The Night Driver podcast: Siblings’ vow: We will never be able to stop looking until Janine’s body is laid to rest

After two decades of futile searches, ­Janine Vaughan’s siblings believed they might have just uncovered the remains of their murdered sister.

Janine Vaughan.

As Adam Vaughan gingerly pulls a collection of bones from a burned out train carriage, he turns and looks to his sister, Kylie Spelde.

After two decades of futile searches, the siblings believed they might have just uncovered the remains of their murdered sister, ­Janine Vaughan, near a bridge outside Bathurst in the NSW ­central tablelands.

“You do panic straight away because you think, ‘Oh my God, am I holding on to a piece of Janine’,” Kylie says. “You think, ‘Oh my gosh, is this it? Well, if it’s not ­Janine, well it’s somebody else, and somebody else’s case will be solved’, so that’s the thought process that you go through.

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“Instead of going to Bathurst Police Station, I’ve brought those bones home and I took them into Muswellbrook Police Station and, I mean, it just sounds stupid, I know, it sounds desperate, doesn’t it? I didn’t think that they’d take me seriously if I walked in with a bag of bones.”

Their trepidation was soon replaced by despair after testing revealed the bones had belonged to an animal.

It is a feeling Kylie and Adam know only too well. It is a particularly cruel punishment inflicted on people who have a loved one disappear and is presumed dead.

The finality that comes with burial and cremation rituals and the normal grieving process does not happen when there is no body.

The not knowing, the hope for a miracle, the searches and the gut-punch with every news bulletin about the discovery of a body add to the pain, and it stays with people like Janine’s family.

“I feel like half my life has been not knowing what happened to ­Janine,” Kylie says. “How do I grieve? You can’t grieve because you haven’t got a body.”

Along with Adam, she has spent long hours scouring the countryside around Bathurst, about three hours’ west of Sydney, since Janine went missing after a late night out with friends in early December 2001.

The 31-year-old was last seen getting in a red car with an unknown driver after leaving the Metro Tavern and stepping out into the city’s darkened streets shortly before 4am.

Despite successive investi­gations, the identity of the driver and her final resting place have eluded authorities.

The one thing investigators are sure of is that the young clothing store manager was abducted and murdered.

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Janine’s siblings are obsessed with finding both her body and her killer.

“People send you stuff. Little mud maps of where they think she could be buried and who they think’s involved,” Kylie tells The Night Driver, a podcast by The Australian that is dedicated to trying to help solve these mysteries.

“I can’t not go and look, I can’t not go check it out because you know. So yeah, we’ve gotten in the car and gone.

“You know, we’ve got to the point where we’ve found a tarp. And we were like, ‘Do we pull that tarp out?’ You know, it’s in the same vicinity where these people have led us to.

“Here you are, down on your hands and knees, lifting pieces of tin. We’re talking early days when there possibly would’ve been a (whole) body.

“Your heart’s pounding and you’re just like, ‘Oh my gosh, if I pull that out and there’s a dead body in there, like should we ring the cops right now and say, Can you come down here?’ But then we didn’t want to look stupid, desperate, because that’s what you feel.”

Every disappointment and setback has served only to harden Kylie’s resolve.

She knows she will never be able to stop until she has laid her sister’s body to rest.

“I have thrown myself into this, yes,” she says. “There’s been times where there’s been three or four months of going to bed at three or four in the morning.

“I’d be sitting there looking up people on Facebook you know just to find different things. I’ve had clairvoyants say she’s a sex slave in Thailand. That she’s been taken over there, and then I’m on there looking at every photo in Thailand just to see if I can see her in the background of the photos.

“It’s there every day (and when) you close your eyes at night, she’s all you think about. I feel like because I talk about her every day that she’s still here anyway.”