Barrenjoey Road 04 | The Green Kombi Van

This is an ABC podcast.

The disappearance of Trudy Adams is one of the state's most baffling murder mysteries.

But now, after 17 years, police believe it will soon be solved.

Very reliable information.

I'd say our best breakthrough at this stage to solve the disappearance of Trudy.

Almost two decades after the original investigation into Trudy's death failed to find any answers, police went public with a new breakthrough that pushed the case back into the headlines.

Detectives are re-questioning witnesses and hope others will now come forward.

It was the 90s, 17 years after Trudy was last seen, and a fresh lead had emerged.

Something that had been overlooked.

The information is very reliable, and

as a result of previous information, it does corroborate that.

Police had an explosive theory that centered around a green combie van.

This breakthrough is certain to haunt those responsible for Trudy Adams' murder.

After so long, it appears their dark secret will once and for all be revealed.

This is Unravel Season 2.

Baron Joey Road.

In this episode, a green combie leads police to a network of men on the other side of Sydney.

And a new source gets in touch with me.

Someone who knows this case better than anyone else, but who's never been interviewed about it before.

Someone who's spent years trying to track down Trudy's killer.

I knocked on the door and we heard through the door what sounded like picking up of a metal pipe or something like that and he said, I've got a shotgun, I'm going to shoot you.

Explore Roselands, Australia's greatest shopping adventure.

Roselands shopping centre is in Sydney's south west near Bankstown.

When it opened in the 60s, it was the biggest mall of its kind in the entire southern hemisphere.

As well as every kind of shop, Roselands has a restaurant, a theatre and a baby minding centre.

And a set of escalators to save weary feet.

Roselands Shopping Centre was the place to hang out in the 70s.

Lots of people went there, including a group of young men who became known as the Roselands lads.

Some of them were sharpies, this kind of suburban subculture at the time, which means you had to look and dress sharp, think crisp t-shirts, jeans, sometimes held up by suspenders.

Their world was completely different to the laid-back surfing lifestyle on the northern beaches.

But these two worlds were about to collide, because some of these lads had been heard bragging about killing Trudy Adams.

The reports about the Roselands lads bragging first emerged in the 70s, and what they were heard saying was pretty disturbing.

These guys had been overheard telling people that they had picked up Trudy and had raped her and she'd died.

There's a few different versions of the story.

In one she jumped out of the car and hit a telegraph pole.

In another version some of these men hit her over the head with a spanner.

A few people told police that they'd heard these stories, and police in the 70s looked into it a bit, but on the whole, they didn't take it seriously.

It seems that they just thought that it was boys bragging.

But years later, that all changed.

In 1992, police are looking over the case again and they make a discovery.

It all has to do with a green combie van.

Remember, there was confusion over the car from the night Trudy disappeared.

Trudy's ex-boyfriend Steve always told police that he saw her get into a beige panel van.

But Trudy's mum Connie said that Steve had told her something different.

She remembers him talking about a green combie van.

Police at the time went with Steve's version of events.

After all, he was the one that saw the car pull up next to Trudy.

But in the 90s, police started to wonder if Connie had been right about the green combie all along.

It was thought Trudy was dragged into a panel van, but police are now certain it was a lime-coloured combie van carrying a group of men.

The green combie van was obscured and witnesses only saw, in fact, the beige penal van.

There are some things that convince police that they're on the right track.

They discover that one of these Roselands lads did actually own a green combie at the time.

And another one had a girlfriend who lived near the northern beaches, so that would explain why these men from the other side of Sydney might have been cruising around so far from home.

And that's not all.

Police also know that two years after Trudy went missing, a few of these guys were charged with rape.

They were found not guilty, but the woman said the rape happened in a green comby.

It seems like everything is pointing in the same direction, so police launched a huge media campaign and a new search for Trudy's body.

A group of officers is digging up bushland at an undisclosed spot in Sydney's north, hoping to find the teenager's remains.

