THE man police allege committed two of the Claremont serial killings sat in the video room at Hakea Prison looking as if he was somehow in the wrong place, that it was all a mistake.
Bradley Edwards wore glasses, a green prison T-shirt and sat quietly with his hands in his lap, his thumbs circling each other.
Clean shaven with his dark hair combed back from his face, Mr Edwards raised an eyebrow and turned his head.
He looked away from the camera beaming his image from the prison into Perth’s grand old Supreme Court building.
And as the Stirling Gardens Magistrates court registrar Janet Whitbread allowed Western Australian state prosecutor Carmel Barbagallo to briefly mention Mr Edwards case, he pressed his thumbs together.
Ms Barbagallo did not list the eight charges which police have laid against Mr Edwards, who has entered no pleas.
He faces two charges of wilful murder in 1996 and 1997 against Claremont victims Jane Rimmer and Ciara Glennon.
The six other charges against Mr Edwards relate to the 1995 abduction and sexual assault of a 17-year-old at a cemetery near Claremont and the 1988 indecent assault of a woman, 18.
Ms Barbagallo told the court documents needed to be provided to Mr Edwards’ lawyers who would be taking further instructions from their client.
Registrar Whitbread adjourned the case and Mr Edwards vanished from the screen, back to at least another two months of the strange new life he has been leading since his arrest six weeks ago.
Bradley Robert Edwards, 48, is in custody 25km south of Perth and a world away from the life he had been leading in the city’s inner eastern suburbs.
The former Belmont Little Athletics president who confidently strode the green playing fields of his club and accepted awards for his contributions to the community is now living among criminals.
Hakea Prison, in the lower middle income Perth suburb of Canning Vale, houses up to 1200 prisoners including convicted murderers as well as inmates like Mr Edwards, who are on remand on unproven charges.
Mr Edwards, a Telstra technician and the son of retired Perth real estate agents, had been living an apparently ordinary suburban life for decades.
The father of an adoring stepdaughter, Mr Edwards had lengthy relationships with two different women, a normal social life and reasonable work success.
He lived in a slightly rundown four bedroom house in the Perth suburb of Kewdale, enjoyed computer gaming, photography and video.
Nothing out of the ordinary.
One reference in a newsletter to his drinking too much at a wedding he attended with his former partner made his seem even more an average Australian life.
That ended with his dramatic arrest at the Kewdale house just before Christmas, on the morning of December 22.
One astonished resident of Mr Edwards’ street told news.com.au he could not believe it when police swooped on the house and handcuffed the quiet obliging computer buff who helped out neighbours.
“I only met him once, when we were collecting for charity and he gave us $10, yeah just a normal bloke.” the neighbour said.
An elderly couple in the street said that Mr Edwards had given them some electronic cord and helped them hook up computers in their spare rooms.
A Perth man who lived next door to Mr Edwards’ parents at the Gay Street, Huntingdale property where he spent part of his childhood told news.com.au that they were “a normal family”.
Bradley Edwards, who has a younger brother, grew up in the southeastern Perth suburb where he also attended the local primary school.
His parents would be one of a number of land owners who bought, subdivided and developed properties on Gay Street which even today retains stretches of bushland.
The Edwards brothers attended Gosnells Senior High School, now Southern River College, a six minute drive away.
Mr Edwards’ graduating class of 1986 remembered nothing extraordinary about their five years of secondary school other than a fire which gutted the school gymnasium.
Mr Edwards made the senior year book among everyone else with his nickname — Bogsy — and his “future ambition in life”, to which was jokingly put “life member of A.A.”
Bradley Edward turned 18 at the end of his senior year, and started work as a technician for Telecom, which preceded Telstra, the following year.
His father had also been a technician, training with the Western Australian branch of the Postmaster General’s Department which operated the national telephone wires.
In 1988, when Bradley Edwards was a 19-year-old, a woman in the suburb of Huntingdale was sexually assaulted by a man who entered her home and lay on top of her.
The sleeping 18-year-old woke up, screamed and the man left, dropping an embroidered silk kimono.
Police claim the assailant was Bradley Edwards.
In the early 1990s, Mr Edwards began a relationship with a young woman who worked at a legal firm, Esiuw Culhane.
The couple lived at a Madora Bay house owned by Mr Edwards’ parents before buying a house together in Fountain Way, Huntingdale.
Mr Edwards’ relationship with Ms Culhane ended some time around the mid-1990s, before finally selling the house they owned together in April 1997.
In the early hours of February 12, 1995 a 17-year-old girl walking home from Claremont’s Club Bay View was abducted.
Her attacker tied her with cord, placed a hood put over her head and drove her to Karrakatta Cemetery where he raped her and left her.
The following year, at around 2.06am on January 27, 1996, 18-year-old Sarah Spiers vanished from the highway near the Club Bay View in the fashionable eastern Perth suburb of Claremont.
When childcare worker Jane Rimmer, 23, also vanished from a Claremont Hotel on June 9, 1996, and her body was found two months later, WA police announced they had a serial killer.
Solicitor Ciara Glennon was the third girl to disappear from Claremont, on March 14, 1997 and body was found three weeks later.
Perth’s young women were now living in fear and being told to avoid Claremont.
No-one has been charged over the death of Sarah Spiers and police say it remains an open investigation.
Around the year 2000, Bradley Edwards began a relationship with a French Australian woman Catherine Genest.
The couple bought a house together in Acton Avenue, Kewdale where they lived with Ms Geneste’s young daughter, Vinnie.
The couple joined the nearby Kewdale Little Athletics Centre and in 2003 the Belmont Little Athletics Club (BLAC), where Mr Edwards was appointed to the committee as a records officer.
By 2007, he was the Belmont club’s president, writing reports about club matters such as timekeeping, equipment, and competition days.
In one report he wrote, “In the first half of the season I was so busy on competition days I rarely had the opportunity to get out and meet the athletes and parents.
“But as the season went on and the issues were resolved, I found time to sit back and watch the Belmont athletes compete and socialise.”
Photographs of Mr Edwards at the BLAC show a man comfortable in his surroundings, smiling and apparently at ease.
In one of his club reports he addressed young athletes, “you have all performed to the best of your abilities and demonstrated to each and every parent that within each of you there is the potential to be whatever your heart desires.”
Mr Edwards continued to work at Telstra, where reportedly he was promoted from field technician to an office-based role managing technicians.
In 2013, former WA Labor leader Eric Ripper presented Mr Edwards with a medal for ten years’ service at Kewdale Little Athletics Centre.
In December of that year, the City of Belmont council selected him with three others for their annual community spirit awards.
Bradley Edwards had just turned 45 years old.
Posing with Belmont Mayor Phil Marks, who said the four award recipients voluntary work was vital for their thriving community, Mr Edwards was praised for his “tireless work” for the Kewdale and Belmont clubs.
Mr Edwards’ stepdaughter, meanwhile, had come of age and he reportedly encouraged her interest in computer gaming and the film and television industry.
However his relationship with Ms Geneste’s mother broke down and by 2016, she had left the Kewdale house which they owned.
It was there that police came knocking last December and wrested Mr Edwards from his everyday life.
Detectives and forensic police have now searched the Kewdale house, Mr Edwards’ family’s house at Madora Bay south of Perth and the Fountain Way, Huntingdale house he owned in the 1990s.
Police have also searched his Telstra office station and a Holden Commodore he owned 20 years ago.
Bradley Edwards will next appear in Stirling Gardens court via video link from Hakea Prison on March 29.
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