Robert Adams jailed for 15 years for murdering a nurse in 1983

Robert Adams, now 64, was found guilty last year of killing 33-year-old Mary Wallace, whose body has never been found.

• Mary Wallace’s family share grief at sentencing hearing

KILLER and serial rapist Robert Adams is finally behind bars after a historic cold case investigation, a strand of hair and the courage of three women.

Adams, 64, was jailed for 20 years with a non-parole of period of 15 years for murdering popular nurse Mary Wallace, 33, in September 1983 after he offered her a lift from the Alpine Inn wine bar at Crows Nest.

Her body has never been found despite searches of rugged land in Lane Cove National Park.

The father-of-four told police they had fallen asleep in his car after having sex and when he woke she was gone.

Robert Adams lived in freedom for years before his arrest in 2010. Picture: Jonathan Ng

Mary Wallace, 33, disappeared after a night out in a Crows Nest wine bar in 1983.

But just three months before Ms Wallace’s murder, Adams had ended his parole for a shocking rape of another woman and had a history of similar assaults.

His earlier victim, then a schoolteacher, and two other women bravely gave chilling “similar fact” evidence during his murder trial that he had also choked and raped them.

“I didn’t black out but it frightened me. I felt that he could have killed me,’’ one of them had told police.

When Adams was arrested in 2013 by the state’s unsolved homicide team, it was then the oldest case in which they had made an arrest.

Detectives had submitted human hairs vacuumed by police from the boot of Adams’ Holden Commodore after Ms Wallace disappeared for mitochondrial DNA analysis, which had not been invented decades ago. The hairs matched the DNA of Mary Wallace.

Mary Wallace’s sister Anne Fraser (left) turned out in gloomy weather to be present at the Supreme Court to witness Robert Adams being sentenced to a minimum 15 years for her sister’s murder. Picture: AAP

Adams, a rugby player nicknamed “Bob the Yob”, was convicted of her murder last year by Justice Richard Button.

“This offence against a young woman in the prime of her life, simply for the sexual gratification of the offender, cannot be assessed as anything other than extremely grave,” Justice Button said while sentencing Adams yesterday.

The judge said that Adams had longstanding tendency to choke young women to force them to have sex with him.

He said Ms Wallace’s parents had gone “to their graves without any resolution of the mystery of the loss of their daughter” and it was regrettably a forlorn hope that Adams would ever reveal where he had put the body of Ms Wallace so she could receive a proper burial.

He said he had to sentence Adams on the basis of sentences in 1983, when there was no true life sentence.

An undated photograph of Mary Louise Wallace, whose parents died without knowing of her tragic fate.

Ms Wallace’s two sisters and friends watched in court yesterday.

Justice Button said Adams had shown “not the slightest sign” of remorse and may have thought that he had literally got away with murder before his arrest.

Ms Wallace was a theatre sister who worked at Hunters Hill hospital when she met Adams in the bar in September 1983. He had told her friends he was a police officer so they did not worry when she got into his car intoxicated.

His inquest in 2010 was told that after the 1976 rape, to which he pleaded guilty, he said to police that he “needed psychiatric help’’.

The inquest was also told that his first wife, who claimed he whipped her with dog chains, had said Adams had two different personalities, “one kind and attentive, the other impulsively violent both towards her and towards other people generally’’.