The Disappearance of Sarah Spiers

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. Welcome to the Serial Killer Podcast. The podcast dedicated to serial killers. Who they were, what they did, and how. Episode 277. I am your humble host, Thomas Rosland Weiburg Thorn. Again, I would like to remind you that if you are tired of the vast swath of AI slop and AI voiced content out there. You've come to the right place. My promise to you is that the Serial Killer Podcast will never Be voiced by AI. Only by me. Tonight we travel once again down under. To the great nation of Australia. I find Australian serial killer cases to be Especially fascinating. I don't know what exactly it is, but the harsh nature, vast spaces. And of course, the charismatic Australian people always makes for a fascinating tale. So join me. As we take a close look at a case that stood unsolved for many years, In fact. When I started this podcast almost ten years ago The case was simply known as the Claremont Serial Killer Mystery. Three young women. had all disappeared under similar circumstances and the police suspected a serial killer. But even though They brought various suspects to court. No. turned out to have blood on their hands. That is until the twenty second of december twenty sixteen. Six months. Through this podcast was born. A man was arrested. It turned out to be Bona fide serial killer in T. His name. is Bradley Robert Edwards. This It's his saga. Enjoy. This episode, like all other sagas told by me, would not be possible without my loyal patreones. They are. Lisbeth, Lisa, Kathy, Corbin, Meow, Val, the Dougletons. Jonathan, Manuel, Derek, Alicia, Robin, Holly, Troyer, Lissa, Cody, Young Mustard WTF Reviews, Lindsay, Aulin, and C You are truly the backbone of the serial killer podcast. Without you, there would be no show. On a sweltering Saturday night in February 1995, Lisa borrowed her older sister's driver's license and went looking for a good time. She was seventeen, lean and athletic, with the easy confidence of someone who had grown up in Claremont. She had no reason to feel anything other than safe. This was her neighborhood. She had walked these streets her whole life. In daylight alongside her mother Past the coffee shops and boutiques of Bayview Terrace. Under the wide canopies of the plain trees that arched overhead and gave the suburb its unhurried leafy character. The footpaths were swept clean every morning. The hedges were clipped. Everything about the place announced order and respectability. Plama. It was not North Bridge. With its reputation for brawls spilling out of clubs and bottles breaking in car parks. Claire mount. Well safe. That sense of safety? Was a lie. Through the late 1980s and into the early 1990s, more than twenty women had reported to police that they had been followed, grabbed, groped, or dragged toward vehicles in and around Claire. In March nineteen ninety. A woman jogging through King's Park before dawn was raped by a masked man. He attacked two more women in near identical circumstances. Prowling the same bush trails that families use during the day. where Jara and Banksia grew dense along the limestone ridge above the Swan River. Those same trails. became lightless corridors at night. And he used them like a predator uses cover. In one attack. A woman walking home late was stripped and narrowly raped in Row Park before she managed to survive the ordeal. Another woman assaully in the same park in nineteen eighty seven. had fought back with everything she had. Biting her attacker in the penis hard enough to open a deep wound and cause significant blood loss. Excruciating pain. forcing the attacker to flee into the dark. In nineteen ninety two. Two women were raped near Swan Bourne railway station, one stop from Claremont Center, after walking home from a night out. In nineteen ninety four, two more women were nearly dragged from their cars at traffic lights. on Stirling Road. Both. bought themselves free. Whether these were the crimes of a single man or many is a question that had apparently never troubled the investigators. If it was one man. He had been practicing for years, learning what worked. Learning how to be faster and stronger and harder more difficult to escape from. Lisa knew none of this, as she prepared for her night out. She started the evening at a work function. Moved on to a house party in nearby Mosman Park, hit a club in Northbridge, and eventually ended up where every young local ended up. Club Bayview. In the centre of Claremont. The club's pull was total. The music loud enough to feel in your chest. Mirror balls, disco balls. Throwing shards of white light across a dance floor packed with teenagers and twenty somethings from the local schools and streets. Lisa was underage. But her sister's laminated card and her own striking looks got her past the door without a second glance. Sometime after one in the morning. She walked out with a male friend. to wait for a taxi outside the hotel. Hoping to get ahead of the crowd and catch a cab to his place. in Gugre Street. The street had gone. Quiet. Why then? The odd set of headlights drifting past on Stirling Road. The hotel's entrance darkened. Still past closing time. After a long wait with no taxi coming. Lisa made a decision. She could not have known would change everything. She sent her friend home. On foot. and went back inside. By around two in the morning. Her friends had scattered. Lisa walked out of Club Bayview alone. And headed south. toward Gugri Street. She had run out of money. Could not afford a cab even if one had materialized. Her