Barrenjoey Road 05 | The Big Bad Wolf

This is an ABC podcast.

Just a warning before we start, this episode contains intense stuff, including descriptions of sexual assault.

Also, if you haven't listened from episode one, you should go back and start there.

Six hours drive west of Sydney is a small country town called Leeton.

In the 50s, Brian McVicar was a student at the town's only Catholic school run by nuns.

The people there, they did a fantastic job.

A lot of farming boys, much bigger than the nuns were, big, healthy, strapping young fellows.

And how they contained them, I've got no idea, but they had a long bit of a cane there, which certainly kept us into a bit of order.

One day, a new boy showed up at his school.

Well originally he arrived at the convent school I went to.

The rumours at that time he'd been in a bit of trouble, just floating around the town like rumours do in a small country town.

Nobody in Leeton had much money in the 50s, but Brian remembers this mysterious new kid showing up with a lot of lollies.

The people at that school, he's sort of given handfuls of lollies to different people and he was just throwing them up in the air and making a bit of a hero of himself at the time.

The lollies?

Stolen.

The kid,

his name was Neville Tween.

He was just one of those kids destined for problems, you know.

Just a few years later, Tween was admitted to a boys' home and the crimes continued, getting more serious.

Assault, escaping jail, possessing explosives.

Brian McVickers' path went in the opposite direction.

He became a police officer.

One day, while preparing for an undercover job in Sydney, he was getting to know the names and faces of all the crims in the area.

And I was looking through the Australian Criminal Register one day and it opened up and there's a big photograph of my old schoolmate Neville.

Today, Neville Tween's criminal record lists 12 different aliases and dozens of charges, including a major cocaine importation importation which put him behind bars for good in 2006.

And then there's the crimes he might have gotten away with.

For decades, police have suspected Neville Tween is responsible for the rape of 14 women on Sydney's northern beaches.

And they also think he might have been involved in whatever happened to Trudy.

after she was picked up 40 years ago on Barranjoey Road.

The question is,

did the little boy who started out stealing lollies

grow up to become a murderer?

Look, from what I know of Neville, he was capable of anything and everything.

This is Unravel Season 2, Baron Joey Road.

I'm Ruby Jones, and I'm trying to find out what happened to Trudy Adams.

In 2011, after a police reinvestigation that failed to crack the case, a coronial inquest was held.

A last attempt to air all the evidence, interview the suspects, and come up with answers.

At the inquest, the main suspect, Neville Tween,

was questioned for close to five hours.

Everything he said was recorded.

I've got those tapes and so now,

for the first time ever, Tween's testimony will be made public.

This court is now sitting.

Yes, thank you.

Can I call John Anderson?

Yes, thank you.

John Anderson is Neville Tween.

That's the name he's going by now.

Yes, have a seat, please, Mr.

Anderson.

It's where you're seated.

Administer an affirmation, please.

Trudy's friend Leanne is in the courtroom, sitting in the front row.

So do you remember him him actually walking in and taking the stand?

Yeah I do.

He had really big blue eyes,

very

sort of pinkish skin colour, balding,

had a comb over of some sort and he was

scary

in a word.

He was scary.

scary looking

and I think he knew it and he actually played on it

And when he sat down, he

sat down and leant forward and gave everybody a death stare, which sent shivers down your spine.

Trudy's friends and family have heard a lot about Neville Tween.

They've wondered who he is and what he's capable of.

They've waited a long time for this moment, for the chance to judge for themselves.

Did this man kill Trudy Adams?

Thank you.

Are you aware why we're here?

Yes.

You understand that this is an inquest into the disappearance of an 18-year-old girl or young woman in June of 1978?

Yes.

The guy asking the questions is the counsel assisting the coroner, Peter Hamill.

First, Hamill tells Neville Tween that he's been brought to the inquest because he's a suspect.

Then he starts asking him questions about his criminal history.

Without being unduly rude about it, you have

a

career of committing criminal offences

from about the age of nine years.

until the importation, which of course you deny.

Of course I deny it.

Yeah, well putting that aside, do you agree that you've led a life of crime?

No.

Seriously?

Serious?

You don't think you've led a life of crime?

No, do you?

Well, it doesn't much matter what I think mercifully.

Well, you're making the assertion.

I'm asking you.

I'm asking your observations.

He's asking a question.

He's not making an assertion.

That's the coroner Scott Mitchell trying to keep things on track.