Police are confident a new search will find Trudy's remains and that her killers will be brought to justice.

When you hear these news reports, it's like, wow, they have solved this case.

It's all happening.

But then

it comes to nothing.

Police don't find any remains and they don't lay any charges.

So it's a little hard to know what to make of their investigation.

I've been looking into this green combie theory for a couple of months now.

Crime reporter Neil Mercer's been investigating with me, and we still aren't sure how seriously we should take all this stuff about the Roselands lads.

We decide that the best thing to do is to go to them directly, to track down the guy who's supposed to have owned this green combie, see if he'll talk to us.

We're going to call him James.

So we're not sure what his reaction is going to be.

We're going to ask him obviously whether he'd like to do an interview to talk about the...

We managed to find a current address for James and we head out to his house on a busy road in Sydney's north west.

He lives still in the same address that he lived at when Trudy disappeared and we think that this was a house where quite a few of this kind of loose group of men gathered.

From what we can tell there were people who really worshipped him and I don't know how he's going to respond to us knocking on his door and asking about it but he does have the right of reply.

Yeah, I'll put it to him and see if he will do an interview because we want to run down every lead we can.

James isn't there but another family member is.

They give him a call and they hand the phone over to Neil.

Neil asks some questions and then hangs up.

When we walk back out onto the street we turn our mics back on.

He doesn't want to do an interview.

He was pretty angry, not at me, but at the New South Wales Police.

So we had quite a conversation.

He said, quote, it's all fucking bullshit, unquote.

So did he mention the Green Combie at all?

Yeah, I asked him, I said, did you own a Green Combie at the time?

And he said, yes, I did, but I didn't even know how to bloody well drive it at the time that Treaty disappeared.

He says, it's all rubbish.

And he also said that they'd tried to link all the Roselands lads into one sort of coherent group.

And he said, at the time Treaty Adams disappeared, he didn't even know some of the key members.

Neil reckons James sounds pretty believable, but to be sure, we try a few of the other lads.

None of them want to talk.

New South Wales Police also declined my request to interview serving officers, so we're coming up against a lot of dead ends.

But then I get a message.

It's from someone who I've been trying to track down for a while.

He's a former detective.

And out of everyone I know of who worked this case, he sounds like he dug dug into it the deepest.

If anyone's in a position to work out if this whole green combie theory holds any weight, it's him.

Straight away, I arranged to talk to him in person.

Hi.

Hey, Vivi, how are you?

Nice to meet you.

Nice to meet you, Gavin.

Thanks for meeting up with me.

Gavin McKean headed up a recent police effort to solve Trudy's case.

He was assigned to it in 2008, and he worked on it non-stop for almost two years.

He's since left the police force, so he's free to talk.

Gavin's a lot younger than other police who I've spoken to.

He's clean-cut and he weighs his words carefully.

But I'm surprised when Gavin tells me that he never interviewed any of these guys himself.

And he says that's because he decided really early on in his investigation that the Roselands lads probably weren't involved.

Gavin says for him they just didn't stack up as credible suspects.

I think it would be less probable that this group just decided one evening to drive over to the Northern Beaches which is quite a distance away and then just happened to pick up Trudy Adams and they went a group that were known for picking up hitchhikers.

There was no evidence to that extent

and then just happened to accidentally kill her.

So there's a number of

I think improbable circumstances in that story.

And my general view is that they were not involved, that it was a handful of them speaking nonsense and rubbish.

I don't know why you would brag about raping and murdering a teenage girl.

It's a messed up thing to do.

But Gavin says this sort of stuff happens in high-profile homicides.

You might think it sounds insane for someone to do that, but it's not actually that uncommon for

people to ring up and want to be a part of it all and make comments in bars and pubs and to the like, and that's what these guys essentially did.

The more I talk to Gavin, the more it seems like he was right.

The Roselands lads were probably just a distraction.

They don't really sound organised enough to hide a murder for four decades.

They might have said some vile stuff, but I don't think that they're killers.

