The Night Driver podcast: timeline of events in the case of Janine Vaughan
Stepping back through key events in the life of Janine Vaughan, and what happened after she vanished.
January 7, 1970: Janine Vaughan is born at Scott Memorial Hospital in Scone, NSW. Her father Ian is away at sea at the time. Janine’s mother offers her for adoption and Janine is adopted by Ian’s parents, Athol and Nancy Vaughan. They maintain responsibility for Janine’s upbringing, however on occasions Janine visits her father and his new wife Jenny at their home. Janine and Jenny develop a close relationship.
1980: Ian and Jenny move in with Ian’s parents at their Muswellbrook home, and from this point the bond between Ian, Jenny and Janine is strengthened. From the age of ten Janine begins calling Ian ‘Dad’.
1982: Jenny and Ian have their third child together, Adam, and shortly afterwards they, along with their other children, Kylie and Rodney, move to their own place in Muswellbrook. Janine stays with Athol and Nancy. Despite the separation, Janine remains close to Ian, Jenny and the children, and they get together three to four times a week. Janine attends high school at Scone High, where she was good at sports and at one stage was School Captain.
1992: Aged 22, Janine marries Rod Eather, her boyfriend of four years. They are very much in love and Janine wants to settle down and have children, but Eather is not ready. After four years of marriage, they separate.
1998: Janine, now 28, leaves her hometown of Muswellbrook, following new boyfriend Phil Evans to Bathurst in the NSW central tablelands, where she hopes to start a new life. Within months of the move, Janine is targeted by a stalker. She receives strange telephone calls with heavy breathing down the line, and handwritten notes begin turning up under her car’s windscreen wiper and in the letterbox of the home she shares with Evans. Terrified, Janine reports every incident to police, who note that her stalker seems to know when she would be alone and at her most vulnerable.
2000: Janine breaks up with Evans after two years together.
September 2001: Janine breaks up with her short-term boyfriend David when he moves to Sydney. Janine remains friendly with his friendship group.
October 2001: Bathurst Detective Sergeant Brad Hosemans is charged with sexually assaulting a woman at the Bathurst Golf Club. The woman alleges he grabbed her breasts and exposed himself to her.
October-December 2001: Brad Hosemans expresses a romantic interest in Janine, asking a mutual friend about her. Janine’s mother later tells police Janine had described Hosemans as ‘drop dead gorgeous’, while other friends report that Janine was uncomfortable with the attention and that she would hide from Hosemans if she saw him walking past Ed Harry’s, the menswear store she managed.
December 6, 2001: Janine is picked up by her regular taxi driver and friend, Barry Cranston, and taken to the Oxford Hotel where she meets with friends. Whilst there, Janine dances with Andrew Holland, a police officer from Orange who was a friend of Brad Hosemans and who had previously worked at the Bathurst Police Station.
December 7, 2001 – 1am: Janine’s friends Jordan Morris and Wonita Murphy arrive at the Oxford Hotel, meeting Janine there. The trio and another friend leave together and head to the Metro Tavern.
December 7, 2001 – around 3.37am: A young woman named Lynette Boreland, who bears a resemblance to Janine Vaughan, is walking along the road in central Bathurst not far from the Metro Tavern when a red/pinkish red car begins to follow her. Frightened, Boreland hides; when she emerges the driver continues to pursue her, eventually pulling up close to her. The driver gets halfway out of the vehicle. Boreland runs from the driver, eventually reaching the safety of a nearby service station.
Around this time, back at the Metro Tavern, Janine cannot locate her handbag. She and Wonita Murphy search for it to no avail.
December 7, 2001 – 3.47am: Janine, Wonita Murphy and Jordan Morris leave the Tavern. Janine is frustrated after losing her bag and walks ahead of her friends, who are arguing, in heavy rain. As Janine is walking up Keppel St, about 40m ahead of the others, a small red car with a mystery driver pulls up behind her in the street. The passenger door swings open, she enters the car and it drives off.
December 7, 2001 – 9am: A customer arrives at Ed Harry’s menswear store to find it closed, and contacts another branch to advise the store isn’t open. Janine had been rostered to open the store that morning.
December 7, 2001 – Afternoon: Janine is reported missing to police. At this time, Inspector Mark Gallagher has responsibility for the investigation in a relief capacity. Detective Sergeant Brad Hosemans, on restricted duties owing to the criminal charges against him, is on leave on the day of Janine’s disappearance, but returns to work on December 10, 2001. He is briefly in charge of the investigation until it is taken over by homicide detectives from Sydney. Hosemans continues to assist with the investigation.
