After a long evening of Australia Day celebrations, a young woman walked to a phone box in Claremont in the early hours of the morning.
Thirty years on, the only evidence she was ever there was a recording of a crackly phone call to Swan Taxis.
“I’m at the phone booth,” she told the operator.
“It’s on Stirling Street – it’s on the corner of Stirling Street and Stirling Highway round about the middle, up.”
“And the name?” the operator asked.
“Spiers.”
On January 27, 1997, Sarah Spiers was just 18-years-old when she left her friends at Club Bayview in the affluent suburb of Claremont.
She made the phone call to Swan Taxis on the highway at 2.06am. Three minutes later, she was gone, and her body has never been found.
On the 30th anniversary of her disappearance on Tuesday, a WA Police spokesperson said the case was far from over.
“The investigation into the disappearance of Sarah Spiers remains an open investigation with the WA Police Cold Case Investigations Unit,” they said.
“The WA Police Force will never give up, and investigators remain committed to finding answers for Sarah’s loved ones.
“Not knowing what happened to a loved one is confronting and challenging for their families and friends.”
Bradley Robert Edwards was charged with Spiers’ murder in 2016, 20 years after she became the first of three young women snatched off the streets of Claremont by a suspected serial killer.
Edwards was also charged with the murders of Jane Rimmer, 23, and Ciara Glennon, 27 – who both disappeared within 14 months of Spiers’ going missing.
He was convicted of both Rimmer and Glennons’ murders after evidence from their bushland graves connected him to their abductions through DNA and clothing fibres from his Telstra uniform.
But Spiers’ body has never been located, and Edwards was only ever found by Judge Stephen Hall to have “likely been responsible” for the disappearance of Spiers. He was found not guilty of her murder at trial.
Edwards has never confessed to any of the murders, but police officers connected with the investigation say information revealed during his WA Supreme Court trial in 2019 could eventually jog someone’s memory.
Spiers graduated from Iona Presentation College in 1994, where she was a boarder. She was originally from the South West town of Darkan, and was the daughter of sheep shearer Don Spiers and his wife Carol.
She lived with her older sister Amanda in South Perth, and worked at BSD Consultants in Subiaco. She was described as bubbly, thoughtful, responsible and knew how to make everyone feel good about themselves.
On Australia Day in 1996, Spiers and her friends had a picnic at Kings Park before meeting up with friends and her older sister Amanda at Ocean Beach Hotel in Claremont.
Amanda drove her sister and her friends to Club Bayview at midnight, and as she was leaving, Sarah walked around to Amanda’s drivers window, gave her a one-armed hug and a kiss, and said goodbye.
It was the last time she ever saw her younger sister.
Spiers’ friends remember being at the club for just over an hour when she approached them on the dance floor and said she was going to take a taxi home.
While one of her friends asked for her to wait so they could take a car together, Spiers said it would be fine and left anyway.
She walked out onto the street, wearing a light coloured t-shirt, a pair of knee-length tailored beige shorts, beige suede shoes with a silver buckle and a pattern of a flower cut out the front, a black denim jacket, a men’s watch and gold hoop earrings.
The last known sighting of Spiers is by three men who were driving home themselves.
“As they came around the corner he noticed a woman leaning, or half-sitting, half-standing, up against a bollard that was on the footpath,” the court heard.
“It looked like she was waiting for someone. She glanced at them as they went past.”
The taxi driver who received the job to collect Spiers and take her to Mosman Park said when he arrived at the location, just three minutes after Spiers made the booking, she was gone.
There is no evidence where Spiers went after the last sighting, but just an hour later, neighbours at Sarah’s intended destination said they heard something disturbing.
It was a hot night, and one neighbour described having left her window open.
“Early in the morning, she thinks it was about 3.00 am, she was either awake or was awoken by screams,” Edwards’ murder trial was told.
“She thinks she heard about three screams, which she described as very high-pitched, desperate, bloodcurdling, terrible screams.”
Another neighbour said he heard the same, and described the scream as “very distressing”. Another said the scream pierced the quiet, still night and was “horrific.”
It was the last anyone heard what is believed to be Spiers, and she was formally reported missing days later.
Speaking to Australian Story, Don Spiers described the aftermath of his daughter’s disappearance.
“I sat in the front lounge, just waiting for her to walk in as if nothing had happened,” he said.
“But deep inside I knew it was more.
“I effectively cried myself to sleep for 12 months when Sarah first went missing. Every night I just went to bed and cried myself to sleep and I’m not ashamed to say that I cry.”
WA Police have offered a $1 million reward for anyone who can provide information which leads to the solving of her murder.
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