Trudie Adams
Trudie Adams disappeared from Sydney’s Northern Beaches in 1978. So what really happened to her?
EIGHTEEN-YEAR- OLD TRUDIE Adams was a free spirit with the world at her feet when she vanished just after midnight on June 25, 1978, on her way home from Newport Surf Club in Sydney’s Northern Beaches. Her disappearance, which has never been solved, is the subject of the gripping ABC podcast, Unravel.
The last person to see her alive was Trudie’s on-off boyfriend Steve Norris, then 22. “We’d sort of broken up, but we were still on really good terms,” he tells investigative reporter Ruby Jones. Steve recalls asking Trudie for a dance but she wasn’t keen. The 18-year-old secretarial student left the club about 15 minutes later. There were reports she was upset.
Worried about Trudie hitchhiking home alone, Steve went after her. “By the time I got to the bottom of the stairs I saw a car … pick her up. It was a standard panel van. I saw it didn’t have windows in the sides. It was a beige colour.”
Steve thumbed a lift with a passing car. But when he reached her home in Avalon, Trudie wasn’t there. Trudie was reported missing by her parents Charles and Connie, and five days later they received a disturbing phone call. A male voice said: “Her body is halfway up Mona Vale Road,” before hanging up.
Ten minutes later, at 4.15pm, investigators at Mona Vale Police Station received a similar call. “The girl is dead, it was an accident. She’s halfway up Mona Vale Road.” A subsequent search of bushland became the biggest in NSW history at the time. As news spread, 14 females came forward to report being abducted from Barrenjoey Road – the same road Trudie went missing from – and viciously raped in bushland.
Hours before Trudie went missing, around
9pm on June 24, Amanda Smith had a lucky escape. She was hitching to the Newport Arms Hotel when a man pulled up in a sedan and offered her a lift. “He grabbed me by my neck, pulled me towards him …,” she said at a 2011 inquest into Trudie’s disappearance, at NSW Coroner’s Court in Glebe. “There was a bit of a struggle ... I recall trying to make some noise, wriggle and scream. I was terrified. He was saying: ‘if you just be quiet, it will be okay.’”
Another woman, Kirsten Mckenzie, told the court she was followed by a man in a panel van while walking at night on Barrenjoey Road. She said he got out of the vehicle and knocked her unconscious. When she came to, he was dragging her, so she screamed and kicked him in the groin until she was able to escape.
Former NSW detective Gavin Mckean spent two years investigating Trudie’s disappearance in 2007 when he was a member of the Unsolved Homicide Squad. He had two suspects, one of whom – Neville Tween – was a police informant and convicted sex offender who lived nearby. “I strongly believe that Trudie Adams was kidnapped off the street by Tween and [Raymond] Johnson … I believe that something went wrong as the two men went about the business of sexually assaulting Adams and she has been killed,” Mckean wrote in a statement to the Coroner’s Court. Johnson died in October 2010. But Tween, who is currently serving an 18-year sentence for conspiracy to import $7m worth of cocaine, gave evidence at the inquest. He was described as a difficult witness. “My memory is not the best. I would not remember one day, let alone one week or a very special event. I lived a very sedate life,” he said.
Deputy State Coroner Scott Mitchell found Trudie’s death was caused by a criminal act or misadventure by persons unknown. No-one was held accountable and her body has never been found, but it’s hoped media coverage will prompt witnesses to come forward.
One hitchhiker took to the ABC’S Facebook page to describe an attack by a man in a station wagon. “It was pitch black … [he] grabbed me, pulled me down onto his lap with his hand over my mouth. I struggled but it was useless. All of a sudden he let me go … there was a young man out there. I ran to him crying hysterically. The car sped off. I dodged a bullet.”