The specialist Tactical Response Group stormed into Bradley Robert Edwards' home to arrest him almost two decades after the third Claremont murder, then police spent two days searching his home, a Perth court has heard.
The 51-year-old former Telstra technician is on trial in the West Australian Supreme Court accused of murdering Sarah Spiers, 18, Jane Rimmer, 23, and Ciara Glennon, 27, in 1996 and 1997.
Detective Senior Constable Ian Berry arrived at Edwards' Kewdale home on December 22, 2016 about 7.40am after the TRG forced their way in and Edwards was arrested.
"He was taken for further inquiries at our office at the Cold Case Homicide Squad," the detective testified on Tuesday.
During a two-day search of the home, a notebook was seized which detailed Edwards' bank transactions, believed to have been written by his second wife.
"My inquiries were to establish if the information that was written in that book, some of it albeit in a form of shorthand, were consistent with what would have appeared in a bank statement during the 1990s, if it had been indeed copied from a bank statement," he said.
The wife, whose identity is suppressed, previously testified she was "sick and tired of the lies" and feared for her life when she began trawling through Edwards' bank statements.
She could not find a bank statement that covered the day Ms Glennon disappeared.
Records also showed Edwards used an ATM in Claremont in December 1996, despite telling police he had no connection to the area.
Last year, Det Sen Const Berry was also asked to look into whether there were any fireworks in Mandurah between 1995 and 1996.
He checked the local newspaper and found "references of some events which had contained fireworks" and took copies back to the office.
They were a fireworks display on the foreshore on Australia Day in 1996, as well as events in June 1995 and March 1996.
Prosecutors allege Edwards visited his estranged first wife at her parents' home on Australia Day and asked her to attend the fireworks display with him but she refused. He then allegedly murdered Ms Spiers later that night.
His first wife, whose identity is also suppressed, testified she could not remember the date of his visit but believed it was in late 1995 or early 1996.
PathWest scientist Louise King testified that in 2003 she examined a pocket knife found near Ms Rimmer's naked and decomposing body in Wellard in 1996.
Prosecutors allege Edwards had been issued a Telstra work knife of that type.
Ms King said she tested the sharp knife for blood but the results were negative.
She also noted a yellow-green sticky stain on the knife, which she thought might be glue or vegetation.
Under cross-examination, she said she always took care to minimise the risk of contamination, before defence counsel Paul Yovich pointed out her DNA was found on a combination of some vegetation samples.
"I don't recall any lapse of my procedures. I would have followed our standard protocols," she said.
Edwards admits raping a 17-year-old girl he abducted and dragged through Karrakatta cemetery in 1995 and attacking an 18-year-old woman as she slept in her Huntingdale home in 1988.
The trial continues.
Australian Associated Press
