Forty years ago, in June 1978, 18-year-old Trudie Adams vanished after attending a dance at a surf club on Sydney’s Northern Beaches.
The last person who saw her was her ex-boyfriend, Steve Norris, as she hitchhiked for a lift home shortly after midnight. She was spotted getting into a panel van on Barrenjoey Road in Newport – and then she disappeared.
What happened to Trudie has puzzled the police, her family and the Australian public ever since.
A year ago, ABC journalist Ruby Jones, 29, was unaware she was about to take on the most challenging − and rewarding − job of her career by delving into the cold case.
Ruby, along with Sydney crime journalist Neil Mercer, have spent the past 10 months sifting through clues and investigating every single aspect of the Trudie Adams mystery.
The result is a gripping three-part true-crime series and podcast titled Barrenjoey Road.
Ruby moved from Adelaide to Sydney to work on the case. She was driven by the fact that this could be the last chance for Trudie’s elderly father and friends to finally get some closure.
“It was all-consuming for both Neil and I,” Ruby tells TV WEEK.
“We lived and breathed it every day, and I think that’s what most good journalists do.”
“As soon as you start talking to people, especially Trudie’s friends, you have to be invested. You have to care.”
Journalists Ruby Jones and Neil Mercer.
Ruby and Neil begin the series with nothing but a blank page. By the end, they’ve uncovered more than they could have ever imagined.
The pair soon realised it was more than just a missing-person case.
It included possible police cover-ups, drug allegations, and the strange atmosphere that pervaded Sydney’s sun-kissed Northern Beaches at the time.
“There was so much to wrap our heads around, there really was,” Ruby says.
“There are just so many layers to the story, and I think after we took our first look at it, we were like, ‘Where do we start?'”
Ruby and Neil commenced their investigation by retracing the events of that fateful evening in June.
“We went looking for people who were at the dance on that night, and spent a lot of time going up to the Northern Beaches,” Ruby reveals.
That picturesque part of Sydney, along with what was going on there between some men and teenage girls in the late 1970s and early ’80s, has already garnered plenty of media attention in recent months.
Australians have been gripped by the popular podcast, The Teacher’s Pet, which has shone a light on the cold case of missing Bayview mum Lynette Dawson.
In that instance, Lynette’s husband, Chris Dawson, was the last person to see her alive in January 1982.
The suburbs of Newport and Bayview are close to each other, and although the cases aren’t connected, in many ways they’re eerily similar.
Teenager Trudie Adams.
The Barrenjoey Road podcast was commissioned before The Teacher’s Pet, and Ruby says both expose what life was like on the Northern Beaches during that era.
“They’re tight-knit communities,” Ruby says.
“When something like this happens, everyone remembers it.”
In the first episode of the series, Ruby tracks down Trudie’s former boyfriend, Steve Norris, and without giving too much away, she ends up really feeling for him. The case has tormented him for decades.
“As soon as we met him, I trusted him,” she says.
“I felt he was really honest with us.”
In fact, Steve proves to be an invaluable source of information for Ruby and Neil, handing them reams of documents that aid their investigation.
Ruby is hopeful the screening of Barrenjoey Road will reignite formal interest in the infamous case – and potentially answer the 40-year-old question of what happened to young Trudie.
Although production has wrapped on the series and podcast, Ruby believes she will always be seeking answers to the intriguing mystery.
“I don’t think I’ll ever be able to stop thinking about this case, thinking, ‘What else can we do?'” she says.
“I definitely don’t feel like this is done.”
Barrenjoey Road airs Tuesday, 8:30pm, on ABC.