And there's another good reason to discount this theory.

Gavin had a better one.

He'd circled back to one of the very first suspects that police had on this case, Neville Tween.

The evidence, I think, in the serial rape matters is fairly strong, I think, against Neville Bryan Tween and his associates.

I think then you can draw a bow of probability that he is most likely responsible for Trudy Adams who was hitchhiking on Baron Jerry Road, his known hunting ground, and that it was Tween that picked her up on that night.

Gavin McKean first starts looking at Tween in 2008.

Tween's just been locked up for attempting to import a large amount of drugs.

He was in custody on

relatively fresh matters and those matters carried lengthy jail terms.

And Gavin thinks maybe now that Tween is locked up, he'll have less to lose by telling the truth.

But he doesn't want to speak to Tween yet.

He's saving that for later.

The first thing he decides to do is to chart Tween's movements over the last few decades.

He finds out that Tween is something of a career criminal.

He's been in and out of jail for most of his life, stealing, break and enter, firearms, drugs.

But there is something interesting in the timing of his jail stints.

Every time Neville Brian Tween was incarcerated, whether in this state or another state, the rapes stopped.

And then when he was out and back in this jurisdiction, and particularly back in the northern beaches, the rapes started again.

Gavin keeps going through the evidence in the file, and he discovers a couple of really frustrating things.

He finds out that some of the women who reported rapes actually identified Tween and his associates from photos in 78.

But there was a problem with the selection of photos police had shown to the women.

On one of the photo boards they had, Neville Tween appeared three times.

Gavin knows that wouldn't stand up in court.

That's stacking the deck.

But it's not like he can redo it because he says the rule is, you only get one shot at IDing someone from photos.

Once you've done it once, you can't do it again.

It was very frustrating.

That's a really good word to use.

It was a very frustrating investigation because things were done back then that did not comply now,

yet couldn't be redone.

It's a really awkward phenomenon.

So that's one missed opportunity, but there's another.

A couple of months after Trudy disappeared, there was a police pursuit in western Sydney.

Two cars crashed and the drivers ran away.

In the cars, police found the drivers' licenses.

One belonged to Neville Tween and the other to one of his associates, Ray Johnson.

The other stuff found in the cars should have rung serious alarm bells.

There were revolvers, police radio scanners, full-face plastic masks, and a brown wig.

Remember, the women who were attacked talked about the men having guns.

Some mentioned hearing a radio, which could have been a police scanner, and they spoke about the men wearing disguises, like fake glasses or wigs.

They had access to wigs, which is a significant thing due to the fact that some of the female victims gave an account of the assailants wearing wigs and glued on facial hair.

They could smell the glue and it's a rather unusual thing and that's what Neville Brian Tween had in his possession when he was arrested.

And it wasn't just the wigs.

The women who were attacked, all of them talked about guns being used.

And in some cases, there was mention of a radio, which sounded like it could have been a police scanner.

There are so many links between the objects found in the cars and the reports of the 14 rapes on the northern beaches.

Tween and Johnson were charged over the car chase and the guns.

But here's the thing.

They weren't even asked about the sexual assaults on the northern beaches.

It's hard to believe now, but the police who picked them up were from a different part of Sydney.

And it seems like they might have had no idea that Tween was a suspect in those rape cases.

Well, there was no computers back in those days, so they wouldn't be able to just cross-reference it on the computer system that police have nowadays.

It seems like a bit of a missed opportunity when you look at it now.

Potentially, yes.

Gavin thinks thinks police in the 70s might have had a shot at building a decent case around all this evidence.

But for Gavin, 30 years later, it's not enough.

He needs more.

Gavin knows that all the 14 women who were attacked on the northern beaches said there had been two men.

So Gavin decides to start putting pressure on Neville Tween's criminal associates.

First, he tries to go to the guy who was arrested with Tween when police found the wigs and the guns in the cars, Ray Johnson.

But Ray won't talk.

Next, Gavin moves on to Gary Batt.

