Slaying a monster — the imprisonment of Bradley Edwards

For everyone who says 2020 has bought nothing good, they’ve finally sentenced the Claremont serial killer. He was operating in the mid 90s in my hometown, attacking young girls. He was the boogeyman of our lives and part of the reason I’ve been scared of taxis, as one of the millions of theories as to why the girls got in his car was he was a fake taxi driver.

Now, exactly how we we supposed to be careful wasn’t clear because in those pre-uber days the only way you could check a driver was who he said he was, was to climb in and check the taxi license on the dashboard. But it was laid out as our job to ‘take care’ or ‘be safe’. Even though by the time one of us had entered any taxi and identified a potential serial killer, it wasn’t exactly clear how we’d be supposed to actually ‘be careful’.

In the end it seems he was a telecommunication technician and no one noticed the telecom vehicle on the road late at night. He grabbed the girls when they weren’t expecting it in blitz attacks. They had no real chance but fought and got his DNA under their nails and eventually he was caught by familial DNA. Before he killed those beautiful girls (Jane Rimmer and Ciara Glennon), he also raped 2 other women and attempted to sexually assault a woman IN THE COURSE OF HIS WORK and somehow kept his job. And got a suspended sentence for dragging her into a toilet and attempting to tied her up with cable ties and sexually assault her.

So — we didn’t really have a chance to be careful. But there was more than a clue that he was a no good, very bad kind of guy that someone should have locked up and kept out of the way of the rest of us. We didn’t fail in keeping safe, or taking care. Society failed to recognise a dangerous man attacking a woman wasn’t just a minor incident but foreshadowing of what could come. They failed. And they should feel guilty because that oversight helped to allow a monster to roam the streets of Claremont and Perth for way too long.

And now, all things willing, he’ll die in jail. We’ve captured and imprisoned the monster that haunted the dreams of a generation of women in Perth. Thank goodness. May he rot and be forgotten.

Hopefully the lesson we learn from this, as we’ve seen in the case of Adrian Bailey, is that rape and attemped rape are serious crimes. Rape and sexual assault show a person can disregard the personhood of someone else and can be a foreshadow of what else they can do.