The Night Driver Podcast: Schoolgirl declined ‘troubling’ offer

A former private schoolgirl has confessed she was offered a lift by a man whose car fits the description of the vehicle Janine Vaughan was last seen getting into.

Then 31-year-old Janine Vaughan. Picture: NSW Police

A former private schoolgirl has come forward after 19 years to ­reveal that, as a teenager in Bathurst, she was approached by a local man who asked if she wanted a ride in his small red car a week to 10 days after Janine Vaughan was last seen getting into a small red car in the town.

She told The Australian and The Night Driver podcast series that the approach by Andrew Jones had troubled her because he did not know her and his ­persistence seemed unusual.

She was a student of the Scots School at the time, however the approach occurred at the end of the final term in 2001 and no teachers of students were around.

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The woman, now a teacher at a private school and who asked to be known only as Kate, said she was unaware until listening to The Night Driver podcast that for most of the past two decades Jones has been a key person of ­interest for NSW homicide detectives.

Despite being called as a person of interest at a coronial inquest into her death in 2009, Jones has always vigorously maintained he had nothing to do with Janine’s disappearance and no adverse findings were made against him.

 

“I have never picked up Ms Vaughan in any car at any time,” he said in a statement. “The suggestion I did is false, based on conjecture and simply not true.

“I had nothing to do with her disappearance or suspected murder.”

He has also denied trying to persuade Kate — or any other young women — into his car around the time Janine vanished.

“Andrew has never asked any woman to get in his car as has been suggested,” his lawyer, Karen Espiner, says.

“Andrew categorically denies that these claims are true. If these women were approached by someone who asked them to get in their car, it was not Andrew.”

While she had never before met or spoken to Jones at the time of the encounter, Kate said she recognised him as a member of the school’s residential staff.

• READ MORE: The Night Driver — the new podcast from the investigative journalist who brought you The Teacher’s Pet

In the hours outside his job as a pharmacist in Bathurst, three hours west of Sydney, Jones worked at the Scots School as a house master in exchange for free meals and accommodation.

“I do remember us all kind of just noticing him when we were playing netball or something. Like he’d just be standing, watching us play sport,” she said.

She said she was sitting alone on the step of a boarding house in mid-December 2001 as she waited for her boyfriend to finish his part-time job tending to the college cricket pitches when Jones pulled up in his car in the main college drive.

School had already broken for the year, so the campus was largely deserted.

“He got out of his car in front of me. He’s like, ‘Oh, you right?’,” Kate said. “He said, ‘Are you waiting for someone?’

“I said, ‘Yep’. And he’s like, ‘Oh well, if you don’t want to wait, I can drive you home?’ I just went, ‘No, no, I’m fine. I’ve got my car here’.

“He goes, ‘Oh well, if you don’t want to drive, you can just leave your car here and I can take you.’

“I just looked at him. I thought, ‘No, no I’m fine. Like I’m waiting for someone. And why would I leave my car here?’ ”

Kate said the fact she had never interacted with Jones ­before made his approach all the more unsettling.

“If he was a teacher that I spoke to every week might have been different,” she said. “There might have been a relationship there with genuine care for my welfare but he was essentially a stranger.”

What troubled her most was that Jones’s car was a small red Renault sedan. Kate was aware that it matched the description of the mysterious red car Janine had last been seen getting in before she went missing about a week earlier.

The young clothing manager had been enjoying a night out of the town when she left the Metro Tavern shortly before 4am and decided to check if another nearby pub was still open.

She was walking alone in the pre-dawn rain a few hundred ­metres from the tavern when a small red car pulled up behind her and she unexpectedly got in and disappeared into the night, never to be heard from again.

Successive investigations have concluded Janine was abducted and murdered, though her body had never been found and the identity of the driver who picked her up remains a mystery.

In the days that followed, Kate’s father, a public servant, had been directly involved in helping to co-ordinate the search to find the missing woman. “Dad had warned me, like, ‘if you’re going out and you see a red car like don’t approach it’,” she said.

Kate said she found the ­encounter so strange she told her parents about it that night.

“I went home and went, ‘This guy just approached me at school. And Dad, he drives a red car.’ And Dad talked to his colleagues. And I thought that was the end of it. “Until I heard your podcast this morning, I didn’t even know that it went further. I didn’t even know that he was actually considered a suspect.”