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Bradley Edwards suburban life before his arrest for alleged Claremont serial murders

HIS nickname at school was “Bogsy” and his schoolmates from Gosnell Senior High School don’t remember anything remarkable about the man who has now been charged with two of the Claremont serial killings.

Bradley Robert Edwards was a tall, dark-haired quiet schoolboy at the southeast Perth coeducational college who finished his senior school year in 1985.

His quiet demeanour prompted his fellow students to joke on a satirical list of year 12 students’ future ambitions, that his was to be a “life member of AA”, presumably meaning Alcoholics Anonymous.

The man who would go on to be a Telstra technician, and Little Athletics timekeeper and club photographer gave off the same unassuming exterior to neighbours.

Police arrested Mr Edwards last week and charged him with the wilful murders of Jane Rimmer in 1996 and Ciara Glennon in 1997, who both disappeared from Claremont, and over two sexual assaults in Perth in 1988 and 1995.

Mr Edwards has been remanded in custody on eight charges, including two counts of deprivation of liberty, two of aggravated sexual penetration without consent, one break and enter with intent and one of indecent assault.

His arrest astonished neighbours of the 48-year-old accused, who had been living for the past 15 years in a modest four-bedroom house in Kewdale, in south Perth.

The sports fan and computer hobbyist who had helped neighbours with electronic connections in a casual, friendly manner is now in custody charged with allegedly committing two murders in one of Australia’s longest running unsolved cases.

Mr Edwards’ old high school friends were equally surprised, saying that one of their year 12 students had studied law at the University of Western Australia with Ciara Glennon, the last of the three young women whose deaths were attributed to the “Claremont serial killer”.

The western Perth suburb of Claremont is an affluent area famous for its clubs, pubs and night-life, and now infamous for the killings.

Mr Edwards has not entered a plea and has not been charged with the murder of Sarah Spiers, whose January 1996 disappearance from Club Bay View in Claremont started the case.

Born in December 1968, Bradley Edwards grew up in at least two different suburbs in Perth and, according to his high school friends, attended Huntingdale Primary School in the 1970s.

Graduating to Gosnells, which is now called Southern River College, Mr Edwards is believed to have attended the school with his brother, who is two years younger.

After finishing year 12, Mr Edwards is believed to have started working for Telstra (then called Telecom) in Perth in 1986.

Police allege that Mr Edwards was the person who committed an attack on a woman in Huntingdale, Perth, in 1988.

The alleged attack took place on February 17 when a man walked into a house and lay on top of a sleeping 18-year-old girl.

The attacker dropped an embroidered silk kimono dressing gown taken from a clothes line before the attack.

Bradley Edwards has also been charged for the sexual assault of a girl in the suburb of Claremont.

In the early house of February 12, 1997, a 17-year-old was walking home from a club through Rowe Park in Claremont when she was abducted by a man.

The attacker tied her with electrical cord, placed a hood over her head and forced her into a vehicle.

She was driven one kilometre away to Karrakatta Cemetery, where she was raped and left.

Last week, police claimed they had found a DNA match between the dropped silk kimono, the Karrakatta rape and the last murder in the Claremont serial killings of Ciara Glennon.

The first suspected murder at Claremont, for which no body has been found and no one has been charged, was of Sarah Spiers.

A country West Australian girl, Spiers moved to Perth to study at a business college and had found work as a secretary with a town planning company when she vanished.

The 17-year-old left Club Bay View early on January 26, 1996, and disappeared while waiting for a taxi on the Stirling Highway.

On June 9, 1996, childcare worker Jane Rimmer, 23, was bar hopping with friends in Claremont when she decided to stay on at the Continental Hotel.

CCTV from the hotel shows Ms Rimmer speaking briefly with a dark-haired male, whose back is to the camera.

She never made it home, and almost six weeks later Ms Rimmer’s body was found in bushland at Wellard, in southwestern Perth.

The male in the security footage, dubbed “mystery man” by police, has never been identified.

Solicitor Ciara Glennon had been travelling overseas for a year when she returned to Perth to attend her sister’s wedding.

The 27-year-old, who had been born in Zambia to Irish parents, went to the Claremont Hotel on March 14, 1997, a Friday and the eve of the weekend on which her sister’s wedding was due to take place.

Ms Glennon left her friends to take a taxi home, but was never seen alive again.

Nineteen days later, a bushwalker found Ms Glennon’s body on a track in scrubland in Eglinton, north of Perth.

In 2000, Bradley Edwards and his French-Australian wife bought their four-bedroom house at Kewdale, where Mr Edwards has lived since.

Mr Edwards’ wife, whose family operated a successful restaurant business in Perth, has a daughter who was born in 1994.

The young woman was at the Kewdale house at the time of Mr Edwards’ arrest last week, although he has reportedly separated from his wife.

Mr Edwards’ social media pages indicate that he and his wife were both volunteers at the Kewdale and Belmont Little Athletics clubs, and made life members at Kewdale.

Photographs of Mr Edwards at club events show a large, dark-haired man in relaxed poses wearing club attire.

Belmont Council gave Mr Edwards a community service award for his “tireless work” at the region’s little athletics centre.

He has acted as a photographer for one of the clubs and his stepdaughter has worked in broadcast media at several sports events.

Last year, detectives from Task Force Macro, which has been investigating the Claremont serial killings for two decades, announced they had a DNA link between Ciara Glennon’s remains and the Karrakatta rape victim.

After Mr Edwards’ arrest last week, police confirmed the link with the silk kimono dropped in the 1988 attack.

WA detectives said the dressing gown was accidentally dropped by the intruder in the Huntingdale attack after he intended to rape the teenager, but her screams forced him to flee.

The gown had spent 28 years in storage at the WA Police evidence receival centre.

However, a few months ago officers from the State Crime Operations team conducted DNA tests on the kimono.

Police now alleged the DNA samples came back matched two other samples on the police database.

Those samples had been recovered from the body of the Ciara Glennon, and from the 17-year-old girl raped at Karrakatta cemetery in 1995.

Police had the DNA link, so they reopened the case file of the 1988 Huntingdale attack.

Another clue Macro detectives have employed is the identification of car upholstery fibres found on the remains of Jane Rimmer, which led police to believe the killer drove a VS Commodore made in the mid-1990s.

After Mr Edwards arrest and a forensic examination of his Kewdale home, detectives made a further search of a property at Madora Bay in Perth belonging to his parents.

Bradley Robert Edwards will next appear in court on January 11.

candace.sutton@news.com.au

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