Missing
Authors: Barry Cummins
For everyone who has been lost
Introduction
B
etween March 1993 and July 1998 six young women aged between seventeen and twenty-six disappeared without a trace in Ireland. It is feared that
all six women were abducted and murdered. Despite intensive Garda investigations, massive media coverage and public appeals, the bodies of the six women have not been found. Their disappearance has
brought untold anguish to their families and shocked a country unused to such unexplained and seemingly random violence. And, of course, there is the disturbing reality that the killers responsible
have not been caught. There live among us killers who have gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal their crimes, who have not left an identifiable crime scene behind, who have somehow hidden the
bodies of their defenceless victims.
Four of the families of the missing women accept the terrible fact that their loved ones have been murdered. A fifth family fear that the same fate befell their loved one but still hold out a
glimmer of hope that she may be alive. The sixth family maintain that any speculation about their missing teenager being murdered is simply that—speculation.
The trauma of the families of the six women has been laid bare in the glare of the media. Hundreds of buildings and thousands of acres of land have been painstakingly searched; suspects have
been arrested and questioned; but still the mystery of the disappearance of the women remains. We will never know the emotional and physical pain they suffered in the hours or minutes after they
were last seen alive. The recovery of the bodies of the missing women is crucial for the distraught families, who long for some kind of closure; it might also help prevent similar murders being
committed in the future. Wherever the missing women now lie, there is evidence to link the killer or killers to each individual crime. Recovering the bodies is a must for the Gardaí, who
know that some of the most heinous crimes to be committed in Ireland remain unexplained, undetected, and unsolved.
This book confronts the disturbing fact that a number of Ireland’s most evil murderers have not been caught. In each of the cases of young women believed to have been abducted and murdered
in Leinster, suspects have been identified by the Gardaí. In three of the cases prime suspects have been identified, yet no charges have been brought. Without the bodies of the women being
discovered, and without the exact crime scenes being found, the job of bringing a case before the courts is an almost impossible one. Yet each of these cases remains an active one for the
detectives involved.
The first of the six women to disappear was an American woman, Annie McCarrick, who was twenty-six when she was abducted and murdered somewhere near the Wicklow Mountains in March 1993. Her
disappearance devastated her parents, John and Nancy McCarrick, who are now divorced. Annie was an only child, and the fact that her body has never been found has caused great distress for her
parents, who live in Long Island, New York. Growing up in an Irish-American community, Annie developed a passion for Ireland. When she was nineteen she arrived in Dublin for the first time and fell
in love with Irish culture and the Irish people. She lived in Ireland for three years while she studied in Dublin and Maynooth. She developed serious relationships with two men during that time,
and had a wide circle of friends. By Christmas 1992 she was back in New York and trying to decide what she wanted to do with her life. She was thinking of becoming a teacher, and she decided, once
and for all, that she was going to go back to Ireland to see if she could settle down and make her life here. She arrived in Dublin in January 1993. Less than three months later she was abducted
and murdered, after heading out for a walk in Enniskerry, Co. Wicklow. Her body has never been found, and her killer has never been caught.
The second woman to disappear in similar chilling circumstances was the 21-year-old Co. Kilkenny woman Jo Jo Dullard. Late at night on 9 November 1995 she was trying to hitch a lift home in
Moone, Co. Kildare, when her killer stopped to offer her a lift. She had already hitched lifts from Naas to Kilcullen, and then from Kilcullen to Moone, but she was still more than forty miles from
her home in Callan, Co. Kilkenny. Whoever stopped to offer her a lift at about 11:40 p.m. managed to conceal his murderous intentions. Jo Jo Dullard’s body has never been found, leading to
one of her sisters, Mary Phelan, publicly criticising the failure of the Gardaí to conduct an extensive search within a twenty-mile radius of where she was last seen. Mary has also
spearheaded a campaign for the establishment of a specialist Garda National Missing Persons Unit. Jo Jo’s disappearance has traumatised her three sisters and brother and her nieces and
nephews. There are a number of suspects for this abduction and murder, but without Jo Jo’s body being found the killer or killers remain at large.
In August 1996 25-year-old Fiona Pender, who at the time was seven months pregnant, was lured out of her flat in Tullamore by someone she knew. At some unknown place in the midlands she was
murdered, and her body was concealed. Her violent death was the second tragedy to hit the Pender family: her younger brother, Mark, was killed in a motorbike accident in June 1995; but the murder
of Fiona Pender and her unborn baby was not the last tragedy to befall the Penders. In March 2000 Fiona’s father, Seán Pender, took his own life at the family home in Connolly Park,
Tullamore.
