Accused Claremont serial killer Bradley Robert Edwardss suburban Perth life, including as chairman of a Little Athletics club, was so ordinary he was considered a no one until science helped investigators link him to a graveyard rape and some of Australias most baffling murders.
The arrest of the 48-year-old Telstra technician from Kewdale in the aspirational City of Belmont in Perths east comes a decade after a cold-case review that set police on a path towards his door. As the Macro Taskforce painstakingly studied car upholstery fibres on one of the three victims 23-year-old childcare worker Jane Rimmer and tried to extract a DNA profile of the killer from the body of another 27-year-old lawyer Ciara Glennon Mr Edwards was going about the modest job hed had for *decades.
GRAPHIC The Claremont murders
Telstra declined to comment about its long-term employee yesterday, but The Weekend Australian has learned his skills made him useful in the field for the companys contracts with resources giants Rio Tinto and BHP in Perth and in the states north.
Mr Edwards and his French wife, Catherine, bought their Kewdale home in 2000 and he was stepfather to her daughter.
Mystery that haunted a cityMystery that haunted a city
Mr Edwardss former state MP Eric Ripper recalls meeting the couple at functions for community volunteers about three times a year, including at Christmas drinks in his electoral office to say thanks to those who gave their time for childrens sport, the disabled and the elderly.
In 2013, it was Mr Rippers duty to award Mr Edwards a service medal for 10 years at Kewdale Little Athletics.
I am deeply shocked, as Im sure everyone in Belmont is, Mr Ripper said yesterday.
In October 2008, federal *Liberal MP Steve Irons praised *Mr Edwards in a speech that *acknowledged the work of volunteer sports administrators in his Perth electorate. The (Kewdale Little Athletics) chairperson, Bradley Edwards, heads up a fantastic committee and a hardworking group of volunteers, Mr Irons said. As we know, without volunteers, sporting clubs and competitions like this would not exist.
Mr Edwardss marriage ended about a year ago, The Weekend Australian has been told. His now adult step-daughter, who has not been charged with any offence, has continued to live with him.
At 8.30am yesterday, as transport guards at the Perth Police Complex put Mr Edwards in a van for his first court appearance, West Australian Police Commissioner Karl OCallaghan dropped a carefully worded bombshell about the most expensive homicide investigation in Australian history.
He revealed that police believed Mr Edwardss life of crime went back 28 years.
He is charged not only with the 1996 murder of Rimmer and the 1997 murder of Glennon, but also with two earlier sex offences. Police now believe he is the rapist who snatched a 17-year-old girl from Claremont after dark the year before the Claremont serial killings began.
That teenager was restrained with what she reportedly told police were ties, and driven to Karrakatta cemetery where she was raped. The girl never saw who *attacked her because he put something over her head.
Police have also charged Mr Edwards with a home invasion in 1988, when he would have been 20 years old. They will allege he forced his way into the bedroom of a young woman and sexually *assaulted her before she struggled and he bolted.
The unsolved rape at the cemetery has taken a terrible toll on the victim, who has found great strength to move on with her life.
Mr OCallaghan thanked her for her patience yesterday, as well as paying his respects to the parents of the Claremont victims who had waited 20 years for a development as significant as this one.
No charges have been laid over the death of Sarah Spiers, the 18-year-old long described as the Claremont serial killers first victim. Mr OCallaghan yesterday stressed the Macro Taskforces work was ongoing.
By 2004, Macro Taskforce was considered stalled when Dennis Glennon, Ciaras father, began to quietly ask for a cold case review involving international experts.
Soon British forensic scientists Dave Barclay and Malcolm Boots were working with superintendent Paul Schram from the South Australian bodies-in-barrels case to try to find new lines of inquiry for the Macro Taskforce.
Police have never said whether it was advice from the experts or simply advances in technology that helped them make the breakthroughs that followed, but soon they had two new clues. They had learned that the fibres found on Rimmers body could have come only from a mid-1990s Commodore VS Series. There were reportedly about 50 of these fibres and the exact upholstery was not used by Commodore in earlier or later models of the vehicle.
And they believed they had managed to obtain a DNA profile of the killer from the body of Glennon. In an astonishing development, they matched this to the Karrakatta rape in 1995.
The person they were looking for, they decided, drove a late-model mid-1990s white Holden Commodore VS Series in the mid-1990s. They had his DNA but they did not know who he was.
Next came the technique sometimes called familial DNA where police look for people who are closely related to a suspected offender.