I survived an attack by a serial killer but police dismissed me

A woman has revealed how she narrowly escaped the man responsible for one of Australia’s most confusing serial killer cases – claiming that the police didn’t take her seriously because she was a single mother.

Bradley Robert Edwards, 54, was brought to trial in 2016 following a 20-year investigation into the deaths of secretary Sarah Spiers, childcare worker Jane Rimmer, 23, and lawyer Ciara Glennon in January and June 1996 and March 1997 respectively in Claremont, near Perth , Western Australia.

Edwards was sentenced to life sentence in 2020 for the murders of Jane Rimmer and Ciara Glennon. He was found not guilty of the murder of Sarah Spiers, whose remains were never found, although Judge Stephen Hall, who at the time of sentencing said it was ‘probable’ that Edwards also killed her.

In Night Stalker: Terror In A Small Town, airing tonight at 10pm on Channel 5, single mother Liz Kirkby revealed how she survived an attack by Bradley Robert Edwards in 1988 – eight years before Sarah Spiers’ disappearance – in her home in Huntingdale, WA.

Liz, who suffered a basilar skull fracture and two black eyes as a result of the violent attack, claimed in the documentary that the police did not consider her case as important because she was a single mother living in a modest neighborhood.

Liz shared how she settled in Huntingdale with her children.

“I was 24, 25, and I was divorced with three kids. Being a single mom wasn’t that common in those days, I thought,” she said.

“I just bought a house in Huntingdale, which I was very proud of,” she added.

The mother of three revealed that she had a phone line installed at her home, but was uncomfortable with the technician who came to install it.

“I didn’t feel comfortable with the guy who did it, I couldn’t wait for him to leave,” she said.

“That’s why I decided to myself it was probably him, that’s how he found me, if you will,” she said of her attacker.

Liz talked extensively about the night of her attack in the documentary.

“I just came home from work in the evening, I was working in a bottle shop. I let the cat out, because I had kittens, that’s why the door was opened. That’s how he came in,’ she said.

‘I was just going out of the shower and he was in my toilet. He had a woman’s nightie on and what I think were undies on his head,’ she added. 

‘At first I thought it was a joke, when I saw him. I couldn’t see his full face; I could see his eyes, they went dark, clearly to match his soul.

‘Then he pushed me against the wall and I had a fractured skull and I’ve fell onto the floor and he was beating me,’ Liz added. 

She said that at the time of her attack, her thoughts were for her children.  

‘Oddly I thought he wanted the kids, I did think he’d have to kill me before he could get to the children,’ she said. 

‘So that’s what probably protected me, it was that maternal instinct, protecting the children,’ she said. 

This gave her enough strength to fight off her attacker.  

‘I kneed him in the groin and he got off and ran out the backdoor and it wasn’t until I saw myself that I realised how bad it was,’ she said. 

‘Cause my face wasn’t recognisable because it was so swollen. And the bruises and the two black eyes. He was very brutal, very strong,’ she added. 

The mother-of-three claimed that not enough resources were put into finding the man responsible for her attack.   

‘I think if I lived somewhere in a better suburb, there perhaps would have been more resources put into looking for him. 

‘But certainly being a Huntingdale single mom, I don’t think there was an importance placed upon it that there should have been,’ she said. 

‘And the police didn’t tell me at the time that I was one of many. I didn’t know that until recently,’ she added. 

It is believed Liz was a victim of the Huntingdale Prowler, a tall man roaming the Perth suburb as a teenager within a kilometre radius of his parents’ house, stealing women’s underwear and attacking women, who was later confirmed via DNA to be Bradley Robert Edwards.

Liz is one of two survivors speaking out in the documentary airing on Channel 5 tonight.

The show also heard from Wendy Davis, a hospice worker who Edward attacked at Hollywood Repatriation Hospital in 1990. 

‘I worked as a senior social care worker at Hollywood Hospital working in the palliative care unit, working with people coming to the end of their lives and their family, and I loved my work,’ Wendy recounted. 

‘The day that it happened it was just a normal working day for me, I was working alone in the office and I had my back to the door of the ward.

‘I heard this voice say: ‘”Can I use the toilet” and I turned around and I glanced and it was a telecom worker, and I just sort of said “yeah, sure”.

‘I heard him go behind me. As he went behind me I just thought “that’s a strange… This just doesn’t feel right”,’ she recounted in the show. 

