The Night Driver podcast: Janine Vaughan’s missing handbag adds to night of mystery

Police wonder if Janine Vaughan’s missing bag was part of a plot to snatch her.

Inset: Photograph of Janine Vaughan's handbag and contents, taken by police. Main image: CCTV footage of Janine Vaughan leaving the Metro Tavern shortly before her disappearance.

It is raining as Janine Vaughan storms out of the club and into the pre-dawn gloom of a town still asleep; she has had a late night on the town with friends and is in a dark mood.

Somewhere inside Bathurst’s pub of last resort, her handbag has gone missing and, despite an ­extensive search of the Metro Tavern with one of its owners, she has to leave without it.

The 31-year-old is now at her most vulnerable. It is 3.50am and she has no money for a taxi; no keys to her home; and, if any ill fortune befalls her, no phone to call for help.

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She is with a couple of friends, Jordan Morris and Wonita Murphy, but leaves them trailing her after the trio decide to check if The Oxford pub is still open a couple of blocks away, striding ahead through the early morning rain.

The young clothing store manager makes it a few hundred ­metres before she pauses abruptly and turns to face a red car that has driven up behind her.

Police are mystified by the reappearance of Janine Vaughan’s handbag a day after she went missing.

A passenger door opens and, without uttering a word, Janine walks towards it and gets in. The door closes, and she is never seen again.

Despite repeated investigations, the driver of the car remains a mystery along with Janine’s final resting place.

One of the questions that would trouble the detectives trying to solve her abduction and murder is whether her handbag’s disappearance was merely a coincidence or part of a sinister plot to snatch her. It is an issue Wonita has also wrestled with in the years since her friend vanished on December 7, 2001.

“Look … I always was suspicious,” she tells The Night Driver podcast, which is investigating the murky details surrounding ­Janine’s disappearance. “Because she went back in and had a really good look … searching the dance floor, everything else, asked the bouncers, asked the people behind the bar.

“I remember being with her on the way out the door and she was furious, and we’re like, ‘No, no, we haven’t seen it, we have no idea where it is’. Nobody knew where it was.

“It’s really bizarre because it disappeared and then it turned up again. Nobody could find it when we were leaving, but the next morning it was there. Extremely suspicious.”

It was eventually found by the Metro Tavern’s cleaner, Greg ­Brodie, two hours after Janine vanished — in the very spot staff always put patron’s handbags to keep them safe.

When the upstairs part of the pub was not in use, a timber board was placed across the stairs to prevent people from going up, and bar staff would put handbags in the area behind that board while their owners had a dance or went to the toilet.

Like Wonita, Brodie says he has long harboured suspicions ­Janine’s handbag had been deliberately hidden. “It wasn’t just placed ­behind the board. It was actually jammed in,” he tells The Night Driver. “Nothing’s been ever sort of jammed in like it was. That’s what struck me straight away.”

Brodie says he told police he had found the bag rammed in ­behind the board the day after ­Janine vanished but there is no ­record of that conversation. An ­official statement he gave a month later — on January 11, 2002 — makes no mention of it.

Not long after Brodie found ­Janine’s handbag, he discovered he had another uncanny link to the mystery consuming the ­region, three hours west of Sydney.

By a quirk of fate, his wife, Melissa, worked at an aged-care centre with a wardsman named Denis Brigs, who drove a small red car.

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

Briggs would become one of the early suspects in Janine’s disappearance — hardly surprising given he told his friends and then-partner Julie Cleave he had done it.

He claimed he had picked up Janine in his Hyundai and tried to rape her before stabbing her to death and dumping her body at White Rock, a popular camping and fishing spot near Bathurst.

Briggs later recanted the confession, attributing it to delusions of grandeur while off his anti­psychotic medication and has since denied any involvement with ­Janine’s disappearance.

Those who know him, like Melissa, say he was a different person while off his medication. “He was a very strange man, put it that way. If he didn’t take his medication, you knew that you were in for it,” she tells The Night Driver.

“You’d be nervous with him being around you. He’d snap. It could be the slightest little thing and he would snap. And then, all of a sudden, he’d be, ‘Oh, I’m really sorry about that. It’s just I didn’t take my medication today.’

“(When) Julie said, ‘Oh my God, I don’t know what to do. Dennis has said all this stuff to me about doing it …’, I just thought, ‘I’m staying out of this’.”