Police watch new Claremont suspect
18th August 2008, 6:00 WST
Police Commissioner Karl OCallaghan yesterday refused to justify a police decision to sit for 12 years on footage of a man seen talking to Claremont serial killer victim Jane Rimmer, as it emerged that detectives investigating the murders have had another suspect under covert surveillance for the past year.
Police also refused to provide details about recommendations from reviews of the handling of the serial killer investigation, which they claim back their decision not to release publicly the security camera footage of Ms Rimmer talking to a mystery man outside the Continental Hotel in Claremont on the night she was abducted in June 1996.
The secrecy about the footage comes despite the police admission on Friday that it had been considered important enough to show to more than 700 people in an attempt to find the man.
Mr OCallaghan referred questions about the issue to the special crime squad.
Amid the growing controversy, The West Australian can reveal detectives have interrogated an information technology expert after he was seen trying to lure a young woman into his car in Mosman Park in the early hours of a Sunday morning last year.
The IT expert is not the mystery man in the footage. Detectives have been unable to rule him out of the inquiry because he cannot account for his whereabouts when Sarah Spiers, Ms Rimmer and Ciara Glennon were abducted on January 27, 1996, June 9, 1996, and March 14, 1997, respectively.
The IT expert came to the attention of police when a concerned father reported seeing him as he tried to lure a young woman into his car on Stirling Highway at 2am. The IT expert became spooked when the father, an accountant who was on his way to pick up his daughter from a party, stopped alongside him.
The father was unable to take a registration number because the man drove away, but special crime squad detectives tracked him by sifting through more than 300 vehicles that matched the description of his car and using security camera footage from a nearby service station.
Detectives have raided the IT experts home and questioned him. He was charged with possessing obscene material but the charge was dropped.
A source described the man as a chameleon, saying he was fastidiously neat outwardly. He maintained his car in an immaculate condition and his personal presentation and demeanour were of an unusually high standard. But his home was described by the source as abject squalor and he is understood to engage in group sex and sexual fetishes.
During a police interview, the man denied involvement in the killings, but detectives have been unable to rule him out of the inquiry and continue to watch him closely.
For several years there has been speculation that police no longer believe the Cottesloe public servant long regarded as the prime suspect in the case was involved in the killings.
In 2005, surveillance of the man ended after detectives failed to convince a WA Supreme Court judge that the attention was warranted. Police yesterday refused to comment on the new suspect. They also refused again to release the footage.
The special crime squad would not respond to questions from The West Australian about the specifics of the recommendations made regarding the release of the footage in the many reviews of the case.
On Friday, police said the reasons the vision had been withheld from the public had been subject to scrutiny by all of the reviews of the investigation and no recommendation was made to release the footage.
Neil Stanbury, from police media, said yesterday they had been caught off guard by media inquiries about the footage and were not prepared to handle the flood of calls they expect when it airs in a documentary about the killings on pay-TV on August 28.
Police believed their refusal to immediately release the footage would not hurt the investigation and would instead draw greater attention to the documentary
