The Night Driver Podcast: ‘Evil alter ego Bad Denis is the killer’

Julie Wheatley believes she knows where Janine Vaughan’s remains are buried and who murdered her — because the young woman’s self-confessed killer told her himself.

Dennis Briggs. Source: Channel 10

Julie Wheatley believes she knows where Janine Vaughan’s remains are buried and who murdered her — because the young woman’s self-confessed killer told her himself.

His name is “Bad Denis” and he is the dark alter ego of a usually sedate aged-care wardsman the nurse once worked alongside, better known as Denis Briggs.

Diagnosed as bipolar, Briggs needed to take prescription medication to keep his extreme mood swings in check and, Julie says, when he did, he was a gentle and friendly presence in the Bathurst nursing home where they both worked two decades ago.

When he failed to take his medication or was drinking heavily, the other side emerged.

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“We’d be sitting at a table and he’d go, ‘You need to leave.’ We’d ask why and he’d go, ‘Bad Denis is coming, you need to leave,’” Julie tells The Night Driver, which is investigating the murky details surrounding Janine’s murder.

“We’d get up and go elsewhere. And it could be an hour later, he’d come and find us and he’d tell us, ‘Bad Denis is gone’.”

It was this reckless and violent persona Julie fears is behind ­Janine’s abduction and murder.

Even though Briggs vigorously maintains he had nothing to do with it, Julie says that in the months following the young clothing store manager’s disappearance, Briggs boasted to her and several friends that he did it.

Janine had been enjoying a late night out on the town with some friends in Bathurst, three hours west of Sydney, when she was last seen leaving the Metro Tavern shortly before 4am on ­Friday December 7, 2001.

The 31-year-old was walking through the pre-dawn rain alone a few hundred metres from the pub on her way to another nearby hotel when a small red car pulled up behind her in the street and its passenger door swung open.

Janine unexpectedly turned to the car, walked up to the passenger door and silently got in.

She was never seen again and her body has never been found.

Despite successive investigations — and the insistence of those who knew her that ­Janine would never have accepted a ride from a stranger — the identity of the car’s driver continues to evade authorities almost 20 years on.

Janine Vaughan. Picture: NSW Police

As the town became consumed by rumours and speculation about who was behind the wheel in the months after Janine went missing, Briggs bizarrely put his own name forward, telling friends and his former partner that he was the mystery driver and that the small red car Janine was seen getting in was his salmon-coloured Hyundai Excel.

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He boasted he had driven her out of town and tried to rape her, before stabbing her several times with a knife he was known to carry on him, then cutting her throat and burying her body near a creek at White Rock, a popular camping area just outside the NSW central tablelands town.

“I honestly believe, the way he was talking, he did do it,” Julie says. “He had in the past pulled a knife out on me … (and) one day to the next day, the story was exactly the same. It never changed. He was either a very good liar or he was telling us the truth.”

She says Briggs told her that he later returned to Janine’s crude burial site, disinterred her body and dumped it down a deep well on a secluded property. She knows the spot well because she once lived there herself.

While Briggs later recanted his disturbing confessions, Julie remains troubled by his denials.

“He later said, ‘look, I was only joking, I didn’t kill Janine’. He said he was off his medication and that he had these delusions of grandeur,” Julie says.

“He actually said that we made him. We didn’t make him say that at all, it came out of his mouth and constantly came out of his mouth. Every day at the pub, it was always the conversation.”

She believes the deep well at White Rock might still hold the answers that investigators have been searching for all these years.

“The police have looked out at White Rock, but they didn’t look on the right side of the river,” she says. “There are two (wells) on that property. They were on the wrong side of the river.

“I had detectives come to my house and they wanted me to take them to the laneway and it happened to be raining the day they came and they didn’t want to drive their car down the dirt road. So it never got looked at.”