One of Western Australia's darkest chapters might finally be closed when accused Claremont serial killer Bradley Robert Edwards learns his fate.
If found guilty on Thursday when Justice Stephen Hall delivers his long-anticipated verdicts, the confessed rapist will go down as one of WA's worst murderers.
The former Telstra technician, who called himself the "bogeyman" online and repeatedly lied to detectives about his sex attacks, insists he is not the notorious predator who stalked women in Perth's wealthiest suburbs in the mid-1990s.
"It wasn't me. If it wasn't me how would I know what happened?" he said in his 2016 police interview played during his epic seven-month trial.
Vision of his arrest at his Kewdale home showed a handcuffed Edwards on the floor, swearing in seeming disbelief.
Prosecutors presented hundreds of witnesses, including Edwards' two ex-wives, former friends and people who had run-ins with a stranger lurking in Claremont offering lifts.
Trial evidence from the post-mortems was so confronting that boards were erected to shield the public.
Prosecutors have relied heavily on DNA evidence to link Edwards to the murders of secretary Sarah Spiers, 18, childcare worker Jane Rimmer, 23, and 27-year-old solicitor Ciara Glennon in 1996 and 1997.
They also have relied on fibre evidence, which an expert said strongly supported the view Ms Glennon and Ms Rimmer had been inside Edwards' work car.
The 51-year-old was also charged with twice raping a 17-year-old girl at Karrakatta Cemetery in 1995 and indecently assaulting an 18-year-old woman sleeping in her Huntingdale home in 1988.
In the police interview he denied everything, even as detectives told him his DNA was found on a kimono left behind at the Huntingdale house, on the rape victim and under Ms Glennon's fingernails.
But weeks before his trial began, the former Little Athletics coach dropped a bombshell by pleading guilty to those sex attacks.
Edwards declined to testify and the defence case was finalised within minutes.
Defence counsel Paul Yovich tendered only a weather report seemingly connected to testimony by Brigita Cook, the wife of one of Edwards' former colleagues.
Ms Cook testified that Edwards tinkered with their air conditioning on a hot morning - hours after he allegedly murdered Ms Spiers.
She has never been located, but the bodies of Ms Rimmer and Ms Glennon were found by chance in bushland at opposite ends of Perth.
Ms Glennon was last seen alive leaning into a car as she walked down a highway away from Claremont's nightclub district, before "bloodcurdling" screams woke several people in semi-rural Wellard where Ms Rimmer's naked body was dumped.
The same description was used for screams heard in Mosman Park which was Ms Spiers' intended destination.
A couple then heard doors slam and saw a station wagon fitting the description of Edwards' work vehicle parked near a phone box on the wrong side of the road with its tail lights on.
But with no physical evidence connecting Edwards to Ms Spiers, Justice Hall indicated he was not convinced by the state's "homicide pattern" argument.
Prosecutors had suggested all three victims were likely to have been murdered by the same person if they were taken from the same area around the same time.
Lead prosecutor Carmel Barbagallo abandoned an argument that the killings corresponded to "emotional upset" in Edwards' personal life.
However, evidence related to Edwards' conviction for attacking a social worker in 1990 and his separation from his first wife in the mid-1990s remained admissible for other reasons including opportunity and propensity, Ms Barbagallo argued.
She said Edwards had failed to show up as planned to the Cooks' holiday home the night Ms Glennon was murdered.
He claimed he was trying to reconcile with his wife, who testified he never asked her to return.
The prosecutor says his lies about his later-confessed sex crimes demonstrate a consciousness of guilt and undermine his credibility.
Australian Associated Press
