Missing (18 page)

Operation Trace was unable to establish any links between Fiona Sinnott and any of the other missing women, or with any known convicted offenders who might have attacked women. Caroline Sinnott
believes the answer lies closer to home, but that the whole issue of missing women must be tackled.

Caroline recounted in clear detail an evening some years before Fiona disappeared that she says should make everybody think.

F
ive months after the disappearance of Fiona Sinnott, another young woman disappeared from her home in Leinster. The circumstances of her
disappearance are deeply disturbing. This young woman, who was eighteen years old, vanished in broad daylight from the gate of her home at Roseberry in Droichead Nua, Co. Kildare, on Tuesday 28
July 1998.

This time the response of the Gardaí was immediate. Within hours a massive search was under way; but no sign of the missing woman was ever found. Her parents have campaigned vigorously
for any information in relation to her disappearance, and still hold out the hope that she will be found safe and well. Privately, many gardaí fear the worst, knowing that the disappearance
was so out of character for the woman, and that no trace of her has been found. The possibility that some person or persons may have abducted her in broad daylight from the roadside beside her home
is one that the Gardaí must examine, and have been examining since that summer’s day. By the autumn of 1998 senior gardaí were privately voicing extreme concern about the number
of young women who had apparently been abducted and murdered. From the disappearance of Annie McCarrick in March 1993 to that of Fiona Sinnott in February 1998 at least five women had been abducted
either from the roadside or from their homes at various places in Leinster.

The disappearance of this sixth young woman in July 1998 was just too much; something had to be done. By the end of 1998 a specialist six-member Garda team had been hand-picked in an attempt to
establish whether any of the cases were linked. For the first time, a special computer system was developed to cross-reference information on thousands of convicted sex offenders. The investigation
would bring the Gardaí into contact with some of the most violent men ever to live in Ireland. And at the back of everyone’s mind was one question: was there evidence to suggest that a
serial killer was operating?

It was a warm summer’s afternoon on Tuesday 28 July 1998 in the bustling Co. Kildare town of Droichead Nua. Families walked along the footpaths, looking in shop windows,
eating ice cream. Children hung around the town centre, enjoying the long school holidays. A general feeling of well-being from the continuing good fortune of Kildare footballers in the Leinster
championship was evident in the conversations that could be heard around the town. But in total contrast to this almost perfect summer scene, something awful was about to happen to an
eighteen-year-old woman that would ensure that this day would be remembered for ever, by people from Droichead Nua and beyond, with shock and sadness. In deference to a request from her family, the
young woman is not referred to by name in this book.

The eighteen-year-old woman was in good form earlier that day, and there was nothing to suggest that anything was troubling her or that she intended to disappear voluntarily. She was home from
England to spend the summer with her parents and younger sister. She was studying to be a teacher at Strawberry Hill College in London and had just finished her first year. Her boy-friend was going
to come over from London and visit her later that summer; in fact a letter she sent to him that arrived only after her disappearance showed that she was in the best of spirits and was looking
forward to the future.

The young woman was enjoying her summer holidays at home in Droichead Nua, where she would often walk the short distance from her home at Roseberry into the town centre to help her grandmother
in the shop she ran. On the weekend before she vanished she stayed with two girl-friends in Kingscourt, Co. Cavan. She returned home on the Monday evening and was in the best of spirits. Less than
twenty-four hours later she vanished from the gate of her house.

Her family point out that any speculation about whether someone is responsible for her disappearance is purely speculation. Nevertheless, many gardaí privately fear that the woman was the
victim of one or more killers.

The hours and minutes before this woman disappeared did not betray anything out of the ordinary. Indeed some of her actions that day prove she was making plans for her future. At 2:20 p.m. she
went to the AIB in Main Street, Droichead Nua, where she got a bank draft to pay for the second year of her training course in London. She then walked the short distance to the post office to send
it off to the college. Along the way she said hello to a number of people.

After coming out of the post office she spoke briefly to a friend as they crossed the road, and they then parted company; nothing she said or did gave any indication that she intended to vanish
within minutes. She then began the walk to her home at Roseberry, on the Barretstown Road, just north of Droichead Nua. This is a winding but busy road, close to the River Liffey, where the
bustling town gives way to the quiet countryside. It was a road she had walked hundreds of times before.

The last definite sighting of the woman was when she was three hundred yards from her home. There was no scream, no screeching of brakes, no sound of the slamming of a car door—nothing to
suggest that a would-be killer snatched this young woman from the roadside. The only definite pieces of information the Gardaí have had to work on are that her bank account was never
touched, she has never contacted any of her family or friends, and no trace of her or her clothing has ever been found. When last seen she was wearing white Nike runners, jeans, and a Nike top, and
she was carrying a black bag with a Caterpillar logo on the flap. In an inch-by-inch search of the roadside outside her home nothing was found to suggest there had been a struggle as she was pulled
into a car or van.

