Bret Christian - Stalking Claremont: Inside the Hunt for a Serial Killer

There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact

Arthur Conan Doyle

A bogeyman appeared to leap from the pages of our childhood storybooks in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Our family of seven discussed an all-too-real demon as we sat around the kitchen table in our home in Claremont. How could we protect ourselves?

As preteens, the prospect of sleeping with wooden clubs under beds was alien to our previously carefree childhoods in a safe suburb. Our nights were now haunted by a man who murdered strangers in their beds. Our parents drilled into us the importance of double-checking that all doors and windows were securely locked each night.

We breathed a sigh of relief with the rest of the community when the serial killer, Eric Edgar Cooke, a thirty-three-year-old truck driver and father of seven, was caught in 1963 and hanged in 1964 after committing eight murders. His trial judge called him a monster.

In coming decades, two more serial killers were to operate in the same areas Cooke had prowled.

At the age of twenty-eight, as the 1970s ended, I had left my job as a daily newspaper columnist to start a chain of suburban newspapers. At the centre of their circulation area was the then-sleepy urban village of Claremont, a short walk from our childhood home where we had shivered in fear. Claremont is an historic suburb situated halfway between Perth, the capital of Western Australia, and its Indian Ocean beaches.

The four editions of the Post newspapers serving Claremont and its surrounding suburbs thrived from their first print-runs. They reported the rhythm of local life, its people and its politics, its quirks and its crimes. On their pages in 1986, they recorded the evil work of a serial killer couple, David and Catherine Birnie. Some of their ghastly abductions of young women happened in the papers catchment area, four of the couples victims murdered. The Birnies eventually confessed to their crimes.

The smell of fear that Cooke and the Birnies engendered returned in the mid-1990s. Gradually, realisation was dawning that yet another serial killer was operating in Claremont.

The Posts reporters documented each twist of what turned out to be an epic spanning decades, a saga both horrible and fascinating.

We lived and worked in the middle of it all, sharing the grief of those close to the murder victims alongside the fear of the great unknown. Someone was weaving a black, evil thread through the tapestry of our peaceful lives.

Was he a local, living among us, abducting and killing almost in plain sight?

After news spread of yet another abduction, with no news of the victims fate, the Post reported on its front page on March 22, 1997: A businessman wept in public, his pain typical of our communitys anguish. He does not know the victim. Men and women have lost sleep out of their concern for the young woman, her family and friends. They have felt unable to function properly, and talk of little else except the disappearance.

Decades later, Post photographer Michelle Stanley reported: I can still see the faces of the police at the murder scene. They had failed to stop another murder. They looked mad, crazed. It was hideous.

Nobody wanted to believe that such vile things could happen, but here they had. Someone was getting away with murder.

Could anyone ever rest easily again?

As a journalist who has told thousands of stories, the inside chronicle of the Claremont serial killings and their aftermath is like no other I have covered; it is crying out to be told. There is a public craving to know the truth about what really happened, in order to properly face the past and future.

In this strange story, what stands out is the culprits incredible luck, the grief he caused, the bad luck of his innocent victims and that of the innocent men who fell under the gaze of police. Details that explain how someone got away with murder for so long have remained hidden until now.

What follows also is a letter of love to my community, which retains its pre-serial-killer, laid-back, carefree innocence, along with its charming navet, good humour, goodwill and trust, despite its bruised heart.

O n a hot summers Saturday night in February 1995, Lisa, a lithe, athletic seventeen-year-old, borrowed her older sisters drivers licence for a night out that was to end, as usual, at a nighclub in the suburb of Claremont, close to where she lived. She had no qualms about being out alone late at night Claremont was familiar turf, so benign during the day that even in the black of night young women felt sheltered, close to places where their mothers had taken them shopping. The village looked and felt safe, unlike the central-city nightclub strip of Northbridge, which had a reputation for alcohol-and drug-fuelled violence.

This protective ambience, tragically, provided a false sense of security.

In the early morning hours, Claremonts dark underbelly was exposed. More than twenty reports had been made to police in the late 1980s and early 1990s of young women in the vicinity of Claremont being followed and pounced on or groped indecently, of attempts made to rape them or drag them into cars.

In March 1990, a woman jogging in Kings Park was raped by a masked man one of three almost identical attacks.

In one serious crime, a young woman walking home late at night had been stripped and almost raped in Rowe Park. Another who was orally raped in the same park in 1987 had bitten hard into her attackers penis, causing the rapist considerable blood loss and him to flee.

In 1992, two women were raped near Swanbourne railway station, one stop from Claremont, after walking home from central Claremont late at night.

In 1994, there had been two attempts to drag women from their cars at the traffic lights on Stirling Road near the railway subway.

On each occasion, the women fought back and escaped. Was this a series of unrelated perpetrators? Or, more chillingly, was it one person, honing his skills in the Claremont area, seeing what worked and what didnt?

As she made plans for her night out, Lisa was blissfully unaware of this spate of crimes. She knew her night would likely end at every young locals favourite nightclub, Club Bayview. The clubs allure was hypnotic and irresistible pumping music, mirrorballs lighting the dancers, friends from local schools and neighbourhoods who socialised easily, and young men all in the centre of a familiar neighbourhood just a long walk to her parents upmarket home. Although underage, Lisas model good looks and laminated card were green lights to the discriminating bouncers.

Lisa had already been to two parties that night a work event, then a gathering at a friends home in nearby Mosman Park and to another nightclub in Northbridge. Her travelling party consisted of a group of friends in their teens and early twenties, all dancing and drinking.

Some time after 1 a.m., Lisa walked from Club Bayview with a male friend to wait outside the local hotel. The couple was trying to leapfrog other would-be taxi passengers to catch a lift to the young mans house in Gugeri Street.

The pair stood outside the hotel long after its midnight closing time. After a long, frustrating wait, and with no cab in sight, Lisa, fatefully, returned to the club, leaving her companion to walk home solo. At about 2 a.m., her other friends had left or were making their move home. Lisa later left Club Bayview alone on foot, heading towards her male friends house. She had spent all her money and could not afford a taxi, even if she could find one.