only option was our feet. Go Grey Street? Was well lit. And wide. Following the railway line south. Path running under a row of established trees. In daylight it was pleasant enough. In the dead hours of the night. Posts through pools of orange light. at intervals along the path. the stretches of dark between those pools. We're long. The path eventually left the road and cut through Row Park. Narrow strip of ground wedged between the street and the railway and bunk. open near the road, the park thickens fast as you move inward. Old peppermint trees and Morton Bay figs planted decades ago have grown so large and so close together Seal out the sky. See L out of Street Line. Seal out. Everything. Their roots have buckled the ground into ridges and hollows. In summer, the interior of Roe Park becomes a pocket of near total darkness. at the city's edge. Amen. Was waiting. Inside it. He had parked his light colored work van in the park. Cargo door open. Engine off. He watched Lisa come along the path. When she was close enough. He came out of the dark behind her with a violence that gave her no time to think or react. He drove her face first into the grass. with enough force to knock the breath from her body. Before she could scream, before she could roll or kick or run. He had flipped her onto her back, dropped his full weight onto her stomach, and shoved a cloth deep into her mouth. Then he wrenched her over again and bound her wrists behind her back. pulling the cords so tight they bit immediately into the skin. He moved with the practised economy of someone who had thought through every second of this. He lifted her as though she weighed nothing. One hand behind her knees, one beneath the small of her back. Yeah, thought about that too. Cargo door was already open. Once inside. He pulled a calico bag down over her head. Plunging her into complete darkness. bound her ankles together with the same cord at her wrists. Pulling it tight. Until she was hog tied, bent backward, her bound wrists meeting her bound feet. She had caught one brief look at him before the bag came down. Tall, dark hair. T shirt, jeans. After that she kept her eyes shut under the hood. Reasoning with a clarity of mind that under the circumstances was extraordinary. That her best chance of surviving this was for him to believe she could not identify him. He said almost nothing. A single low instruction to be quiet was all. In the struggle in the par Her sister's driver's license had come out of the pocket of her Danim vest. Either shaken loose or Taken by him. It list on her home address. She did not know this yet. She lay in the back of the van and listened to the engine. turns and accelerations and long stretches of road. tried to map where she was going without being able to see anything. Then the van stopped. He dragged her out by her arms. Their black shoes pulling off on the van floor. He untied her feet. Yanked the hood from her head. and the gag from her mouth. She kept her eyes shut. What followed lasted between five and ten minutes. He raped her brutally twice. Without a word. with a brutality that left her body bruised and torn. Anally, vaginally. He was merciless. She lay motionless throughout, willing herself not to react, not to give him anything that would tell him she was conscious. Capable of memory. She told herself over and over in a kind of Dissociated loop. She could not believe it was happening. She genuinely believed he would kill her when he finished. Instead He picked her up and threw her into a stand of bushes. Then he stood back and watched. Seeing no movement. He came back, gathered her again. This time threw her deeper into a far denser thicket of scrub. And he walked to the van. The engine started. The sound retreated into silence. She waited five minutes. Then she rolled to her knees. Graves. She was looking. Graves. She was inside Karakata Cemetery. Roughly a kilometer from Roe Park. Its formal paths and granite headstones orderly by daylight but its interior Away from the gates and perimeter roads. Something else entirely at this hour. The immature trees planted along the cemeteries in the drives had grown until their canopies merged overhead. shutting out whatever ambient light reached from the surrounding streets. The darkness was almost complete. Insects choked in the grass. Somewhere. Far away. A car moved along Monage Avenue. She was completely naked. Bleeding. From the waist down. Her wrists still bound behind her back. Barefoot? Hello. among the gravestones. Her hands were going numb from the cord. The temperature had fallen to sixteen degrees. The grass was cold and wet. It stood up. What Lisa did next belongs to a particular category of human action. That does not have a good name. Something between survival instinct and sheer refusal. She ran. barefoot through the dark cemetery, dodging headstones she could barely see. She simply ran until she hit the parameter fence. And she kept going. Embarrassment about her state. stopped her from knocking on the doors of the house as she passed. Instead she shrugged her vest off her shoulders and and use her elbow to pull it low. covering herself as best she could with her arms pinned behind her back. She spotted a light. The Salvation Army's aged care unit, low and set back from the road. Its automatic entry door opening as she triggered the sensor. Inside, a corridor lit by flat fluorescent tubes. The kind of light designed for function over comfort. Nobody at the desk. She did find a telephone, and attempted to dial with her chin. The receiver fell. She thought she had