The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large (45 page)

Around that time, a number of other prostitutes had simply gone missing. Mother of four Ana Maria Nores, aged 26, was two months pregnant when she disappeared on 19 July 1997. After she disappeared, someone called the police and told them to look along Highway 88, but nothing was found. Another anonymous call to the local newspaper, the
Clarin
, said that Ana Nores “would not be the last one”.

She had told colleagues in the La Perla district where she worked that she feared that she would be the next victim of what the
Clarin
had dubbed the “Highway Maniac”. And three days after she vanished, working girls from the district marched on the local police station, demanding better protection.

Checking their records, the police discovered that another prostitute was also missing from the area. On 23 February, 36-year-old Patricia Prieto – aka Dark Patricia and
La Dominguera
– had left her five-year-old daughter at home and never returned. But she was only reported missing in July when the child’s father asked for custody.

On 20 October, 26-year-old Silvana Paola Caraballo was reported missing by the superintendent of her apartment block after he discovered her six-year-old daughter alone and crying because her mother had not returned from work. Silvana Caraballo was working as a prostitute in La Perla to support her family and put herself through an architectural course.

On 14 January 1998, 25-year-old Verónica Andrea Chávez’s mother reported her missing when her daughter did not return from work. Verónica Chávez had no arrest history for prostitution and her mother said she worked as a cleaner for a law firm and a hat-check girl at a club. The police discovered that she did not work in either place and, although friends denied that she worked as a prostitute, she was friends with a number of the girls from La Perla.

On 1 March 1999, 30-year-old Claudia Jaqueline Romero vanished from her usual patch. Her husband said that she had had problems with some of the other girls, but would not have run away voluntarily as she loved her family. She left a three-year-old daughter and was three months pregnant when she disappeared. Soon after, 39-year-old Mirta Adela Bordón also vanished.

On 11 September, 26-year-old Sandra Carina Villanueva, a prostitute with a history of arrests, disappeared from the centre of Mar del Plata. Then on 30 October, 33-year-old mother-of-four Mercedes Almaraz went missing from La Perla. That Saturday night she left home in the barrio Las Américas on the outskirts of the city at midnight, wearing a denim miniskirt, violet top and sandals. She was last seen on the corner of España and 11 de Setiembre in La Perla in daylight. She often left her four boys, aged between one and five, in the care of a babysitter for days on end as she also worked as a mule for a drug-smuggler.

The city prosecutor Fabian Fernandez Garello blamed his own policemen for not catching the killer. Prostitution is one of the sources of greater police corruption, he said. He also denounced District Attorney Marcelo Garcia Berro, who became a “person of interest” in the case when his name was found in Veronica Chavez’s phone book. She had also been seen getting into his car the night before she disappeared. Berro admitted knowing her but could not explain why she had called him over 20 times on his mobile phone and in the office over the preceding days.

Veronica had dealings with three other policemen, two of whom were involved in the investigation of the cases of Ana Nores and Silvana Carabello. Nores’ mother claimed that the police wanted her daughter to act as bait to catch the killer. The families of the two women also alleged that the police used their daughters to sell drugs. There is also speculation that the killer is a policeman who extorts protection money from the prostitutes.

In March 1999, the governor of Mar del Plata offered a $50,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the Highway Maniac. Soon after, an anonymous informant accused the son of a wealthy family who had been locked away in an insane asylum 30 years before after he had killed three prostitutes in Buenos Aires, dressed in women’s clothing. Although diagnosed as a dangerous schizophrenic, the man had been released shortly before the first murder and the doctor who had signed his release was sacked.

Australia’s Claremont Killer

In September 2006, the task force investigating the abduction and murder of three young women ten years earlier in Claremont, a well-to-do suburb between Perth and Fremantle, Western Australia, had its manpower trebled after an international panel of experts lead by South Australian Detective Superintendent Paul Schramm, veteran of over a hundred murder enquiries, declared that the case could yet be solved.

“We believe that by careful, incremental gathering of further information there are still opportunities for this to be successfully resolved,” he said.

