Police integrity probe into innocent cop ‘completely cruelled murder hunt’

Former homicide squad commander Nick Kaldas says the hunt for Janine Vaughan’s killer was crippled by false allegations against local detective Brad Hosemans.

Former NSW police deputy commissioner Nick Kaldas Picture: Nikki Short

The former top-ranking cop in charge of the homicide squad when Janine Vaughan vanished says the hunt for her killer was crippled by false allegations against local detective Brad Hosemans and a subsequent inquiry into his involvement in the case by the now-defunct Police Integrity Commission.

Two decades on, former NSW Homicide Squad commander Nick Kaldas says he remembers the investigation into the 31-year-old’s abduction and almost certain murder in vivid detail, along with its many shortcomings.

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“I’ll never forget it. I recall it very, very well,” he tells The Night Driver podcast series dedicated to unraveling the details around her death. “It was just a tragedy. How we didn’t end up solving it, obviously, and everybody felt that. It’s tough: you don’t have a crime scene and you don’t have a body.”

Janine had gone missing after a night out drinking and dancing in her home town of Bathurst, three hours’ drive west of Sydney, on Friday, December 7, 2001.

After leaving the late-night Metro Tavern with a couple of friends shortly before 4am, she decided to head to another nearby pub to see whether it was still open.

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

The young clothing store manager was walking by herself a few hundred metres from the Metro when a small red car pulled up behind her in the pre-dawn rain.

She turned and walked towards the car before unexpectedly getting in and vanishing into the night, never to be seen again.

While successive investi­gations concluded that Janine had been abducted and murdered, her final resting place — and the identity of the red car’s driver — have never been uncovered.

As homicide detectives worked to solve the case, Kaldas says they were hobbled by the PIC’s very public pursuit of Hosemans.

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“This was a beat-up from the start. They basically derailed the whole thing,” he says.

“The unfortunate part and the tragic part is that through their actions, holding hearings in a small town like Bathurst, saying things publicly and essentially insisting that homicide be removed from doing the investigation, have in my view ruined, stalled and really put a hurdle in front of the investigation. It effectively stalled that homicide investigation that was never solved.”

Local speculation about Hosemans’s supposed involvement in Janine’s disappearance had begun in the weeks after she went missing, and the high-profile detective — who was also the town’s deputy mayor — soon found himself the target of a relentless campaign of rumours and innuendo.

Gossip spread through Bathurst’s wide, tree-lined streets that he had been spotted at the Metro Tavern in the hours before Janine vanished, that his mother had owned a small red car that had been found abandoned and torched in the wake of the young blonde’s dis­appearance, and that he had been obsessed with Janine and snapped after she repeatedly rebuffed his advances.

None of these accusations were true — and all the claims have since been ­debunked.

Hosemans has always vigorously rejected any suggestion that he had anything to do with Janine or her disappearance.

A coronial inquest in 2009 into Janine’s death would also find that there was no evidence that Hosemans had ever even met her.

Still, there are many in the town who continue to repeat the baseless accusations as fact.

Kaldas says the fixation with Hosemans as a murder suspect was given undue credibility by the PIC inquiry into the former detective, and that it also served to undermine the investigators still working to solve the case.

“Firstly, it completely distracted the investigators,” he says.

“Secondly, I think it robbed them of confidence from the community in Bathurst because of these very high-profile, highly publicised hearings, and so on.

“It completely removed the community’s confidence in police generally, but particularly in the investigation into the murder.”

As for his thoughts on Hosemans, the veteran investigator says it was clear all along that the former Bathurst cop had never been responsible for Janine’s disappearance and that he was yet ­another victim in the tragic unsolved murder.

“They (were) baying for his blood almost with no evidence. He was never a serious suspect — he simply did not do it,” Kaldas tells The Night Driver podcast. “There is no doubt he did not commit the murder and yet you look at the damage that’s been done to his reputation, his career, his life.

“I’m not sure he will ever recover from it. And it’s yet another tragedy adding on to the original tragedy. A lot of lives and a lot of operations were ruined by (the PIC’s) ­actions.”