He was Tween's accomplice in that assault on the young man, the 19-year-old.

We talked about it in the last episode.

So I went down to Victoria and

went to the house of Gary Batt.

Gavin takes another detective with him.

Her name's Nicole Jones.

They walk up to Gary Batt's house, but they're completely unprepared for what happens next.

Nicole and I knocked on the door and we heard through the door what sounded like

picking up of a metal pipe or something like that and he said, I've got a shotgun, I'm going to shoot you.

Then arrived at Batt's house unarmed.

They hadn't even thought thought about calling Victoria Police for backup.

We're apprehensive, to say the least.

Before we could sort of work out what we were going to do, he's opened the door and he said, I'm just joking.

What do you guys want?

So it was a bit of a nerve-wracking experience and it kind of goes to the mindset of these guys.

They were pretty loose and pretty...

crazy, I think.

Gary Bat invites Gavin and Nicole into the house and says he'll he'll put the kettle on.

Over tea, he starts to open up.

Bat told us that Tween was a sexual deviant and that he was discovering this more and more as the relationship progressed.

He was saying, Neville Brian Tween

became a sexual deviant around the 70s and I distanced myself from him.

I think what he

failed to disclose was that he didn't want to do these offences with Tween anymore.

That's what he he was essentially saying.

That is hardly a glowing personality reference for Neville Tween,

but he doesn't have a lot to offer in terms of evidence that might link Tween to the series of rapes on the northern beaches.

And he says he knows nothing about what happened to Trudy Adams.

Gavin McKean has one more person he needs to visit.

Before Gary Batt, Tween had another associate called Len Evans.

Gavin looks and finds out that Len was in jail at the time Trudy disappeared, so he has an alibi.

But Gavin thinks he might have been involved in the earlier sexual assaults.

Along with Tween, he was picked out in a line-up by one of the assault victims.

And someone who was in jail with Len said that Len told him that he and Tween went to Karingai National Park together and sexually assaulted women.

So Gavin tracks Len down.

He's living in New Zealand on an isolated island off the coast of Auckland.

We caught the big police boat over to Wahike Island with a couple of local police with us, detectives,

and basically we just went up and knocked on his door.

Len Evans answers the door.

He's clearly surprised to see a couple of Aussie cops on his doorstep.

What I do distinctly remember is

the reaction from him was unequivocal.

He

was immediately resigned to the fact that he thought he was done.

Head dropped, his shoulders dropped forward, to the point where I kind of thought, is this guy going to make an admission right here, you know?

So we went down to that police station and the whole way down there, not a word was spoken.

He was so solemn.

and

just completely turned into himself.

Because we didn't say much, we just simply said those two things when we first got there.

We didn't say much on the way to the police station, so it was almost like he was resigned to the fact that he was going to the clink, you know, for it.

When they get to the police station, Gavin starts asking Len questions about the assaults.

He rejected the allegations we put to him in a very, very mousy, quiet manner.

Len denies making any confessions in jail.

Then Gavin asks him about Trudy.

Did you get the impression that Evans knew anything about what had happened to Trudy?

Yeah, I did get the impression that he did, yes.

And I also got the very, very strong impression that he was involved in those accusations that I put to him.

But Len Evans isn't about to hand something on a plate to this Aussie cop.

Again, Gavin leaves with nothing he can use against Tween.

Gavin has tracked down every potential accomplice who might have worked with Neville Tween,

but none of them have cracked.

There's only one thing left to do.

Only one person he hasn't spoken to.

His main suspect.

Neville Tween.

At this point, it's 2009.

Neville Tween is locked up in Silverwater Jail in Sydney's West.

So the two detectives, Gavin McKean and Nicole Jones, notify the prison.

They drive out there.

They go through security and then into a small interview room.

Tween's already in the room, behind a sheet of perspex.

And what I saw when I walked in there on the left was just

this

very insignificant, seedy

old man.

By now, Neville Tween is 68.

He's wearing a prison uniform.

