Kiss of fate: ‘Would Janine be alive if I’d stayed with her?’

Just one kiss can be all it takes to change a life. Scott Heiman has spent two decades wondering whether it might also have been enough to save one.

Scott Heiman has spent two decades wondering whether he could have saved Janine Vaughan.

Just one kiss can be all it takes to change a life. Scott Heiman has spent two decades wondering whether it might also have been enough to save one.

The army reservist shared two romantic interludes with Janine Vaughan in the hours leading up to her disappearance during a late night out with friends in Bathurst in early December 2001.

Scott says that he was enjoying a night off at The Oxford pub in the heart of the town, three hours west of Sydney, when he started talking to Janine, and kissed her twice before leaving her at the Metro Tavern later in the night about an hour before she vanished.

Janine left the late-night venue shortly before 4am and was seen getting into a red car with an unknown driver shortly before 4am; she was never heard from again.

Janine Vaughan.

“I am a former employee of The Oxford, being security, but that night I was off-duty and I was drinking ... with Janine,” he tells The Night Driver podcast, which is investigating the circumstances surrounding her murder.

“It started outside on the old beer garden wall and then we ended up moving inside. And from there, once the Ox started to close down with lack of patrons, we moved to the ‘Dirty Tav’, or what’s known as the Metro Tavern.

“I had recently had a breakup with a girlfriend and I was getting familiar with Janine. Another couple of gentlemen were at the same location trying to get her attentions as well. The night was jovial. It was just fun and drinks.

“She kissed me twice and I didn’t see her kiss any other boy, even though there were some others looking for her attentions as well. There was no groping.

“There was no nothing. It was more like teasing, kissing sort of thing to help it linger. She wasn’t necessarily fond of me. It was more the alcohol talking. And I assessed that it wasn’t going to go anywhere that evening. I probably left about an hour before she did.

“I decided to leave because I didn’t think it was going to come to any sort of fruition or sexual advancement that day.

“When you’re trying to make some advances and everything is going well, that seems like I was getting somewhere. In the end, it never happened. That’s why I left.”

Successive police investi­gations and a coronial inquest have provided few answers about Janine’s disappearance.

While authorities agree that the 31-year-old was abducted and murdered after leaving the Metro Tavern, the driver of the red car and the location of her final resting place remain unknown.

Scott has thought about that night often over the past 19 years, and can’t help but wonder whether Janine might still be alive if he had decided to stay. “You always think about that, that ‘what if’,” he says.

“Perhaps I could have been walking her home. Or perhaps nothing would have eventuated. I just simply could have stayed there an extra hour and left an hour later and got to work hungover.

“I’ve been interviewed at least three times by the NSW Police Force (about her disappearance).

“The last interview was in 2007. I was a firearms trainer for the Australian Federal Police and a NSW detective conducted an interview at my office location in Canberra.

“He was asking about a small red car. I didn’t see anything. He also asked about what were my thoughts on her disappearance.”

In the army reserve, Scott specialises in the recovery of human remains belonging to Australians who fall on foreign battlefields, such as during the Vietnam War half a century ago.

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It is a painstaking task that requires a forensic eye and meticulous research. He says he appreciates the challenge police face in finding Janine’s remains — or any evidence leading to her killer — despite repeated searches in the countryside near Bathurst.

“The Bathurst Dam was having works conducted on it at the time, extensions works. There were thoughts that if anybody was going to bury a body, the best place would be in that because it would be concealed forever,” he says.

“You don’t have to go far to get into the bush (either) ... whether you bury or leave (a body) on the ground, you know how long a kangaroo lasts on the side of the road before it’s just bare bone.

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“Imagine what happens in the middle of a forest. Perhaps the perpetrator might have left something behind or perhaps they have taken some sort of souvenir and it’s sitting at home on some sort of mantelpiece like a trophy, be that a necklace or a piece of clothing.

“There are so many different avenues you can look at. It’s like writing a novel; there was just so much going on in and around Bathurst at that time.”

Like Janine’s family, Scott hopes a careful re-examination of her case might help tease out previously overlooked evidence, but he knows that whatever happens from here, the girl who shared her last kiss with him is gone.

“I’d love to know what happened to her and especially for her family to resolve that and to have some sort of ending,” he says. “But no amount of thinking or dwelling on anything like that will actually bring her back.”