She walked away from the men and at 2.06am used a public telephone to call Swan Taxis and requested a cab collect her from Stirling Highway.

After the phone call, Sarah crossed the road and waited at the intersection of Stirling Road and Stirling Highway for her cab.

A passerby in a car thinks he saw Sarah leaning against a bollard, and noticed a vehicle behind him that appeared to stop near her. He told his friends he was concerned for the girl and that they should turn around to check on her but the group decided the suggestion was an overreaction - that she was probably fine.

At 2.09am, three minutes after Sarah called a cab, the taxi driver pulled up but could not find her - the street was empty.

In the days and weeks that followed, her family and police tried desperately to find her.

She hasn't been seen since.

Five months later, Jane Rimmer vanished after visiting the same club as Sarah on June 9, 1996.

The 23-year-old childcare worker had left friends to walk from Club Bay View to the Continental Hotel.

Security footage captured her waiting near a pole outside the popular nightspot. She acknowledged an unidentified man before the camera panned away.

When it returned, she was gone.

Her body was found in bushland in Wellard two months later by a passerby.

By now, police and the community began to fear there was a serial killer on the loose. Women who once felt safe to walk the streets at night or catch a taxi on their own, stopped doing so.

Better lighting was installed in dark alleyways around Claremont to try to allay people's fears of the once "safe" suburb as parents began telling their daughters to avoid the area.

Then, seven months after Jane's body was discovered, Ciara Glennon, a lawyer who had been drinking with colleagues at the Continental Hotel, went missing on March 14, 1997.

In a hauntingly familiar story, she told her friends she felt tired around midnight and left to catch a taxi near Stirling Highway home to her parents' house in Mosman Park.

Shortly after she left her friends, witnesses saw her leaning into the passenger side window of a light-coloured car that had pulled up beside her.

When they looked back, Ciara and the car had gone.

Her mother, Una, had previously warned her about the dangers of Claremont.

The family started a frantic search when she failed to show up for her sister's hens party the next day.

Ciara's body was found three weeks later by a bushwalker in Perth's north.

Since the three abductions, the hunt for the Claremont serial killer has become Australia's longest running and most expensive murder investigation with more than 3000 people investigated under the 'Task Force Macro' operation.

The breakthrough arrest came in December 2016, around 20 years after the women disappeared.

Police charged Kewdale man Robert Bradley Edwards, 49, with the wilful murders of Ms Rimmer and Ms Glennon, alleging he abducted them off the streets of Claremont in 1996 and 1997 respectively.

Mr Edwards was also accused of raping a 17-year-old girl in Claremont in 1995 and the indecent assault of an 18-year-old woman in a Huntingdale home in 1988.

He was 26 and 27 when Ms Spiers, Ms Rimmer and Ms Glennon went missing.

After more than a year in custody, Mr Edwards was in February 2018 charged with the wilful murder of Ms Spiers whose body has never been found.

He has pleaded not guilty to all charges against him and will face trial in the Supreme Court of Western Australia in July, 2019.

Mr Edwards, prior to his arrest, lived in his Kewdale home and was the former president of a Perth Little Athletics club.

In 2013, he was awarded life membership at Kewdale Little Athletics Club.

More recently he had volunteered for the Belmont club as a timekeeper, photographer and website administrator.

He was employed with Telstra his entire working life.