Gordana Kotevski: The abduction that shocked Australia – and why a new arrest brings hope in the 30-year hunt for answers
‘Complicit’ people know the truth behind a sickening case that has gripped Australia for 30 years, a former cop warns after a new development.
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The disappearance of Gordana Kotevski was a chilling crime that horrified Australia. After a recent arrest, former cop MENI CAROUTAS believes someone, somewhere, can solve it.
Losing a child is a tragedy no parent should ever have to endure. To lose a child to a violent, senseless act is heartache on a whole other level.
The disappearance of 16-year-old schoolgirl Gordana Kotevski on Thursday, 24 November 1994 has baffled investigators for three decades.
Gordana went missing at around 9pm as she was walking to her aunt’s house in Newcastle. In my experience, it’s unusual for a young girl to be abducted as she walks home. You see it in movies, but it doesn’t often happen in real life.
When I started The Missing Australia podcast, Gordana’s case was one of the first I wanted to cover. However, I knew her family had endured a great deal of disappointment over the years. They’d participated in a lot of media interviews in the hope they would lead to a breakthrough in the case that might finally deliver the answers they so desperately craved.
Unfortunately, the case remains unsolved.
When a journalist decides to cover a missing person case, it can be harrowing for the family because they have to publicly revisit the most distressing moment of their lives. This is why it wasn’t until two years after I first contacted Gordana’s mum, Peggy, and her sister, Carolina, that I proposed we do the story.
We’d spoken many times and had got to know each other to the point where I felt I’d gained their trust. Most importantly, I believed they were strong enough to speak about Gordana.
‘Gordana was born in 1977. She had dark, dark eyes like her dad and lots of hair. She was very, very small. As she grew older she blossomed into a beautiful young lady,’ Peggy said, when I visited her home south of Wollongong.
Gordana was born to Peggy and Branco Kotevski. As well as her older sister, Carolina, she had a younger brother, Damian. The Kotevskis were a traditional Macedonian family – strict yet loving, with strong values.
Peggy recalled that, in the week her younger daughter vanished, Gordana was excited to soon be attending her first concert. She was going with her cousin to see the boy band Boyz II Men, and it was to be a significant milestone for her, a taste of freedom she’d never had before.
‘I was on afternoon shift,’ Peggy recounted, her eyes distant. ‘I dropped Gordana off at school, then went to the local shops and bought a little top for her to wear to the concert.’
That was the last time Peggy saw her daughter. Branco picked up the kids from school in the afternoon and later dropped Gordana at Charlestown Square shopping centre.
At around 8.45pm, as the warm summer night descended into darkness, Gordana left the shopping centre on foot. She was heading towards her Aunt Sonia’s house on Powell Street, just five minutes away, where she was to be picked up by her mum.
But the young girl never made it.
‘THE NIGHTMARE BEGAN’
‘She was going to walk down, and it was daylight saving so she really thought there was no danger, and the street is pretty safe – not even five minutes from the roundabout up the top from the main road down to Sonia’s place,’ Peggy explained.
On that fateful night, Gordana’s sister, Carolina, had been driving up from Sydney with her husband and newborn baby.
‘When we arrived, I asked Dad, “Where’s Gordana?” He said she was out shopping with the girls [and that] Mum was going to pick her up on the way back home,’ Carolina recalled. ‘But when I called my aunt at about quarter past nine, she said, “Oh, she’s not here” in a weird way. She told me to ring [Gordana’s] friends. By the time I did that, my aunt called back and said: “Call the police. We found her wallet and bag on the roadside!”
And the nightmare began.
Gordana’s Aunt Sonia had heard screams and sent her husband, Greg, outside to check. But it was too late. Powell Street was empty and Gordana was gone.
Greg found Gordana’s wallet and a torn shopping bag on the side of the road, evidence of a violent struggle. The offender must have snatched the shopping bag from Gordana’s hand, leaving a partial palm print.
Carolina’s voice trembled as she recounted more. ‘She was a feisty little bugger. So the bag was from the old Grace Brothers – I think [that’s what] the store was called then. It had their grab mark on the bottom of it so they would have dragged her in [to their vehicle] that way. I think it just would have happened all so suddenly. She wouldn’t have been expecting it, that’s for sure.’
A group of teenagers skateboarding on the same street had heard Gordana’s screams and seen a vehicle speed away.
Realising a crime had occurred, the skateboarders raced to the police station to report it. They described having seen a light-coloured ute, possibly a Toyota HiLux, driving down the hill earlier and parking on the side of the road. After hearing the screams, they heard two car doors slam, suggesting two people were involved.
Carolina also called Charlestown Police Station.
‘When I told them the street name, they said, “You better come to the police station because we’ve got three witnesses here giving us statements,”’ recalled Carolina. ‘I didn’t know how to tell Dad. Then we started ringing the hospitals, thinking that maybe someone did something and then tossed her out on the side of the road. It just got worse from there, when we didn’t hear anything and there was no ransom. You think somebody would have done it for money.’
Peggy was at work when she got the call. The call that every parent dreads, that changes everything, forever.
I asked whether she’d understood at that moment that her daughter had been taken.
