John Edwards showed off ‘World’s Greatest Dad’ T-shirt after shooting kids

After shooting his two sons to death, John Edwards put a black T-shirt on a wire hanger and hung it from a dresser at the foot of his bed.

Three words were printed on the shirt: “World’s Greatest Dad.”

The unhealthy scene was discovered by officers who came to Edwards’ home in Normanhurst, in north-west Sydney, to arrest him for the murders.

They found him lifeless in his bed after taking his own life.

“I believe this shirt had been strategically placed on the side of the dresser so that it could be seen when entering the bedroom,” Detective Sergeant Tara Phillips wrote in her statement.

It was Edwards’s twisted final act in the cold-blooded murders of his two sons Jack and Jennifer, calculated to inflict excruciating pain on his ex-wife Olga after a bitter separation.

On Monday, a coronary investigation began into the horrific murder-suicide that shocked Australia two years ago.

Olga wrote in a 2016 family court affidavit about her “tremendous fear” that she would one day return home to find her 15-year-old son killed at the hands of his father.

His nightmare came true on July 5, 2018.

The full scope of the 67-year-old Edwards’ evil plan was revealed for the first time this week.

After the custody battle, he wasn’t destined to find out where his children lived.

At his autopsy, a bloodstained piece of paper with 13-year-old Jennifer’s train schedule and movements was found in his pocket.

The police have never found out how he did it and suspect that he may have hired a private investigator.

But Edwards burned his tablet and mobile phone before he died, cutting off possible leads.

In the days leading up to the murders, he rented a nondescript rental car that his children wouldn’t recognize.

He also collected two pistols from the St Marys Pistol Club. He was in a nervous mood, he slammed the door to his pistol locker so hard it jammed and had to be repaired with a screwdriver.

On the afternoon of July 5, he lurked for over an hour at the Pennant Hills train station before spotting Jennifer.

His rental car was captured on CCTV following his bus, and then his eight-minute walk from the stop to his home in West Pennant Hills.

At 4.59 pm, as Jennifer entered the house, Edwards stopped. Inside, she fired 14 rounds at her sons with a semi-automatic Glock. Their bodies were found crumpled under Jack’s desk. At 5.01 pm she was gone.

Olga, who emigrated from Russia to marry Edwards when she was 19, was left in an unfathomable world of pain.

He stayed at the house on Hull Rd because “it still had some Jack and Jenny in it.”

He showed photos of the morgue to his doctor, desperately trying to piece together his sons’ last moments from their gunshot wounds.

He took his own life in December 2018, at the age of 37.

An investigation into this week’s tragedy revealed that Olga was the last of seven women, and Jennifer and Jack the youngest of 10 children, who had the misfortune to call John Edwards’ family at one point or another.

Six of his seven ex-partners interviewed after the murders spoke of psychological or physical abuse.

Edwards liked her long hair, short skirts and frightened children, the investigation heard.

An ex-partner split from him after he blatantly joined another woman on a family vacation to America.

Another was so afraid of him that she changed her name and moved to Queensland to escape.

Five of them, and an adult daughter as well, reported complaints of violence or harassment to the police.

But this story wasn’t enough to deter the firearms registry from granting Edwards a gun license in mid-2017.

He only had one conviction on his criminal record sheet for assault and malicious damage in 1969.

The rest of the complaints were a combination of three provisional arrest warrants, a final AVO, and police reports.

Before Edwards was granted a license, firearms registry staff considered a report automatically generated by an algorithm, the investigation heard.

It featured three provisional and one final AVOs, but omitted a threat of kidnapping and violence reported by Edwards’ fifth ex-partner in 1997.

He also ignored two recent reports made by Olga, due to police errors.

A number of police officers from Hornsby Police Station took the stand this week to explain the many mistakes they made in recording their complaints.

After Olga reported that Edwards had assaulted Jack and Jennifer, she was asked to bring the children to the station.

When he didn’t, his complaint was labeled “no crime detected” and closed without further investigation, according to the investigation.

The officer noted the report as a possible “willful attempt” by Olga to influence family court proceedings.

All of this went against the standard domestic violence procedures of the NSW Police, which the officer who dealt with Olga first read when she testified.

Six weeks later, in a scene straight out of a horror movie, Olga opened her eyes after lying down in a “hot yoga” class at 6am to see Edwards standing behind her, reflected in the mirrors that lining the studio walls.

He returned to the Hornsby police station and met with a different officer, who told the investigation this week that he thought his complaint was an “tit for tat” about who had to go to what yoga class.

The lawyer who attended the coroner Christopher Mitchell asked him: “Wasn’t it relevant that John was looking at Olga?”

“Yes, but I don’t know if you’ve ever been to a yoga class,” the sheriff replied. “They all look in one direction.”

Whether something would have been different had the police responded appropriately to Olga’s reports is one of several questions Coroner’s O’Sullivan is trying to answer.

How the heck Edwards got a gun license is another. Firearms registry staff are among more than 40 witnesses to be called.

Both the Firearms Registry and NSW Police say they have made changes to their systems since Jack and Jennifer died.

Also under scrutiny is the Family Court, where Olga and Edwards were embroiled in a bitter battle between April 2016 and February 2018.

A children’s attorney appointed to defend Jack and Jennifer insisted that the children told him they still wanted to see their father before a hearing in December 2016.

This was “surprising,” responded the attorney who attended coroner Kate Richardson SC, as Jack and Jennifer told everyone involved in the case that they feared it.

An interim order that children see Edwards every Saturday for three hours was never enforced, teens old enough to vote with their feet.

Olga won full custody on Valentine’s Day in 2018.

Her death is not being formally investigated in the investigation, but her efforts to protect her children from Edwards have consumed much of the evidence.

Her boss remembered her as a brilliant and impressive lawyer, and her yoga instructor as someone with a “happy, light and cheerful” personality.

Jack was a cheeky and endearing little boy who struggled, not surprisingly, with school and his behavior in his late teens.

A former teacher sobbed on the witness stand, so distraught her voice cracked even as she took the oath, remembering Jennifer.

The “kind and gentle” girl was going to channel her intellect and her love of animals to become a veterinarian.

But Jennifer, whose middle name was Angel, would never be more than 13 years old.

At around 5pm on July 5, 2018, Bruce Wilson was watching the sunset on his back deck, as he does every day, when an “almighty blow” tore through the quiet.

He put down his cup of tea and walked to the side, hearing more banging as he walked away.

There, he saw a man leave Olga’s house and calmly walk down the stairs, without using the handrail.

Wilson knew that something horrible had just happened. He looked at the stranger, determined to memorize the color of his hair, the complexion, and the contours of his face.

“What have you done?” he asked, as the man walked directly towards him. He got no reply.

The man methodically walked to his car and pulled out of the road so slowly that Wilson, still looking at him through the window, kept up with him.

Perhaps it was the last interaction John Edwards had with another human being before coming home, putting on his pathetic T-shirt as a tribute to himself and ending his own life.

Wilson watched the car disappear into the distance. Then he retraced Edwards’s steps, to the wide-open door of the house and stopped.

It felt unsettling, he said. Demonic. He was temporarily paralyzed by an indescribable force. Then he took a few steps inside.

“I screamed, is everyone okay? Are you okay there?” he said.

But there was only silence.