BRADLEY ROBERT EDWARDS CATCHING A SERIAL KILLER

A NEW DOCUMENTARY EXPLORES HOW THE CLAREMONT MURDERER WAS FINALLY CAUGHT

- Michael Crooks

Single mum Liz Kirby had just returned home from work one evening in 1988 when she was stunned to find a man in her Huntingdale, Perth house. Kirby, then 24, stepped out of the bathroom to see a man with “dark eyes” wearing a woman’s nightie and what looked like a pair of underpants over his head.

“At first I thought it was a joke,” she recalled. “Then he pushed me against the wall … and I fell to the floor, and he was beating me … I kneed him in the groin, and he ran out the back door.”

Nearly 30 years later, Kirby learnt she had fought off a man who went on to become a notorious serial killer. Kirby, who was left with a fractured skull and two black eyes in the attack, is one of only two survivors who feature in a new Network 10 documentary about the Claremont killings, a series of murders that terrified Perth residents in the late ’90s.