At one time the biggest serial-killer investigation in Australia, the Claremont task force had dwindled from a peak of about 120 officers to a handful of detectives and, in the months before the panel was set up, Police Commissioner Barry Matthews indicated that the task force would have to be disbanded.

All three women disappeared in similar circumstances from night spots in Claremont, around six miles from the centre of Perth, leading police to believe that a serial killer may be responsible. The first victim was 18-year-old secretary Sarah Ellen Spiers. On Australia Day – 26 January – 1996 she went with friends to the Club Bayview on St Quentin Avenue in Claremont. At around 2 a.m. the following morning she left, saying she was going to get a taxi home. Last seen in a phone booth, she then vanished. Her disappearance was completely out of character and attracted massive publicity in Perth.

A taxi driver named Steven Ross came forward with information. He said he remembered picking her up twice. On the night before she disappeared, he had driven her from Wellington Street, Mosman Park, to the Club Bayview. Later, he had driven her from Claremont to South Perth and remembered, from her call, that she had lived in Mill Point Road.

Ross told the police they should be looking for a fellow passenger, a man who had shared the taxi with Ms Spiers. The man did not appear to know her. Another woman, also a stranger, had doubled up in the cab that night. After he dropped the second woman in Dalkeith, he had taken the man and Ms Spiers to the Windsor Hotel, in South Perth. The man had pushed Ms Spiers out of the cab then paid the fare.

“I think he came back to Claremont the next night, found her and killed her,” Mr Ross said.

However, the woman from Dalkeith never came forward. Police raided the taxi driver’s home in August 2004, armed with a search warrant that listed personal items belonging to the missing women. They probed the garden and searched both dwellings, but found nothing. Sarah Spiers is still missing.

On 9 June, 23-year-old child-care worker Jane Louise Rimmer disappeared from a night spot called the Continental Hotel on Bayview Terrace, just 150 yards from the club where Sarah Spiers went missing. She had been drinking. Friends said that she declined a companion’s offer to share a taxi home when the pub closed at midnight. Her body was found by a mother and children in bush land in the south of Perth eight weeks later.

Early in the morning of Saturday 15 March 1997, 27-year-old lawyer Ciara Eilish Glennon also disappeared from the Continental Hotel. She had only returned to work that Monday after travelling abroad for a year. That Friday, there had been drinks in the office and one of the partners in the law firm had offered her a lift to Claremont, which was just about ten minutes from her home. She arrived at the Continental Hotel at about 10.45 p.m. She stayed there with friends for a short time, but she said she wanted to have an early night and left on her own to catch a cab home. She was never seen alive again. Her body was found on 3 April, off a track in scrub 28 miles north of Perth. Her silver Claddagh brooch was missing. With this murder police admitted that they were searching for a serial killer and Western Australia’s Premier Richard Court offered a reward of A$250,000. The Continental Hotel changed its name to The Red Rock and is now known as The Claremont Hotel.

For operational reasons, the police kept the details of the case to themselves. However, they were very forthcoming about their chief suspect, a man named Lance Williams who has not been charged or found guilty of anything. Williams was a civil servant in his forties and lived with his elderly parents in the neighbouring suburb of Cottesloe. Police stopped him on the streets of Claremont at 3 a.m. on 8 April 1998. They had been conducting an intense surveillance operation over some months and said that they had observed him in his car regularly following women as they left nightclubs.

That night, detectives questioned Lance for several hours, then released him. Afterwards, police had his parents’ home and a vacant beachfront unit he owns searched, twice. His car was subjected to a thorough forensic examination and the police tried to entrap him in a sting operation using an undercover female officer. She asked him for a lift to Mosman Park, only for uniform officers to surround his vehicle. Nevertheless, Williams co-operated with the police. He supplied DNA samples. At his own request he underwent a lie detector test and, later, he consented to a day-and-a-half of psychological analysis.

Williams denied anything to do with the killings. He said that he only picked up the plain-clothed woman police officer as a good Samaritan and the only evidence the police can come up with against him is circumstantial.

