Missing (20 page)

While detectives analysed information relating to the six missing women they were specifically assigned to investigate, those cases could not be looked at in isolation. There were other missing
women who were not receiving as much attention, and there were four unsolved murders where bodies had been found weeks or months after those women had gone missing in Leinster. So while Operation
Trace was officially looking only at six missing women, privately detectives were also looking at five other unsolved cases. Those were the cases of the missing Eva Brennan and the murdered Phyllis
Murphy, Antoinette Smith, Patricia Doherty, and Marie Kilmartin.

Before Operation Trace was a year old there had been a breakthrough in relation to one of the unsolved murders that gave all the other investigations renewed vigour and
enthusiasm. On an evening in July 1999 Chief Superintendent Seán Feely emerged from Naas Garda Station and addressed the large group of journalists waiting outside. He confirmed that a man
was due in court the next morning charged with the murder of Phyllis Murphy twenty years before. The next day the man was named as John Crerar, a 51-year-old former army sergeant from Woodside
Park, Kildare. 23-year-old Phyllis Murphy had last been seen alive on 22 December 1979 as she walked towards a bus stop to travel from Droichead Nua to Kildare. Her naked body was found four weeks
later in the Wicklow Gap. For two decades the Gardaí had feared that her killer might strike again. In October 2002 John Crerar was convicted of murdering Phyllis Murphy after the jury
accepted the evidence of forensic scientists that semen taken from the body of Phyllis Murphy was John Crerar’s. An alibi witness who had lied for twenty years also changed his story.

Though Crerar had no previous convictions, his name was known to the Gardaí in Kildare since 1980, after many gardaí had privately had their suspicions raised about the security
guard who volunteered a blood sample. It was to be another nineteen years before that blood sample could be matched with the specimen recovered from Phyllis Murphy’s body. It was detectives
from Operation Trace who co-ordinated the questioning of Crerar, and they also prepared the book of evidence and kept the valuable exhibits safe.

Crerar’s movements have also been examined in relation to the disappearance of the other missing women in Leinster. This is a difficult task, and one that is continuing. One detective told
me the Gardaí do believe that the solving of this murder will at least lead indirectly to progress being made in other cases.

The three murder cases that remain unsolved are much more recent than those of Phyllis Murphy. While her body was hidden under ferns in a densely wooded area, the bodies of the
three other victims who were originally classified as missing were buried on bogland.

On 11 July 1987, 27-year-old Antoinette Smith travelled to Slane, Co. Meath, with a friend to a David Bowie concert. It was a lovely summer’s day and she danced the afternoon and evening
away at the concert. Afterwards she and her friend travelled to the La Mirage night club near Parnell Square, Dublin. They met two men while they were there, one of whom was a barman whom
Antoinette knew. The four left the night club at about 2 a.m. and headed down O’Connell Street. There was a minor dispute about where they might go next, and Antoinette and her friend parted
company. Antoinette and the barman walked on, but they too parted company a short time afterwards. Antoinette walked over to Westmorland Street close to the Abrakebabra restaurant, where she met
two unidentified men. The three of them got a taxi to Rathfarnham, close to the Yellow House pub. The taxi driver seeing Antoinette Smith getting out of the taxi with these two men in Rathfarnham
was the last time she was seen alive.

For nine months the disappearance of Antoinette Smith was treated as a missing person case. Antoinette was separated from her husband, who had quickly reported her missing, as she had not
arrived to visit her two young children in Clondalkin. For nine months there were no leads; then, on 13 April 1988, her body was found in a shallow grave at the Feather Bed in the Dublin Mountains.
She had been strangled, and a plastic bag had been put over her head. Her body had been left in a drain at the side of a turf bank but had become exposed when rain washed away part of the soil. The
body had been preserved to a certain extent because of the soil in which it lay. From evidence gathered in what soon became a murder investigation, the Gardaí are satisfied that two men were
involved in the attack and murder of Antoinette Smith.

Detectives with Operation Trace looked at the Antoinette Smith file to see if any similar names were cropping up in relation to any of the other missing women. The abduction and murder of
Antoinette Smith would fit the profile of two random attackers, but what detectives were trying to establish was whether these violent men were opportunistic killers who had killed once or were
serial killers who had struck again.

Operation Trace detectives were fully aware that whoever murdered Patricia Doherty in December 1991 buried her body less than a mile from where Antoinette Smith’s body
had been left four years before. The Gardaí still wonder whether the two women were murdered by separate killers and the burial sites were close purely by coincidence or whether the murders
were the work of the same two men.

Patricia Doherty, a native of Anascaul, Co. Kerry, was last seen alive on 23 December 1991. She had travelled to the Square in Tallaght to buy Santa hats for her two children. She and her
husband, Paddy Doherty, were living at Allenton Lawns, Tallaght, close to a road that heads south into the Dublin Mountains. Patricia Doherty had been working as a prison officer in Mountjoy Prison
for about six months before her disappearance, having trained in Port Laoise Prison. Her disappearance was out of character for her, but the alarm was not raised until Christmas Day, because her
husband thought she had gone to work on Christmas Eve. He first realised something was wrong when he arrived to meet her at her mother’s house in Rathfarnham, as they had arranged, only to
find she wasn’t there. Weeks became months, and still there was no sign of the missing woman. Then, in June, everyone’s worst fears were realised.

Patricia Doherty’s body was found by a man out cutting turf close to the Lemass Cross at Killakee in the Dublin Mountains. A full-scale murder investigation immediately began, headed by
detectives in Tallaght. Patricia Doherty had been strangled, and her body had been left in a bog drain. She was identified by dental records and by rings she was wearing. The key of her front door
was found close to the body. Detectives are satisfied that the body had lain in the Dublin Mountains from about the time she went missing the previous Christmas.

