The Night Driver podcast: ‘I have terrible guilt,’ Janine Vaughan’s workmate confesses

Janine Vaughan’s friend says she must have recognised the driver of the small red car behind her the night she disappeared.

Janine Vaughan.

When Janine Vaughan turned and looked at the small red car idling behind her in the pre-dawn rain the night she disappeared, her friend Nicole Nolan says she must have recognised the person sitting in the driver’s seat.

She says Janine was too street-smart to get in a car with someone she did not know and trust.

For this reason, Nicole has trouble reconciling the thought that former Bathurst pharmacist Andrew Jones could be responsible for her friend’s abduction and almost certain murder.

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“It boggles my mind why he is a person of interest,” she tells The Night Driver podcast that is re-examining details surrounding Janine’s disappearance.

“I don’t understand — he was just the quiet chemist man.”

Janine’s split-second decision to get in the car ended her life and forever altered the lives of the people around her.

She had just left Bathurst’s Metro Tavern after a late night out with friends in the rural university town, three hours’ drive west of Sydney, when she vanished a little before 4am on Friday, December 7, 2001.

The clothing store manager had been walking to check whether another nearby pub was still open and was alone when the small red car pulled up behind her and she unexpectedly got in, never to be seen again. The authorities would conclude she was abducted and murdered.

Despite two police strike force investigations, a coronial inquest and a Police Integrity Commission inquiry, the driver of the car remains a mystery, as does her final resting place.

In the days after she disappeared, Jones attracted the attention of Sydney homicide detectives searching for Janine’s killer. He was later one of three persons of interest called to give evidence at a coronial inquest in 2009 into her death.

The pharmacist has always denied having any involvement in Janine’s disappearance and no adverse findings have ever been made against him.

Nicole remembers him well because he used to work in the same shopping centre as Ed Harry’s, the Bathurst menswear store where she worked alongside Janine.

“He was a quieter sort of chap. Just polite, not overly friendly, just the pharmacy man,” she tells The Night Driver podcast. “The girls did more of the work at the front counter when they served you. He wasn’t anything that raised alarm bells.

“He was an unassuming person, polite, did his job. No threat to anyone, really. Didn’t jump out in any way, shape or form as a person to anyone.”

While Janine would have also known Jones from the centre, Nic­ole says there is no way she would have trusted him enough to get in his car alone at 4am.

“I couldn’t picture Janine getting in the chemist man’s car because he wasn’t someone you’d frequently talk to,” she says.

“Jan­ine was street savvy. She wasn’t stupid.”

She also dismisses suggestions the two might have been involved in a clandestine relationship, saying Jones was not Janine’s type.

“The people that struck her were more vivacious type people that had a bit of a personality and (liked to) have a laugh,” she says.

“She was quick-witted. Shyer people (like Jones), she would have walked past and said hi if he said hi.”

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

Nicole has similar views on another of the persons of interest called at the coronial inquest: former Bathurst aged-care home wardsman Denis Briggs.

She says she cannot comprehend any circumstance where Jan­ine would have accepted a lift from him by herself at that time of the night.

She does have reservations about the final person of interest, former Bathurst detective and deputy mayor Brad Hosemans.

Like Jones, Briggs and Hosemans have denied having anything to do with Janine’s dis­appearance and no adverse findings were made against either at the coronial inquest.

Despite the inquest concluding there was no evidence to suggest Hosemans and Janine had ever met, a large number of people in the town still believe the former cop abducted her after she rebuffed his romantic advances.

Nicole is one of them. She says she blames herself for Janine’s death because she encouraged Hosemans to pursue her colleague. “I have terrible guilt,” she says. “I said to him, ‘Janine is ­single. Why don’t you ask her out?’ And now she’s gone.

“I’ll feel bad about that for the rest of my life. I do keep her in my prayers and say I’m sorry I ever mentioned to ask her out.”

The enduring gossip contributed to Hosemans’s decision to pack in his life in Bathurst and leave his policing career and hometown behind.

More than two decades since Janine vanished, he still feels betrayed by the town he dedicated his life to serving.

“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,” he says.

“Either putting shitheads in jail or trying to get parks and swings (put in) and everything else councillors do. Then you’ve got to sit here and try and defend yourself down the track because some dickhead thinks, ‘Oh yeah, Hosemans did it.’

“At the end of it, you just think: ‘F..k me. Was it worth it?’ ”