The police openly followed his every move 24 hours a day for over a year. Until October 1999, they sat outside his house in an unmarked car, followed him to work and home again. This became such a cosy arrangement that Lance would phone the police to let them know when he was doing something outside his normal routine, such as attending to a leaving party for a workmate.

While Williams was under surveillance, and since then, no other woman has gone missing in Claremont. However, four other women have disappeared without trace in Western Australia, but police insist that these cases are not related. One other case does seem to be related though.

According to ABC Radio journalist Liam Bartlett, Sarah Spiers was not the killer’s first victim. He claimed that police had told the father of a fourth missing woman, 22-year-old Julie Cutler, that his daughter was probably the first victim of the Claremont killer. Ms Cutler was a university student from Fremantle, who vanished after leaving a staff function at the Parmelia Hilton Hotel in Perth at 12.30 a.m. on 20 June 1988. Her car was found two days later in the surf near the breakwater at Cottesloe Beach. Her body has never been found. She was last seen wearing a black evening dress with a high collar and gold buttons on the shoulder, and black patent shoes.

There may have been other attacks by the same man. In October 1994, a man hiding in the back of a taxi grabbed a 31-year-old woman when she got in near Club Bayview. She leapt out, breaking an ankle. The following New Year, a man dragged a woman from her car after she left Club Bayview. He attempted to sexually assault her but she fought him off. Then in February 1995, a 17-year-old girl was abducted in the early hours of the morning while walking home from the Club Bayview along Gugeri Street, near Claremont subway. She was trussed up with electrical cord, raped and left for dead in Karrakatta Cemetery nearby

At 2 a.m. on 3 May 1996 – after Sarah Spiers’ abduction and before Jane Rimmer’s murder – a 21-year-old woman was indecently assaulted in the lane behind Club Bayview. The assailant ripped her skirt off and banged her head against a wall six times before she fled. And on 8 November 2000 – after Ciara Glennon’s death made the search for a serial killer official – 20-year-old Sarah McMahon disappeared after leaving her workplace on Stirling Highway at 5 p.m. Her car was found abandoned at Swan Districts Hospital in Middle Swan, a small town just inland of Perth. In all the disappearances of 16 women have fallen within the scope of the Claremont investigation.

The police are also investigating the possibility that Bradley John Murdoch, the convicted killer of British backpacker Peter Falconio in 2001, may have been involved, although Murdoch was in jail from November 1995 until February 1997. Murdoch has also been questioned over the disappearance of 17-year-old Hayley Dodd, who was last seen in 1999 north of Perth, and an unidentified woman missing since 1996 from Broome, Murdoch’s home town a thousand miles to the north of Perth.

There has also been some scrutiny of Peter Weygers, who was the mayor during the time of the disappearances. His 12-year tenure of office ended in 1997. Weygers had bought a house from taxi-driver Steven Ross, but had allowed him to continue living there in a mobile home in the back yard. Weygers had also been seen driving the Ford station wagon that Ross had used as a taxi when he had picked up Sarah Spiers in 1996.

Weygers was a controversial political figure and leading libertarian who once agreed to launch a book written as a guide for Australian males who wanted to get themselves a virgin Filipina bride. The launch was abandoned amid public outcry. He created more controversy in April 2004 by defending the three-time convicted serial rapist Gary Narkle, describing him as an artist and claiming Narkle had more to fear from his victims than they had to fear from him.

As a politician Weygers made a career this way by thrusting himself into the public spotlight, a trait which would appear to be at odds with the behaviour of a serial killer. He owned 19 investment properties around Perth, mostly inherited from his mother, with whom he lived until her death. He has since married Vicki, a Filipina. Nevertheless in September 2004, the police staged a very public search of his home and, despite his objections, forced him to give a DNA sample.

“This is a gross invasion of privacy. This is a gross invasion of rights. I have no idea what their excuse is for this absolutely disgraceful conduct,” he told a journalist, claiming the police scrutiny was part of a State Government plot to discredit him.

In office, Weygers had questioned the mass DNA testing of taxi drivers by investigators in the Claremont case and, later, took up the issue of the human rights of Lance Williams, then still under day-and-night surveillance.