In 1878, Constable Fitzpatrick arrived alone and drunk at the Kelly family homestead and assaulted fourteen-year-old Kate Kelly, the spark that turned her brothers Ned and Dan into outlaws. With her mother jailed as an accomplice, teenage Kate raised her younger siblings, campaigned for Ned’s clemency, and later toured with relics of the gang after his hanging at Melbourne Gaol in 1880.
Eighteen years on, now married and living near Forbes in New South Wales, Kate vanished from her home. She was found drowned in a nearby waterhole, aged 35. Her death was officially ruled an accident, but questions about what drove her there have never fully gone away.
After 24 years, the case that haunted Perth came down to a single judge and a 619-page verdict. Bradley Edwards, a 51-year-old former Telstra technician, was found guilty of two of the three Claremont murders and not guilty of the third.
All three women vanished after nights out in Claremont, then one of the busiest nightspots in the city. Sarah Spiers, 18, called a taxi from a phone booth at 2.06 am in January 1996; when it arrived three minutes later, she was gone. Her remains have never been found, and although Edwards was acquitted of her murder, the judge found it more likely than not that he was involved in her disappearance. Jane Rimmer, a 23-year-old childcare worker, was last seen on security footage that June and was found 55 days later in bushland by a family picking wildflowers. Ciara Glennon, a 27-year-old lawyer, disappeared in March 1997 and was found 19 days later in scrub north of the city.
The hunt became the biggest, longest and most expensive investigation in Western Australian history. Thousands of taxi drivers were fingerprinted and DNA tested, 110 “persons of interest” were sent a questionnaire asking “Are you the killer?”, and a public servant was pursued as the prime suspect for a decade before being cleared.
Edwards had no known link to the case until his arrest in December 2016. DNA found under the fingernails of his final victim matched a kimono dropped by an intruder fleeing a suburban house in 1988, and fibres on both bodies matched the Telstra-issue station wagon he drove at the time. Tried without a jury over seven months and more than 200 witnesses, he was sentenced to life with a 40-year minimum, the judge noting a “high likelihood” that he would die in prison.
In the early hours of September 23, 1986, 23-year-old penguin parade worker Beth Barnard was found stabbed to death in a house on Phillip Island, Victoria. A blanket had been placed over her body, but beneath it her throat had been cut, her nightgown pushed up, and her body slashed and stabbed repeatedly, with defensive wounds on her hands. Cigarette butts and a knife lay near the body, and bloodied paper towels were stuffed around the bathroom sink.
Carved into her chest was a knife wound resembling the letter A, leading some to dub the killing the Scarlet Letter murder. Barnard had been having an affair with her married employer, Fergus Cameron, a founding shareholder of the Phillip Island Grand Prix. The night before her body was found, his wife, 36-year-old Vivienne Cameron, learned the truth and smashed a wine glass across his head and back before driving him to hospital.
Fergus spent that night at his sister’s house while Vivienne asked friends to mind their two young sons. She then vanished and was never seen again. A coroner later found that Vivienne had contributed to Beth Barnard’s death and concluded that she had taken her own life by jumping from the nearby San Remo Bridge, although her body has never been recovered.
Seagull portrait on grass with San Remo Bridge blurred behind
