Missing NZ woman likely met with foul play

A New Zealand nurse who disappeared from Sydney in 1980 is dead and probably met with foul play, a coroner has found.

NSW deputy state coroner Paul MacMahon said the death of Marion Sandford, 23, was a tragedy.

"The evidence before me is overwhelming that Marion is in fact dead," Coroner MacMahon said when he delivered his open finding at an inquest.

"Marion died on or about January 29, 1980.

"The life and death of Marion Sandford is a tragedy for the community and her family."

However, Coroner MacMahon said he could not make a formal finding about where or how she died.

He ruled out death due to suicide, accident and natural causes because those causes would have led police to her body within the 32-year period.

He said there was a possibility that her risky lifestyle as a heroin addict and a prostitute may have led to foul play.

Shortly before her disappearance, Ms Sandford was approached by her drug dealer to do a drug run to Malaysia.

"The final possibility is that Marion was involved in a drug importation that some way went wrong."

However, the inquest heard there was no evidence she ever got a passport.

Ms Sandford wrote a letter to her brother, Peter Sandford, on January 27, 1980 saying she had gone to meet friends and would be back at the Cammeray home they shared within a week.

"I am not at all sure when I will be home but it should be within 2 days to 1 week at the latest I suppose! Met a couple of friends. See you later, love Marion," she wrote in a letter posted at Sydney's Central Railway Station on January 27, 1980.

The letter was received two days later, but she vanished without a trace.

Outside Glebe Coroners Court, Peter Sandford, along with three other of Marion's siblings who had all travelled from New Zealand, said the family still didn't have closure.

"As a family we accept what the coroner has found," Mr Sandford told reporters.

"We have to live with that at the moment.

"There's always a hope that something comes up in the future."

Ms Sandford had a promising career as a nurse but moved from New Zealand to Sydney in 1978 to live with her brother and sort out her drug problems.

Instead she secretly became a prostitute and worked the streets of Kings Cross to support her and her boyfriend Warren Mills' $200 to $300 daily habit.

On one occasion, she was picked up by two men who forced her to take LSD and raped her.

When she reported the matter to the police, she was charged with drug offences.

Ms Sandford and her brother flew to Auckland at Christmas in December 1979, and Ms Sandford pledged to work on her drug problems, pay back her debts to family and attend to court matters in Sydney.

Soon after her return to Australia, she vanished.