Claremont Killer: How two unlikely heroes found the key to unlock the serial killer mystery
Some incredible detective work from two unlikely overseas heroes was key to unlocking the mystery of one of Australia’s most notorious crimes.
Book extract
Don't miss out on the headlines from Book extract. Followed categories will be added to My News.
The hunt for the Claremont Serial Killer was Australia’s longest-running criminal investigation. In this exclusive edited extract from the new book Stalking Claremont, Bret Christian reveals how two unlikely heroes from overseas found the key to unlock the mystery.
In early November 2004, visiting experts from across the seas and the Nullarbor Plain were greeted warmly, and with high hopes. They met the families of the three Claremont murder victims, promising to do their utmost.
‘The last roll of the dice in the hunt for serial killer’ is how The Australian newspaper’s headline described the review. That report bore a pessimistic tone, quoting senior police as saying that the murders might never be solved.
The visiting team members were keen to learn as much as possible about the characters and backgrounds of the young women: What were they like? How would they have acted on a night out, and reacted to a threat? Would they have responded with fight or flight? Or the third F: Freeze.
In their turn, the distraught families quizzed team members for details of what exactly had happened to their daughters.
Parents and siblings of the victims were on a rollercoaster ride of expectation and disappointment, said panel chairman, Detective Superintendent Paul Schramm. Personable and quietly spoken, Schramm was careful to explain that the team did not possess magical powers. He was a South Australian veteran of more than a hundred homicide investigations solved by solid police work. The hopes of the families and of the entire community now rested on his expert team.
‘They are being cautioned by the team that there may not be the development they are looking for,’ Schramm said.
The team went straight to Claremont’s compact business district late at night, ‘a critical place to start’. They trod the last known walks of the missing women, pacing out the steps and measuring the times, attempting to see and feel, as closely as possible, what those three young women had experienced. Sarah Spiers and Ciara Glennon had different starting points and had walked different routes, but they were abducted at almost the same end point, the intersection of Stirling Highway and Stirling Road. These two crimes were committed fourteen months apart.
Jane Rimmer’s last confirmed sighting was from the eye of the Continental’s revolving camera.
‘These are predatory crimes – it’s likely the offender has sought out women on their own walking around alone in various degrees of intoxication,’ said Schramm. ‘How and why the women got into the killer’s car was still a mystery. We will work out what deception was used against the girls.’
The team also visited the sites where the two bodies were found, piecing together the young women’s last terrified moments.
Schramm was quick to pass on the compliments of the parents for the police work done so far. That the team felt the need to say this was pushback against waves of disquiet now rippling through the community, questioning the work of the Macro investigation.
Review team members examined a cache of police documents that would fill a tea chest – a fraction of the paperwork local police had collected, representing 120,000 pieces of information, 70,000 calls and the results of 10,000 interviews.
Review team member Joël Kohout, an FBI-trained profiler and sexual homicide expert, mirrored the observations of other profilers. Most pertinently, she began by cautioning that profiling can cause investigators to overlook the real culprit who, when found, would lack power in his own life.
‘Killing gives him a sense of control, a huge sense of real power … [they kill] when they are very angry and feel powerless.’
She said that, when caught, the killer will very likely be the oldest child in the family, with a domineering mother and an absent or useless father.
The community was dealing with an organised, methodical offender, not one who killed in a frenzy, thus leaving behind lots of evidence. There was no overkill. He was someone likely to blend into the community, an apparently normal man with a steady job, often fitting easily into different situations — a chameleon, even charismatic, but a ‘moral flat-liner’ with no conscience.
A selected victim will be one of opportunity and have fulfilled the predator’s fantasy criteria, such as age, hair and stature. Nothing is random. The killer will have a death kit ready – weapons, ropes, masking tape.
This one had acted alone; he was intelligent and well organised, carefully planning his murders. Their man would live within a five-kilometre radius of Claremont, be familiar with its streets and the geography of the disposal sites. He had killed his victims before dumping their bodies.
Even if the profile was accurate, Kohout was describing huge numbers of potential offenders. But her conclusions should have set alarm bells clanging. If she was right, it was clear that the local police were still targeting the wrong person, or persons.
After the panel had finished its work, the members expressed disappointment that they had not fingered the killer. They enumerated the problems law enforcement had faced in looking for clues: no body in the case of Sarah Spiers; no kill site nor vehicle nor witnesses to any of the murders.
Somehow, the young women had ended up in their murderer’s car and been quickly subdued. Perhaps, the panel speculated in a confidential report to Macro, the women had been duped by the vehicle of someone with status in the community, such as a security guard or police officer.
This secret Schramm report specifically mentioned ‘a Telstra employee’. The team speculated that a direct clue to the culprit may eventually be found in his choice of a non-threatening vehicle – such as a taxi, fake taxi, police car or commercial vehicle, which might provide some comfort to young women looking for a ride home.
Secretly, the Schramm team made thirty-three recommendations for further action by Macro, including pursuing neglected testing of forensic trace evidence recovered from the victims.
The team was also especially interested in Telstra vehicles observed on the weekend Sarah disappeared, the sighting of a Telecom van near Hollywood Hospital the night Lisa (not her real name) was raped, and the ‘near-misses’ by women who were offered late-night lifts in the Claremont-Cottesloe areas by drivers of Telstra vehicles.
