The Night Driver podcast: ‘There’s no way he’d just killed someone’

A businessman has information he hopes will help prove Brad Hosemans’ innocence | NIGHT DRIVER EPISODE 9 OUT NOW

Bathurst local Rob Lee had coffee with detective Brad Hosemans on the morning of Janine Vaughan’s disappearance. Picture: Jane Dempster

A prominent Bathurst businessman has come forward with new information he hopes will help persuade townsfolk that Brad ­Hosemans had nothing to do with the abduction and almost certain murder of young clothing store manager Janine Vaughan.

Rob Lee says he can clearly recall catching up with Hosemans at a popular cafe in the rural university town’s central business district about 10am on Friday, December 7, 2001 — six hours after Janine vanished — and there was no way the man opposite him had just committed a crime.

Lee says he has been able to piece together the date of the coffee meeting through a number of events happening around Bathurst back then. “We used to catch up for coffee at Porters (cafe) every couple of days and have a bit of a chat,” he tells The Night Driver podcast ­series reinvestigating the murky details surrounding Jan­ine’s death.

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“I remember meeting up with him that Friday; he’d been away visiting his mother that week. He was really calm and normal … the same as he always was. There was no change in him, no difference.

“There’s no way he’d just abducted and killed someone and then come had a calm coffee with me, you know. It wasn’t possible

“If he’d just done something like that, you’d know and be to tell. He wouldn’t just be sitting there, normal. There wasn’t even any talk about anyone missing or anything like that.”

Indeed, at that point, few knew Janine was missing. She had been out clubbing with friends before leaving the town’s notorious late-night Metro Tavern about 4am and heading off through the pre-dawn rain to check if another nearby pub was still open.

The 31-year-old had gone only a couple of hundred metres and was walking by herself when a small red car pulled up behind her in the street. She turned, got in and was never seen again. Her boss reported her missing after she failed to turn up work.

Successive investigations concluded she was abducted and murdered but her the driver of the mysterious small red car has remained a mystery, along with her final resting place.

As Janine’s family searched for answers, speculation ran rampant in Bathurst that Hosemans — the town’s deputy mayor and leading detective — was somehow responsible. Investigators were tasked with getting to the bottom of the ­rumours and he was officially named as a person of interest at a coronial inquest in 2009 into Janine’s death.

Hosemans has always vigorously maintained he had nothing to do with the young woman’s disappearance and no adverse findings have ever been made against him. In fact, the inquest found there was no evidence to suggest he had ever met her.

Still, many in the town remain fixated with the enduring ­rumours about him. It is part of the reason Lee has decided to speak up. While he has not seen Hosemans in about 12 years, he wants to help remove any doubt he was involved so the town, and homicide detectives, can concentrate on finding “the real killers”.

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

Asked why he has waited so long to come forward, Lee says early on he did not think his coffee meeting with Hosemans was a big deal. “It’s been on my mind, you know, for a long time. And you hear every small detail helps and some people haven’t spoken up or nothing. So I thought I should do my duty to give you as much information as I can,” he says.

“I’ve also seen the devastating toll it has taken on Brad and his family. They are all lovely people and they’ve been through a lot of trauma with all this and I don’t think it’s justified.

“His poor mother had to put up with rumours she owned the small red car. She never owned a red car. Why is someone spreading those type of rumours, which are just complete garbage?”

Lee suspects he knows the answer to that. “Brad was a really conscientious workers who did a lot of good for the community … but if you’re an intelligent, good-looking bloke with charisma in this town, there’ll always be people wanting to cut you down.”