A new podcast delving into the mysterious disappearance of two teenage girls from New South Wales’ Sutherland Shire over four decades ago has uncovered remarkable parallels between this cold case and other unsolved murders in the area.

Elaine Johnson, 16, and Kerry Anne Joel, 17, were best friends who disappeared in January 1980. At the time, authorities dismissed them as runaways.

The teenagers were labeled rebellious; Elaine had left home following a dispute with her parents about a party, while Kerry Anne had recently had a minor car accident in her mother’s vehicle.

Despite these assumptions, Elaine’s family has consistently insisted that she was not the kind of person to just vanish, and they have never stopped seeking the truth.

It wasn’t until 2014, more than 30 years later, that the girls’ friends were finally interviewed. During a 2016 inquest, it emerged that Elaine’s original police file had gone missing.

Elaine and Kerry Anne weren’t the only teenage girls to go missing from the NSW south coast around that time, and for the subsequent police investigation to be riddled with incompetence. 

Just seven months earlier, in July 1979, 16-year-old Kay Docherty and 15-year-old Toni Kavanagh went missing from Warilla, a suburb on the outskirts of Wollongong.

The high school students were last seen at a Warilla bus stop. They had planned to hitchhike to Wollongong to go to a disco.

An inquest in 2013 found the girls had likely died shortly after they went missing and aired suspicions of detectives that they may have been murdered by notorious Australian serial killer Ivan Milat.

“They went without telling anyone. Kay told her parents she was staying at Toni’s house for the night, and Toni told her family she and Kay were going to the movies,” Jeff Dakers, a retired NSW police officer who was one of the first to investigate Kay and Toni’s disappearances, told the podcast.

With very few leads to go on, the girls just became missing people, Dakers said.

About a decade ago, Dakers was contacted by local police officers who wanted to chat about the case.

To his shock, Dakers was told the files on Kay and Toni’s disappearance had been misplaced and police had no evidence to go on.

Dakers also told of a chilling conversation he had with a Warilla local man who used to ride his bike in the sand dunes as a boy in 1980.

In the podcast the local man is referred to as Liam. Liam recalled seeing a man with two girls in the sand dunes in 1980, who told him the man was trying to kill them.

Dakers said Liam told him the girls he saw that day managed to escape the man and run to a local house.

Not long after, Liam went back to the sand dunes and saw the same man with a shovel and a ute.

The retired copper said Liam told him he believed the man he saw those two times out riding his bike was notorious Milat.

Liam says he had only recognised the man as Milat years later after seeing him in a documentary.

Milat was convicted in 1996 of the murders of seven backpackers whose bodies were found in the Belanglo State Forest, in the NSW southern highlands.

He was sentenced to life in prison and died in jail in 2019.

Milat’s victims were all killed between 1989 and 1992 after he picked them up hitchhiking.

Police have long suspected that more victims of Milat are yet to be uncovered.

In 1993, Task Force Air reviewed nationwide unsolved cases of murdered and missing young people who could be possible Milat victims and the list ran to 58 people.

Last month, a NSW parliamentary inquiry into missing person cases and unsolved murders was announced.

The inquiry will focus on cases from 1965 to 2010, and investigate possible links between unsolved murders and long-term missing people around the Southern Highlands, Inner Sydney, Newcastle and the North Coast.

Toni and Kay’s disappearance will be one of several case studies examined for possible systematic failings in the criminal justice system, and with a view to how new technology can assist police.

The push for the inquiry came from NSW upper house member Jeremy Buckingham, who gained support from Premier Chris Minns. 

Buckingham told the Illawarra Mercury there were often failings by the police during the era when Toni and Kay went missing.

In the 1970s and 80s, Buckingham said, women and girls who went missing or were murdered were often considered runaways or at fault for being out at night and “making themselves vulnerable” by catching a bus alone or hitchhiking.

“Now, it’s utterly egregious to think like that,” he said.

A lack of urgency led cases to go cold quickly, Buckingham added.

“Key people weren’t interviewed, and I don’t think it’s an isolated incident,” he said.

“How it is that two young women, two girls can just disappear off a suburban street, and key family members are not interviewed for years, if not decades, later.”