The Night Driver: Murder clues in earlier lucky escape

Minutes before Janine Vaughan vanished, her suspected abductor tried to take another young woman.

Janine Vaughan.

About 10 minutes before Janine Vaughan was snatched from the darkened streets of Bathurst and murdered, her suspected abductor tried to take another young woman making her way through the town’s centre alone.

Lynette Boreland had been walking past Machattie Park in the heart of the rural university town a little after 3.30am when she realised she was being stalked by a man in a small red car.

When he tried to lure her into his vehicle, she froze — gripped by fear in the pre-dawn rain.

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“I wanted to move. But for those seconds, or whatever it was, I had a panic attack. And I just couldn’t make myself run,” she later would tell police.

Lynette had spent the night vis­iting friends in town and was walking to a service station where she hoped to score a lift to her farm on the rural fringes of Bathurst, three hours west of Sydney.

The town’s wide streets were silent in the hours before dawn on Friday, December 7, 2001, and as she made her way past the sleeping houses she noticed the small red car had begun to follow her.

Frightened, Lynette pushed on faster, only for the driver to pull alongside her.

“He had both his hands on the steering wheel and I remember him looking up at me. I remember he was a big sort of fellow. He had hairy arms, right down to the first knuckle,” she said.

“What made me get frightened was I thought he took his hand — his right hand — off the steering wheel. I got frightened … I stepped down and walked around the back of the car quickly and then crossed the road and kept going.”

As the small red car sped off, Lynette impulsively crouched behind a large box on a street corner and collected her thoughts. She knew she had to make a run for it before he found her again.

Lynette Boreland, who was targeted by the night driver about 10 minutes before Janine got in his car in 2001.

“I came out from behind the box. I recall he came really fast down the road, chucked a U-ey right in front of me and pulled up and he was right there,” she said.

“The next thing I knew he was out of the car … and I think he said, ‘Excuse me, I want to talk to you’ or ‘Can I talk to you?’ I wanted to run.”

She did not recognise the driver but almost every inch of him was seared into her memory. He was big, about six feet tall (183cm), with dark hair and fair skin. He had hairy arms and a square jaw.

“I couldn’t tell you what colour eyes he had but I remember he had a bumpy nose, like pimples. And that stood out to me,” she said. Something about his car’s number plate also troubled her. It looked as though the registration number had been painted on as it was now washing away slightly in the rain.

“I said to myself, ‘This is not right, this is bad, get out of here, go.’ I ran as far as I could from that point,” Lynette would tell police.

She did not stop until she reached the service station, where she relayed the ordeal to the attendant. “He asked me if I wanted him to call the police,” she said. “I said, ‘No, I’ll just see what happens.’ I’ve often regretted that, but it’s just what I did at the time.”

As she talked to the attendant, there was no way she could have known that another young woman walking alone through the rain that morning was being approached by a man in a small red car.

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

This time it was on the opposite side of Machattie Park, not far from the Metro Tavern, and the woman, a young clothing store manager named Janine Vaughan, was never seen again.

Police have little doubt how lucky Lynette was to escape with her life that night.

Announcing a $1m reward in March last year for information leading to Janine’s killer, NSW homicide squad commander Scott Cook said detectives working on the case were convinced there was an ominous connection between the two incidents.

“We’re confident that it’s the same car and by extension the same driver,” he said.

“We think a local was involved. We want to catch this person and we are focused on that. Whoever did this has engaged in a despicable act.

“People who murder people need to be brought to justice.”

Lynette’s family hopes her police statements might play a crucial role in that, even if she no longer can.

Her son Andrew told The Night Driver — a podcast by The Australian re-examining the ­circumstancing surrounding Janine’s abduction and murder — that she had since died following a freak accident on a farm near Grafton in northern NSW.

“She actually got kicked by a horse and then that put her in hospital and then she had to get an operation,” he said. “She got a staph infection at the hospital and then just sort of went downhill from there and her heart ended up failing in the end.”