He's got brown hair and blue eyes.

Gavin and Nicole are finally in front of the guy that they've been investigating for all these months.

They've prepared a strategy.

But as soon as they walk in, Tween starts trying to walk out.

He doesn't want a bar of it.

I probably only got a handful of words out before he shut me down.

What did he say?

No, no, no, no, no, no.

I'm not talking to you.

Not talking to you.

Not talking to you.

And then he started to yell at the custody to take him back to jail.

Take me back, take me back.

I don't want to talk.

So he was quite adamant.

I was just the wrong person for him straight away.

Gavin starts to realise that he's about to lose his chance.

We'd come so far, we didn't want to just walk away.

So Nicole Jones, my offsider, who's

one of the best detectives I've ever worked with, and I knew that she would do an awesome job.

And so she took charge at that stage of the interview.

And she asked him him again,

would he be willing to talk to her?

And it worked perfectly because he seemed to take a shine to her.

Gavin watches on as Detective Jones asks the questions.

She starts off by asking Tween where he was on certain dates in the 70s, the dates when those rapes happened on the northern beaches.

He was an artful dodger, you know, of the questions, really.

He would distract and evade questions and come back with nonsensical responses, basically try to make himself appear like he didn't understand and just fumbling through.

What did Twin say when you put the allegations to him about the rapes and about treaty?

Yeah, so he said things similar to,

you know, you could have spoken to me back then, why didn't you put a policewoman on the street back then as a bait device?

That type of thing, which was

all about why didn't you get me?

Not about

I'm horrified at these allegations you're levelling at me.

I'm horrified.

He was void of empathy.

It was really obvious that he was completely void of empathy and more inclined to

take excitement out of the fact that we didn't get him without saying so directly.

At the same time as avoiding the questions and playing games, Tween's trying to find out if the detectives have any new evidence on him.

I think on a number of his questions and the way he was acting, I think he believed we had something bigger than what we had.

And so he was, that's what kept him interested.

That's why he hung around in that interview room.

He was trying to find out what you had.

Yeah, 100%, yeah, yeah.

And he was waiting for us to go, Wamper, here, there's the reel that you took on the video or something like that.

I think he thought we were going to pull something out, but we obviously didn't have anything to pull out.

The interview goes for almost two hours.

Just the three of them, Neville, Gavin, and Nicole, in an interview room.

Tween denies any involvement in Trudy's disappearance or the rapes.

But Detective Nicole Jones presses on, and she does get one important fact out of him.

He admitted that he had a panel van, which matched the description

of the one Trudy Adams was seen getting into.

This whole time, Nicole Jones has been leading leading the interview, asking all the questions.

Gavin's been mostly silent, watching Tween closely, listening to how he's responding.

And then, right at the very end of the interview, after all the allegations have been put to Neville Tween,

after Tween's denied everything,

After the tape player that's been recording is switched off,

Gavin McKean takes a chance.

He puts to Tween his best theory about what happened to Trudy.

Because you see, Gavin doesn't necessarily think that Tween intended to kill Trudy.

Gavin thinks it's possible that Tween planned to drop her home, just like all the other girls.

But maybe something happened.

Maybe the gun went off by mistake.

Maybe Trudy's death was an accident.

And I tried to put it to him in a compromise, like I wanted to compromise with him and say, look, you know, if you've done this,

we understand that was most likely an accident, not a premeditated, vicious murder.

You know, there's so much evidence that points to you doing all of these other sexual assaults where you didn't kill anyone.

So it's most likely

this was an attempt on the type of crime you'd already been doing on numerous occasions prior, and something went wrong.

And I felt that he, there was a level of acceptance to that hypothesis, although not verbalised to that extent.

Based on what?

His facial expression, he just sort of went, yeah, that could have most likely been that or words to that effect.

But a facial expression isn't enough to prove that someone's guilty.

And all the other evidence Gavin has isn't enough either.

As he leaves the room, Gavin's sure that Tween is hiding the truth.

