The Night Driver podcast: I put Janine Vaughan’s lost handbag away, says bouncer

A former pub staffer has revealed that he is the one who moved Jan­ine Vaughan’s handbag inside a country town hotel the night she disappeared.

Former staffer-cum-bouncer Matty Dalley in the lane next to the now-shuttered Metro Tavern site in Bathurst, NSW. Picture: Nikki Short

A former pub staffer has revealed that he is the one who moved Jan­ine Vaughan’s handbag inside a country town hotel the night she disappeared from the streets of Bathurst and was almost certainly murdered.

The young clothing store manager had been distraught over her inability to find the bag while leaving the Metro Tavern after a late night out with friends. She had even scoured the venue with one of its co-owners, Trevor Howey, but had been unable to find the bag.

It meant Janine was at her most vulnerable as she stepped out on to the town’s darkened streets a little before 4am on Friday, December 7, 2001. Without her handbag, she had no money for a taxi home, no keys to get inside her house, and no phone to call for help if she got in trouble.

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Within a few minutes — and a few hundred metres — of leaving the Metro Tavern and making for another nearby hotel to check whether it was still open, she unexpectedly got in a mysterious red car that had pulled up behind her in the pre-dawn rain.

She was never seen again.

The identity of the red car’s driver and Janine’s final resting place remain a mystery.

Successive investigations have considered whether the dis­appearance of Janine’s handbag had been part of an intricate plot to weaken her defences before she was snatched from the streets.

It was a suspicion shared by the pub’s cleaner, Greg Brodie, who found Janine’s handbag about two hours after she vanished, ­curiously rammed into a boarded-off area on the stairs leading to the venue’s second floor.

Matty Dalley does not know how it was rammed in but admits he was the one who put Janine’s bag behind the board.

The former tavern staffer tells The Night Driver — a podcast by The Australian dedicated to shedding fresh light on Janine’s unsolved murder — that he moved it there because it was a well-known spot where unaccompanied items were often stored.

“We quite often put people’s handbags there because the doorman was close and there was a camera area, so they were safe,” Dalley tells The Night Driver.

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

“It was common knowledge for all staff — that’s where handbags were put because they didn’t want them behind the bar.”

Dalley worked both sides of the bar during his time at the Metro Tavern as a barman and ­security muscle when some of the establishment’s less salubrious patrons needed to be ejected.

He says the now-shuttered pub had earned a justifiable reputation for being a rough and tumble venue that often attracted trouble but as one-time world-ranked bare-knuckled fighter, he was never worried about his welfare while working there.

“If we went more than a weekend without having to have a fight, then something was wrong,” Dalley says. “Because I was the smallest bloke in the pub, they always thought they were best off fighting me. So I was kept pretty busy.”

The one thing that has troubled him over the past two decades, though, is Janine’s disappearance and whether he might have somehow been able to prevent it.

He says he still cannot forget the last time he saw her — as he drove home past the tavern after finishing work just as she was leaving through the front door.

“I could have noticed that she didn’t have her handbag and contacted the pub, and told (the owner) Trev and he could have taken it out to her,” Dalley says. “Or I could have stopped and given her a lift myself.”

Janine’s younger sister Kylie Spelde, who devotes much of her free time to trying to solve her sister’s abduction and murder, is also plagued with thoughts of “what if?” And while she does not blame Dalley in any way for her sister’s death, she believes Janine might still be alive had she not lost her handbag that night.

“It definitely would’ve changed the course of the night because she would have just walked straight away,” Kylie tells The Night Driver.

“There wouldn’t have been hovering around the nightclub at the end of the night. She would have had her handbag. She would have still had money, keys, phone, access to her whole life.”