THERE were 30 metres between Gordana Kotevski making it home that night and disappearing, forever.

On November 24, 1994, the pretty teenager was abducted from outside her aunt’s house on Powell St, Newcastle, NSW.

She was so close to home, her family heard her screams.

There was a short, sharp ‘no!’, followed by a longer ‘noooo!’

Muffled male voices, grunts of exertion.

Evidence of a scuffle, as two unidentified men bundled her into a white Toyota Hilux.

Then, three car doors slammed shut and the car disappeared up the street and around the corner.

And with it, 16-year-old Gordana Kotevski.

TRUE CRIME AUSTRALIA: AUSTRALIA’S BEST CRIME STORYTELLING

THE TIME I ‘SAW’ GORDANA KOTEVSKI STILL HAUNTS ME

TINY MINING TOWN DEATH: SUICIDE OR MORE SINISTER?

Gordana was the last in a string of young women to go missing from the Hunter region over a 16-year period.

The disappearance and subsequent suspected abduction and murder of 14-year-old Amanda Robinson, Gordana Kotevski, 16, Robyn Hickie, 18 and 20-year-old Leanne Goodall were investigated by police in isolation between 1978 and 1994.

Now, one of the nation’s most senior judicial figures, has made a startling revelation, confirming the unsolved homicides are potentially the work of a serial killer.

Former State Coroner John Abernethy, who presided over the inquests and 2003 Strike Force Fenwick review of the cases, has broken his public silence to reveal his belief the cases are the work of the one person or group.

“Of course I do, you can’t say for sure but of course I do, you’ve got to look at them as a package,” he says when asked whether the cases are linked.

Mr Abernethy maintains the commonalities between the cases are too hard to ignore, not least of all the disappearances occurring along just a 23km stretch of highway.

Amanda, Robyn and Leanne all vanished within four months between December 1978 and April 1979 while waiting for or getting off buses at bus stops on the Pacific Highway in Newcastle. Gordana was walking home from late-night shopping.

No trace of the women has ever been found.

“It was horrible,” says Gordana’s former best friend Belinda Miljkovic, softly.

“It’s amazing how somebody can just vanish, without any answers, without anything … it’s just like, how? How can that happen?” says Belinda, 40, her warm almond eyes revealing the turbulence of decades of questioning.

For 24 years, what happened to Gordana Kotevski and who took her has remained a mystery.

A 2003 coronial inquest found Gordana had been murdered, by person or persons unknown, but all leads have since dried up.

For years, the case has sat cold, among hundreds of others in the NSW Police unsolved homicides division, until a further development could help police unravel the riddle.

Now, through unprecedented media access, her family, friends and Newcastle locals shed fresh light on the case and reveal information that could catch her killer.

They confirm Gordana had a stalker — a man she nicknamed The Spook. And in the weeks and months before she disappeared a series of unnerving events occurred. Were these the signposts pointing to the horror about to befall the schoolgirl?

THE ABDUCTION

Darkness had begun to fall on that balmy November 24 summer’s evening as Gordana Kotevski left Charlestown Square shopping mall and made her way down the hill to her aunt Sonya Simonovich’s stately brick home.

It was just after 8.45pm and cicadas hummed from the bushland on either side of Powell St.

On the short seven-minute walk, Gordana swung a plastic shopping bag containing a pair of stockings, a black dress and a lay-by receipt for a new swimming costume.

Soon, that shopping bag would be found by the side of the road, its handle torn and imprinted with her finger marks, evidence she put up a fight.

Gordana had no idea of what lay before her.

A witness would later remark on her “happy gait” and the carefree demeanour of the young girl, jubilant about getting her first taste of adulthood that weekend.

Her parents, Peggy and Branko Kotevski, had given Gordana permission to attend her first concert on Saturday night and she had spent the evening shopping for an outfit.

It was a rare stroke of freedom for the Year 11 student whose strict immigrant parents didn’t allow her the same freedoms granted to many of her friends.

“She was excited. She was going to the Boyz 2 Men concert,” recalls Belinda.

“Whatever happened to her, whoever took her: I can guarantee it would have taken her by surprise.”

But there was something out of the ordinary about Gordana’s decision to walk that night. She had been offered a lift by her friend Betty Cocomanovski but turned it down.

Why?

According to all those who knew her, it was the first time she’d walked alone.

“To walk that late is very unusual for her,” says Gordana’s older sister, Carolina Kotevski, 45.

“This is a kid who would wake you up to go to the toilet at night, sort of thing, so there’s a lot of questions around that: why was she walking home?”

As Gordana trotted down the hill, a group of four male skateboarders, mucking around on Powell St, noticed her as she walked past.

One of the boys clocked a Toyota Hi-Lux four-wheel-drive as it travelled down the hill behind her.

When the car passed Gordana, it stopped, made a U-turn and parked at the bottom of the street, about 30 metres from Sonya and Gary Simonovich’s house.

The two men inside the car switched its lights off.

Sonya and Gary Simonovich were relaxing at home on the evening, when they heard a female screaming.