failed. Then A nurse's voice came from the airpiece. And somehow Lisa managed to say what had happened. Though she could not say where It was. The nurse told her to stay put while police were called. Five. twenty nine A. M. But Lisa. Alone and terrified with the thought that he might come back, Moving. Outside again, the cord still cutting into her wrists. She saw a white van moving along the street. Terror closed her throat. She crossed the road and pressed herself flat against the flank of a parked range over. Holding her breath as the van passed without slowing. When it was gone. Something shifted. The adrenaline sharpened into focus. She worked at the cord around her wrists. Until one hand finally came free. You found the phone box. A glass and aluminum box standing alone under a street light at a quiet intersection. She tried the number of the house she had been heading for. No answer. Reverse charges. He answered. She told him she was crying. That she had been raped? That she did not know exactly where she was. He asked what she could see. She told him she could see the sign of Hollywood Hospital. He told her to go there. Hollywood Hospital stands on Monash Avenue, a wide arterial road running inland from the coast. Yes, let's sign was Visible at distance, a fixed point in the darkness. Lisa crossed Moonage Avenue, pulling her top low with her elbows. The cut cord still dangling from her left wrist. And then she hammered on the hospital door. She was hysterical, but then screaming for someone to open it. No nurse dead. She wrapped her hands around the girl and then wrapped her in hospital pants and a gown, and cut the cord from her wrist. Please arrive. So did their parents, who found their seventeen year old daughter sobbing and shaking. Officers from seventy nine Division drove Lisa back through the street she had run. To Rove Park and then to the cemetery. While forensic officers collected what the ground had held on to. Her shorts. Her underwear, her shoes? Binding cord. The sun there was loose and dry. Mixed with leaf matter. It had taken the impressions of the struggle well. It would give them up. Just as easily in the morning wind. At the sexual assault referral centre in Subiaco, examining physician Dr. Amanda Banard catalogued what had been done to her patient. Plant matter in her hair, abrasions and grazing across her breasts. Arms and knees. Deep bruising at her wrists and ankles from the cord. Swelling and bruising so severe. The examination itself was acutely painful. Lisa I'd been a virgin. Doctor Banard swabbed carefully. Labelled everything and stored the samples. twenty five years later. She would still remember this case without prompting. Lisa went home to her parents that morning. She had been gone one night. The lost driver's license was still out there somewhere. Carrying her home address. The hunt. of the man who had done this. Later that Sunday, a light-colored van drove slowly past the family home. Lisa's friends gathered around her in a show of solidarity. Ran for their calls and Dave Chase. They did not find it. At the Claremont criminal investigation branch, some detectives were initially skeptical. account of abduction, binding, hooding, and cemetery rape. Struck a few of them as Too elaborate to be real. But the forensic evidence did not lie. And the case was referred to a female officer who took statements and organized further testing. DNA samples were taken from Lisa's male friends. No. Not the attacker's profile. Public appeals were made. Taxi drivers were interviewed. The cab that had not come was traced. Nothing pointe clearly at anyone. Six weeks in, local detectives closed the active investigation. Lisa's case file was marked as an unclear defense. Trace of offender. There were leads, however. Leads that were handled. with the care of people who did not understand what they had. Wayne Wookiee. A security guard on duty at Hollywood Hospital that night? I'd been outside smoking with a hospital cleaner at around the time Lisa was being driven to the cemetery. Monash Avenue is straight and flat there. Headlights carry a long way in either direction. had watched a van approach along the road. It's headlights on high beam. Coming from the direction of the phone box Lisa had used to call her father. The van? turned in front of them, and cruised slowly past the hospital. Woki described its front bodywork in Enough detail that detectives could match the description. It was consistent. The Mr. Bichi L three hundred vans issued to telecom technicians at the time. Fifteen houses. faced Row Park directly. Across the road. Old Federation era homes. behind garden walls and established paintings. The kind of houses where someone might sit up late on a warm summer's night Or step outside for a cigarette. Or be woken by a sound They could not immediately place. Detectives never knocked on a single one of those doors. They never found out what those fifteen households might have seen or heard in the darkest hours of a February morning. It was. As it would later become clear. One of the worst failures of a case that would accumulate many. The attacks. Continued In March nineteen ninety five, just a month after Lisa's abduction, a man attacked terrified teenagers. in a Subiyako street. And another girl was indecently assaulted at a nearby railway station. He grabbed her and told her she was coming with him. That she wanted to? And she only got away by running hard toward a crowded intersection. In April, a woman in Carterslow hid in a driveway while a man followed her, only escaping when she reached strangers