Australian ex-mayor vanishes in serial killer hunt

By GREG ANSLEY

CANBERRA - A former mayor of the Perth city of Claremont and a prominent civil liberties activist is thought to have left Australia after police named him in the hunt for a serial killer who has evaded capture for eight years.

The home of Peter Weygers, president of the West Australian Council for Civil Liberties, was raided by police in a high-profile operation last week following an earlier search of a property owned by Weygers but rented to another man.

Weygers was required to give a DNA sample to officers of Task Force Macro, which is investigating the deaths of three women in Claremont, an affluent suburban cluster in southwest Perth, in 1996 and 1997.

On Monday night the Ten Network reported that Weygers had told a friend also under investigation that he intended to disappear.

Yesterday Perth ABC radio also said friends said they had been told Weygers had gone overseas and did not want to be contacted.

Police have said Weygers is not facing charges, and he has furiously denied any connection to the killings of Jane Rimmer, 23, Ciara Glennon, 27, and Sarah Spiers, 18.

Spiers vanished after leaving a Claremont nightclub in January 27, 1996. Her body has never been found, but police believe she was murdered.

Rimmer disappeared the following June, and her body was found in bushland south of Perth three months later.

Glennon was missing for almost three weeks before her body was found in April 1997.

The case is one of the most notorious serial killings in Australia, with no arrests despite an intensive and continuing hunt and the existence of a main suspect, a public servant living in the seaside suburb of Cottesloe.

Dozens of people have been interviewed by detectives, and in June two of Australia's most experienced investigators and two British forensics experts were appointed to conduct a review into the case.

Investigators have also revisited the deaths or disappearances of 16 other women in Perth and a string of sex-related crimes at Claremont over the past two decades.

Last month police raided the Embleton home of a 43-year-old taxi driver and seized two cars, one of which had been used as a taxi around the time of the Claremont killings.

Although the property was owned by Weygers, police said at the time that he was not a person of interest.

But last Thursday detectives swooped on his Claremont home, ordered the former mayor off the property and launched an exhaustive search.

Police said there had been a significant development associated with the Embleton raid and that Weygers was now a person of interest in the Claremont investigation.

An irate Weygers claimed he was the victim of a political conspiracy.