In December 2016, John Edwards hired a private investigator to follow his estranged wife, Olga. They were to track her at home and at work, to establish if she was seeing anyone new.
Edwards had met Olga in Russia when he was 50 and she was 19. They had two children together in Australia but their marriage broke down as he became increasingly controlling and angry. He had a “propensity for domestic violence and a history of psychological and physical assaults stretching back to the early 1990s”, a coronial inquest would later hear, and apprehended violence orders dating back to 1993.
