A real estate agent who unknowingly encountered John Edwards years before he murdered his children was immediately suspicious after his creepy behaviour.
A real estate agent who unknowingly showed John Edwards through his estranged daughter’s open house said he had a “gut feeling” about a suspicious pair who claimed to be father and son.
The chilling incident occurred in 2011 after Edwards used private investigators to track his adult daughter down and then stalked her, leading her to apply for an apprehended violence order.
Seven years later, Edwards shot dead his two youngest children, Jack, 15, and Jennifer, 13, before killing himself on July 5, 2018. Their mother, Olga, took her own life five months later.
An inquest last year probed how Edwards was able to get a gun licence despite a 24-year recorded history of domestic violence inflicted on his seven former partners and 10 children.
Among them is JC, who cannot be named by court order and had not seen her father in 15 years when he began to stalk her in 2011.
The year before, Edwards hired Sydney Private Investigations to track JC down, and in November 2010 the agency sent him details about JC and her husband, including their address.
Real estate agent Steven Kourdis was working for North Sydney agency McConnell Bourn in May 2011 when JC’s house came across his desk for sale.
At the open house, two potential buyers stood out to him, a father and son who gave the names “Ron” and “Steve”.
In a 2018 statement, Mr Kourdis told police of how the younger man captured his and his colleague’s attention while “Ron” wandered off into the house.
“I found him in one of the kid’s bedrooms looking at pictures on the walls. There were school certificates on the wall as well as pictures and other stuff.
“I said, ‘Can I help you there?’ He said, ‘I’m just having a look. It’s a nice house’.”
Mr Kourdis initially suspected the men were casing the house for a break-in, he said, but concluded it was unlikely due to the high windows.
“When I caught the older man looking at the school certificates on the walls I believed that they were casing it for information about a person.
“I can’t put my finger on exactly what made me think that … I have years of experience in real estate but they didn’t seem like normal buyers,” he said. “It was a gut feel.”
He later discussed the men with JC, who realised her father had been through her house.
“I can’t even begin to describe how physically ill that made me, on hearing that,” she told the inquest last year.
Soon after the house inspection JC caught a man trying to slip an envelope under her front door that contained a note from Edwards saying a friend of his would keep tabs on when JC visited Westfield.
Days later, he approached as JC dropped her daughter at preschool. She told him she would take out an AVO and sped away, terrified. When she got home, a note from Edwards was in the letterbox.
Police declined to pursue stalking charges and thought just an AVO would be sufficient as Edwards had “only made three separate attempts to contact” JC.
In court, she told the inquest, a prosecutor leaned over and whispered: “He is your father, can’t you just sort this out among yourselves?”
The provisional AVO was never finalised as JC and her family moved overseas.
Over 2016 and 2017, state coroner Teresa O’Sullivan found, JC’s detailed account in the police online database was ignored by officers who took down Olga’s complaints of assaults on the children and Edwards stalking her at a yoga class.
It went unnoticed at the gun registry, where staff took a blinkered approach that only finalised AVOs counted.
And it was dismissed by independent children’s lawyer Debbie Morton, who said she read Edwards’s police file before telling a family law judge in December 2016 that she didn’t have “any concerns” about Jack and Jennifer being at risk from seeing their father.
Years after the open home, Mr Kourdis was shocked to be contacted out of the blue by police investigating Jack and Jennifer’s murders.
He now asks sellers if there is anyone he should be aware of before an open home.
“Normally, they give me the name of a neighbour they don’t get along with,” he said in his statement. “But sometimes it is a family member.”