*
While all media eyes and ears were on the review team leader and its profiler, two quiet, reserved British scientists in the five-person review squad discovered the keys that would eventually help unlock the door to the baffling Claremont case.
David Barclay and Malcolm Boots were both experts in physical evidence, which they knew would solve the riddle.
By 2004, scientific advances had proved that, while witness and confession evidence can be vital, it can also have serious drawbacks. Stark evidence of this is clear from disastrous courtroom verdicts, and the hundreds of wrongful convictions overturned by the discovery of the real culprits’ DNA profiles, years after mistaken witness evidence or malpractice by police and prosecutors convicted the wrong person.
Both British scientists had vast experience in homicide reviews. Professor Barclay was the head of physical evidence at Britain’s National Crime and Operations Faculty; Boots was a DNA expert, a senior forensic scientist with the British Home Office. Their crime-solving talents far exceeded their specialist qualifications. Barclay said the Claremont crimes were sexually motivated, but that sexually motivated murders do not necessarily mean sexual contact.
The pair trawled through all the forensic records from the Claremont cases they could track down. In the last days of the four-week review, they made an interesting, and alarming, discovery. None of this startling information was shared with the public, except in an oblique way.
The two scientists found records of 4000 fibres, hairs and possible DNA samples that had been recovered from the sites where Jane Rimmer’s and Ciara Glennon’s bodies had been found. When they tracked the progress of the samples through the testing laboratories, however, they discovered that many had either not been tested, or not tested against each other.
Such comparisons could prove whether body hair or fibres came from the body or clothing of one murderer, or from different murderers.
Obvious Macro prejudices jumped out at them. Thick green silk recovered from Ciara’s bush gravesite had been tested only against clothing belonging to two long-term suspects (neither of them Bradley Edwards, who was last year found guilty of the murders of Jane Rimmer and Ciara Glennon but acquitted of the murder of Sarah Spier). Foreign hairs recovered from Ciara Glennon had been tested only against those found in one suspect’s car and his parents’ car, with negative results. They had been compared with nobody else’s. It appeared that Macro was interested only in comparisons that put those two suspects in the frame.
The same applied to multiple ‘foreign’ pollen samples recovered from that same man’s car.
Similarly, DNA of two unknown males recovered from Ciara’s underpants found on her grave had been compared with one suspect’s DNA but nobody else’s. There was no match. Much more work needed to be done on these largely neglected samples to see if they matched vehicles or samples from other crimes thought to be unrelated, the pair said.
‘These comparisons could hold the key to solving the baffling murders,’ the Post reported in December 2004.
The fibres, along with a trove of material recovered from the crime scenes, were still available for comparisons. Find them, test them and compare them with the other crimes, the panel recommended.
As Barclay explained: ‘Every contact is an opportunity to transfer saliva, hair, fibres and other material. If we get a match and we know who that person is, through a vehicle, or an address, or by some other means, the Claremont case has been solved. We haven’t anywhere near reached the end of the process in the Claremont investigation. This work has not even been started.’
Also unknown to the public, the panel put together a full report on the crimes against Lisa, recommending a reinvestigation of the obvious similarities between the murders and Lisa’s abduction from Rowe Park and rape at Karrakatta Cemetery.
They noted that Karrakatta, too, had featured witness reports by Hollywood Hospital security guard, Wayne Wookey, of his sighting of a vehicle carrying a telco’s logo.
In fact, a Telstra ‘person of interest’ had already been hauled in by police, creating a giant distraction. He was a former interstate police officer who had joined the telco, did not have alibis for the nights of the murders and had failed a lie-detector test.
All incidents involving Telstra vehicles were collated – during the years women were being abducted from Claremont, drivers of a Holden or other vehicle had been involved in at least six other interactions with young women late at night in the Claremont and Cottesloe areas, each report mentioning a Telecom or Telstra connection. But it appears investigating officers were sidetracked by the innocent ex-cop, who was kept under surveillance and deemed worthy of a further probe. He was later eliminated by forensic evidence.
In all, twenty-three Telstra employees had been investigated.
The panel recommended a much wider investigation of any Telstra link.
Schramm had given local police a lot to chew on in their main report, including the possibility suggested by Professor Barclay that the murders may have stopped because his last victim, Ciara Glennon, had fought back and scared him, not because the murderer was being watched. Nobody ‘out there’ was to get a hint of any of these details, clasped tightly to the police bosom.
* Bret Christian is a journalist based in Perth.
You can read part one of the book extract – The real story behind the Claremont Killings here.
DO NOT MISS
The book: STALKING CLAREMONT: Inside the Hunt for a Serial Killer by Bret Christian, published by HarperCollins Australia, out on January 20
The documentary: CATCHING THE CLAREMONT KILLER: The Untold Story on Sky News, February 4
Originally published as Claremont Killer: How two unlikely heroes found the key to unlock the serial killer mystery
‘Shrapnel and faeces’: Shock of Bali bombing victims
A new book has revealed what happened inside the walls of the burns clinic treating Aussies injured in the Bali bombings. Read the extract.
My coffee date with two gangland killers
In his book extract, Enzo Condello — the brother of slain gangland figure Mario Condello — describes the day he saw the dark side of Carl Williams.