The Night Driver podcast: Janine Vaughan stalked with calls, notes

‘Don’t be scared of me. I don’t want to hurt you. I just want to get to know you. I will be in touch.’

‘These could be … evidence’: Ian Vaughan, at home in Muswellbrook. Picture: Milan Scepanovic

“Don’t be scared of me. I don’t want to hurt you. I just want to get to know you. I will be in touch.”

These are the disturbing words a stalker sent Janine Vaughan not long after she moved to Bathurst.

Her father, Ian, found the handwritten missive hidden away with a bunch of similarly creepy notes in Janine’s bedroom while clearing out her home in the weeks after she went missing on December 7, 2001.

PDF: Police stalking incident report

Even now, 19 years on, his skin prickles when he thinks of them.

“It’s not over,” one reads. Another­ says: “I’ve missed you.”

While the contents are forever seared into his memory, he cannot bear the thought of looking at the messages again.

Janine Vaughan at her 30th birthday party.

“I don’t want to see them,” he tells The Night Driver, the investigative podcast by The Australian dedicated to trying to help solve his daughter’s murder.

“Don’t ask me where they are. The police have got them, I think. I don’t want to see them again.”

Ian says it was a few days before Christmas, in 2001, when he ­travelled to Bathurst, three hours’ drive west of Sydney, and started packing up Janine’s personal effect­s. It had been two weeks since she was last seen getting in a red car with an unknown driver in the early hours of December 7, after a night out with friends in town.

Nobody could yet say for certain whether she was alive or dead but police had their suspicions.

They had spent days scouring the countryside around the rural university city with cadaver dogs in search of the 31-year-old’s body, and successive investigations would later confirm she had been abducted and murdered.

Ian was still hopeful there would be an innocent explanation as he worked his way through Janin­e’s house: she had simply hit her head and suffered a temporary memory loss and would soon breeze back into their lives as if nothing had happened.

Detectives had long since gone through Janine’s home in Rocket Street, searching for clues, by the time Ian stumbled across the notes in a green bag in his daughter’s bedroom wardrobe.

“When she disappeared, I knew it was cold over in Bathurst and I grabbed the jacket that I’d worn on the day of the grand final. And as I went to put it on, one of her long blonde hairs was on the back,” he tells The Night Driver.

“So when I went over there (to her house) … I said (to one of the detectives), ‘I haven’t touched this’, and he said, ‘Don’t worry, we’ve got a hairbrush full of them.’

“It was the only thing they took from the house. Not a fingerprint or anything. Nothing. Not one utensil or anything.”

His mind reeling, Ian reported his discovery to police, only to learn they were well aware Janine had been tormented by a stalker.

“I didn’t know. I thought any of these could be some sort of evidence,” he says. “When you’re in a state like I was in, you don’t think straight.”

Janine had been targeted by the stalker within months of moving­ to the tree-lined streets of Bathurst, in the NSW central tablelands, in 1998.

She was looking to start a new life with her new boyfriend, doting electrician Phil Evans, and had left behind her family and failed first marriage to Rod Eather three hours’ drive away in her home town of Muswellbrook, in the Upper Hunter.

Police investigation records reveal it was not long before Janine’s fresh start was spoiled by the unwanted­ attention of an anonymous and frightening admirer.

There were strange telephone calls with heavy breathing down the line, and handwritten notes began turning up under her car’s windscreen wiper and in the letterbox of the home she shared with her new beau.

Scanned notes which were submitted as evidence when Janine Vaughan reported being the victim of stalking on September 21, 1998.

As the stalker grew increasingly brazen, Janine began to fear she was being closely watched. Whenever her boyfriend was out of town for work — sometimes for up to five days at a time — the intimid­ation and stalking would intensify.

One of the notes at her home was accompanied by a white flower that appeared to have been picked from her garden, while black lacy lingerie was left for her in a standard envelope.

Terrified, Janine reported every incident to police, who noted that her stalker seemed to know when she would be alone and at her most vulnerable.

Senior Constable John Ivanow documented the concerning timing­ of one message left for Janine­, bearing the words, “I don’t want to hurt you”, which had been placed on her car in the brief moment­s it took her to pick up dinner from a barbecue chicken takeaway shop.

“She was away from her vehicle for a short time and upon returning she discovered a note on her vehicle windscreen,” he wrote in an incident report at the time.

“The victim has no knowledge who may have left the note but she believes it to be the same person who has made two unwanted telephone calls to her.”

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Stoking her fears she was being monitored, both those telephone calls were received, 20 minutes apart, in the moments after she arrived­ home that evening.

Then Janine got the most menacing note of all: “Get rid of him or I will. You too good for him.” The handwritten note had been tucked under her windscreen wiper after another trip to a fast-food outlet. At home, she found someone had broken into their garage.

Like many men in Bathurst, her boyfriend Phil was a bit of a motorhead who worshipped the V8 supercars and the annual championship endurance race around Mount Panorama. He spent much of his spare time in their garage, pulling apart and ­rebuilding car engines. The stalker had broken in and strewn Phil’s parts across the garage floor.

A few weeks later, there was another break-in, again when Janine­ was alone, and Phil’s tools were once more scattered about the garage. Some of Janine’s jewel­lery pieces — yellow gold rings with diamonds, sapphires and emeralds — were also stolen, along with a coin tin and some wrapped presents that had been under their Christmas tree.

It was as if the stalker was becoming­ angrier and starting to lose patience.

Each episode exacerbated a deep-seeded fear of men Janine had been secretly harbouring since high school.

“Look, I’ll share something with you,” her ex-husband, Rod, tells The Night Driver. “It was at a Year 10 party, after Year 10 finished­, and, yeah, there were a couple of guys that she went to school with that tried to attack her on that night … to the point where they held her down and were trying­ to get her clothes off.

“They didn’t go through with the whole plan of what they were trying to do … (but) that’s always frightened the hell out of her because­ these are people that she trusted.

“She would have been 15, 16, at the time. And yeah, like if Janine was sort of frightened in any way it would bring on an emotional asthma that she had, she’d start hyperventilating and she would have to be on the puffer. So it affected her.

“When she told me, she said, ‘You are the only person that’s ever known this’. So I know that she would not get in a car with someone she didn’t know. I’ve shared that with the police.

“It made her realise the bad that is out there. It left its imprint.”

The attempted sexual assault and repeated stalking had left Janine­ permanently wary.

Those who knew her best insist whoever she got into the red car with the night she vanished would have been someone she knew and trusted. It was a trust that would prove fatally misplaced.

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