Barrenjoey Road 03 | The Hunting Ground

This is an ABC podcast.

Trudy Adams disappeared in June 1978,

and her disappearance set something in motion.

Because in the days and the weeks afterwards, other women began to come forward.

One by one, they approached police,

all telling a similar, terrible story.

It turns out for years young women on the northern beaches had been targeted.

They were kidnapped while hitchhiking or walking home,

driven to a hidden spot of bushland,

blindfolded and raped.

The place they were taken is a half hour drive away from the coast,

into a national park,

an isolated spot

where they could hear the sound of high voltage power lines in the distance.

Just you can kind of hear them humming.

I mean on one hand it's you know a beautiful peaceful woodland on a balmy night but the second that you start to think about the sorts of things that happened here you get a completely different feeling.

Even the drive here was a bit scary.

You go down these little dirt, bumpy dirt tracks.

You're very quickly out of street lamps, out of houses, there's nothing around.

You know, you go from a main road to feeling really isolated really quickly.

And that's pretty scary.

It's really sick to think about the way that they saw this area as a hunting ground to pick up young girls who were just trying to get home.

You know, it's a really calculated way of attacking women.

And it doesn't happen that often,

but it was happening often around here.

You know, it was happening

with regularity.

It was happening to lots of women.

It's exactly what you're taught to be scared of as a girl, that

men who you don't know can

spring out of nowhere and abduct you and rape you and you know that's what you're scared of.

That's exactly what you're scared of when you're a teenage girl or, you know, any age woman.

That's the nightmare.

That's the total fear.

This is Unravel.

Our season two story is Baron Joey Road.

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

She was 18 when she went missing.

She was last seen hitchhiking towards home from the Newport Surf Club.

That was 40 years ago.

She hasn't been seen since that night and her body has never been found.

Just a warning, you're about to hear some graphic stuff, descriptions of sexual violence.

Because to understand what might have happened to Trudy, it's important to know about the horrible things that happened to a lot of other women in this area.

And why the men who did all this stuff got away with it.

Since we released episodes one and two, some of you have gotten in touch with stories of your own.

You've told us about things you remember happening on the northern beaches in the 70s.

One woman's told me about something really terrifying that happened to her in 1978.

That's the same year Trudy disappeared.

Her name's Karen, and she was 19 when she decided to hitchhike to a wine bar one night, just a few case south of where Trudy disappeared.

I was walking and on the way it started to drizzle so because it was such a short distance I just thought well I'll just hitchhike hitchhike and I'll just get a small lift and I'll be fine.

So I did that and this guy picked me up in a little

white mini minor van like

a mini van with a black roof.

So we get to the wine bar and he drives past and won't let me out.

And I started to panic a bit there and I just said to him, well, you know, you can let me out here.

That's where the wine bar is.

And he took a hard left into the road to Long Reef, which in those days, it it had nothing.

It was just bush with a dirt, you know, like a bush road in.

I can't remember whether the road was paved or dirt, but I don't know whether it was paved because it was pretty bumpy.

And we just got to the end in dark bushland.

No lights, no lights at all in there, nothing, not a street light.

Yeah, God, that's so scary.

So he just continued to go.

And then when he came to a halt, I turned to my left to open the passenger door to jump out and run away and he grabbed me from behind.

He grabbed me around the throat and pulled me back down on his knee and put his hand over my mouth.

So I was struggling of course and trying to yell out and

trying to get at him so I could get his hands off me and let go.

But nothing worked.

And your thought was that this man wanted to sexually assault you.

That's what he was doing.

Absolutely.

I just thought that that's what was going to happen next.

He was going to overpower me and then I would be raped.

Beaten and raped, I thought.

But Karen was lucky.

The driver got distracted by a passerby and she managed to get out of the car.

She ran away and this passerby helped her get home.

And so after it all happened,

did you tell your friends or did you tell anyone?

Yes.

