It reads like a chilling script for a Hollywood thriller. As investigative journalist Estelle Blackburn uncovers the real story behind a 1960s serial murderer, another killer is terrorising the same city. Blackburn is also enduring her own private hell, suffering regular beatings from a boyfriend who holds a knife to her throat and threatens to kill her.
Weeks after she finally leaves him, the disappearance of a third woman sparks an appalling realisation for Blackburn: her former boyfriend could be the current killer.
Tomorrow the latest twist in Perth's unsolved 'Claremont murders' will be aired in a documentary on Australian television. It has been more than a decade since Sarah Spiers, Jane Rimmer and Ciara Glennon were abducted after leaving nightspots in the leafy city suburb. Their murders sparked one of Australia's biggest manhunts which, because each victim had talked of going home by taxi, focused on the area's cabbies.
Blackburn, a respected journalist and one-time press secretary to former West Australian premier Carmen Lawrence, says her former boyfriend, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was a mechanic who repaired taxis. She approached homicide detectives with her suspicions about him. 'I don't want to believe he is the Claremont killer but I fear he could be,' she says she told them. 'I don't think they really took me seriously,' she adds.
Blackburn says she was told that the charismatic but violent European immigrant later bound and gagged another girlfriend, threw her in a car boot lined with plastic and drove to a remote lake. 'He did terrible things to her, threatening to kill her and told her, pointing to the water, 'There's another blonde bitch down there and you are going to join her'. Fortunately she managed to talk her way out of it, telling him she loved him and would give him her house and all her money.'
In 2000 he was jailed after stalking and threatening to kill a different girlfriend. From jail, he tried to hire a hit man to murder her.