Then Hamill tries again to pin-tween on a relatively minor charge, stealing when he was a kid.

Yeah.

Would it be fair to say that you appeared in court, charged with a great many crimes before you were 20?

About a great many.

Well, more than the average.

Well, what's the average?

Well, I don't know.

You don't know.

But my present inclination is to think that you have committed, or at least been accused of committing, more than the average number of crimes by the time you were 20.

I don't say I'm an angel.

I'm not saying that.

Alright, well, we're getting somewhere.

We've descended from the status of angels.

Let's just get it down to the status of human beings.

Do you agree that whether it's a matter of police picking you up, there was a lot of times when you were appearing in courts as a young man and as a juvenile, accused of a great many crimes.

Yes, but the prosecutor setting me up as a big bad wolverine.

Not only is Neville Tween refusing to answer even the most basic questions, he's also asking questions of his own.

It's like he's trying to wrestle control of the whole inquest from Peter Hamill.

He was fairly comfortable in the fact that he knew

if there was a case that was capable of proving his guilt beyond reasonable doubt, he would have been charged.

And so his behaviour in the witness box reflected an arrogance, I thought.

The counsel assisting the coroner, Peter Hamill, is now a Supreme Court judge.

He says Tween was not your average witness.

Well, I mean, he was a career criminal.

I mean, we deal with these people sometimes, not frequently.

There's not all that many people that you can say, well, you know, at at some point in his 20s he decided to be a criminal and that was going to be his life.

And that, I think, was what Neville Tween was.

Most people are intimidated by the courtroom, the coroner, the robes, the whole process.

It's designed that way.

But not Tween.

In fact, the longer Tween spends on the stand, the more arrogant he becomes.

He gets impatient with all the questions about his past.

He says he wants to talk about Trudy Adams and the car that was seen picking her up.

If we would just consider that you didn't get to New South Wales until 1974, we could clear you.

Do you follow?

Yes.

What about the car?

Well, forget about the car.

Yeah, forget about it, though.

No, no, well, you owned, did you not,

1972 Holden Panel van at the time that Trudy Adams disappeared, last seen getting into a Holden Pedal van.

On, yes.

Is that right?

Do you agree with that?

Wait on.

Do you agree with that?

What year, panel van, I don't know.

Is a panel van now does it have side windows in it?

Did you own a panel van of that kind?

Wait on, no, no, no, no, never mind reversing that on me.

No, no, well, you asked me to talk about panel vans.

Here was the question.

Mr.

Anderson,

the way it works is he asks the question, you don't.

That's not the only time that Tween makes an interesting concession and then quickly backs off from what he's just said.

It happens again when Tween's asked about one of his criminal associates, Len Evans.

That's the guy who lives in New Zealand, who's suspected of being involved in some of those earlier assaults.

Did Len Evans ever come to Australia?

Oh, yes.

Did you ever spend any time with him in Australia?

Yes, I did, yes.

And you were aware that he went to jail?

Yes, yes, yes.

There was one exception there.

What do you mean, one exception to what?

Oh, we did something together.

What did you do together?

No interest to you.

What did you do together?

Oh, I wouldn't say that.

What did you do?

I'm not going to tell you.

Do I have to tell him?

Oh, yes, you've been asked the question.

You're doing well.

You're really keeping the whole room entertained, and I think...

Well, I don't intend to keep it entertained.

Well, you don't intend to try and find out what's that.

This Trudy Adams has just gone so far and

they start putting the truth on the table.

Well you're not going to find that out unless you start answering questions, are you?

And he's not going to find out going back to New Zealand and whoop woof 13, 40 years ago.

It's fair to say the questioning is not going well.

So Peter Hamill makes an attempt to break through Tween's facade to force him to think about the consequences of Trudy's disappearance.

The gentleman sitting here is Trudy's dad.

And there's a number of other people in the back of the court who are friends of Trudy.

And the objective is to get to the truth.

Do you follow?

Yes,

I understand you.

Hamill is hoping that by pointing out Trudy's dad, he'll provoke some sort of reaction in Neville Tween.

99

people out of 100,

that will get to them.

That is the dad, that's the grieving father who wants to know what happened to his little girl.

But not Neville Tween.

To those sitting in the courtroom, it seems like Tween just doesn't care.

Trudy's dad Edge isn't the only one watching all this.

Trudy's ex-boyfriend Steve Norris is there too.