Yes, I told all my friends because I was sharing with girls and I told all them

and they were just sympathetic.

I mean, it was mixed reaction, you know, they just sort of went along with my

view that

I felt guilty.

I, you know, didn't want to tell the police because I thought I would be in trouble.

Why did you think that you would be in trouble?

Because I was hitchhiking.

And, you know, in those days, well,

you were asking for it in a way.

I mean, you put yourself yourself out there, and what do you expect?

Sort of is the way I felt the attitude was.

It seems like that was the culture in 1978.

Don't take risks, and if you do, it's your fault.

Karen's not the only woman who was attacked on the northern beaches after trying to hitchhike in the 70s.

She's also not the only one who didn't report it.

Karen got away, others didn't.

For women, the bushland on the northern beaches was a dangerous place.

Believe it or not, you can still see this was a track, right?

Yeah.

Once you turn off Baronjoy Road and head west, you find yourself surrounded by bushland.

There's rivers, duck ponds, ravines.

Most of it's protected, part of a national park called Karingai Chase.

This is the area where an anonymous caller said that Trudy's body was dumped.

So I've met up with a guy called Brian Walker.

He was a park ranger here for 30 years and he's agreed to be my guide.

There's a spot out here that he wants to show me, a place that he stumbled across a long time ago, back in the early 70s, years before Trudy went missing.

But he thinks it might have something to do with Trudy

and the other women too.

It's pretty isolated back then you know.

Like Monavel Road I think was pretty well a single lane road in them days.

Back then you could drive to this spot but these days the scrub is so thick that we can't get through on the first track that we try and we have to back out again and come around on another trail.

As we're walking the bush opens out and we reach a kind of clearing.

And believe it or not,

this is the spot.

Brian first came here because he was hearing gunshots at night.

It was more a rifle top, oh, maybe a pistol, but a bang, bang, bang, bang, you know, not just bang.

He also saw some lights, maybe car headlights, that he thought were coming from somewhere around here.

So he came out a day or two later.

to see what he could find.

When Brian got to this clearing he found something that really worried him.

Something he now thinks might be linked to the rape of all these women.

So where was the mattress?

Mattress is

pretty well in there.

Just here?

Yeah this used to be a real, you can sort of see this used to be a real, you could turn a car.

And so what sort of mattress?

What size, what colour?

I can tell you it was a double, like a double bed mattress, just an inner spring mattress you know.

Some of the women who were taken into this bushland blindfolded told police that they'd been forced to lie down on something soft, something

like a mattress.

And what sorts of other stuff would you see around here?

Oh well

after gunshots I'd come out here and I'd near the mattress or something at different times I've seen women's underwear.

As well as the women's underwear, Brian also found old car wrecks and blown-open safes.

He says he reported this to his local police station at the time.

I rang the police several times and said there were shots being fired out in the bush and they said, well, you know, there's nothing we can do about it.

It's out in the bush and how are you ever going to find them?

It seems police didn't do anything about what Brian had seen.

At least not until 1978, after Trudy Adams went missing.

A couple of days after her disappearance, a series of girls began to come into Monavel police station to report a series of rapes, horrifying rapes, rapes that they'd been too scared to talk about before.

The rapes, all carried out by two men, all took place in the thick bush inland from the northern beaches.

The rapes were of such maniacal brutality that even now the police have refused to reveal details on or off the record.

Some details about what happened to these women were later given to the inquest into Trudy Adams' death.

So the general pattern of the attacks goes like this.

Two men would pick up the girl or girls.

They would threaten them with a pistol, handcuff them and tape over their eyes.

They usually wore some sort of disguise like a fake wig or fake glasses.

Sometimes they pretended to be cops telling victims that they were in trouble because of a drug bust and had to come with them.

They seemed to have a spot or a few spots in this bush near the northern beaches where they would take the women.

A few of them remember hearing the sound of power lines crackling.