Despite the fact that no crime scene was ever found, many local gardaí remembered the case of 23-year-old Phyllis Murphy, who had disappeared from Droichead Nua twenty years before. In
that case also there was no crime scene, and for four weeks Phyllis Murphy was classified as a missing person. But in January 1980 her body was found in the Wicklow Mountains. She had been abducted
in Droichead Nua as she walked for a bus, and she had been murdered. By July 1998 the killer of Phyllis Murphy had not been caught. It would be another year before John Crerar from Kildare would be
charged. Mindful of that abduction and murder two decades before, detectives investigating the disappearance of the eighteen-year-old woman already feared the worst.

The search began within hours of the young woman’s disappearance. Her mother arrived home in the early evening and sensed immediately that something was wrong. Her daughter was the kind of
girl who would always let her family know where she was. Her father arrived home, and within minutes they had decided to contact the Gardaí.

The search was exhaustive, with roads, lanes, hedges, fields, bogs, rivers and ponds subjected to a thorough search. Detectives were conscious that the first twenty-four hours were crucial in
catching a possible abductor before he could cover his tracks. The Gardaí began to trace the movements of a number of men who were known to show extreme violence towards women. The
whereabouts of a number of vehicles owned by known criminals were also sought. One person reported seeing a woman in apparent distress sitting in a white Hiace van spotted near Droichead Nua that
afternoon. The witness described seeing two men in the van with the woman, and the driver of the van appeared to have red hair. However, no leads emerged from this sighting.

Another line of inquiry would later emerge in relation to an extremely violent man from Co. Wicklow who had not yet come to the attention of the Gardaí. This would-be killer was in
Droichead Nua at about the time the teenager disappeared, working as a carpenter on contract work at a pub in the town. In February 2000 this man’s reputation as a quiet family man was
shattered when he abducted a woman in Carlow and drove her to a number of places in the boot of his car before subjecting her to a number of vicious assaults. He then tried to murder her. This man
remains a suspect for the disappearance of the teenager in Droichead Nua in July 1998, and investigations into his activities are continuing while he serves a fifteen-year sentence in Arbour Hill
Prison, Dublin. Yet despite a massive investigation, no trace has been found of the eighteen-year-old, the sixth woman to vanish in Leinster within a five-year period in the most chilling of
circumstances.

Within days of the disappearance of the eighteen-year-old woman from outside her home in Droichead Nua, a number of senior gardaí had an informal but detailed
discussion. They were worried that this latest disappearance, if it was what they feared, was too much. The other case mainly discussed was that of Jo Jo Dullard, the 21-year-old woman who was
abducted and murdered in November 1995 and who was last seen in Moone, Co. Kildare—fifteen miles from Droichead Nua. The close proximity of the disappearances of two young women, both last
seen on a roadside in Co. Kildare, was something that could not be ignored. Though the two women disappeared at different times of day—Jo Jo Dullard was abducted as she hitched a lift at
around midnight, while the latest missing woman disappeared in broad daylight—detectives were privately wondering whether the same person might be responsible. Had the unknown abductor and
murderer of Jo Jo Dullard changed his modus operandi? Was the disappearance of the Droichead Nua teenager the work of an opportunistic violent person or persons? Was there some evil killer roaming
the roads of Co. Kildare and beyond?

Certainly, the Gardaí had always feared that whoever took the life of Jo Jo Dullard would strike again. It is almost a certainty that she would not have known her killer before she sat
into the mystery car on the night she disappeared. Indeed some gardaí wondered whether Jo Jo Dullard had been the first victim of this unknown killer. Certainly the person responsible for
the abduction and murder of Annie McCarrick on the Dublin-Wicklow border in March 1993 would fit the profile of a random attacker; and in both cases the bodies of the victims had not been found.
Could the person who killed Annie McCarrick have killed Jo Jo Dullard? And were they responsible also for the disappearance of the Droichead Nua teenager?

Also on the minds of detectives were the three unsolved cases involving women whose bodies were found some months after their murder. Antoinette Smith disappeared in Rathfarnham, Co. Dublin, in
July 1987; her body was found buried in the Dublin Mountains in April 1988. Patricia Doherty disappeared from Tallaght, also in south Co. Dublin, in December 1990; her body was found in June 1991,
also buried in the Dublin Mountains. And Marie Kilmartin disappeared from Port Laoise in December 1993; her body was found buried in a bog in north Co. Laois in June 1994.

Then there were the cases of three missing women in each of which individual suspects had been identified; but the question had to be asked, What if those suspects were not the people
responsible? Though is was thought unlikely, what if a serial attacker was responsible for murdering Fiona Pender from Tullamore in August 1996, or Ciara Breen from Dundalk in February 1997, or
Fiona Sinnott from Co. Wexford in February 1998? And what about the missing Dublin woman Eva Brennan, who disappeared from her home in July 1993, four months after Annie McCarrick was murdered? Was
she a forgotten victim of a random attacker? One Garda superintendent, who was approaching retirement, took another officer aside and said to him,

This was a reference to two Englishmen who in 1976 abducted and murdered two women at random. The senior garda said he would bring the concerns to the attention of the Garda
Commissioner as a matter of urgency. And so it was that, twenty years after the last serial killers to terrorise Ireland were put behind bars for the rest of their lives, the Gardaí were
once again faced with the distinct possibility that a serial killer or killers might be at large in Ireland.