One stage I wanted to shout his name out so he'd miss the stare and fall down.

I just wanted to say, hey, Tweeny.

I just wanted to look up and then down he went.

I just wanted to do something.

You just got to zone out because you just can't.

So you just got to listen to it all.

And, you know, it was just, he's just a cocky little...

He wouldn't have been that cocky if he hadn't done it.

I couldn't imagine.

As the inquest continues, Leanne's also watching Tween and deciding that he's really dangerous.

I think he tried to make everybody feel intimidated.

I think that was his power.

That was his mind.

His mind was that he could make everyone feel like they were next.

That's what I felt.

So far in the courtroom, Tween's attitude has been really frustrating.

He's deflecting and avoiding the questions.

But the people in the courtroom haven't seen all of Neville Tween.

yet.

It's not until Peter Hamill starts asking Tween about his sexual assault conviction that Tween really shows his true colours.

Look, it was no big deal.

This guy,

he obviously wasn't terrorised.

We talked about this assault in episode 3.

The victim was a 19-year-old man and it took place in the bushland near the northern beaches.

Remember, there were a lot of similarities between this attack on the young man and what happened to all the women who were abducted around the same time.

The location was similar.

There was the use of a gun and a Polaroid camera.

A warning here, what's coming next is pretty graphic.

When Tween's questioned about the assault, his responses give you a real insight into the way that his mind works.

We've beeped up the victim's name to protect his identity.

Well, can you tell me what is funny about

having them strip naked, perform fallatio on your colleague and taking Polaroid photos of him.

Can you tell us what's funny about that?

You are the one saying it's funny.

What makes her f ⁇ ing suffer is outrageous and horrible.

And if you can't see that,

I don't know.

There's something wrong with you.

I must say that.

So if I don't believe that you really think that it wasn't a big deal.

And he was smirking and laughing the whole time when they were talking about that.

Tween he was.

As they were bringing this all up,

everything, they were bringing it up.

He was just there having a bit of a chuckle and a giggle and thought it was very funny.

And I think the judge even said, mate, this is not a funny situation.

And he still was laughing about it.

So that's the sort of person you're dealing with.

He's a horrible person.

In this assault, Tween had an accomplice, Gary Batt, also known as Dinger.

The pair forced the young man to put on women's underwear and used a Kabanosi sausage to sexually assault him.

And Tween took Polaroid photos of it all.

As Peter Hamill asks him about the photos, Tween starts to ask if he can take a look at them.

Are you going to give me a look at them?

I don't think I am.

What do you want to see them for?

It's not a turn on.

No, no, it's not a turn on all, no.

Off a million years from there.

But you're in an advantage of having a look at them now and then firing questions that...

I want to have a a look at these photos, do you?

Well,

only to see what his facial expressions are.

Does that concern your facial expressions?

Well, not really.

No, not really.

I don't get no turn on either.

Then Tween is asked to tell the courtroom what was in the photos.

They depict him.

What was he?

I think they dressed him up in some women's clothes and things like that and looked sick and made him made him improper

sort of

looks and suggestions and took them photos which were to be held if he didn't get the money back

and that was basically it.

You made him dig a grave for himself didn't you?

Who?

You made him dig a grave for himself.

Where did the shovel come from?

What did he carry in?

Where did the cabernossi come from?

Well, I didn't bring it there.

Don't look at me.

He probably put it in his own pocket.

He probably brought it with him.

This age.

And

you told him to start digging.

Who?

You told...

What did I tell him to do?

And

you told him to take his clothes off.

Right?

Well, the hell was he going to put his dresses on?

Neville Tween is turning this whole thing into a joke.

And it's kind of working.

Everyone seems to sink to his level.

A warning here, the language starts to get pretty colourful.

This is just not the kind of stuff you would expect to be hearing at a coroner's court.

Anyway, let's move on.

You told him to get down on his

get down on his hands and knees

and to suck dinger's cock, didn't you?

I don't think I said that.

that.

I think he'd done it wrong, aren't we?

From here on, the whole thing just descends into a bit of a farce.

And eventually, the coroner has had enough.

He sends Tween back to the cells.

Very well.

Would you like to put, please, take Mr.

Anderson to the cells and keep him there till two o'clock and bring him back into this court at two o'clock.

Mr.

Anderson, I've got all the time in the world, but certainly I've got all day today, all day tomorrow and all day the next.