The men would sometimes shoot at the ground near the women and force them to undress.

The men would take turns to repeatedly rape the women.

Sometimes they took Polaroid photos of the attacks.

This had been happening for seven years before Trudy disappeared, and the attacks had been getting more and more violent and more frequent.

The first attack was in 1971.

By 78, the year that Trudy disappeared, they were happening almost every month.

There was one in January 78,

another in February, one in March,

then there were three in April.

Trudy disappeared in June.

It was after all the media attention and the police appeals for help on Trudy's case that most of these women came forward.

The women thought that what happened to them might be able to help explain what happened to Trudy.

And when it became known that these attacks had been happening for so long, people wanted to know why many of these women hadn't come forward earlier.

The women were even criticised by some news programs for not reporting sooner.

So in a way the responsibility does lie with the girls who didn't report them.

Why didn't they come forward before to report them?

In all instances, it's been because of complete fear of reprisal by the offenders, having in mind the terror that they went through at the scene and also the fact that the offenders told each girl that if they should report the matter to police then they would be either hurt in some way or either themselves or their family would be killed.

It turned out the men had been taking the women's names and addresses and telling them that they would come back for them if they said anything.

So on top of that fear, the fear that these men would find and kill them, there was also the fear of not being believed.

After all, at least one woman who was attacked wasn't.

In the early 70s, a woman did report what happened to her.

She actually went to her local police station the very night that she was raped.

But police didn't take her seriously.

A police report calls her complaint doubtful twice.

It questions why she didn't struggle more.

It says that she didn't want to make a full statement.

And as far as I can tell, police did nothing more about it.

A few days later, two more girls were attacked.

Which raises the question, if women who reported being raped were treated differently, could other attacks have been prevented?

When all of the women who had been raped in this area came forward, Brian immediately thought back to this spot that he had found a few years earlier.

After Trudy disappeared, he told police about this place again, and this time they took him more seriously.

Some officers came out and had a look.

The mattress was still there.

And so, knowing what we know now about

what happened to these women, what do you think happened here?

I'd probably pretty for sure say this was the spot that they were bringing them and

doing indecent things to them them and then letting them go again.

I'm pretty well 100%

sure.

There's something else that Brian wants to show me.

He's taking me to another spot, a place that he stumbled across just a few months after Trudy disappeared.

It was September 1978 and Brian was out riding his bike in the bush.

when he saw something that scared the hell out of him.

We're not far from where the mattress was or from where the power lines are where I was the other night.

All of these locations are within a couple of Ks of each other.

We're walking a bit further into the park away from the main road and in here there's more trees and you can walk around without having to bash your way through the bush.

So you were walking down this way?

Yeah, I just stopped the bike there.

I walked down this bit of a track.

I don't even know what made me come down here.

It's not somewhere where I'd normally go.

I just came down here and went to turn around.

I thought, God, there's a guy's coat hanging there.

Well, I could see a sports coat just hanging on the tree.

And then when I come in, I can't recall where there was a shovel and a crowbar.

stuck in the ground and this hole was empty.

What Brian saw was a freshly dug hole.

It was about two metres long and a metre wide.

He started to feel pretty panicked.

It was going to be a grave.

It was definitely going to be a grave.

For who or for what, do not know.

A mound of dirt was next to it with that crowbar or shovel stuck into it.

And there was a tree next to that with the coat just hanging there.

Brian started to feel like he was being watched.

I got very jittery.

I thought, gee, I'm out of here.

Yeah, so I took off.

Did you think that the person whose coat it was was still around?

Yeah, I suspected he was.

Yeah, because we'd had rain and there were footprints here where the sand had been lifted off from someone's foot and you could see the dry footprints.

So I assume whoever did this heard me coming and was just somewhere in the bush here.

So what happened after that?

Did you get back on your bike?

Got back on the bike and yeah, took off.

Yeah, I think if I'd gone back and the bike hadn't I started, I probably would have run out of here and left the bike there.

