The Night Driver podcast: Doubts linger over recanted confession

Almost 20 years on, Julie Cleave still believes a confession from the man she loved could be true | EPISODE 5 OUT NOW

Janine Vaughan.

Julie Cleave recoiled in disgust; she had known and loved Denis Briggs for more than a decade and there he was — the man she once thought she would grow old with — telling her how he had just abducted, raped and murdered a young woman in their hometown.

What made his troubling confession so disturbing was that, by and large, it seemed to add up to her. Even now, almost 20 years on, Julie still believes that it could well be true.

“The chances are he did do it,” she tells The Night Driver — an investigative podcast by The Australian that is re-examining the details around Janine Vaughan’s disappearance after a night out in Bathurst in early December 2001.

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Julie says Briggs suffered from a bipolar mental illness and was usually placid and gentle — and he never raised a hand to her — but by the time that Janine vanished, he was off his medication, drinking heavily and potential capable of anything.

Janine had been clubbing at the country town’s late-night Metro Tavern before leaving with a couple of friends just before 4am. They decided to head to another nearby pub a couple of blocks away, with Janine storming ahead through the pre-dawn rain, and leaving her two friends trailing behind her.

The 31-year-old was alone, a few hundred metres from the Metro, when a small red car with a mystery driver pulled up behind her in the street. The passenger door swung open, and she turned and silently got in. She has not been seen since and her body has never been found.

Not long after the young clothing store manager disappeared, Briggs started telling friends and his partner he was responsible; that he had picked up Janine in his car, driven out of town with her and tried to rape her, before stabbing her with a knife, slitting her throat and burying her body near a creek in the bush.

He later recanted his confession, blaming it on delusions while off his anti-­psychotic medication, and has since denied any involvement in Janine’s disappearance.

Julie desperately wants to believe in her former partner’s innocence but says she has been unable to rule him out.

For starters, Briggs owned a small red car matching the description of the one Janine was last seen getting in —– and then sold it shortly after she vanished.

They had also been having relationship problems and he was drinking and gambling heavily that December. Given that he was also off his medication, Julie believes he would have had the capacity to commit such a crime in his darker moments.

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

What is more, Briggs was infatuated with Janine before she went missing and had become an almost daily visitor at the Ed Harry’s menswear store she ran in a local shopping centre — not that Julie realised he was nursing a crush at the time.

“He actually never admitted that he had one but he would go to Ed Harry’s every day. Every single day he’d have a new shirt or something,” she says. “And I said, ‘What do you need so many shirts for?’ I actually didn’t realise that Janine even worked there until she went missing.

“So I didn’t actually know that he had an obsession with her until then, but I knew he had an obsession with Ed Harry’s and I couldn’t figure out why. How dumb am I?”

Julie says she found the circumstances around his confession so compelling that after agonising over what to do, she confronted her partner and reported him to police. “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’,” she tells The Night Driver.

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

Briggs was interviewed by police while forensic analysis was carried out on his car but detectives could find nothing to support his now-retracted claims that he had taken Janine or that she had ever been in his vehicle.

There were also major inconsistencies in his story. The place where Briggs told people he picked up Janine was a few hundred metres from where she was seen getting into the mystery red car, while those who knew Jan­ine best say she would never have got into a car with him alone in the dark of the night.

Ultimately, Julie hopes the truth will come out about Janine’s killer, even if it ends up being the man she loved. “Look, I don’t think he’s that smart to have not left a clue of some description,” she says. “He was a brainy person but I don’t know he would have been able to discard a body so that no one would ever find it.”