Victims of rapist ex-WA Police officer speak out – MASHAHER

Moore also struck Edwards across the back with a horse whip, leaving wounds which took months to heal. Nicole said she had been left “bleeding from every orifice”.

A second victim, who spoke anonymously, told Under Investigation that Moore had committed a series of unspeakable acts on her after drugging her. She also met Moore via a dating app and trusted him because he wore a police uniform.

“Once he would drug you, then he controlled everything you did. He had that power. It was a full 100 per cent control,” she said.

Both women only became fully aware of the horrific acts Moore had committed after police showed them videos which had been seized from his property.

Moore’s anonymous victim spoke of the horror of watching herself being assaulted hour upon hour by Moore while she was drugged.

“Your eyes are just totally on another planet. You can see that you’re struggling to speak, and you’ve really got no idea what’s going on around you,” she said.

Moore was convicted in the WA District Court at the end of 2022 and sentenced to 30 years in prison after being found guilty on 87 charges involving crimes against 13 women.

His crimes spanned more than a decade from the first known offence in 2007. His last known offence was committed in 2019.

District Court Judge Alan Troy described Moore as “misogynistic, depraved and sadistic”. His offences were “unprecedented” and “not comparable” to any other case to come before the WA courts, the judge said.

Some jurors were so sickened by the images they saw that they sought counselling.

Moore made an unsuccessful appeal against his sentence and conviction in 2023 and has since sought special leave to appeal to the High Court.

But while Moore was finally convicted, a host of troubling questions remain unanswered, in particular why it took two years for WA Police to finally charge him with sex offences despite having a trove of videos and images showing his crimes and identifying his victims.

There is also evidence Moore claimed to have high-level protection within the force, telling at least one of his victims that he had photographs of a senior female police officer.

“He was very confident that he was never going down,” Edwards told Under Investigation.

“He had a list of police officers that he had been with and he provided those lists to let the other police officers know that they couldn’t go anywhere with it because he had high-ranking contacts.

“He was just forever what he believed to be in the strongest place.”

An untold number of victims

Thirteen women agreed to give evidence at Moore’s criminal trial in late 2022. But the true number of Moore’s victims is likely to be much higher.

Edwards, who gave evidence at Moore’s trial, says she was told by investigating police that Moore had videos and images of some 200 women.

Investigators gave evidence that they had seized hundreds of thousands of pictures and videos of women, including images of bestiality. Moore’s collection was enough to fill three terabytes of data.

In one case, Moore recorded and kept more than a thousand images a woman, none of them taken with her knowledge or consent.

Professor Ian Coyle, a veteran forensic psychologist, said Moore’s practice of videoing victims gave him sexual gratification. It also formed part of his planning and was consistent with the modus operandi of a psychopath.

“The planning of inflicting pain, being totally dominant over someone, that gives him enormous pleasure,” Coyle said.

“He can decide whether they live or die. He can decide whether they’re hurt a little bit or hurt massively.”

Coyle, who was part of the Under Investigation examining the Adrian Moore case, said from a forensic psychological perspective, Moore was someone you might see “once every one to two decades”.

“He is incapable of emotion in the way that we experience it,” Coyle said.

“He is incapable of remorse. He’s incapable of feeling sorrow or pity for another human being. What he wants to do is good, and if you try to stop him, that’s bad. He is untreatable.”

A devastating delay

WA Police began the investigation into Moore’s crimes after one of his victims – also a police officer – provided information to the internal affairs branch in January 2018.

Investigators seized Moore’s computer and hard drives containing the evidence of his crimes.

Yet Moore’s victims told Under Investigation investigators seemed more interested in another aspect of Moore’s behaviour: his misuse of police computers to illegally access confidential information on his victims, who he had met on dating apps.

Police charged Moore with computer breaches, rather than his sadistic sex attacks. He was found guilty in Perth Magistrates Court in early 2019 and released just months later.

No longer in the police force, Moore was back on the streets and able to strike again – which is exactly what he did. In October 2019, he met another unsuspecting woman via a dating app.

They arranged to meet. Yet again, he drugged the woman before assaulting her.

Loading

In the meantime, Edwards was running out of patience with the slow pace of the internal affairs investigation.

In late 2019, after a series of delays, she contacted the WA Corruption and Crime Commission. Within days, the police investigation was taken out of the hands of internal affairs and passed to the sex assault squad.

It was only then that Moore’s victims were interviewed by specialist investigators.

One woman, who asked to remain anonymous, told Under Investigation in a statement that the long delay was “two years of hell”.

“I nearly died. Literally,” she said.

“I’m angry. Nothing will ever take away the pain of this.”

Moore’s victims contacted by Under Investigation spoke of the horrific impact of seeing for the first time what Moore had done to them, in some cases many years after the event.

Edwards claimed “a number” of Moore’s victims have had suicidal attempts because of the delays in the police investigation and the failure to pass the Moore case over to the sex assault investigators sooner.

“I have myself. We have all spoken about that,” she said.

A WA Police spokesman said an internal review into the handling of Moore’s case was completed and a number of recommendations for internal affairs investigations were identified.

“These recommendations related to areas of improvement to practices and processes,” he said.

“All recommendations have since been implemented.”

If this subject has raised issues for you please contact the Sexual Assault Research Centre (SARC) in Perth on 1800 199 888, every day of the week from 8:30-11pm. Alternatively, please contact Lifeline on 13 11 14.

You can stream this episode of Under Investigation with Liz Hayes for free on 9NOW.