A woman who survived an encounter with a serial killer has described how she managed to escape after the attack left her 'unrecognizable'.
It was the mid-1990s when killer Bradley Robert Edwards wreaked havoc with a series of murders in Claremont, near Perth, Western Australia.
Edwards was found guilty of murdering Jane Rimmer and Ciara Glennon in June 1996 and March 1997, respectively, and was considered a 'likely' suspect in the earlier death of secretary Sarah Spiers.
Almost a decade before Edwards went on his killing spree, he launched an attack on single mother Liz Kirkby at her home in Huntingdale, WA.
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She's since opened up about her experience in a new documentary Night Stalker: Terror In A Small Town, describing how she was divorced with three children and in her mid-20s when the attacker got into her home.
"I just got home from work in the evening, I worked in a bottle shop," she said. "I let the cat out, because I had kittens, that's why the door was opened. That's how he got in."
Edwards surprised Kirkby as she was getting out of the shower, when he appeared wearing a woman's nightie and with what Kirkby described as 'undies' on his head.
"At first I thought it was a joke, when I saw him. I couldn't see his full face; I could see his eyes, they went dark, clearly to match his soul.
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"Then he pushed me against the wall and I had a fractured skull and I've fell onto the floor and he was beating me," she said.
Kirkby was convinced the attacker wanted to get to her kids, and remembers thinking that he'd have to 'kill' her before she'd let him get to them.
She credits her maternal instinct with giving her the strength to fight back, recalling how she kneed the man in the groin and caused him to run away.
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"It wasn't until I saw myself that I realised how bad it was,' she said.
Kirkby was left with a fractured skull and two black eyes, and said her face 'wasn't recognisable because it was so swollen'.
"He was very brutal, very strong,' she added.
Kirkby went to the police, but believes her case wasn't given enough attention.
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'I think if I lived somewhere in a better suburb, there perhaps would have been more resources put into looking for him," she claimed.
It wasn't until recently that she learned she was 'one of many' attack victims at the time.
She is believed to have been a victim of an attacker known as the Huntingdale Prowler, who stole women's underwear and attacked them. DNA later revealed the man to be Edwards.
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It wasn't until 2016 that Edwards was arrested for his killings with the help of advancements in DNA technology.
He had previously admitted to raping a 17-year-old girl in 1995, though he denied murdering Spiers, whose body has never been found.
Topics: Crime, True crime
Emily Brown