Night Driver podcast: Mother’s torment of a girl lost twice

Janine Vaughan’s biological mother has twice experienced the pain of losing a child.

Janine Vaughan with her father’s parents, Athol and Nancy, who raised her ‘in a selfless act of love and loyalty.

Janine Vaughan’s biological mother has twice experienced the pain of losing a child — ­firstly when she gave up her baby girl for adoption in 1970 and, secondly, when that same daughter mysteriously disappeared in a NSW country town three decades later.

Anna — her pseudonym — still keeps carefully clipped newspaper photographs from ­reports about Janine’s abduction from a street in Bathurst in ­December 2001, but those black and white images are mostly sad reminders of the daughter she watched grow up from afar in the town in which they both lived but never connected.

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Anna has agreed to talk to The Australian’s investigative podcast The Night Driver, which is probing the details surrounding her daughter’s disappearance, in the hope it might encourage new witnesses to come forward and help solve ­Janine’s murder.

The young menswear store manager vanished after leaving the Metro Tavern in Bathurst, about three hours’ drive west of Sydney, following a late night drinking and dancing with friends.

The 31-year-old was last seen getting into a red car a short walk from the nightspot at about 4am, and has not been heard from since.

Despite successive police strike forces, a coronial inquest and Police Integrity Commission inquiry, the identity of the red car’s driver remains unknown, though those who knew Janine best maintain she would never have got into a vehicle with a stranger.

Police last year posted a $1m reward for information leading to the killer responsible for her death. Janine’s body has never been found.

Anna is haunted with questions about whether her daughter would still be alive if she had not been given up for adoption.

She described Janine as a “beautiful girl”.

“I just keep thinking, ‘maybe people are blaming me for it’,” Anna says. “You know, if her life was different, that probably never would have happened. And all those things are in your mind all the time.

“I certainly did (grieve for her). And I do every day. I think about her every day. If I could go back in time, it wouldn’t be like this. But I can’t go back in time.”

Anna has seldom spoken of the daughter she gave up for adoption in Scone, in country NSW, half a century ago.

The family of Janine Vaughan … from left, Kylie, Adam and Rodney, with their father Ian in Muswellbrook, NSW. Picture: Milan Scepanovic

Janine was born 50 years ago, at a very different time in Australian society.

Anna was already raising a young son, with the help of her parents, as a single mother in the sleepy Hunter Valley community of Muswellbrook, three hours’ north of Sydney, when she fell pregnant.

Janine’s father, Ian Vaughan, was in the navy and at sea when Anna gave birth at the local hospital on January 7, 1970. While he knew Anna had been pregnant, he thought she had suffered a ­miscarriage.

In small towns, then as now, such matters never stay secret long, and Ian’s parents, Athol and Nancy Vaughan, soon heard a ­rumour they had a new baby granddaughter who was likely to be given up to strangers.

PDF: Janine Vaughan’s family history

Athol and Nancy knew they wanted her and, in a selfless act of love and loyalty, asked to raise her as their own. For Anna, the offer came as a blessing.

“The situation I was in at the time, I was living with my parents,” Anna says in The Night Driver.

“I never had any child support for the little boy that I was raising on my own because my husband had walked out.

“I was working full time to try and look after him, and my parents were wonderful to me. But I knew, and they said, that they didn’t know if they could handle another baby or child in the house.

“I thought, ‘Well, how can I raise two children on my own?’ And then, when the (Vaughan) family were interested in taking her and looking after her, and I thought, ‘Well, she’ll have a good home and I know where she’s going’.

“And she seemed to be happy growing up, but I regret from that very first day what happened and the decision I made.

“If I was in a better position, I would have raised her myself and tried to raise her myself.

“But I knew I just couldn’t, just financially, and I didn’t have anywhere permanently to live. Then, as the years go by, you wish to goodness you’d never made that choice.”

When Anna saw her daughter on occasion around town, she says it was like looking at a younger version of herself.

But she resisted initiating contact with Janine as a girl or as a young woman in their small rural community.

“I did (want to) but then I thought, ‘Well, she’s been with them since she was a baby. They’ve reared her. She’s happy.’

“I thought, ‘No, I won’t interfere’. I don’t know. All these things go through your mind and you make mistakes and bad decisions. And that’s just a bad decision that I made that I didn’t reach out to her.

“I keep asking myself why. Why didn’t I? You know I ask myself that all the time. I really don’t know. It was just one of those things that I didn’t. And I still don’t know why.

“But she had the opportunity to reach out to me too, but. And then I kept thinking, ‘Well, maybe she doesn’t want anything to do with me’. I had that in my mind all the time too.

“If she had come around, knocked on the door and said, ‘You’re my mum, I’d like to get to know you’, well I certainly, I would have accepted her. Well I would have liked to have got to know her too. I don’t think that would have been a problem at all.”

Janine had spent much of her childhood wanting to do precisely that.

As a small child she had ­believed that her father, Ian, was actually her big brother.

After returning from duty in the navy, he married Jenny. Their three children, Kylie, Adam and Rodney, thought of Janine as a ­really cool young aunty.

When Janine was old enough to start school, her grandparents told her the truth. They thought it was important for her to know her real identity.

Her younger sister Kylie says the revelation only strengthened the family’s bond.

“We just assumed, I suppose, that because she grew up with my grandparents that she was one of theirs,” she tells The Night Driver.

“It was one of those things that when we sort of got to an age where we would understand we were then told that, ‘She’s actually your sister’.

“My mum had no issues at all. She loved her as if she was her own as well. And it actually got to a point where it was quite difficult because Janine wanted to sort of stay with mum and dad. She had visits with my parents.

“Though my mum and dad would never have taken her away from Gran and Pa. Like you know, they’ve raised her, you know, from a baby, right through till toddler age and even a little bit older, you know, and to take her away from — that would have just broken their hearts.

“My parents would never have done that. So it was just something that had to work. They ­obviously made it work. It was a shared upbringing and I think they’ve all done a great job.

“At times, you know, people would sort of say that, ‘Oh, she’s only your half-sister, isn’t she?’ Like, what difference does that make? You know, so I kind of, I get quite defensive of the whole fact that she is only half and not full.”

But the issue of her biological mother would play on Janine’s mind until the day she died.

“Janine would go to school, would see her. (Anna) would see Janine. There was a time there where — which breaks my heart — that Janine used to sit across the road from (Anna’s) house and hope that she’d come over and talk to her,” Kylie says. “She went through her whole life just wanting that one person’s attention and she never got it.”

Even as an adult, it consumed Janine, and she would confide in close friends, such as Rebecca Howell, her ongoing feelings of abandonment.

“I remember her telling me that growing up that her biological mother obviously still lived in Muswellbrook and used to live around the corner from where ­Janine used to catch the bus,” ­Rebecca says.

“She would tell me that, that she was really sad and she couldn’t believe that how, that she only lived not that far from Janine and she’d never tried to reach out to Janine and make any contact with Janine.

“That probably contributed to her (need for a) sense of belonging. And also her feeling of probably, in her relationships, what she was looking for. She was ­looking for that person to settle down with and to have a family with her.”