‘The first thing I remember I said was: “Where’s the police? Have you notified the police?” At the time, to be honest with you, I was naive. I thought the whole army would go and look for her. That was my expectation because it’s a human being we’re talking about, and it’s someone’s child.’
The days that followed were a blur. On top of losing their child, Peggy and Branco had to suffer the indignity of being made to feel like persons of interest in Gordana’s disappearance. Vicious rumours began to circulate within the tight-knit local Macedonian community.
‘Gossip started that I had arranged a marriage for Gordana, and then the police questioned me – had to question me – which was a great insult to my intelligence,’ Peggy told me, the tone of her voice changing. ‘And they looked into our characters, whether we’ve done something to her. You know, most of the time they say that families are involved, and I said, “Go right ahead.”’
SERIAL KILLER STAIN
In 1999, five years after Gordana vanished, Strike Force Fenwick was established to re-examine not only her disappearance but also those of three other missing girls: Leanne Goodall, last seen on Saturday, 30 December 1978 aged 20; Robyn Hickie, who went missing on Saturday, 7 April 1979 aged 18; and 14-year-old Amanda Robinson, who vanished forever on Saturday, 21 April 1979, exactly two weeks after Robyn.
Like Gordana, these girls had gone missing from the Newcastle area, leaving a terrible stain on the region’s soul that is still perceptible today.
I wanted to find out more about the police investigation into Gordana’s disappearance, so I asked Peggy and Carolina if they could nominate one of the detectives on the task force who I could try to talk to.
They both pointed to Bill Glen, a retired detective sergeant. Peggy told me Bill had shown her family great compassion and had always kept them up to date with any developments in Gordana’s case.
Bill now lives in New Zealand, so we talked over Zoom.
‘We went back to the beginning. We got all the investigative notes and went through everything,’ he explained. ‘We had to make a choice at one stage about what vehicle we were going to chase up so we went with Toyota HiLux, but if you see a Nissan Navara next to it, there’s not much difference. So we did a review of every HiLux registered in the Newcastle area in 1994. It was a huge task, really, [as] you’re finding the vehicles have been sold, or gone interstate, or the owner was dead, or it had been written off in a car accident. We identified everything that had been stolen, and every HiLux in New South Wales was identified.’
Each vehicle represented a potential lead, a thread of hope. Bill told me the task force followed up every lead that came in and every suspect who appeared on the police radar.
Some lines of inquiry injected fresh hope into the case, but amid the glimmers of possibility there were shadows of doubt, and nothing solid was unearthed that led to a breakthrough.
I remembered reading media reports at the time that suggested Gordana and the other missing girls might have been victims of the same serial killer. Backpacker serial killer Ivan Milat was, at one time, suspected of being involved, but nothing was ever uncovered to connect him to the disappearances.
I asked Bill if he believed Gordana’s disappearance was linked to those of the other missing girls.
‘I think it was a standalone case,’ he said. ‘I can only give you a gut feeling, and gut feelings are bad. The only people who should have a gut feeling are police dogs.
‘But I think the time had gone and the people responsible for some of the historical ones would have been well into their 30s. The descriptions of the two people who were in the street are basically late teens, early 20s, so no, I don’t think they’re connected.’
Bill’s gut feeling that Gordana’s case stood alone echoed the sentiment of many other investigators. A singular tragedy swirling in a backdrop of uncertainty. The passage of time seemed to distance her fate from those of the other missing girls.
It’s a theory that is also supported by former New South Wales State Coroner John Abernathy, who presided over the 2003 inquest into Gordana’s suspected death.
NEW REWARD, NEW ARREST
In April 2019, Strike Force Arapaima was established to investigate the disappearance and suspected murder of Gordana. It is still an active investigation.
In 2022, the NSW Government increased the reward for information into Gordana’s case from $100,000 to $1 million. That’s a lot of incentive for someone with information to come forward – and if you know something and you don’t come forward, then you’re complicit in what happened to that 16-year-old girl.
In June 2023, I released an episode of The Missing Australia podcast that focused on Gordana’s case. As with all stories I investigate, I made an appeal for information and finished with my catchcry: ‘Someone, somewhere, knows something.’
A number of people heard my plea and they reached out to Strike Force Arapaima investigators, passing on vital information about Gordana’s case that has opened up promising new leads.
One listener to the podcast was triggered by my story on Gordana and contacted Strike Force Arapaima about a violent attack she endured back in 1980 when she too was 16 years old.
Following an investigation by detectives, the victim was able to identify her attacker, and in January 2024, police arrested a man. Warren John McCorriston, a 64-year-old registered sex offender, pleaded guilty to trying to abduct the girl.
At his sentencing hearing last week, Newcastle District Court heard McCorriston had previously served more than eight years in jail for attacks on three women between 1979 and 1999. He was sentenced to two years and three months over the 1980 incident but due to time served already, was granted immediate release.
This huge development gives me hope that Gordana’s case will be solved one day soon. All it takes is one person with the courage to look deep into their soul and do the right thing.
Gordana Kotevski and her family deserve that.
This is an edited extract from Someone Somewhere Knows Something by Meni Caroutas, published by HarperCollins on July 2.
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