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, it's, you know, a beautiful piece for 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 bumpy dirt tracks.

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

You go from the 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.

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