The Night Driver podcast: Stalker link overlooked in maelstrom of false rumours about town’s senior cop

Brad Hosemans encouraged detectives pursuing Janine Vaughan’s killer to look at a potential link between her murder and a pattern of stalking events.

Brad Hosemans. Picture: Adam Yip

Before being removed from the investigation, Brad Hosemans encouraged Sydney strike force detectives pursuing Janine Vaughan’s killer to look at a potential link between her murder and a pattern of stalking events emerging in his country town.

Hosemans was Bathurst’s investigations manager and senior detective when the young clothing store manager vanished after a night out with friends in early ­December 2001, but he was pulled from the case at her family’s behest in the midst of mounting town gossip that he was behind her suspected abduction.

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Rumours had been swirling around the NSW central tablelands town, three hours west of Sydney, that he had been infatuated with Janine and snapped after she rebuffed his advances.

Hosemans strenuously denied he ever talked to her.

A coronial inquest and Police Integrity Commission inquiry found no evidence to support the accusations against him — or that he had even met Janine — but by then he was off the investigation.

Janine’s young sister, Kylie Spelde, has had mixed views about Hosemans because of conflicting stories she and her family were told, but she has been concerned over the unnecessary distraction he presented during those first crucial months as police looked into allegations against him.

“They were not out there looking for the real killer because they were focused so much on dealing with shit that came in about him,” Kylie tells The Night Driver podcast, which is re-examining details about Janine’s murder.

Hosemans has pondered whether he might have been able to help solve the case that has had such a defining impact on his life.

He has long been suspicious about a possible connection between Janine’s killer and a series of progressively brazen stalking attacks taking place in the town in the lead-up to her disappearance.

“There was this succession of young girls, victims, coming in and complaining that … someone had attempted to assault them … generally around the CBD of Bathurst,” he tells The Night Driver.

“There was a similarity in the description of the person they alleged was doing these things … and you can kind of see this scenario playing out where you’ve got a guy that’s some sort of sexual predator.

“He starts off and he’s just trying to grab women in the street or whatever and he starts to escalate his frequency and his brazenness.

Janine Vaughan.

“And you know, like a typical sexual frustration-type offender where, you know, you can just build up to the point that something catastrophic’s happened.”

Janine was no stranger to stalking and had told police before she vanished that she had been targeted by a creepy, anonymous admirer, although it is not known whether her stalker was the same one responsible for the attacks identified by Hosemans.

Her stalking had begun not long after she moved to the town with her boyfriend, doting electrician Phil Evans, in 1998.

Janine told police she had been receiving increasingly disturbing notes from her stalker, and she felt she was being watched. She also reported her home had been twice broken into and her boyfriend’s tools strewn about their garage.

She was last seen leaving Bathurst’s Metro Tavern with two friends a little before 4am on Friday, December 7, 2001, but had marched on ahead of them through the pre-dawn rain after they decided to check whether another nearby hotel was still open.

Janine was alone by the time she unexpectedly got in a small red car with an unknown driver that had pulled up behind her in the street a few hundred metres from the pub; she was never seen again.

Just 10 minutes earlier, another young woman, Lynette Boreland, had been stalked by a man in a small red car a block from the Metro Tavern as she walked through Bathurst’s town centre alone in the early hours.

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A young female bartender from the Metro Tavern, Hayley Stewart, had told police she had been targeted by a stalker as she walked home alone from the pub by herself shortly before sunrise about a year earlier. The violent stalker had tracked her to her share house, crept in through the back door of her home and sexually assaulted a female housemate asleep in her bedroom.

Despite encouraging Strike Force Toko detectives to look into the possibility a serial stalker was targeting young women in the town, Hosemans was unsure whether the line of inquiry attracted a significant investi­gative focus.

“It’s possible those incidents were investigated and I wasn’t aware of it,” Hosemans says.