The accused Claremont serial killer's defence lawyer has rubbished the theory the former Telstra technician planned to murder a teenager he brutally raped and lurked around the affluent suburb assessing potential victims during that era.
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Prosecutors say all of Bradley Robert Edwards' three known crimes and the three he is accused of were sexually-motivated, telling his marathon Supreme Court of Western Australia trial that Jane Rimmer was found naked in 1996, while Ciara Glennon was discovered with her skirt up around her waist in 1997.
Defence counsel Paul Yovich said on Monday the killer's motivation was "a matter of conjecture", but accepted pathology evidence was "neutral", given Ms Glennon and Ms Rimmer's bodies were too decomposed to ascertain if they had been sexually assaulted.
Mr Yovich admitted there was a "brutal element" to the abduction and rape Edwards committed at Karrakatta Cemetery in 1995 - less than 12 months before Sarah Spiers was last seen in Claremont - but he didn't plan to kill the 17-year-old victim as suggested.
The terrified girl kept her eyes shut and pretended to be unconscious when Edwards threw her into bushes, walked away, then came back and "chucked" her into even denser bushes.
Prosecutor Carmel Barbagallo says that "bizarre" behaviour was Edwards hiding the teen after he was disturbed by security patrols, and he planned to come back and kill her but she fled.
Mr Yovich said the theory "holds no water at all".
"There is no evidence to suggest that he intended to come back."
He said Edwards didn't injure the girl "beyond the sexual assault itself" and "dropping" her into bushes was not a life-threatening action.
He would have known she was alive and would run away if he left.
Edwards had "ample means and opportunity" to kill the teen there or drive her elsewhere to do it, as the state alleges he did with the three murder victims, but he didn't.
"If he wanted to kill her, she would be dead."
Mr Yovich also pulled apart testimony from witnesses who were given a lift by a man driving a Telstra car or tried to flag one down, mistakenly thinking it was a taxi, around Claremont in the mid-1990s.
Two of the women repelled a sexual advance.
Mr Yovich questioned sketchy descriptions, sobriety, if the incidents involved the same driver and whether there was anything sinister about them, saying it was sadly "not unknown behaviour" for men to proposition women leaving nightclub districts.
The prosecution argues the Karrakatta crime shows Edwards had a propensity to take vulnerable young women from the edge of Claremont's entertainment strip as they walked alone at night, either by abducting them in a "blitz attack" or luring them into his work vehicle.
Australian Associated Press
