Car ‘ties missing teen to Claremont victims’
Reports of Telstra vehicles approaching women in and around Claremont should help support the case against Bradley Robert Edwards, lead prosecutor says.
A spate of reported incidents of Telstra vehicles approaching women late at night in and around Claremont should help support the case that accused serial killer Bradley Robert Edwards murdered Sarah Spiers, lead prosecutor Carmel Barbagallo says.
Spiers was the first of three women abducted from the Perth suburb of Claremont and murdered between 1996 and 1997. Unlike Jane Rimmer and Ciara Glennon, her body has never been found.
DNA evidence recovered from the fingernails of Glennon and fabric fibres matching Telstra clothing and vehicles issued to Edwards recovered from the bodies of Glennon and Rimmer have been central to the prosecution’s case on those murders, but no such evidence has been identified in relation to Spiers.
As Ms Barbagallo’s closing arguments in the marathon trial stretched into a third full day, she highlighted numerous reports of Telstra-branded vehicles approaching women in Claremont and neighbouring Cottesloe around the time of the murders to help connect Edwards to Spiers’s disappearance.
The numerous incidents, collectively referred to by Ms Barbagallo as the Telstra Living Witnesses, pointed to a “modus operandi” in which Edwards would drive around Claremont and Cottesloe “trying to lure women into his car”.
Ms Barbagallo said the collection of incidents gave insights into how Edwards allegedly approached victims and may have got them into his vehicle.
Those incidents, together with the evidence that prosecutors say proves beyond a reasonable doubt that Edwards murdered Rimmer and Glennon, point to him also being responsible for the murder of Spiers.
Spiers, who was 18 years old at the time, was last seen standing alone leaning against a bollard opposite a phone box in Claremont in the early hours of January 27, 1996, having just ordered a taxi at 2.06am. When taxi number 232 arrived minutes later, Spiers had disappeared.
Judge Stephen Hall, who is hearing the trial without a jury, pressed Ms Barbagallo on what the prosecution had to link Edwards to Spiers’s death beyond propensity evidence.
“What I want to understand is even by accepting propensity, what is it that makes it more than probable but proves it beyond reasonable doubt?” he asked.
Ms Barbagallo noted the testimony of one witness in Mosman Park, who said he had seen a Toyota station wagon on the street around the time of the screams. Edwards was driving a Telstra-issued Toyota station wagon at the time of Spiers’s murder.
Ms Barbagallo has spent the week noting connections between the three murders and the abduction of a 17-year-old girl from Claremont in 1995 and her subsequent rape in the neighbouring Karrakatta cemetery.
Edwards pleaded guilty to the Karrakatta rape on the trial’s eve.
Edwards’ lawyer, Paul Yovich SC, is expected to spend the next few days making his closing arguments.
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