A West Australian police officer who led the discovery of missing four-year-old Cleo Smith, spearheaded a serial killer’s undoing 23 years on and honed a sniper murder investigation has become a national hero flagged in Australia Day honours.
Detective Superintendent Rod Wilde steered the 140-officer Taskforce Rodia to swoop on the home of Cleo’s abductor in the early hours of November 3 last year.
Detective Superintendent Rod Wilde.Credit:Cameron Myles
On Monday, 36-year-old Terence Darrell Kelly admitted in court to kidnapping Cleo from a Carnarvon campsite more than 900 kilometres north of Perth and sparking a nationwide hunt.
The news of Cleo’s rescue 18 days after she was abducted from her family’s tent in October sent a sigh of relief around Australia and made headlines across the world.
Similarly, Detective Superintendent Wilde’s cold case homicide team brought an end to decades of fear and uncertainty haunting one of Perth’s most elite areas after the murders of three young women in the mid-1990s.
Loading
Sarah Spiers, 18, was the first young woman to disappear from the well-heeled western suburb of Claremont in January 1996. Her body has never been found.
In 2020, 51-year-old Bradley Robert Edwards was found guilty of murdering Jane Rimmer, 23, in June 1996 and Ciara Glennon, 27, in March, 1997, and attacking two other women in 1988 and 1995.
Edwards, who worked as a Telstra technician at the time, did not appear on the radar of detectives until 2016 despite Australia’s largest and longest running murder taskforce, Macro, exhausting every lead – bar one.
Cop who found Cleo, solved Claremont and caught bikie sniper claims Australia Day honour
Source: Philippines Alive
