NoCookies | The Australian
Claremont: 20 years of fear
Bradley Robert Edwards goes to trial on Monday accused of being the Claremont serial killer.
Pre-trial hearings have already heard that in May 1990, Edwards had been repairing a telephone system at Hollywood Hospital when he attacked a 40-year-old social worker. He approached her from behind, put a piece of material over her nose and mouth, and began dragging her towards a toilet. She kicked him and broke free. Edwards pleaded guilty to common assault, was sentenced to two years’ probation and ordered to undergo a sex offender treatment program.
Could the end of Edwards’s marriage to his first wife, after her infidelity and pregnancy to a lover who had moved into the family house, have possibly driven him to kill? Was his obsession with staying on the computer until the early hours, and his massive stock of pornographic material, credible evidence of a propensity to extreme violence?
Even before the trial begins, much of the prosecution case against Edwards has been laid out in six pre-trial judgments delivered by Hall over the admissibility of certain evidence.
And then Edwards himself made a shock decision late last month, just weeks before his trial was due to start, to change some of his earlier pleas.
While he maintains he is not guilty of the three murders for which he will stand trial, he switched his plea to guilty on other charges relating to brutal attacks on women in the years before the three Claremont killings.
