The Night Driver podcast: Retired cop still haunted by ‘blood-curdling screams’ after ­Janine Vaughan vanished

A retired police inspector has spoken publicly for the first time about the screams he heard after ­Janine Vaughan disappeared.

Janine Vaughan was last seen in Bathurst on December 7, 2001.

A retired police inspector has spoken publicly for the first time about the piercing screams he heard emanating from the bush near his Bathurst home in the days after ­Janine Vaughan disappeared.

Two decades on, John Haynes remains grimly confident he played witness to the missing clothing store manager’s final ­moments alive.

“I know the term ‘blood-curdling scream’ is bandied around a bit, but it certainly was a blood-curdling scream. It was horrifying,” Mr Haynes says in the latest instalment of The Night Driver podcast series, released on Friday.

“It was something I’ve never heard before … and I haven’t heard since. It was (like) somebody who was being severely injured, raped, murdered, stabbed. As soon as I heard the screams, it was Janine Vaughan. Certainly I thought straight away it could be her, which worried me even more.”

While he immediately notified his colleagues at the local police station, Mr Haynes, who was a senior constable at the time, has revealed that a patrol car came up with its lights and sirens on, and the screaming suddenly stopped. He believes the attacker heard the approaching car.

Mr Haynes tells The Night Driver that he regretted that a search the following day was neither thorough nor concentrated on the site where he believes the scream came from: an area of thick blackberry bushes and other vegetation fringing a creek on the Charles Sturt University side of Mount Panorama.

His comments come in the midst of a number of significant revelations contained in the latest episode of the award-winning podcast, including an interview with a previously unknown person of interest, expert analysis of the police interrogations conducted as part of the murder investigation and fresh insight into the conflict that pushed Janine to breaking point the night she vanished.

Mr Haynes says the memory of those screams has weighed on his mind for the past 19 years and that he is sharing his recollections now in the hope of shedding fresh light on the case that could perhaps help find Janine’s remains.

He says he had just returned from a police Christmas party with his wife and young family on Sunday, December 9, 2001, when they heard the screams carrying across his 30ha sometime between 8.30pm and 9pm.

His thoughts immediately went to the 31-year-old blonde ­Janine, who had gone missing ­during a night out with friends 2½ half days earlier.

Janine was last seen getting into a red car after leaving the university town’s pub of last resort, The Metro Tavern, shortly before 4am on Friday, December 7.

Despite two strike force investigations, a coronial inquest and a Police Integrity Commission, the identity of the driver has remained a mystery and Janine’s body has never been found.

Mr Haynes says the sound of the screams he heard came from a secluded patch of dense scrub.

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“It was some distance away, but it was clearly audible. It went on for a little while … enough time for me to think, ‘I really need to call the station and get somebody to check it out’,” he says. “I rang the station and asked if they could send the car down to come and check it out. It was a few tense moments waiting, waiting for the police to come. But they did.”

He urged his colleagues to ­approach quietly. “Unfortunately, they were coming down the street, which is Panorama Avenue leading up to the mount, and they had their lights and sirens on. And as soon as those sirens were audible, the screaming stopped,” he says.

“I was a bit annoyed, to be ­honest. As soon as I could hear those sirens in the distance, ­obviously the person (or) persons would have heard it as well.”

He is unsure whether the officers in the police car conducted an extensive patrol of the university precinct, which had largely emptied out for the summer, and says it is likely any perpetrator came and went without notice.

In the days that followed, State Emergency Service volunteers and police conducted a line search in a section of the bushline but, critically, did not include police dogs or scour the area on the university side of the creek.

The fact that a more rigorous search was not conducted still troubles Mr Haynes.

“There’s a lot more that perhaps could have been done, a thorough search, maybe having had other police involved in it,” he says.

“At that stage Janine had been missing for almost three days. The investigation into her disappearance wasn’t really ramped up until the following week.”

Trevor Gunter agrees. He oversaw the search as the controller of the Bathurst SES and says it was haphazard and poorly managed.

“What we call line searches are very inefficient. They look good to the public because you have all these people in a line at a certain spacing,” Mr Gunter tells The Night Driver podcast.

“But you need to have a structure in how a search is applied to effectively cover an area as large as possible, as quick as possible to maximise your probability of success. And that wasn’t done.”

He confirms the area identified by Mr Haynes was overlooked and that their attention was ­focused on campsites near the top of Mount Panorama. Mr Haynes says he regrets that after the initial search he did not press the issue with Homicide Squad investigators.