on Stirling Highway. In September, a mother sharing her bed with her four year old was raped by an intruder who broke into her home at three in the morning. Topa. Two teenage girls were attacked walking home from school. In December. A woman washing dishes looked up to find a man at her kitchen window. And In early december nineteen ninety five, nine months after Lisa's ordeal, Woman named Katrina Jones was walking alone. Along Stirling Highway. Two thirty in the morning. upset after a fight with her boyfriend. When a white van did a U-turn and pulled up beside her. The driver was good looking, she said. Apparently in his early twenties. He told her he was a Telstra technician. and that he had been driving to Cotterslow looking for women in distress. Jones accepted the lift. He drove her fifteen kilometers where her car was parked in the northern suburbs. When she got out. He followed. tried to kiss her. She told him she held a blue belt in Taekwondo. and would not hesitate to use it. He backed away. A woman living in Davies Road, the next street over from Stirling Road, had come forward after reading about Lisa's case to describe something. She had witnessed in the early hours of a Sunday morning. A naked young woman On her door. Barely coherent. saying she had been driven to a dark spot near the Claremont Golf Course in what she had believed was a taxi. Then stripped naked by the driver. before escaping into the dark. Golf course back onto the river. It's fairways are unlit, its border, scrub, deep and disorienting. Police were called. The story checked out. And nothing further was made of it. Sightings of a telecom or Telstravan were also reported inside Karakata Cemetery. The vehicles seen parked near the intersection of Smythe Road and Monage Avenue on four or five separate occasions. Between six. Seven in the evening. A man sitting inside alone watching. Different witnesses describe the driver. In ways that did not perfectly align. as eyewitness descriptions never do. But underneath. The variations. They were pointing at the same person. Two hours past midnight on the twenty sixth of January, nineteen ninety-six. Australia Day Public holiday. Another young woman stepped out of Club Ba view and walked west into the dark. How name. Osaram Spears. She was eighteen years old. Sara had grown up in Dar Khan. A small farming town two and a half hours south, Perth. Surrounded by wheat paddocks and graves. But families knew each other across generations. that closeness across distance. And Father Don Ran a sharing team. He was a practical, protective man who had thought carefully about how to keep his daughter safe. and he sent them to the city for school. He had bought an apartment in South Perth. The safer side of the river. and made sure Sarah had her own car. Amanda, her older sister, was her best friend. She spoke to her mother back in Darkan almost every day. Sarah had spent Australia Day evening exactly as a young woman in her city on a warm Friday night should. picnic on the lawns of King's Park with friends, watching the last of the light fade over the city. While the river below went dark. Then a taxi to the Ocean Beach Hotel in Kotelslow where the sea breeze came in off the Indian Ocean smelling of salt and sunscreen from the beach just a block away. At midnight, Amanda had picked her up and a group of friends and dropped them in church lane at a quarter past. Right beside the club. Sarah leaned in through the car window. and kissed her sister goodbye. Inside She danced and drank and laughed with the people she had known for years. At around one thirty, she told her close friend Emma She was leaving. Emma ask her to stay. Sara said she was going to get a taxi. and walk down the stairs alone. pausing at the bottom to chat with two doormen she knew before stepping out into the night. She turned west on Saint Quentin Avenue. The lights and noise of the club fell away fast. Startling Road at that hour. It was dark and empty. The shops closed, the footpaths bare, the road surface still holding the day's warmth. While the street trees threw long shadows under the lamp posts. Ahead. Some five hundred meters from the club, a payphone cast a small cold light. It was the only illumination at that end of the street. Transport from Claremont at two in the morning was always difficult. The regular taxi cabs got picked off by other fairs on their way to a booking. So experienced clubgoers had learned call from a phone box further along the route. A practice they called leapfrogging. The logic was simple. A further from the club? the more likely the cab would reach you before someone else grabbed it. Sarah walked toward the phone box. The same way dozens of young women before her had walked toward that phone box in some dozens of similar lights. At two oh six AM She picked up the handsets and dialed swan taxis. The call was recorded. Her voice on that recording is young and clear. She girlname. and named her destination as Mausman Park. Her friends would later think she must have arranged to stay the night at a girlfriend's place there. It was a much shorter and cheaper ride, but Then back to South Perth. The cab company dispatch driver. Jaroslav Kropnik It was on Starling Highway in Cottleslow. Less than two minutes away. He drove directly to Board Claremont. He reached the intersection of Stirling Highway and Stirling Road. two oh nine. A M The phone box. Was empty. The street. It was empty. Sarah Spears. Was gone. And with that, we come to the end of part one in this series covering the Claremont serial killer Bradley Robert Edwards.