And I don't care how long it takes, I'm not going to be made a fall off and this inquest will continue.

Back at two o'clock.

No, you may not.

Tween's stubborn refusal to give straight answers is wearing everyone down.

When Tween is sent out, everyone else leaves court too and has a break.

Now that you've heard a lot of Neville Tween's voice, you might have started to notice something distinctive about it.

He has a a slight speech impediment.

You can hear it when he says words like photograph.

His R's sound like W's.

This speech impediment is important because some of the women who were attacked mentioned that one of the men had a strange way of speaking.

They described it as a stutter or a funny accent, just something distinctive.

It's one more thing that could link Tween to the attacks.

When Tween's brought brought back into the court after the break, Peter Hamill asks him about it.

Do you sometimes stutter?

Peter?

Stutter.

Do you have a stuttering...

Of course or I don't.

But the line of questioning doesn't go anywhere.

Tween just shrugs it off.

Peter Hamill continues on.

He edges closer to what everyone in the courtroom is here for.

He starts asking Tween where he was when 14 women were attacked on the northern beaches.

And he starts asking more about the methods used to attack the women.

Those young girls were terrorised by the use of firearms, guns.

Yes.

Guns were discharged.

You're a man that had access to guns in 1971, crap.

You can't get a gun.

Well, don't worry about everyone else.

I'm just asking about you.

I'm stating the facts.

I'm also stating a fact.

You're making me out as the only one who can get a gun.

That's crap.

I'm just asking if you had access to guns in 1971, is actually what I'm doing.

Yes, but you're making the errors to do you, you, you.

You know.

I mean, anyone can get a lot of these things.

Mr.

Edison,

most people can't get a gun.

Oh.

You think they can, do you?

Yes.

Well, we must have spent our lives in different social circles, is all I can say.

I don't know anyone who could get a gun.

It's not that easy.

Well, I didn't know judges in my earlier day either, but guns are easy to get.

It's as simple as that.

Tween uses this defence for most of the similarities.

Guns, wigs, false beards.

He says that these are normal items and anyone can get them.

It's a different story for the police scanners though.

They were found in the car of Tween and another one of his associates, Ray Johnson.

Speaking of scanners, I think you and Mr.

Johnson both possessed police scanners, correct?

Used to communicate with one another,

listen to police radio calls, that sort of thing?

Possibly.

Well, did you or didn't you?

Forget about possibly.

Did you or didn't you?

I think I had one at one time.

Yeah, and some of the victims of this series of rapes talk about thinking that they'd heard police scanners.

That's just another coincidence, isn't it?

Oh, well, this is the first time you brought it to my attention.

I'm giving you the opportunity to answer it.

I'm saying I don't know what you're on about because I

did not kidnap, tape or rape

or whatever any girls

ever.

And I wouldn't.

Tween denies any involvement in the series of rapes.

And so then Peter Hamill starts circling back to Trudy Adams.

I'd ask you to comment on this propositional coincidence that the series of rapes of young women

that had these features including handcuffs and so on

stopped after Trudy went missing and after you left the area.

Can you comment on that?

Yes, I can.

Please do.

Firstly, it's you who has all this information as to when the girls were raped and when they weren't.

Secondly,

I was in jail.

Well, you see,

that?

What the police said.

I can't go in two places at once.

It's not actually true that Tween was in jail.

We know that because we have his criminal record.

So that's just a lie.

He wasn't in jail when Trudy disappeared either.

And he does admit that.

You certainly weren't in jail when Trudy went missing, were you?

Uh,

no.

And what the police have done, have followed your custodial history from 1971 through to Trudy's disappearance.

And what they...

Well, you took it beyond that.

What they can show is that when you were in custody,

these rapes stopped happening.

And when you were out of custody, they kept happening.

Well, look, I've got no control over that, but it was not me.

Is there anything you can tell us about Trudy?

I have never, ever known Trudy.

I've never met her.

I've never seen her from a distance.

She was

not a hitchhiker or

that I got in the car,

as described by

Mr.

Norris.

I'm sure it was a, there had to be another car, simple as that.

Peter Hamill is finally asking Neville Tween,

what do you know about Trudy's disappearance?

And what he's getting back is a total, unequivocal denial.

Tween saying he never picked up Trudy.

Despite the denial, Tween isn't coming out of all of this looking great.

He's evasive, he's disruptive, he's told some lies, we can prove that.

