WARNING: This story contains graphic content that some readers may find upsetting
When three young women went missing late at night in the affluent Perth suburb of Claremont in the late 1990s, it set off the biggest and most expensive unsolved murder case in West Australian history.
A specialist taskforce knew it was hunting a serial killer … it took 25 years to solve the crime.
Now, Channel Seven’s two-part series The Claremont Murders, looks back on that true crime, focusing on the police who never let the case go, and the journalist who followed the case from the day the first woman went missing.
What’s our obsession with shows about serial killers?
Whichever way scriptwriters approach a dramatisation of a historic true crime, the audience is always compelled, at some point, by the offender, his motivation, his methodology and his previous criminal history.
Fictitious storylines about serial killers are equally fascinating.
There’s the award-winning Dahmer: Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story from Netflix, about the American serial killer and sex offender who killed and dismembered 17 men and boys between 1978 and 1991.
In Australia there’s Snowtown, the story of the killers of 12 men disposed of in barrels and kept in an abandoned bank vault, and Deep Water, a TV drama series based on the historical, unsolved hate murders of possibly 30 to 80 gay men in Sydney’s eastern suburbs and beaches in the 1980s and ’90s.
There are also shows about serial killer Ivan Milat and Martin Bryant, the man serving a life sentence for the Port Arthur massacre.
US veteran true crime journalist Kate Winkler Dawson and cold case investigator Paul Holes, whose podcast Buried Bones examines historic crimes dating back to the 1700s, spoke to The New Daily this week.
Holes has investigated some of America’s most horrific cold cases, including The Zodiac Killer, The Golden State Killer (which he spent 24 years working on), Laci Peterson and Jaycee Dugard.
“When we take a look at it, people like a good story and part of the stories that have always been part of human history, are the monster stories – vampires, werewolves … but who are the modern-day monsters? It’s the serial killer,” Holes said.
Winkler Dawson added: “Crime has a very natural narrative arc … true crime is a genre that is so complicated now because we are looking at these serial killers and we want to know what happens and what goes behind everything they do.”
How the Claremont killer was caught
In 2020, Claremont killer Bradley Robert Edwards was sentenced to life imprisonment with a non-parole period of 40 years.
The 52-year-old was convicted of abducting and killing childcare worker Jane Rimmer, 23, and solicitor Ciara Glennon, 27, in 1996 and 1997.
He was acquitted of the 1996 murder of 18-year-old secretary Sarah Spiers.
All three women disappeared after a night out with friends in affluent Claremont, with the bodies of Ms Rimmer and Ms Glennon discovered in bushland weeks after they were killed.
Ms Spiers’ body has never been found, but Justice Stephen Hall said the confessed rapist’s propensity for violent abductions made it likely that he also killed Ms Spiers.
Edwards pleaded guilty on the eve of his trial to sexually assaulting two young women in 1988 and 1995.
Justice Hall described Edwards as a dangerous predator who had sought out vulnerable young women and attacked them for his own gratification.
The court heard Edwards, who opted not to give evidence during his seven-month trial, had declined to participate in a psychiatric report.
Edwards committed his first known attack on women in 1988, breaking into the Huntingdale home of an 18-year-old acquaintance and indecently assaulting her as she slept.
It provided the crucial piece of evidence homicide detectives needed to arrest him almost 29 years later.
He’d left behind a semen-stained silk kimono stolen from a washing line and when it was finally tested in November 2016, DNA matched swabs taken from a teenager he abducted from Claremont then raped at nearby Karrakatta Cemetery in 1995.
It also matched cellular material found under Ms Glennon’s fingernails, gathered during a violent struggle shortly before her death.
Fibre evidence established that both murder victims had been in Edwards’ Telstra work vehicle shortly before their deaths.
The Claremont Murders was written by Justin Monjo (Bali 2002, Catching Milat) and Michaeley O’Brien (Mystery Road, Underbelly).
Tweet from @YouNetflix
Not every serial killer story has to be based on true crime
It has just been announced that Netflix’s You, starring Penn Badgley, who plays a serial killer and book shop manager, Joe Goldberg, has just been renewed for a fifth season.
It has been variously labelled by reviewers as “hugely popular”, widely entertaining, and compelling viewing.
What lures us in?
Holes says Goldberg is doing the killing “out of love”: “He’s committing these crimes in order to advance his own life circumstance. His love interest. Self gratification. You look at these predators, they do something that the average person can’t relate to.
“When people ask me why we’re so fascinated with serial killers, I think it is jumping into a world that you’ve never been in, probably and into a world you hope to never be in,” Winkler Dawson said.
“It’s like a mystery.
“That fascination with the person next door, who your neighbour is, the doctor who treats you, the person you marry.
“To think you can watch someone on television who can be so manipulative to manipulate an audience, a story, to feel that level of vulnerability is unreal to me.
“People think Ted Bundy invented the good-looking killer. There were many before him and it scared the life out of people to think a perfectly normal person could take you to your most vulnerable point, and then kill you.”
Tweet from @IndieWire
Our obsession?
“It’s not new,” Holes said.
“There’s always been a true crime fascination. The internet contributes a fair amount … and people can binge watch … contributing to people’s fascination.
“It allows them to dig deeper,” he says, noting there are “hundreds” of online sleuths at any one time trying to solve some of the biggest serial killer crimes, including the Zodiac Killer’s identity, which remains unsolved.
According to US data survey website, Morning Consult, two out of three Americans are fans of serial killer content.
Winkler Dawson says that in some of the Buried Bones podcasts, people would distribute versions of trial transcripts and sell them, so desperate were they for “true crime content”.
“For better or worse, true crime is entertainment. But what we want to do with [the podcast] is elevate the thinking, learning.”
Either way, she says people are “as fascinated with killers as they were 100s of years ago”.
The Claremont Murders premieres on Channel 7 and 7plus on April 10.
The Buried Bones podcast, which has been running since September, can be found here
