The Night Driver podcast: Brother Adam says Janine Vaughan’s ‘cry for help’ went unanswered

With her bubbly personality and zest for life, Janine Vaughan is remembered­ as an irrepressible livewire and fun-loving party girl.

Janine Vaughan

With her bubbly personality and zest for life, Janine Vaughan is remembered­ as an irrepressible livewire and fun-loving party girl.

But there was another, fragile side to her that she shielded from all but a select few. In her quieter moments, she told them of a pervading darkness and underlying sadness that had crept into her life.

She wanted to settle down and start a family but had been unlucky in her relationships and was struggling with debt. As the life she wanted seemingly moved further from her reach, she turned to drinking and recreational drugs.

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Hours before she vanished during a night out with friends in Bathurst, 200km west of Sydney, she told a friend about an apparent attempt she had made on her life just one week earlier.

Giving evidence about the conversation at a coronial inquest into Janine’s death, Jordan Morris became emotional as he recounted how she had worried that her disclosure might harm their friendship, telling him: “I can’t believe I’ve done this to you. I hope you don’t think any less of me.”

Later that night, he would be one of the last people to see Janine alive after they left the town’s Metro Tavern with his girlfriend, Wonita Murphy, just before 4am.

It was early December, 2001, and raining outside. Even though Janine was due to start work in a few hours at the menswear store she managed, none of them were ready for the night to end.

They decided to head to another nearby pub in the faint hope it would still be open. While her friends squabbled over a domestic issue, Janine strode off through the rain and was by herself as a small red car pulled up behind her in the street.

Jordan still remembers his final words as Janine turned and unexpectedly got in.

“I yelled out to Janine, just said, ‘Stop!’, you know, ‘Where are you going?’ ” he told the inquest. “(I) ran forward to try and see where she was going or who she was with but the car quickly took off.”

She was never seen again. While the coronial inquest would conclude she was abducted and murdered, the identity of the car’s driver has remained a mystery and her body was never found.

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

One of Janine’s friends told The Night Driver podcast series, which is re-examining the case, that she had grown increasingly concerned about the 31-year-old before she vanished.

“She was saying, ‘Oh you know I’m not in a good place at the moment­.’ I said, ‘Do you need to go and talk to someone?’,” the friend told The Night Driver.

“She said: ‘I’m just trying to get myself through it.’ In the months leading up to that, it’d drop into conversation that she had been out with this one or that one and they’d been taking pills. The party drugs were … a newer thing.”

Janine’s younger brother, Adam Vaughan, knows there is nothing he could have done to prevent her abduction but he wishes he had known about her dark bouts with depression.

“Why didn’t they contact … (me) and say: ‘Look, Janine’s really that down. She’s attempted to take her own life,’ ” he told The Night Driver podcast. “Clearly, if she was that desperate to tell someone, it’s a cry for help.”

Hedley Thomas on The Night Driver, a subscriber-only online event, Tuesday, 7pm. Register at theaustralianplus.com.au