The Night Driver podcast: ‘I’m deeply sorry for all that terrible stuff I said’

A self-proclaimed killer who boasted of murdering a young woman before later recanting has apologised to her family, saying he was ‘unhinged’ and ‘drinking outrageously’.

‘I think, “What the bloody hell was I thinking, saying all that terrible stuff?” ’ says Denis Briggs. Picture: Paul Mathews

A self-proclaimed killer who boasted of abducting, raping and murdering a young female clothing store manager before later recanting his disturbing confession has apologised to her family, saying he was “unhinged” and “drinking outrageously” when he made the bizarre claims.

Denis Briggs ekes out a largely anonymous life now in a small nondescript town in northwest NSW but two decades ago he was a key suspect in the murder of Jan­ine Vaughan after she vanished following a night out with friends in Bathurst — primarily because he said he did it.

Briggs told his partner and friends he was Janine’s killer but later retracted the confession, claiming he had been suffering delusions of grandeur, and has since maintained he had nothing to do with the her disappearance.

■ Subscribers of The Australian will be able to hear The Night Driver podcast before the rest of the nation, exclusively in The Australian app. Episode four is live now. Subscribe to The Australian here, and download the app via: Apple App Store | Google Play Store

He agreed to meet Jan­ine’s family and The Australian, which is re-examining the murky details surrounding her murder in its The Night Driver podcast ­series, at an undisclosed location as he wanted to lay some demons to rest and ­explain, as best he could, why he claimed to be a killer.

“It makes me feel terrible, sort of speaking to you now, that I said all them dreadful things, which I never would have contemplated doing,” he told Janine’s sister, Kyle Spelde, and brother, Adam Vaughan, during a meeting ­arranged in a park. “I think, ‘What the bloody hell was I thinking, saying all that terrible stuff?’

“I can tell you now, I can tell you to your face, I definitely had nothing to do with Janine’s dis­appearance. I’m telling the absolute truth. No word of a lie this time.”

What Briggs said was deeply concerning to his friends and former partner Julie Cleave. He had been working as an aged-care home wardsman in Bathurst, three hours’ west of Sydney, when Janine went missing in the early hours of Friday, December 7, 2001.

The 31-year-old was upset and emotional while leaving the town’s Metro Tavern not long before 4am following a night out with friends: she had lost her handbag somewhere inside the venue and had been unable to find it.

Without it, she had no money to catch a taxi home, no keys to let her in when she got there and no mobile phone to call for help if she found herself in any trouble.

Instead, Janine decided to go and check whether another late-night pub was still open a few blocks away with a couple of friends, and ended up striding ahead of them through the pre-dawn rain as they trailed some distance behind her.

Janine Vaughan.

Janine was walking alone when a small red car pulled up with an unknown driver behind her in the street, a few hundred metres from the Metro Tavern. A passenger door swung open, she turned and silently got in, and the car — and Janine — vanished into the night.

She was never seen again and her body has never been found.

As rumours ran rampant through the NSW central tablelands town, speculating who was behind the wheel of the small red car that night, Briggs inexplicably put his own name forward. He bragged that he picked her up, drove her out of town and tried to rape her, before stabbing her with a knife, slitting her throat and burying her in the bush.

What made his confession so troubling was the fact it was all so plausible. Briggs was bi-polar and needed to take prescription antipsychotic drugs to control his mood swings but had stop taking his medication at the time; he had recently separated from his partner of more than a decade; and he was rumoured to have developed an obsession with Janine. He also owned a salmon-­coloured Hyundai Excel that matched the description of the small red car Janine was last seen getting in.

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

In the months that followed, he compounded the confession by selling his car and altering his appearance by getting a facial tattoo. He now blames a former friend, Peter Barker, for having “hounded” him into confessing to Janine’s murder, adding that his lies were exacerbated by the fact he was off his medication.

“He said, ‘Did you murder Jan­ine or did you abduct Janine?’ And he kept on egging me on, he just kept hounding me and I thought if I tell him some outrageous story, he might just bloody back off and leave me alone,” Briggs told The Night Driver.

“I said I cut her throat … and I cut her fingers off or some bloody thing, and then I said I raped her seven times or something. I was unhinged, yeah I was right off my tree. I was drinking outrageously.

“I would never want to stab anyone or stab someone or something or anything like that. (But) in them particular moments, I would have said anything.”

Briggs was open about his troubled past, the mistakes he has made and the egregious crimes he has committed.

He freely admitted he had spent time in prison for a sexual ­offence but pointed to the fact he owned up and pleaded guilty to his crime as proof he was telling the truth when it came to his innocence in Janine’s case.

While Briggs desperately wanted to see Janine’s killed caught, he said it has as much to do with his desire to see her family received some piece of mind as it was to clear his own name.

“I know you won’t accept my apologies or anything, but I’m deeply, deeply sorry that you had to go through this trauma. I can’t imagine,” he told them.

“I definitely didn’t do it. And that’s the truth and the whole truth. And I know it will still go on until the perpetrator is caught and you can finally lay Janine to rest and I hope that is soon.

“The perpetrator should be punished immensely.”

As for Janine’s family, her younger brother, Adam, said while he accepted Briggs’s explanation, in doing so, it created some new demons to contend with.

Without a murder confession on the table, it left open the possibility, however remote, that his sister was still alive, somewhere, somehow.

“I believe him and that’s sad … my thought of her being alive and kept alive and is still alive and living a life somewhere and is hidden away,” Adam said.