Saturday 4 June 2022 07:46 AM Woman's miracle escape from Claremont serial killer, Perth trends now
It was early afternoon on May 7, 1990, and social worker Wendy Davis was working alone in a corner of Perth's Hollywood Repatriation Hospital, quietly absorbed in writing a report.
Sitting in an annexe between the palliative care ward and a small utility room with a toilet, the senior grief counsellor was familiar with the sight of tradies and technicians conducting an upgrading of the telephone and electrical systems.
As she wrote her report, Davis was looking forward to a family dinner for her youngest daughter's 11th birthday, and she was wearing her favourite shoes, the maroon ones with a pink and red flower on top.
Behind her, a male voice asked to use the toilet, Davis grunted, then heard the toilet flush 'too quickly' before the voice made an odd request to retrieve a lost pencil.
Before she could register that something was not quite right, a large hand holding a cloth clamped over her mouth, snapping her head back, and then another arm grabbed her roughly and began pulling her backwards on her wheeled office chair.
The tall, strong young man tightened his arm around the petite and terrified Davis, who could feel his 'murderous rage' in the way he was hurting her as he dragged her back.
Bradley Robert Edwards attempted to kidnap Wendy Davis in a terrifying attack in Perth just six years before he embarked on the Claremont serial killings
Wendy Davis (above with he then WA policeman husband Dave) was traumatised, injured and angry after the assault which Telstra bosses dismissed and police failed to properly investigate
Hollywood Hospital (above) where Davis was attacked by a young Edwards became part of his hunting ground as he morphed into a violent rapist and the Claremont serial killer
As she recalls in her new book 'Don't Make a Fuss, It's only the Claremont Serial Killer', what she didn't realise until later was the man kidnapping her had surveilled and targeted her.
And she wouldn't know for another 26 years that this was a practice run for the killer whose murderous spree would haunt Perth for decades.
The book outlines how lazy police work and Edwards' Telstra bosses protected him from being identified early on as a depraved sex offender, and cost young girls their lives.
Davis felt her attacker push the cloth he'd shoved into her mouth further down her throat and, terrified it was soaked with something like chloroform, she tried not to breathe.
She struggled and one of her shoes came off, and just as she 'thought I was going to die', her chair clattered over and with his fingers tightening around her, Davis managed to kick him once in the shins, as hard as she could.
Suddenly the man's grip loosened and he was staring at her with dark, unfocused and vacant eyes, saying 'I'm sorry', over and over.
Still fearful, bruised and barely able to talk, Davis ran for help, a security guard came and she was given tea with brandy.
Someone told Davis the man had 'cable ties in his hand', although no-one told her her assailant had confessed to the guard what he had done.
Bradley Edwards was 21 years old when he launched a terrifying attack on Wendy Davis, shoving cloth into her mouth and dragging her towards a secluded utility room
The attack on Davis, minimised by police and Edwards' employers, came just six years before he murdered Jane Rimmer (centre), followed by Ciara Glennon (left) who both vanished from Claremont just like Sarah Spiers (right)
Wendy Davis wearing her favourite maroon shoes, which she had on when Edwards dragged her off in 'a murderous rage' causing her to quit the job she loved (above) working in palliative care at Perth's Hollywood Hospital
Police were called and the man was taken off and fingerprinted. His name was Bradley Robert Edwards, a junior Telecom (later Telstra) technician just 21 years old.
Police never took a statement from Davis, but she remembers a meeting at a police station with her then WA policeman husband Dave and a Telecom manager who apologised for the 'unfortunate incident'.
Dave protested, saying 'it was attack, mate. He lost it' but the manager said 'young Bradley' was having 'relationship problems', was 'a good worker' and what he'd done 'was completely out of character'.
Davis tried to explain her terror, the sinister facts of the attack and her trauma, but the Telecom man became annoyed at her making such a fuss.
The man said cable ties were standard Telecom equipment, that Bradley had emotional issues and there was no evidence for a more serious charge than common assault.
Edwards duly pleaded guilty to the minor offence, equivalent to a push in the chest with a finger, and was placed on two years' probation and ordered onto a sex offenders' course, during which Telecom promoted him.
