Grim history repeats for unlucky publican

The moment Mal Pollard learned a young woman had been abducted and murdered following a night out at his pub, he knew he was in trouble.

Jessica Small who was abducted on Oct. 26, 1997 in Bathurst, New South Wales at age 15. Picture: AAP

The moment Mal Pollard learned a young woman had been abducted and murdered following a night out at his pub, he knew he was in trouble.

After all, he had been through this before.

Four years before Janine Vaughan was taken by an unknown driver after leaving his late-night Metro Tavern in Bathurst in early December 2001, teenager Jessica Small was similarly snatched after leaving Mr Pollard’s previous business, a video game arcade called Amuse Me a few hundred metres away.

Even though he had absolutely nothing to do with it, the ­notoriety of even being connected to such a harrowing crime ­destroyed his business.

Jessica and her friend Vanessa Conlan had been thumbing a ride after an evening at the arcade in the NSW country town, three hours west of Sydney, in October 1997 when they accepted a lift from a man in a white car they did not know.

The 15-year-olds had asked him to drop them at a friend’s house a short drive out of town but, after heading in the direction of their friend’s home for a while, he stopped on a dark stretch of road and grabbed Vanessa around the throat.

She managed to wrestle free from his stranglehold when he turned around to try to restrain Jessica, who had opened the car’s back door and was trying to make a run for it.

While Vanessa managed to ­escape, Jessica did not; she was caught by the driver and never seen again. And like Janine Vaughan, her remains have never been found.

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The fallout from the crime shuttered the arcade, and Mr Pollard decided to turn his hand to bar keeping, buying the Metro Tavern with his friend Trevor Howey — only for the same thing to happen all over again.

“I mean this is gonna sound ­really selfish but when (Jessica) went missing from that business, that just destroyed that business overnight — and (then) it happened again,” he tells The Night Driver podcast that is dedicated to unravelling the murky details surrounding Janine’s murder.

“I know that sounds really selfish but it was, ‘Why is this happening to me again?’ Both times I was an innocent victim in it as well you know.”

Like Mr Pollard’s previous business, the Metro Tavern has also now closed, unable to survive its ­infamous link to Janine’s ­disappearance.

Along with the financial impact, Mr Pollard says he has also had to contend with cruel whispers accusing him of somehow being involved.

“I’m in a wheelchair and one of the rumours was that I’d been faking that for the last 15 years and I really could walk,” he says. “There were a few ridiculous things put to me which I just thought, well that’s just part of being in a small country town.”

Janine Vaughan.

Mr Pollard’s business partner, Mr Howey, also had to deal with the ignominy of being investigated as part of Janine’s case.

He had been the one who scoured the hotel with the young clothing store manager, searching for her missing handbag, ­before she left the Metro Tavern a little before 4am on Friday ­December 7, 2001.

Janine was last seen getting in a small red car with a mystery driver a few hundred metres away, and has never to be heard from again.

What’s more, his wife owned a small red car and it had been parked around the back of the pub the night she disappeared.

However, he was ruled out after CCTV vision from the venue showed him closing up the pub at the time she vanished.

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Detective Sergeant Ben Hopper, who spearheaded one of the investigations into Janine’s disappearance, also believed there was no link between her missing handbag and her going missing.

“I haven’t identified any relevant links between Jessica Small’s disappearance and Janine Vaughan’s disappearance with respect to Mr Pollard,” he reported in the years after she vanished.

“The images on the CCTV footage coupled with the flood light being switched off are a clear indication that Mr Howey was inside the hotel after Janine entered the motor vehicle.

“And I don’t believe the loss of her handbag had any direct connection with her disappearance.”