The Night Driver podcast: odd vibes from the stranger in the bar

Mal Pollard instinctively suspected there was something off about the stranger drinking alone in the corner of his public bar and eyed him cautiously.

Janine Vaughan at her 30th birthday party.

Mal Pollard instinctively suspected there was something off about the stranger drinking alone in the corner of his public bar and eyed him cautiously.

The publican had been working hard to rehabilitate the reputation of Bathurst’s notorious Metro Tavern since buying the place with co-owner Trevor Howey and he had become attuned to rooting out potential troublemakers.

The pub was referred to by many in town as “The Stabbin’ Tavern” following an ugly knife fight on the premises.

“When we first took over, there were fights every week and it had a reputation as being a bit of a bloodbath,” he tells The Night Driver, which is investigating the circumstances surrounding Jan­ine Vaughan’s unsolved abduction and murder.

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The young clothing store manager’s disappearance following a late night out at the venue had Pollard on his guard and alert for possible perpetrators.

“There was a guy sitting over in the corner and he just looked out of place. You know, you get a feeling sometimes about someone?” Pollard says.

It was about a week after Jan­ine had vanished and the man he would later learn was Denis Briggs had arrived at the pub in a salmon-coloured Hyundai Excel he had parked out the front.

That was enough to prickle the hair on the back of Pollard’s neck.

After leaving the pub shortly before 4am on Friday, December 7, 2001, Janine was last seen getting in a small red car that matched the description of the one he was looking at.

The authorities were desperately searching for the car and its unknown driver.

Janine Vaughan as a young woman.

While Briggs now denies having any involvement in Janine’s disappearance, back then, Pollard felt a niggling suspicion he might just know something about it.

“I went and grabbed Trevor and I said, ‘Go and check that guy out,’ ” he tells The Night Driver.

“I said to him: ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if this is the guy that they’re looking for over Janine … let’s go down to the cop shop.’ ”

There were just a couple of blocks separating the Metro Tavern from Bathurst’s police station but before Pollard got there, he saw some uniformed officers and shared his concerns.

It was not long before he found himself again anticipating a police response, this time with further hearsay claims that cried out for investigation.

“Philip Wheatley worked for us and he came in and said to us, ‘Do you guys know Denis Briggs? Well, he just told my sister that he killed Janine Vaughan,’ ” Pollard tells The Night Driver.

“And we went, ‘Well you’ve got to go straight to the cops.’ ”

Little did Pollard realise, he was not the only one approaching investigating detectives with concerns about Briggs.

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The aged-care home wardsman, who is bipolar and needs to take prescription drugs to manage wild mood swings, had been boasting he was responsible for Janine’s disappearance.

He claimed he had picked up the 31-year-old after she left the Metro, driven her out of town and tried to rape her, before stabbing her repeatedly with a knife he was known to carry, slitting her throat and burying her body in a shallow grave near a creek.

Briggs later recanted these disturbing confessions, explaining that he was off his antipsychotic medication at the time, was drinking and gambling heavily and suffering from delusions.

He has been interviewed about his claims several times by detectives investigating Janine’s abduction and murder but they have been unable to find any evidence linking him to crime.

He was called as a person of interest at a coronial inquest into her death in 2009 but no adverse findings were made against him.

Not everyone is prepared to forget Briggs’s dark words though, and Pollard, for one, still backs his ­initial instincts.

Asks whether he believes the fact Briggs was off his anti­psychotic medication explains why he professed he was the killer, Pollard is forthright. “I don’t believe that for a second,” he says.

“Is it the complete explanation for why he killed her?”