December 2001: In the period shortly after Janine’s disappearance, aged care worker Denis Briggs begins telling friends and his partner he was responsible; that he had picked up Janine in his car, driven out of town with her and tried to rape her, before stabbing her with a knife, slitting her throat and burying her body near a creek in the bush.
December, 2001: After hearing about Janine’s disappearance, Trish Salt, a 26-year-old Bathurst woman, phones police reporting an encounter she says she had with a man in a small red car in the early hours of December 1, 2001 – less than a week before Janine vanished. Salt says the man, whom she recognised as local pharmacist Andrew Jones, had tried to coax Salt and her friend into his small red car. Salt says she never heard back from police.
December 12, 2001: Five days after Janine’s disappearance, a knife covered in blood and hair is located in the driveway of a nursing home in Bathurst, little more than five minutes’ drive from where Janine was last seen.
December 13, 2001: Lynette Boreland reports her stalking incident of December 7 to police. The colour of the car described by Boreland matches the description given by witnesses of the car Janine was seen getting into.
Mid-December, 2001: It is around a week after the disappearance of Janine that Bathurst teen Kate alleges she was approached by pharmacist Andrew Jones at the Scots School where he offered her a lift home. Kate is troubled by the incident owing to Jones’ insistence on the offer of a lift despite her saying she had her own vehicle at the school, and also because Jones was driving a small red car which Kate knew matched the description of the one Janine was last seen getting into.
December 16, 2001: Strike Force Toko is deployed to investigate Janine’s disappearance, led by Detective Inspector Paul Jacob, who travels with other officers from Sydney to Bathurst. Jacob remains in charge of Strike Force Toko until May 10, 2004.
January 2002: Police become interested in the movements of pharmacist Andrew Jones, who knew Janine from working in Bathurst, and owned a red car that fit witness descriptions of the vehicle Janine was seen getting into. Jones tells police that he bought a shirt from Ed Harry’s in November of 2001.
January 16, 2001: Police visit Lynette Boreland for a second statement. Boreland agrees to be hypnotised and afterwards says she remembers more detail about the car that stalked her on December 7. In her statement, she says her best recollection of the car’s license plate is that it featured the letters I C U. This is close but not identical to the letters on the license plate of the car belonging to pharmacist Andrew Jones – T C V.
January-February 2002: Aged care worker Denis Briggs reveals more information to his girlfriend Julie Cleave about what he alleges happened to Janine. He claims that she had been killed with a knife and was buried near water. When Cleave asks how he knew this, Briggs says “Because I killed her”. Cleave makes an anonymous call to police.
February 7, 2002: Denis Briggs’ car is forensically examined but nothing of interest is found. He denies to police that he confessed to Cleave about murdering Janine Vaughan.
July 2002: The earlier sexual assault charges against Brad Hosemans are dismissed in court. Despite dismissing the charges, magistrate Graeme Henson finds that Hosemans had engaged in at least some of the behaviour of which he was accused.
June 2002: Police conduct a massive search for Janine’s body at Mount Panorama, using sniffer dogs, divers and State Emergency Service workers. Meanwhile, Denis Briggs confesses to friends Peter Barker and Janine Wheatley that he killed Janine and buried her body at White Rock. Later, when questioned by police, Briggs denies that he made this confession.
June 2002: The connection between Janine and Brad Hosemans becomes the subject of Strike Force Toko’s investigation, and Hosemans is declared a person of interest.
December 19, 2002: Brad Hosemans gives a statement to Detective Inspector Paul Jacob. In it he says that though he had noticed Janine Vaughan and had expressed some interest in her to a mutual acquaintance, he had never had any contact with Janine, never indicated a desire to go out with her, never sent her flowers and never called her. He says at the time of her disappearance he was staying with his mother near Newcastle.
January 14, 2003: A police progress report from Strike Force Toko by Paul Jacob says that there is no evidence of improper, criminal or corrupt conduct by Brad Hosemans with regard to the investigation, and that there is no evidence that Hosemans ever had any contact with Janine Vaughan. The report also purports to cast doubt on what Janine had reported to friends and acquaintances about Hosemans’ attentions, saying that Janine had previously “manufactured issues” such as the “stalking, the flowers, the threatening letters”, and that she was a “drama queen” who made things up.
March 2003: Despite the fact he was found not guilty of the 2001 sexual assault allegations, Brad Hosemans is fired from the police force.
May 2003: Denis Briggs’ former partner Julie Cleave gives a formal statement to police outlining Briggs’ confession to her.
June 2, 2005: An anonymous letter is sent to the Commissioner of Police accusing former detective Brad Hosemans of killing Janine Vaughan.
September 2005: Sparked by the anonymous letter sent to police in June, along with allegations of police mishandling of the investigation during its early stages, the Police Integrity Commission (PIC) begins its own investigation, codenamed Operation Rani.