Yeah, it was frightening.

Brian called the police and they all went out to the spot together.

The grave was filled in.

It was so well disguised, I had to get a stick and sort of scratch in the dirt where it was because If you'd been just walking through here, I don't think you would have either twigged it or been dug up.

I really don't.

Brian says police only took three or four shovelfuls of dirt out, but he wanted to be sure, so he took over and he dug out the whole grave.

I just wanted for my own personal satisfaction to see it emptied out, you know, because I sort of said if there was someone in it, as soon as they opened it up, you'd smell them.

The police were right, there was nothing there.

They said that the site had probably been abandoned by the gravedigger, maybe because Brian had interrupted them.

As we get closer to the spot that Brian stumbled across all those years ago, I'm in for a shock.

Wow, I can't believe it's still here.

I can't believe it's an open grave 40 years later.

It's a bit overgrown and there's leaves and some grass covering it, but it still looks exactly like a grave.

It's still deep from when Brian dug it up all of those years ago, searching for a body.

The grave site didn't end up helping police with their inquiries, but it did suggest that some pretty disturbing stuff was going on out here.

Police were under pressure to work out who was behind all of the awful things happening in the bushland near the northern beaches.

Someone had been digging a grave.

There were mattresses and women's underwear and the sounds of gunshots at night.

Women said that they were being taken and sexually assaulted in this area by two men.

And according to the anonymous caller, this is where Trudy Adams' body had been dumped.

Police were out there in the park searching, but they weren't finding much that was helping their investigation.

So they were also doing other things to try and find a suspect.

They looked back at their own records for known sex offenders in the area and they asked around within the force.

What they found is that two people had actually been convicted of a sexual assault in that same patch of bushland.

It happened three years before Trudy disappeared, and there were a lot of similarities to the 14 rapes.

But this attack didn't start out with a woman hitchhiking.

In this assault, the victim was a man, and it began as a drug deal gone wrong.

I got the story from the cop who investigated the case, Bob Inkster.

Well, the story as I know it was that a young man was selling cannabis in the North Sydney area in small amounts.

This 19 year old small-time dealer sold some bad drugs.

It wasn't full-on cannabis.

It had bits of grass and parsley and whatever chopped up to boost up the

sale.

It turns out his customers weren't happy about being ripped off and they came up with a plan to get him back.

So they pretend they want more drugs and they set up a meeting.

A meeting in the bush just off Monavau Road.

One of them picks him up and drives him there.

The other guy is there in the bush waiting.

Wearing overalls and a full motorcycle helmet and he was carrying an M1 machine gun.

Police suspect the gun was stolen from an army base.

And

he dragged a young fellow out of the car and with some colourful language said words to the effect, rip me off, William.

He then commenced to fire the machine gun around his ankles.

No doubt the young fellow was completely terrified.

The bullets that are aimed around his feet are only the start of this ordeal.

Next, he's ordered to dig his own grave.

This wasn't the place where Brian stumbled on the freshly dug grave, but it's in the same area within a couple of case.

They then gave him the mattock and the shovel and said start digging, which he did.

The young fellow then, begging for his life, had promised the two that if they would let him go, he would compensate them with a large amount of money.

He would get a lot of money and pay them.

But it seems like this wasn't just about money.

The attack continued.

And I've got to warn you, Bob Inkster's description of what happens next takes a pretty full-on turn.

The attack goes from something that could be revenge or teaching a drug dealer a lesson to something far more twisted.

Yeah they stripped off all his clothes and they inserted Cabanosi's sausage into his anus.

They then dressed him in young female's underwear.

They then

did some horrendous sexual act upon him that was part of the humiliation, I would imagine.

What they did was one of the two men, the one who was wearing the motorbike helmet and had the gun, forced the young guy to fallate the other attacker.

And as it turned out, they used a Polaroid camera and photographed it.

