AR IAL THE HITCHHIKER MURDERER

In 1978, 18-year-old Trudie Adams and her friends didn’t give a second thought to hitching a lift to their favourite pub, the Newport Arms Hotel on Sydney’s idyllic Northern Beaches.

But on June 24 that year, the blonde secretarial student flagged down her final ride. That evening, after going first to the pub then partying at the nearby Newport Surf Club, Trudie decided to hitch home to nearby Avalon. She was feeling unwell after some vaccinations for an upcoming trip to Bali.

Her boyfriend Steve Norris saw her getting into a fawn coloured 1974-1977 Holden panel van. Worried, he flagged down another car to follow her up the dark and winding Barrenjoey Road, but the panel van was too quick and got away. Trudie never made it home.

“This is my hood and I worked as a young detective in this area,” recalls Duncan. “In that time, more than a dozen women reported they’d been picked up hitchhiking there and were raped at gunpoint.”

Five days after Trudie’s disappearance, a man phoned her distraught parents and Mona Vale police. “Trudie’s dead,” the voice said. “You’ll find her about halfway up Mona Vale Road.”

Despite an extensive search of the isolated bushland area around the road, her body was never found. Duncan believes the investigators revisiting the case will struggle to solve it. “It’s a difficult case,” he says. “There are no forensics and from day one few clear leads.

“There are a couple of suspects, though, especially career criminal Neville Tween (aka John Anderson), but no sufficient evidence to charge him. Forty years on, finding out what happened to Trudie will come down to pure luck.”

Ten years ago, the NSW government offered a $250,000 reward for leads, but even that sum wasn’t enough to lure out any new information.