April 10, 2006: After seeing a news report about Janine’s disappearance, a new witness referred to by police as RA-1 comes forward saying she remembers seeing a frightened-looking Janine, with her hands tied, in a red car driven by Brad Hosemans on the morning Janine went missing.
June 5, 2006: At the Commission’s first day of public hearings in Orange, Brad Hosemans’ bank records are produced from the time of Janine’s disappearance, and it is found that he was travelling back to Bathurst on the morning of December 6, and not December 7 as Hosemans had claimed in 2002.
August 21, 2006: Stephanie Young, a Bathurst woman with whom Brad Hosemans shared an intimate relationship, tells the inquiry in a private hearing that she thought she had been with Hosemans on the night of Janine’s disappearance. Asked if she can provide proof of this, Young says there may be a reference in her diary, but when the diary is checked there is no mention of her having been with Hosemans at that time.
August 23, 2006: Witness RA-1 gives evidence at the Police Integrity Commission hearing about having seen Janine tied up in the car with Brad Hosemans. Her story unravels during questioning and ultimately she is regarded as an unreliable fantasist. Her story is considered not credible by the commission. Peter Moss QC, the Inspector of the Police Integrity Commission, a watchdog responsible for ensuring the PIC handled its investigations appropriately, is staggered by the PIC’s lack of judgement in calling RA-1 as a witness and giving her a platform from which to publicly vilify Hosemans in the middle of an ongoing murder investigation.
August 30, 2006: Nine days after her private hearing, Stephanie Young contacts the commission to say she has located a loose-leaf page from her diary where she had transcribed an SMS she received from Hosemans on December 7, 2001. She says the message proves she had been with Hosemans the night before, when Janine disappeared.
November 2006: Strike Force Mountbatten is formed to reinvestigate Janine’s case, headed by Detective Active Inspector Guy Flaherty.
November 14, 2006: In a second private hearing, Stephanie Young produces the diary page to the Commission which she says contains proof Hosemans was with her the night Janine disappeared. However the commission is sceptical, and when a handwriting expert analyses the diary page the commission decides that Young had added text to the page at a later date to try to put Hosemans with her on the night in question. No weight was placed on the evidence given by Young, but the commission’s findings were later discredited by Peter Moss QC - the Inspector of the Police Integrity Commission whose job it was to make sure that the commission didn’t do the wrong thing in its investigations.
November 14, 2006: The Police Integrity Commission concludes. The report recommends the sacking of Detective Inspector Paul Jacob over a failure to adequately investigate Hosemans, and that further action be taken against Stephanie Young for providing false testimony. Later, the head of the Inspector of the Police Integrity Commission, Peter Moss QC, would review all of the material from the commission and be staggered by what he considered an unacceptable, publicly funded witch hunt that had done “enormous damage” to the reputations of Brad Hosemans, the detectives who investigated him and Stephanie Young, adding that there had been a “clear and significant failure” by the commission to be fair.
May 26, 2007: Strike Force Mountbatten police mount a massive ground search around Bathurst, including at White Rock where Denis Briggs claimed to have buried Janine’s body. Nothing is found.
2007: Reviews are made of Hosemans’ mobile, home and work phones to see if there is evidence of any phone calls having ever occurred between Hosemans and Janine. None are found. In 2007 the cement floor of Hosemans’ old apartment is dug up and cadaver dogs are taken through the house after a tip-off that Janine’s body was buried there. No evidence is found.
December 8, 2008: Police announce a $100,000 reward for information relating to Janine’s disappearance.
June 2, 2009: A coronial inquest into the death of Janine Vaughan commences, presided over by State Coroner Mary Jerram. The details of the inquest are covered in depth in episodes 8 and 9 of The Night Driver.
2009: Despite the 2006 Police Integrity Commission’s recommendations of disciplinary action against Paul Jacob and Stephanie Young, Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione defies the findings and orders an internal report. This report is heavily critical of the 2006 inquiry.
September 21, 2009: The coronial inquest concludes. State Coroner Mary Jerram finds that Janine Vaughan was murdered by a person or persons unknown. She says there is no direct evidence linking Brad Hosemans, Denis Briggs or Andrew Jones with Janine’s disappearance. She finds there is no doubt that the initial Strike Force Toko investigation was flawed in several ways. Brad Hosemans attends the inquest, telling the media “I am pleased that I have been able to look the family in the eye and tell them I did not kill her.”
December 2012: The investigation is referred to the unsolved homicide team for a full review.
March 2019: Police announce an increase in the reward for information regarding Janine’s disappearance to $1 million.
August 2020: The Australian launches The Night Driver, a podcast investigation by National Chief Correspondent Hedley Thomas into Janine’s disappearance.