So a camera, photographs, just like the attacks on some of the women, a gun, the same section of bushland, and the same type of sickening sexual violence.

Bob had this nickname.

He was known as the snake.

Some people say it's because he would coil around a case, tightening his grip until he squeezed out the truth.

He was and still is an imposing figure.

He's tall and he doesn't smile much.

At one point, while I'm talking to him, he cracks this joke, and it takes me a full 10 seconds to realize because he is just not the sort of guy who kids around.

I can see how Crooms would have been scared of him.

And when the local cops asked him for help with the case, it wasn't long before they had a good lead.

They had a suspect in mind at that stage, and all they knew was his Christian name was Nev,

and that he was in possession of an M1 machine gun.

It immediately rang bells with the people in my office and they knew of such a person.

He was that well known and particularly in relation to the machine gun.

And there was also suggestion that the people up here in the scrub had been involved in safe breaking because the head of an in-floor safe was also located and they had been practicing with explosives.

So we had safe breaker, Christian name Nev,

and in possession of an M1 machine gun.

Immediately that had to be Neville Brian Tween.

Neville Brian Tween became the main suspect in this attack straight away.

Bob Inkster knew a fair bit about him already.

Tween wasn't just a safebreaker.

He was a drug dealer and an explosives expert.

He was a serious criminal.

So when Bob went to confront Tween, he took a team of police.

Tween lived in an ordinary suburban place in a quiet cul-de-sac, pretty close to that section of bush where all of the assaults were happening.

Bob's team arrived at dawn and surrounded the property.

We hit the door with a sledgehammer and he came straight out of his bedroom and we arrested him in the lounge room.

We weren't going to give him one second to get hold of that machine gun.

They searched Neville Tween's house and in his shed they found those Polaroid photos, the photos of the assault on the young man.

So a record proof of what had happened.

They had him.

I was just amazed that someone would do what they did in the first place and then retain the evidence that would

quite properly convict them.

Why do you think he would have kept photos?

Perhaps to be used as a way of further extortion of the victim, to stand over him saying that he would publish them if he didn't get paid money.

I mean any number of reasons.

But it certainly would have had an enormous impact on the victim of that crime.

The police investigating Trudy's disappearance was starting to pull the pieces together.

This guy, Neville Tween, had a gun.

He lived in the right area close to the beach and to the bush.

He'd been convicted of a sexual assault.

He had a reputation as a safe breaker, and broken safes were also found at the place where the mattress was.

So police were asking, could Neville Tween have been responsible for what happened to the 14 women?

And could this be what happened to Trudy?

But here's the thing: despite being a suspect, Neville Tween was never approached by detectives investigating Trudy's disappearance.

No one knocked on his door.

They didn't try to talk to him.

Nothing.

So why was he never interviewed?

When I asked Gary Matthews about this, the original detective on Trudy's case in 78, he brings up Tween's lawyer.

I was told somewhere along the line

that his solicitor had been in touch and said that he was not to be spoken to or interviewed.

He wouldn't be taking part in any line-ups, etc.,

or assist in any way unless he was present.

Tween's lawyer has since denied making any statement like this to police.

But if it is true, if it did happen, the obvious question is: how would Neville Tween's lawyer have any idea that detectives investigating Trudy Adams' disappearance were taking a look at Tween?

For Gary Matthews, it was a sign that Tween might be more than your average criminal.

He just wouldn't have talked.

He was a hardened criminal and unless you have something to talk to him about,

you wouldn't expect any admissions without having some sort of bearance onto him.

I can't help but think that more could have been done to put pressure on Tween.

But the reality is, I don't know what policing was like in the 70s and 80s.

It's before my time and I need some help understanding what it was like.

Luckily, I've had an experienced crime reporter working alongside me on this case.

His name is Neil Mercer, and he's kind of a legend when it comes to crime reporting in Sydney.

He's got decades of insight into police methods and a little more patience than I do.