Mrs Simonovich was helping her daughter with homework when the increasing urgency of the screams unnerved her and she asked Gary to check what it was.

“I could tell it was a female screaming and it was continuous. It got continually louder and lasted for about 30 seconds,” Mrs Simonovich would later tell police.

She accompanied Gary outside to their front lawn where the couple could look onto Powell St.

A white vehicle was driving slowly up the street. They watched it turn the corner and disappear.

Not noticing anything out of the ordinary, the Simonovich’s assumed the noise was teenagers mucking around and they went back inside.

Only in retrospect did they realise they were watching their niece’s abduction.

Shortly after 9pm, Carolina phoned Mrs Simonovich.

Gordana’s big sister had driven up to Newcastle from Sydney, where she now lived, and wanted to pick Gordana up so she could play with Carolina’s newborn baby, Stevie.

But Gordana wasn’t home — a second phone call confirmed she wasn’t at her best friend, Belinda’s house, either.

A minute later Mrs Simonovich phoned Carolina back.

“You better come here,” she said. “We’ve found her shopping and her purse on the side of the road.”

“That was the beginning of our worst nightmare,” says Carolina.

THE SPOOK

In the early 90s, the Newcastle suburb of Charlestown wasn’t the sort of place where people locked their doors.

The area was mainly populated by the close-knit and closed Macedonian community. People knew their neighbours, most of them had lived there for decades.

It was far-fetched to imagine a young girl could get kidnapped from a busy suburban street — and Gordana Kotevski was a particularly unlikely victim.

She didn’t have enemies or mix in dodgy circles. She didn’t drink. She’d never tried drugs. She didn’t have a boyfriend.

“I couldn’t even pinpoint anyone,” says Belinda who, like all those who knew and loved Gordana, has spent the past two decades trying to figure out who would want to do this to her friend.

“There was only one thing that I thought of: there was this guy, she named him The Spook. He started to hang around,” she says.

“We just started to notice him being around, he’d be at the Pizza Hut, he was at the deli, we just started to notice him,” she says.

The Spook was in the supermarket and at the shops, he’d turn up in the shopping centre car park.

After Gordana’s abduction several family members and friends told police they had seen The Spook. She had pointed out the man, who she knew by name. Later, Belinda and Peggy were hypnotised in a desperate bid to remember the name Gordana had mentioned but no-one has been able to recall it.

But they could describe a Middle Eastern looking man, in his early 20s, and that he was often seen with a blonde, surfie-looking “mate”.

In the weeks leading up to Gordana Kotevsksi’s abduction the schoolgirl had become increasingly unnerved by The Spook. She felt she was being watched.

“She was afraid of him,” says Carolina.

“She started telling me she was feeling uncomfortable at work, that this guy kept coming in.

“She was working at the deli in Jesmond at the time, and she didn’t know his name or anything, she just said, ‘he keeps coming and bugging me and telling me he wants to go out with me’.”

When Gordana changed jobs after two months to work at Pizza Hut with Belinda, The Spook started showing up there.

Belinda remembers Gordana suddenly asking her to take the counter one evening so she could avoid serving a particular male customer.

When the man left, Gordana looked at Belinda.

“That was The Spook,” she said.

Her mother, Peggy, remembers Gordana pointing out the man in Woolworths. She recalls the man was “eyeing” Gordana off, as if to say, “she looks nice”.

Gordana had also told her aunt about The Spook.

On numerous occasions, Belinda and Peggy saw The Spook and “his mate”, a guy, aged 20-24, with blonde scraggy hair.

But it wasn’t until the inquest that a chilling revelation was made by Detective Senior Constable Kristina Illingsworth: there seemed to be a match between the description of The Spook and his mate and the two men driving the Toyota Hilux.

The frequency with which The Spook appeared and the unsettling nature of the encounters is enough to terrify most adults.

But in the days before mobile phone cameras, no one thought to get a picture of the man.

Belinda recalls one incident when the girls were shopping at Just Jeans.

Gordana was in the changing rooms, trying on a skirt.

When she walked out to get Belinda’s opinion, The Spook stepped out from the next cubicle.

“That looks nice,” he said.

“I just remember how quickly she wanted to get out of there,” Belinda says.

On another occasion a family friend told Carolina he had to hide a “terrified” Belinda and Gordana in his shop, when the teens rushed in, flustered and afraid of a man following them.

Then there were the phone calls.

About six weeks before Gordana was abducted Peggy Kotevski answered her home phone to a male caller, asking for Gordana.

He claimed to be calling from a new store called Gum Leaf but Gordana wasn’t home so Peggy passed on Belinda’s phone number.

Belinda still remembers the “strange” phone call because Gordana hung up when the caller began asking intimate questions. Did she like swimming? What did her swimwear look like? What size was her bra?

When detectives investigated, they discovered no shop called Gum Leaf ever existed.

• Read Part Two of the investigation into the disappearance of Gordana Kotevski tomorrow on truecrimeaustralia.com.au