Ciara Glennon fought off her depraved murderer in a valiant but ultimately doomed attempt, scratching Bradley Edwards and collecting the vital DNA under her fingernails which helped convict him
Ciara Glennon’s fingernail scrapings (above) provided the DNA profile of an unnamed man which when linked with prints from other cases and Wendy Davis' attack identified Bradley Edwards as the Claremont killer
Ten days after the attack, Wendy Davis resigned from the job she had loved, no longer able to cope with being at Hollywood Hospital.
What no-one except Edwards knew was that Wendy Davis' attack would form part of a pattern of a man metamorphosing into a serial killer and that it had taken place in an area which would become part of his hunting ground.
In the shock, hurt, anger and fear that followed for Davis, she coped by burying her feelings and her memory of it.
Like most Perth residents, Wendy had read about a spree in the late 1980s by a prowler stealing women's underwear from clotheslines in the suburb of Huntingdale.
Two years before her own assault, a teenage girl had suffered a terrifying attack by a man dressed in a silk kimono, after which Davis said in then relatively small Perth 'everybody locked their windows'.
Police had been concerned enough to take finger and palm prints from the prowler locations, and retain the kimono in a box.
What was relatively unknown was when the man in the kimono had straddled the teen in her bed, he had tried to push a cloth into her mouth.
By 1995, Wendy Davis was struggling to keep her marriage to her second husband Dave together, its breakdown likely exacerbated by the shift in her confidence and easygoing nature since the assault.
On February 11 of that year, a 17-year-old girl had finished drinking at Club Bayview in Perth's Claremont entertainment quarter around 2am and was crossing nearby Rowe Park when she was abducted.
The chain of evidence which linked Bradley Edwards to his crimes included semen from a silk kimono the women's clothing fetishist stole in his teens and left after assaulting an 18-year-old girl
Bradley Edwards (above) as a young man was a disturbed sex offender who wore women's clothes and terrorised the suburb of Huntingdale where he lived with his parents
Part of Edwards' hunting ground was Karrakatta Cemetery where he twice raped a 17-year-old he had abducted, bound with telephone wire and placed a hood over her head - police believe he would have murdered her if not disturbed
Bradley Edwards tied her with Telecom cable, stripped her naked, placed a hood over her head, drove her to nearby Karrakatta Cemetery, and raped and defiled her.
He intended to kill her but dumped her in bushes, police believe, because he was disturbed by the sound of a security guard's car, patrolling the cemetery perimeter.
The naked and terrified teenager ran to nearby Hollywood Hospital and banged on a glass door, where she could see a nurse.
Semen and fibre samples were taken from the girl and her clothes stored in police evidence bags.
On January 27, 1996, the first suspected murder victim to go missing from Claremont, 18-year-old secretary Sarah Spiers, left Club Bayview to call a taxi home and was never seen again, alive or dead.
Around that time, Wendy Davis' marriage to Dave broke apart, and she would begin a process that would take her far from WA, to Tasmania, after marrying her third husband, Tim.
However, in that year her daughters were by then in their late teens and early 20s and socialising in Perth night spots.
The diabolical potential was that they could have become victims of Bradley Edwards, who since savagely attacking their mother, had descended into violent, sadistic rape and then murder.
Bradley Robert Edwards (left) a seemingly inoffensive phone technician and (right), an Identikit image of a man seen in a Telstra vehicle in Claremont on January 27, 1996, when Sarah Spiers vanished
Policeman Robert Hemelaar measuring where tree branches had been torn off near the area where Ciara Glennon's body was dumped and covered with foliage in Eglinton in 1997
On Saturday, June 8, 1996, child care worker Jane Rimmer went drinking with friends at Claremont's Continental Hotel, where she lingered on when they caught a taxi home, and was captured outside on CCTV at 12.04am.
When Jane didn't return home, and her parents reported her missing, WA police formed Task Force Macro to investigate.
Fifty-five days later, in early August, a woman picking lilies while her children chased a rooster in then semi-rural