I ask him why Neville Tween was not brought in for questioning.

He doesn't have to answer any questions and he knows that.

So they can call him in.

Well, but they didn't even call him in.

But they've got to have some

leverage.

And they didn't have enough.

I don't think they had enough.

I mean, they could have called him in and he would have said, I know nothing about it.

And I'll get my solicitor.

But why wasn't even that done?

Because,

you know, you can still put the allegations to him, even if you don't have leverage.

Well, no, you can't just hold somebody.

You can't bring them down to the police station.

You can go to their home.

You can go to their home, yeah.

But he's going to slam the door in their face.

I just think it's interesting that even that didn't happen.

If he was, you know, the prime suspect at this point.

I mean, maybe maybe they were waiting until they had more.

I think that's maybe they never collected more, you know.

Well, maybe they couldn't get any more.

They didn't have DNA back then,

they didn't have mobile phones, so they couldn't sort of track anything.

Look, I agree with you, it's interesting.

Maybe they should have applied more pressure to him, but he's a hardened criminal.

It's a tough job.

This guy is

a very, very, very bad crook.

So Neville Tween was never interviewed and six weeks after Trudy was last seen, it seems police started to wind down their investigations because at that point Gary Matthews says that he was actually taken off the case.

His bosses decided that he should do a training course.

I obviously felt disappointment that we couldn't have spent a lot more time.

doing it myself

but then the system was those days that if you just about run out of information, the locals continue it and you move on to the next.

Six weeks does not seem like long enough to investigate a possible murder, let alone potential links to 14 other attacks.

But it looks like that's what happened.

That's where the first investigation into Trudy Adams' disappearance ended.

New leads and tip-offs still filtered in over the next few years, but the investigation went on the back burner.

And the 14 women who were attacked in the bush near Monavale Road most of those women had come forward to try to help Trudy's case and when that investigation petered out it seems nothing more was done about what happened to them either

You know, what happened to these women was horrific.

You know, the whole process, the whole driving along, looking for the women you've got the guns you've got the duct tape you know it's the same every time they were so clearly designed to terrify the women who were abducted

I mean I just think they're sick I think

like these attacks were just they're planned there's almost a script that they ran

because it's the same

you know for all of the attacks they they have this mode that they go into and they know exactly what they're doing and I mean the awful thing about it is that it worked.

They got away with it.

It's clear Trudy Adams case was difficult for police.

All the evidence was circumstantial.

None of Trudy's clothes or things had been found in the bush and on top of that there were no witnesses.

No one saw who was driving the car Trudy got into on the night that she went missing.

But the sexual assaults were different.

The women told police what the men sounded like.

Some even saw what they looked like.

There are serious questions to be asked here about why more wasn't done to follow up on these attacks.

It's true that some of these women said they didn't want to give evidence in court.

They probably wanted to forget what happened.

But others seemed willing to take it further.

And as far as anyone knew, there were two two rapists still out there.

It seems reckless for police to just drop it.

It's crazy that crimes this serious can sit on a shelf at a station somewhere for so long.

But it seems like that's what happened.

It appears no one looked at the rape files again, and that no one looked at Trudy's case again.

Not until the 90s.

When the investigation into Trudy's disappearance took a wild new turn,

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

In the next episode of Unravel, I examine a new group of suspects and a completely different theory about what happened to Trudy.

So we had quite a conversation.

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

And I sit down down for the first ever interview with the cop who says he knows who killed Trudy Adams.

He was a coward.

He was

a seedy little piece of rubbish.

If you know anything about these attacks on women who are trying to hitchhike on the northern beaches from 1971 to 1978, I'd like to talk to you.

The best email address is unraveltruecrime at at abc.net.au.

You can remain anonymous.

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

If this episode has raised any issues for you and you're listening in Australia, you can access 24-hour support services for people impacted by sexual assault via 1-800 RESPECT.

That's 1-800-737-732.