But there's not a lot that Hamill can do without any hard evidence linking Tween to Trudy.

And so the questioning begins to wind down.

You can sense everyone's frustration.

But then there's this one last curious outburst from Neville Tween.

And they all say, oh, if I'd have had the case,

I'd have done things differently.

Yet it's all like 30 years later and making accusations like this.

Right near the end, Neville Tween begins this strange monologue.

It sounds like he's almost taunting the coroner and the council assisting,

letting them know that they've failed.

But then it's like he almost says too much.

They haven't looked at it at the facts.

Even you haven't got to the facts of Trudy's disappearance yet.

I mean, all you're hanging on, you start.

I shouldn't say that.

You started on the veins and that.

I'm not going to say no more.

And he doesn't.

I think he just made your skin call.

He made your skin call because he

somehow

didn't respect anybody that was in the room.

I just despised him that much.

I just knew.

The girls, we'd all go outside afterwards talk, and we were all, it's him.

It's him.

He's the one.

There's a photo of Neville Tween as he left the courtroom that day.

He's hunched over in a police wagon, trying to hide from the camera.

But the photographer catches him looking sideways with those piercing blue eyes.

If he was responsible for Trudy's murder, This photo captures the moment when Tween knew for sure that he'd gotten away with it.

Peter Hamill has kept kept a copy of that photo since the inquest.

He just looks like an evil bastard, I think.

And that's kind of how he presented in court, like a,

I don't know, like an old evil man.

A coroner has found that Sydney woman Trudy Adams was most likely murdered more than 30 years ago, but the mystery surrounding her disappearance remains unsolved.

The coroner didn't get any closer to finding out what happened to Trudy or who killed her.

It was a bitter disappointment for Trudy's family and friends.

The detective who took on Trudy's case in 2008, Gavin McKean, was disappointed as well.

He was there at the inquest.

He'd been hoping that something new would emerge, that Neville Tween might finally reveal something.

He was going to die in prison.

He's now died in prison.

You know, if he had any sense of empathy or humanity, he would have

had the opportunity there to come out and say, this is what happened.

But we didn't get anywhere close to that.

So he wasn't willing to show any remorse or any sympathy or any empathy at all.

In the end, Gavin figured that for someone like Tween,

there just wasn't that much of a difference between stealing lollies

and some of the horrible crimes he's been accused of.

They would ask him about his criminal history and he would say, oh, no, no, no, that was just stealing a lolly from Woolworths or whatever.

So he was just an offender that was completely unwilling to accept the reality of his criminality.

That was what came out of it for me.

I was just seeing someone that was almost childlike denying that they've just stolen the cookie when it's in their hand.

Neville Tween died in 2013, two years after the inquest finished.

If he did all the things Gavin McKean suspects that he did, Neville Tween was one of our worst criminals.

But it seems Gavin McKean's investigation and Trudy's inquest came too late.

And Tween knew it.

I've told you that.

And you see, if they have all this information at hand, why didn't they act on it rather than let it go on and on?

No one ever come out and interviewed me about that.

No one ever showed me a photograph, asked me to go into a lineup.

30 years.

And I reckon they got a red-hot case.

And Tween

kind of has a point here.

Why did it take so long for police to look at him properly?

Neville Tween was a career criminal.

But the weird thing is, the police seemed to lose interest in him a couple of years after Trudy disappeared.

In fact, all his criminal activity just seems to drop off the radar.

This is a guy who's been in and out of trouble from age nine.

But when you look at his police record, the charges all dry up in 1980.

His criminal record is empty for 14 years.

There are some minor charges in 94 and 2000, but nothing much else until the major cocaine bust in 2006,

when he was caught trying to import $7 million of cocaine into the country.

Tween could have been spending those long stretches of time staying out of trouble.

Maybe he just got better at avoiding being caught,

or maybe

he was being protected.

On the next episode of Unravel, we investigate a link between Neville Tween,

Trudy Adams, and a corrupt cop.

This person was absolutely central, central and crucial to criminal investigations involved in organised crime, not only here in New South Wales, but indeed right around the nation.

What the fuck do you think you're doing recruiting Neville Twin as an informant?

Where did you think this was going to end?

If this isn't the first time you've heard Neville Tween's voice, I'd like to talk to you.

Email me.

Unraveltruecrime at abc.net.au.

Don't forget to subscribe to Unravel wherever you get your podcasts or download the ABC Listen app.