“Organised”: Crime Night! reveals how the Claremont killer targeted victims

In the mid 1990s, three women were abducted and killed in an upmarket area of Perth in a case known as the Claremont Murders. The case, which was turned into a 2024 TV drama called The Claremont Murders, starring Kate Ritchie and Erik Thomson, baffled police for years. But then criminal profiling helped police catch their killer, Telstra technician Bradley Edwards.

In the season finale of Crime Night! criminologist Professor Danielle Reynald explains that in 2004 a profiler deduced that the Claremont killer was “organised” and “methodical”.

She says the profiler also believed the killer wasn’t “a novice offender” and that the killings were “sexually motivated”. And, when investigators were able to extract DNA from beneath the fingernail of one victim and link it to a previous sexual assault, they had their killer.

In this episode, host Julia Zemiro and the team explore criminal profiling, including psychiatrist Dr James Brussel’s profile of New York’s so-called ‘Mad Bomber’, George Metesky, who terrorised the city for 16 years until Dr Brussel’s clever profiling work led police to him. Criminologist Dr David Bartlett tells us Dr Brussel believed the bomber was Eastern European because he had a penchant for pipe bombs, which were popular in Eastern Europe at the time.

Dr Brussel also noted the attacker would be wearing a double-breasted suit because he was “old-fashioned”.

We also hear about when profiling gets it wrong. Profiling the perpetrators in a Washington DC sniper case, which saw 16 people killed in coordinated attacks in 2002, sent investigators looking for a suspicious white van.

Ultimately, police figured out the perpetrators, John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, were in a blue sedan.

Crime Night! host Julia says she’s proud the show has such a loyal fanbase. “A lot of parents have said, ‘This is a show I would watch with my teenagers,’” Julia, 59, tells TV WEEK. “In the studio we can feel the audience leaning in, and that’s a nice feeling – to have them silent and listening.”

Crime Night! airs Wednesday, 9pm on ABC and iview.