The Night Driver podcast: ‘the murderer is probably a person I know’

Phil Evans is still consumed with guilt over his failed relationship with Janine Vaughan

The Oxford Tavern in Bathurst where missing woman Janine Vaughan was headed to before she was abducted. PIcture: Jane Dempster.

Phil Evans is still consumed with guilt over his failed relationship with Janine Vaughan.

Rationally, the Bathurst electrician knows there is nothing he could have done to prevent the young blonde’s abduction and almost certain murder in the quiet country town they called home in the months after they split up.

But he cannot forget the five years they spent together and he cannot forgive himself for convincing her to move there in the first place.

“You know that was my decision to walk away from that relationship,” he tells The Night Driver podcast series re-examining the 31-year-old’s death.

“I just wasn’t ready for a full-blown commitment and getting married, and I know that’s what she wanted.

“She came here for me and I know all that … and then that’s happened to her, you know, and that’s what I live with. Because I feel guilty I haven’t done enough.”

Janine had followed Phil to Bathurst, three hours’ drive west of Sydney in the NSW central tablelands, in 1998 in the hope of starting a new life together, leaving behind her childhood hometown of Muswellbrook in the Hunter Valley, her family and a broken first marriage to miner Rod Eather.

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Their relationship faltered and, after about a year together in the rural university town, they broke up.

By then, Janine had developed a close circle of mainly younger friends and had scored a good job running a local menswear store, so she ­decided to stay.

She was out clubbing with some of those friends at the town’s pub of last resort, the Metro Tavern, about 18 months later, in the early hours of Friday, December 7, 2001, when her young life came to an end.

Security vision from the night shows her visibly distressed as she left the venue with her friends, Jordan Morris and Wonita Murphy, at 3.50am.

Janine Vaughan, at 31, who went missing from Bathurst on Friday 7 December 2001. Picture: NSW Police

Janine had lost her handbag somewhere inside the tavern and was now at her most vulnerable: she had no cash to catch a taxi, no keys to get into her home and no mobile phone to call for help if she got in trouble.

As the rain beat down around them, the trio decided to make for another late-night pub, the Oxford, a couple of blocks away to check whether it was still open. ­Janine went ahead as her friends trailed behind her, squabbling over a minor domestic dispute.

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

She was walking ahead by herself when a small red car pulled up behind her in the street.

Janine turned and faced the car before unexpectedly getting in and vanishing into the night, never to be heard from again.

Successive investigations concluded that she was abducted and murdered — but the identity of the small red car’s driver has remained shrouded in mystery and her body has never been found.

A coronial inquest and even the offer of a $1m reward have provided little illumination.

Janine’s family and friends have always maintained there is no way she would have got in a car with someone she did not know and trust.

For Phil, that is something that has weighed heavily on his mind over the past two decades since she vanished.

“What’s always spun me out is that it’s somebody I know,” he tells The Night Driver podcast. “There is a chance of that being possible. It has played on my mind so much.”

Like Janine’s family, he is also perplexed by the faltering police investigations into his former girlfriend’s disappearance.

“I’m a high-voltage electrician. I can’t make mistakes (or) I get killed, or I’ll kill someone else or cause a lot of damage,” he says.

“But the mistakes they made and their incompetency has accelerated the devastation that’s left behind for people.”

He says he feels particularly heartbroken for Janine’s family who are continuing to push for answers in his ex-partner’s unsolved murder.

“There ain’t no one that wants it more sorted out than the Vaughans. I want it sorted out as much as them,” he says. “They’re that desperate, the poor things, mate. Like it cripples me when I hear, see the pain they’re in.”