He's left with the impression that Tween is an opportunistic sort of criminal who's gotten away with a lot.

He just seemed like

creepy, you know?

He was creepy.

Not that he would be any danger to someone like me, but you wouldn't want to leave your kids with him, if that makes sense.

He didn't appear like a big bad wolf rapist.

He more appeared to me like someone at a playground handing out candies.

And that might account for why he offended against such young women

and used weapons, I mean, against these young, vulnerable women.

He still had to put a pistol in their face.

That's the type of man we're dealing with.

He was a coward.

He was a seedy little piece of rubbish.

We'll never get the truth from Neville Tween because Neville Tween is now dead.

He died in jail in 2013 of natural causes.

No one reported on his death.

There were no news articles.

It's like everything he did and everything he might have done has been forgotten.

So I made it my mission to find out everything that I could about him.

I read articles, transcripts, and police records.

In some places, I read that Neville Tween has this distinctive way of talking.

But what I couldn't find was any recording of his voice.

Then I realised there was one place where I could find hours of tape of Tween talking.

Because just before he died, there was finally an inquest into Trudy Adams' disappearance.

It came late, but in 2011, 33 years after she disappeared, Tween was called to the coroner's court and questioned for hours.

I've been trying to get access to the tape of his evidence for weeks.

It's never been broadcast before.

But now,

The Attorney General's Office has granted us the right to make this recording public.

So in the next episode of Unravel, you'll hear the voice of Neville Tween

himself.

I don't say I'm an angel, I'm not saying mate, but the prosecutor setting me up as a big baby wool.

More and more of you are getting in touch with stories about hitchhiking on the northern beaches.

One of the people I've spoken to is Michelle.

She says that she and a friend were also picked up by two men around 1974.

We'd had a rather unfortunate day at the beach.

I'm pretty sure it was hardwood or freshwater.

And

whenever we went in the furf, a piece of my clothing got stolen.

So when I came out, I pretty much all I had left was a towel.

and I wrapped the towel around myself and my friend and I walked for quite a way and it was very hot.

Then this car stopped and it was

we got in and it sounds incredibly naive and stupid today but that's what you did.

And

the two men in the front

were young but older enough.

Michelle says it soon became clear that the men were not going to take them home and when she tried to open a door of the moving car they threatened her.

And the guy in the front passenger side opened the glove box and took out a hammer and turned around and said to me to shut the fucking door or I'll smash your head in.

Michelle says the men drove up to the corner of Monaval Road.

This intersection is just before the bushland where other women were taken and attacked.

They were going to take us, pull over.

on the way to Newcastle and rape us.

And that's what they told us they were going to do.

Or he did.

The passenger did, from memory did most of the talking, if not all the talking.

Some extremely quick thinking saved Michelle and her friend.

And then we got to, we

were slowing down at the intersection of Forest Way and Monovale Road and there was a bit of a cue to turn and

I don't know what went through my head and

I've spoken to my friend since then and she doesn't recall it exactly the same same way here, but I opened her door, pushed her with my foot and I got out the other door because they were literally stopped.

She landed on the bottom, we got up, shaking, they drove off, they did absolutely nothing.

We were just so relieved to get out of the car and then, and I'm always shaking, telling you, stood on the side of the road and had to cross the road to the other side and then we hitched back home.

Yeah, wow.

Like many of the women who were attacked or almost attacked, Michelle and her friend didn't report what happened at the time.

They thought they'd get in trouble.

There was no way we were going to do anything about it because

I think either way, we certainly wouldn't have been allowed to hitchhike and we were probably wagging.

Michelle doesn't remember much about the car the men were driving or what they looked like.

So we don't know who those two men were or if Neville Tween was one of them.

but there are similarities to the other attacks that happened on the northern beaches in the 70s.

Michelle says that there were two men, they had a weapon and they were at Monaval Road.

If you had an experience like this on the northern beaches, please get in touch.

You can email me, unraveltrucrime at abc.net.au.