The Night Driver podcast: ‘I knew man pushing me to get in car’, says Trish Salt

A woman has reveale­d a man tried to coax her into his small red car as she left a pub just days before Janine Vaughan went missing.

Trish Salt caught a taxi. Picture: Glenn Hunt

A former Bathurst woman has reveale­d a man tried to coax her into his small red car as she left a pub at 2am just days before Janine Vaughan went missing when she got in a small red car after leaving the same nightspot.

While the identity of the driver who picked up Janine remains shrouded in mystery, Trish Salt says she knows who approached her the night of her encounter.

She insists it was Andrew Jones — a local pharmacist who owned a small red Renault sedan, and who would later go on to be officially named as a person of interest­ in Janine’s abduction and almost certain murder.

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Jones has always vigorously denied having any involvement in the clothing store manager’s disappearance and has told The Night Driver — an investigative podcast by The Australian re-examinin­g the details surrounding Janine’s death — through his lawyer that he also denies trying to persuade Trish to get in his car.

Trish, who now lives in Brisbane, was 26 and working at a bank in Bathurst, three hours’ drive west of Sydney, at the time of the alleged­ encounter on Saturday, December 1, 2001. After celebrating the end of the week at the town’s Metro Tavern with a friend, Trish says they decided to call it a night at about 2am.

As they walked to a taxi rank, she says a man got out of a small red car and offered them a lift home and continued to press the point even after they declined, saying: “I’ve got drinks in the car.”

“I said: ‘Listen, no, we’re going to walk around and getting a taxi … we’ve had enough, going home,’” Trish says.

“ ‘Oh, there’s probably no taxis around there. I’ll give you girls a lift’. And as he was … talking, he was getting closer and closer. ‘Well your friend’s a bit drunk. She can’t walk that good. I’ll give her a lift home.’

“He sort of went to grab her hand, to say: ‘Oh, come on, I’ll give you a lift home.’ She basically turned around and said: ‘F..k off, we’re going home.’ ”

Andrew Jones: Trish says he wanted to drive her home.

As this unfolded, Trish says she realised she recognised the man as her mother’s pharmacist and that she had previously spoken to him on a number of occasions.

“It took me sort of 15, 20 seconds to go: ‘Oh hang on, I know this guy.’ That’s when it twigged for me: ‘That’s that guy that works at the chemist.’ And it was Andrew­ Jones,” she says.

While the man had been firm — but not unfriendly — with his initial approach, Trish says he grew increasingly agitated and annoyed­ as they rebuffed his persistent advances and that, as they crossed the road to the taxi rank, she noticed he had begun to follow­ them in his car.

“I glanced and realised it was him in the car and he’d parked probably 10, 15m behind the cab that we jumped in,” she says. “I said to this guy, this cab driver, I said: ‘We’ve got some sort of ­weirdo following us in the car.’ ”

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

The taxi driver waited at the cab rank until the small red car left before dropping Trish and her friend home, to ensure that they were not followed.

“We sat there for, I don’t know, about three minutes and then he must’ve got the hint: ‘Oh, hang on. These guys aren’t going to leave.’ So then he drove off,” she says.

About a week later, Trish was surprised to learn that Janine, who she had met through the bank, had gone missing after a night out at the Metro Tavern.

Still, she did not give the news much thought until she heard the 31-year-old had last been seen getting in a small red car after leaving the pub at about 4am on Friday, December 7, 2001.

Trish says that she telephoned the Bathurst Police Station in the days after hearing about the red car and left a message for the investigati­ng detectives, describing the encounter she had with a man in a small red car. She says she never heard back from them.

“I said: ‘I am 100 per cent certain his name’s Andrew Jones and he works at the chemist in the same shopping centre where Janine­ used to work,’ ”she says.

“I gave them my mum and dad’s landline number plus my mobile and no one contacted me. I had assumed that they had checked that red car out and obviously­ cleared him as having anything to do with it.”

When asked if Jones had tried to convince Trish to get in his car as she describes, his lawyer, Karen Espiner, said: “No. Andrew has never asked any woman to get in his car as has been suggested.”

In a statement, he also reiterated that he had nothing to do with Janine’s disappearance.

“When I was approached by police in 2001 about the dis­appearance of Janine Vaughan I co-operated fully,’’ he said. “Everything I told police was the truth. I have never picked up Ms Vaughan in any car at any time. The suggestion I did is false, based on conjecture and simply not true. I had nothing to do with her disappearance or ­suspected murder.”

Having moved towns not long after Janine went missing, Trish lost track of the investigation into her disappearance.

It was only after stumbling across a story on social media in 2018 she discovered Jones had been called as a person of interest at a coronial inquest­ into Janine’s death, and realised her account had never been heard.

She says she spoke at length to a senior detective soon afterwards and he said he would come to Brisbane to take a statement from her but this has not yet happened.

Almost 20 years after Janine vanished from the streets of her home town, Trish is still waiting to make a formal police statement.