‘I can’t even describe the force and the power with which he attacked me.

‘A hand came over my face, my head snap back, he started to pull me up on my chair, he was pulling me back towards the toilet and then all of a sudden, everything stopped.

‘And he was just standing there. I looked directly at him and he was saying “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

She said her attacker looked panicked and kept apologising to her.  

Wendy revealed she sat down for a meeting with the man’s manager following the attack. 

‘There was a meeting with somebody I understood to be a telecom manager. I’m pretty sure it was at a police station. 

‘Telecom had apologised for what they called an accident. I tried to explain to them that I had bruising on my neck, that I was traumatised, that I thought I was going to die but nobody was listening to what I was saying,’ she said. 

‘They were more interested in explaining to me that this person that had attacked me was having relationship problems. That he had “snapped,” somehow “snapped”,’ she added. 

‘It was when I found out that he had only been charged with common assault that I really lost it and I became quite hysterical and I just moved in completely different direction,’ Wendy, who penned a book on her ordeal, said. 

‘I just buried it and moved on with my family. So you can imagine the absolute shock and horror that resurfaced when the WA police rang me and told me that this person that had attacked had been arrested for the Claremont serial killings,’ she added.

The investigation into the murders of Sarah Spiers, Jane Rimmer and Ciara Glennon, called the Claremont Killings is one of Western Australia’s longest, most extensive and most expensive criminal investigations. 

Perth’s clubbing crowd was stricken with fear at the time of the abductions, as Ms Rimmer, Ms Glennon, and Ms Spiers were taken in quick succession from popular nightspots between January 1996 and March 1997. 

Perth residents vividly remember the time of the attacks, and the long period in which the killings went unsolved was an open wound for the whole city.

Edwards, a Telstra technician, was arrested in 2016. He previously admitted to attacking two other women and raping a 17-year-old girl in 1995.

But he denied murdering secretary Ms Spiers, 18, and childcare worker Ms Rimmer, 23, in January and June 1996 respectively, and solicitor Ms Glennon, 27, in March the following year.

Police had long had their sights on the now convicted killer – who called himself the ‘bogeyman’ online – but he repeatedly lied to them about his crimes.

The investigation, which suffered from several setbacks over the year, enjoyed renewed vigour in the 2010s thanks to progress in DNA processing. 

Nail clippings which had been collected from the body of Ciara Glennon in 1997 were put through testing once again, and matched the DNA linked to a series of crimes committed in the 1980s in Huntingdale. 

Also key to their case were fibres found in Edwards’ car that linked it to the bodies of Ms Rimmer and Ms Glennon. 

Further investigations into the DNA sample found that the man responsible for Ciara and Jane’s killings was the man dubbed the Huntingdale Prowler. 

Edwards was just 19 when he donned a woman’s nightie, crept into a bedroom and climbed on top of a sleeping 18-year-old woman.

It was seven years before the first of the three young women would disappear from a popular Perth entertainment precinct and become victims of a predator dubbed the Claremont serial killer.

What happened to the teenager who found Edwards in her bedroom in 1988 forms an integral part of trying to establish him as the Claremont serial killer.

 Edwards knew her and lived in the same suburb.

He attacked her as she slept, but the woman, who lived with her parents, was able to alert her father to her attack, causing Edwards to flee. 

He left behind knotted black stockings, a piece of fabric and a silk kimono which become central to the investigation into the Claremont Killings.

Prosecutors say Edwards’s DNA was found in semen on the silk kimono left behind after the Huntington attack, on the cemetery victim, and under Ms Glennon’s fingernails. 

As the trial in the Supreme Court of Western Australia drew to a close in 2020, the 54-year-old former Telstra technician’s fate was decided by a judge sitting without a jury of his peers.

Justice Stephen Hall sentenced Edwards to at least 40 years before he has any chance of parole. 

‘There is a high likelihood that you will die in prison… but you committed these offences as a much younger man,’ Justice Hall told the court as he handed down his sentence.

Justice Hall said Edwards was a ‘dangerous predator who sought out vulnerable young women and attacked them for your own gratification’.

Justice Hall said Ms Rimmer and Ms Glennon ‘no longer have a voice’ after their lives were taken away.

‘They were both young women with family and friends who loved them. They had good jobs and lots to live for,’ he said.

‘By your actions you not only robbed them of their lives, but their hopes, their dreams and the dreams of others for them.’