The abduction and murder of Fiona Pender differ from those of Annie McCarrick and Jo Jo Dullard, in that the Gardaí believe Fiona knew her attacker. While Annie McCarrick and Jo Jo
Dullard were both out walking or standing on the roadside when they were attacked by their killers, Fiona Pender was last seen at home in her flat in Church Street, Tullamore. There was no sign of
a struggle or disturbance; the most credible hypothesis is that Fiona either left the flat in the company of her would-be killer or left to meet that person by arrangement. A prime suspect has been
identified, but no charges have been brought.
The fourth woman to disappear was technically a child when she was abducted and murdered. Ciara Breen was a few weeks short of her eighteenth birthday when she sneaked out of her bedroom window
in Dundalk in the early hours of the morning in February 1997. Whoever she was going to meet, and wherever she was going, she didn’t want her mother to know about it. The Gardaí
believe she was going to meet an older man, and that this is the person who is responsible for her abduction and murder. A prime suspect has been identified and has been questioned at length, but
he denies that he even knew Ciara. Her murder has devastated her mother, who has lost her only child in the most callous of circumstances. Whoever killed Ciara Breen has taken not only Bernadette
Breen’s only child but her best friend, her whole life.
A year after Ciara Breen’s murder another teenager disappeared in sinister circumstances, this time at the other end of Leinster. Fiona Sinnott was nineteen and the proud mother of
eleven-month-old Emma Rose when she vanished from her home in Broadway, Co. Wexford, in February 1998. She is the only one of the six missing women who has left behind a child. A number of people
have been questioned about her suspected abduction, but no charges have been brought. A major operation leading to the draining of a lake in the locality also led nowhere. A prime suspect has been
identified, but, as in the other cases, without a crime scene, or a witness, or a body, a prosecution is unlikely.
The sixth woman to vanish in the Leinster area within the five years between 1993 and 1998 disappeared in circumstances that have instilled fear throughout the country. In deference to a
specific request from this woman’s family, she is not referred to by name in this book. She was just eighteen when, on a Tuesday afternoon in July 1998, she vanished from the front gate of
her home at Roseberry, near Droichead Nua, Co. Kildare. She was within yards of her front door, having walked home along the side of the road from Droichead Nua, when something happened that
prevented her making it into the safety of her home. Unlike the previous five missing women cases, this time the Garda response was immediate, with detectives combing the area for clues within
hours of the disappearance. In the five other cases the alarm was not raised for hours or even days, and for more than a week in the case of Fiona Sinnott.
Despite an intensive search of bogland and forest in Cos. Kildare and Wicklow, and raids on the homes of a number of criminals, nothing was found to show exactly what had happened to the young
woman, who came from a loving family and was looking forward to studying to become a teacher. Whatever happened that afternoon in 1998, a heartbreaking mystery remains for the young woman’s
family. This case was hampered for a number of months when a Co. Fermanagh man made a number of hoax phone calls claiming he had information about the disappearance. In a separate aspect of the
case, it was not until almost two years later that it emerged that one of the country’s most dangerous men, who is now serving a fifteen-year prison sentence for a random attack on another
woman, was working in the area at the time. This man has been questioned in prison by detectives but has denied any knowledge of any of the missing women. Detectives fear that whoever is
responsible for the disappearance of other missing women—particularly of Annie McCarrick and Jo Jo Dullard— may be responsible for the Droichead Nua case too.
Indeed it is such speculation that led in September 1998 to the establishment of a special Garda initiative—Operation Trace—to explore the possibility that the cases of any of the
six missing women might be linked. A six-member team analysed the movements of more than seven thousand convicted or suspected sex offenders who had lived or travelled in Ireland since the early
1980s. Using a computer program that they nicknamed OVID (for Offenders, Victims and Incidents Data-base), they compiled and analysed information on all known offenders, all known victims, and all
violent incidents known to have occurred in the previous two decades. It was a massive task, with every scrap of information being logged in the hope that a previously unseen link might be
established between any of the cases. From the Operation Trace headquarters at Naas, Co. Kildare, detectives would co-ordinate the arrests of nine men and women in connection with the
investigations, but no charges were brought.
Despite the massive amount of information collected, no clear links could be established between any of the missing women. Members of the Operation Trace team were always conscious that they
were only analysing information relating to known sex offenders and that there were many other offenders who had not yet been caught and who might be responsible for one or more of the
disappearances. Indeed in the years since Operation Trace was set up a number of violent men who had never before come to the attention of the Gardaí have been caught for some of the most
shocking crimes Ireland has known. These offenders are usually married men with children, who somehow have been able to keep their evil and violent tendencies hidden from even their closest family
members. Detectives remain convinced that more of these men of seemingly unblemished character will be caught in the future.
