Night Driver podcast: On a mission to find Janine’s killer

Two decades ago, Janine Vaughan got into a car outside a tavern and was never seen again. Who was the Night Driver?

Janine Vaughan was last seen in Bathurst, NSW, in 2001.

It is the split-second decision that cost a young woman her life, forever shattered those of her family and closest friends, and sparked one of the nation’s most perplexing homicide investigations.

Even two decades and two police strike forces on, authorities are still baffled by what happened to Janine Vaughan after a night out clubbing with friends in ­Bathurst, three hours’ drive west of Sydney, in December 2001.

The 31-year-old was seen ­getting into a red car near the popular Metro Tavern nightspot on one of the city’s main streets shortly before 4am, and then she vanished into the night. Janine was never heard from again.

Authorities agree the young clothing store manager was abduct­ed and murdered but, despite­ multiple investigations, a Police Integrity Commission probe and a coronial inquiry, the identity of the driver that night remains­ shrouded in mystery, along with her final resting place.

When she disappeared, Janine left frustratingly few clues behind. But what remains is just as critical: a loving family entirely obsessed with finding their sister — and the man responsible for her death.

■ Subscribers of The Australian will be able to hear The Night Driver podcast before the rest of the nation, exclusively in The Australian app. Subscribe to The Australian here, and download the app via: Apple App Store | Google Play Store

Her younger sister, Kylie ­Spelde, is single-minded in this mission. Like all those who knew Janine best, Kylie maintains her sister would never have got into a car with someone she did not know and that, consequently, her disappearance can still be solved.

In recent years, she has doggedly devoted much of her spare time to trying to unmask the unknown motorist — from tracking down forgotten witnesses and former detectives, to winning the trust of the women close to the most dangerous men in the Bathurst­ region in the hope one of them will hold the key to a breakthrough.

Kylie says she has spent so long stalking suspects and informan­ts online and in real life — alongside her equally resolute brother, Adam Vaughan — that it is now hard to separate the real leads from the red herrings.

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

She hopes a new investigative podcast by The Australian ­dedicated to the case, called The Night Driver, can help shed new light on the murky details surrounding the motorist’s identity and her sister’s fate.

Kylie Spelde in Muswellbrook, NSW, where she maintains a room honouring the memory of her sister, Janine Vaughan. Picture: Milan Scepanovic

“I get so consumed by it,” Kylie says in the first instalment, to be released on Friday.

“I just want it to be over. I just need it to be over.

“We’re so vulnerable, I suppose, we just believe everything. I just believe everything and then go: ‘Well, it could happen, because it does happen.’ (One woman) said to me: ‘If you ask me do I think (this guy I know) is capable of doing this to your sister?’

“She said: ‘Yes he is, 100 per cent, yes he is. He’s a monster. He would shoot at anybody that would come to the property … and make them that scared that they’d, you know, they wouldn’t be coming back.’

“So, I feel sick to be honest, every time I look at his photo. I think: ‘Oh my god. It’s disgusting. You’re disgusting.’

“I sent the photo to Adam today … and he’s like: ‘I know that guy, I’ve seen that guy.’ He’s racking his brain now thinking that he may have even seen him once when he was out with Janine.”

It is not just Janine’s family who say their lives have been hit hard by her disappearance.

Three men named as persons of interest at a coronial inquest into her disappearance in 2009 say their reputations have also been badly damaged by almost 20 years of investigations and public finger-pointing — even though no adverse findings were made against them.

The inland city’s one-time top police detective and former deputy mayor Brad Hosemans is among them.

Initially involved in helping investigate Janine’s disappearance, he was later linked to the case himself after a purported witness, who came forward years later, claimed she saw him driving a car with the missing woman bound at the wrists in the passenger seat, a look of distress upon her face.

Breaking his silence in the podcast, Hosemans rejects the suggestion entirely, describing it as absolute nonsense.

“Anyone that knows me knows that it’s just completely baseless,” he says.

“I was a deputy mayor contrib­uting to my community and doing a really good job for my community and trying to make it a better place.

“And then you’ve got to sit here and try and defend yourself down the track because some dickhead thinks: ‘Oh yeah, Hosemans did it.’

Former detective Brad Hosemans

“Brad Hosemans was a bloke that was busting his arse for that town. On so many facets, trying to make that place a better place — an even better place.

“And then, here I am 20 years later, still trying to claw my way out of some sort of suggestion that I was a person of interest in the disappearance of a girl I had nothing­ to do with.”

Bathurst pharmacist Andrew Jones is another man named at the inquest. Single at the time of Janine’s disappearance, he lived onsite at the city’s prestigious The Scots School, and devoted his time to church and helping out with students’ sport.

He worked at a pharmacy near the menswear store Janine managed but tells friends police have gone after him for no apparent reason, ruining his reputation and devastating his elderly mother.

“They can test my car as much as they want, they won’t find anything,” Jones said in news reports chronicled in the podcast.

“Never been in my car. Didn’t know her.”

However, he does admit to visiting­ the store run by Janine. “I obviously shopped at a menswear store, which was a great store,” he said. “Obviously, you know, she worked there.”

The third man named as a person of interest is aged-care home wardsman Denis Briggs.

He showed signs of infatuation with Janine in the weeks before she went missing, and also admits that he was drinking heavily and off his antipsychotic medication at the time.

Briggs even made a disturbing confession to his then partner Julie Cleave and several other friends, telling them he picked up Janine in his car, drove her out of town and tried to rape her, before stabbing her to death and dumping her body in the scrub.

“I said to him: ‘The family deserve­s to know if you’ve done this. And you need to pay for what you’ve done if you did it’,” Ms Cleave says in The Night Driver.

“I said to him: ‘Well why would you say something like that?’ I said, ‘Because if you didn’t kill her’, I said, ‘that’s going to make the police pin it on you anyway’.

“And he just looked at me and said: ‘Oh, well if they can’t find a body, they can’t pin anything on me’. And, I said: ‘Oh my God.’ ”

Briggs later attributed his false confession to delusions of grand­eur while off his medication.

Critically, all three men vigorously deny having any involvement in Janine’s disappearance.

Police last year announced a $1m reward for information leading to her killer.

Whoever is responsible, and no matter what happens from here, there is one thing that is certain­: Janine Vaughan’s family will never stop searching for answers­ until the mystery is solved and they can finally lay their sister’s ghost to rest.