coming to terms with his daughter’s death, most journalists and media outlets were uncaring and forceful with their attempts to get information out of his family.

“They would simply camp outside my door, they would call me, they would text me,” he said.

“The other quarter of people that I dealt with in the media were empathetic, understanding, decent people, and when they interviewed, or when they wrote, they wrote with a sense of obligation to my family.”

Ciara Glennon.

He said he was motivated to publish his book, Pastures of Healing, to help others who had also lost a child.

“I was in a business meeting [when I learned Ciara had died]. I left the meeting to take the call, and the police very softly said, ‘Mr Glennon, we have found a body and we think it’s your daughter’. From that moment on, my world changed,” Glennon told the ABC.

“It was as if someone had suddenly pulled a trap door right out from under me and I fell into a world of hell.

“I searched and searched for books, literature, articles, anything to help me understand what was actually happening to me … I found one book written by a man who had lost a child, there were literally dozens and dozens written by women.”

He revealed how the loss of his daughter propelled him into four different types of grief: physical, emotional, mental and spiritual pain.

“You’re heartbroken, you’re lonely, you’re sad, you’ve lost control of your life,” he said, recalling how in the early weeks of grief, he would retreat to his boat.

“I just wanted some quiet, private place to try and get my head around what I was going through, and how the grief was impacting on me, and more privately to cry, because grief of this kind, it brings seismic sessions of deep crying.”

Glennon said he was at peace now with his grief, and hoped his book would help others navigate through difficult periods in their lives.

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