Whoever abducted and murdered Patricia Doherty chose to bury her body less than three miles from her home. The place is also less than a mile from where the body of Antoinette Smith was left by
her killers four years earlier. No-one was ever arrested in connection with the murder of Patricia Doherty.

The third missing woman case that is now officially an unsolved murder case is that of the abduction and murder of Marie Kilmartin in Port Laoise on 16 December 1993. The
34-year-old single woman, a native of Ballinasloe, Co. Galway, was lured out of her house at Beladd on the Stradbally road by some man who phoned her from a public phone box in the town. When it
came to investigating the disappearance of Marie Kilmartin the Gardaí had more precise information to go on than in the Antoinette Smith and Patricia Doherty cases. They knew that Marie
Kilmartin had earlier attended a Christmas party at the day centre where she worked in Port Laoise. She got a lift home with two women, who she invited in for a cup of tea, but they declined. She
was due to meet a friend later that night, at about six o’clock; but when the friend called around, Marie’s shopping was still on a chair in the kitchen, and Marie was nowhere to be
seen.

Detectives would later establish that a phone call was made to her home at about 4:30 p.m. that afternoon. The call, from the public phone box on the Dublin Road in Port Laoise, lasted about
two-and-a-half minutes. Whoever made that call has crucial information relating to her murder; but that person has never been clearly identified. Detectives have established that no other phone
calls were made from that call box between 4:11 and 4:42 p.m. This information could yet prove crucial, as a witness has told the Gardaí that she saw a man in the phone box at about half
past four as she was hitching a lift on the road. She described him as about five feet eight inches tall and about thirty years old. While the description may be vague, it establishes that there
was one person who made the phone call to Marie Kilmartin, and that it was a male caller. This would suggest that whoever managed to lure her out of her house was a man who was known to her in some
way.

For six months Marie Kilmartin was classified as missing. Then, on 10 June 1994, Thomas Deegan from Mountmellick, Co. Laois, made a shocking discovery. He was visiting his son, who was cutting
turf at Pim’s Lane, Barnanaghs, off the Portarlington–Mountmellick road. He had given his son a flask of tea and was looking around. He spotted the wheel of what looked like a pram in a
nearby drain; then he saw what looked like a black boot also in the drain. He looked a little closer, and he saw the body of a woman.

For six months the body of Marie Kilmartin had lain in a bog drain near Mountmellick. It was only when the bog water in the drain had subsided in hot and dry weather that the body became
visible. The area where she was found was covered with gorse, ferns, and bracken. The gardaí who arrived on the scene saw that there was a six-inch-wide concrete block over the woman’s
chest and shoulder. It was a distressing scene, which left many detectives speechless. Before they could reach the body they had to remove a pram and a gas cylinder, which had also been put in the
drain. Marie Kilmartin was still in the clothes she was last seen wearing at the Christmas party she had attended the previous December, with a three-quarter-length tweed coat, the buttons still
fastened. Uncannily, the watch she was wearing began to work again when her body was removed from the drain. The state pathologist, Dr John Harbison, found that the cause of death was manual
strangulation.

Within weeks of the discovery of Marie Kilmartin’s body, two Co. Laois men were arrested and detained for questioning. Both were held for twelve hours but were released without charge. A
file was not sent to the Director of Public Prosecutions, and the case remains unsolved. One man identified as a suspect—a former soldier living in Port Laoise—had previously given
Marie a lift. He was unemployed at the time of the murder, and he had previously cut turf in the area where the body was discovered. His van was thoroughly searched during the investigation, but no
evidence was found of any crime having been committed. A mobile home was also searched as part of the investigation, but nothing was found. Soon after being questioned by detectives, this suspect
was admitted to hospital with chest pains. The murder file remains open, and this man remains a suspect.

Detectives working at the Operation Trace headquarters in Naas entered all the information relating to the murders of Antoinette Smith, Patricia Doherty and Marie Kilmartin in
the OVID system, as well as the information on the murder of Phyllis Murphy—which would later be solved. There were no common features between the cases that would suggest that the cases were
linked. The private feeling of many gardaí is that the murder of Marie Kilmartin is not linked to other unsolved cases, but that the murders of Antoinette Smith and Patricia Doherty may be
linked.

Even if the same killers were not responsible for each murder, the proximity of the places where the bodies were left is suspicious. Detectives have also wondered whether one killer might have
told another killer of an isolated spot where a body could be concealed. There are definitely two men responsible for the murder of Antoinette Smith, but it is not known how many people have
information about Patricia Doherty’s murder. The Gardaí are satisfied that Antoinette Smith did not know the men who murdered her. Detectives have long feared that the same pair might
have struck again, perhaps abducting Annie McCarrick or Jo Jo Dullard, or that one or both of these killers may be responsible for unsolved sexual assaults in the greater Dublin area. But Operation
Trace did not turn up any concrete evidence linking the three unsolved murders with any of the missing women.

The murder of a young woman in the foothills of the Dublin Mountains in July 1982 was also considered by members of Operation Trace. Nineteen-year-old Patricia Furlong was
strangled near Glencullen, Co. Dublin, after she travelled there with friends to attend a festival. Nine years after this brutal murder a Dublin disc-jockey, Vincent Connell, was convicted of the
murder. He later appealed against his conviction, challenging the admissions he was alleged to have made while in custody. His conviction was quashed in April 1995; but he was later convicted of
assaulting four former girl-friends, all of whom made complaints to the Gardaí about his violent tendencies. Connell was given a suspended sentence, and he emigrated to England, where he
died of a heart attack in 1998, while continuing to protest his innocence of the murder of Patricia Furlong.