Missing (22 page)

The man’s first conviction, for housebreaking, was in 1957, when he was thirteen years old, and he was sent to St Joseph’s School for Boys in Clonmel. He later spent time in other
detention centres for young offenders, at Daingean, Co. Offaly, and St Patrick’s Institution, Dublin. He was thirty in 1974 when he raped the elderly woman in Co. Cork. It is now believed
that twenty years later the man killed his first murder victim, a teenage girl. The fact that in the mid to late 1990s this violent man later travelled by ferry between Ireland and Britain a number
of times has not been lost on detectives investigating the cases of missing women in Ireland. However, trying to establish where exactly he was at the time of each disappearance has been a massive
task. He remains a suspect in relation to a number of the disappearances, most notably those of Annie McCarrick and Jo Jo Dullard. He is a suspect, however, not because he was seen in the vicinity
of those abductions but because he is now believed to have killed two teenage girls in different countries.

While this man was already known to the Gardaí by the time Operation Trace was set up, other violent men had not yet come to their attention. The crimes for which they
were later jailed were attacks on women that shocked the detectives who investigated them. While the name of Larry Murphy from Baltinglass, Co. Wicklow, is the most prominent of those who have been
convicted of abducting and raping women in recent times, there are other men who have been put behind bars for similar crimes, and one thing they all have in common is that they have no previous
convictions. But for the courage of the rape victims in coming forward with their harrowing tales, coupled with the dogged determination of detectives in pursuing them, these criminals would still
be as ‘clean as a whistle.’

In September 2000, nineteen-year-old Daniel Moynihan from Raheen East, Rathmore, Co. Kerry, set out in his car posing as a hackney driver. He headed for Killarney, where he began driving around.
In the early hours of the morning two young women got into the car, thinking it was a hackney cab. Moynihan drove one woman to her intended destination and then set off towards where the other
young woman wanted to go. However, instead of driving to the woman’s home he drove to an isolated spot, where he raped her. He later brought her to another place, where he attacked her again.
When he was arrested he told the Gardaí he was glad he was caught and had ‘wished to be found out.’ He was later jailed for twelve years after admitting two charges of raping the
woman, with the final two years of the sentence being suspended because he pleaded guilty.

Another violent young man who is now serving a lengthy prison sentence for abducting and sexually assaulting a woman is Thomas Callan from Shanmullagh, Carrickmacross, Co. Monaghan. He was
twenty-one when he abducted a seventeen-year-old girl, who he put in the boot of his car in Carrickmacross in June 1999. After abducting the terrified teenager he drove her to a secluded area
outside the town, where he sexually assaulted her and tried to rape her. It would later emerge that this was not the first time Callan had tried to abduct a girl. In February 1999 he approached a
fourteen-year-old girl in Carrickmacross and tried to force her to go to an isolated spot, but she managed to flee. In May 2001 Callan was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment for his attack
on the seventeen-year-old and to four years for falsely imprisoning the fourteen-year-old. As he passed sentence, Mr Justice Paul Carney remarked that this was the second case in a month in which
he had to sentence a violent man who had abducted a woman and put her in the boot of his car. The other man was Larry Murphy.

There has been a great deal of speculation about what information Larry Murphy might have about a number of unsolved crimes. The now separated father of two is serving a fifteen-year sentence
for abducting, repeatedly raping and attempting to murder a 28-year-old Carlow woman in February 2000. Murphy disarmed her by punching her full in the face, fracturing her nose. He was trying to
kill his victim in a remote woodland area in Co. Wicklow when two men came upon the scene, and Murphy fled. Detectives investigating the disappearance of women in Leinster have studied
Murphy’s case in an effort to find new leads. Like Daniel Moynihan in Co. Kerry and Thomas Callan in Co. Monaghan, Larry Murphy had no previous convictions and therefore did not feature in
the OVID data-base when it was set up by Operation Trace. The difference between Murphy and the other two men is that he was seemingly a happily married man, while the other two were single. Murphy
was thirty-five when he carried out the heinous crime for which he was convicted. He was twenty-eight when Annie McCarrick disappeared in March 1993; he was thirty when Jo Jo Dullard disappeared in
November 1995; he was thirty-three when the Droichead Nua teenager disappeared in July 1998, and he had been working in the area at the time.

After he was arrested and charged with raping and attempting to murder the Carlow woman in February 2000, Murphy’s car was scientifically examined to see if any information relating to any
other crimes might be found, but nothing came of this. When two senior gardaí visited Murphy in Arbour Hill Prison he told them he had no information about missing women. When he was given
his fifteen-year prison sentence the last year was suspended because he pleaded guilty. Murphy will be in his late forties when he walks out of prison a free man.

Another name that did not feature on Garda files when Operation Trace was set up in September 1998 was that of Thomas O’Connor, who at the time was working as a curator
at Dublin Civic Museum. By the time Operation Trace was set up, O’Connor, a married man with two children from Rock Road, Booterstown, Co. Dublin, was already subjecting a number of women to
a reign of terror by threatening them over the phone and sending them obscene packages through the post. O’Connor picked on at least nine single women and widows and threatened them that they
would meet the same fate as Annie McCarrick and Jo Jo Dullard. He terrorised the women by phoning them anonymously, grunting and groaning into the phone, and ordering them to hang their underwear
out their windows. One woman reported receiving a letter with faeces on it. O’Connor sent one of his victims a newspaper headline, ‘Theory of serial killer rejected.’

The Gardaí in south Co. Dublin had been pursuing the unidentified stalker for five years before Thomas O’Connor was caught in February 2001 as he stalked the house of one of his
victims. In July 2002 he was jailed for three years. He told the Gardaí he had stalked his victims because he loved the control he had over the women and the fear he could put them under.
Detectives, conscious of O’Connor’s references to missing women during his reign of terror, conducted a thorough examination of his previous life. No information could be found to
suggest that he had ever met any of the missing women.

Detectives investigating the disappearance of women in Leinster were always conscious that a killer might have travelled from Britain or elsewhere to commit crimes in Ireland.
A recent example of the transient nature of some violent offenders is the fifty-year-old Englishman who was charged in January 2002 with raping a woman in Bantry, Co. Cork. This man, who was living
under an alias, is wanted by the English police for questioning about the murder of a 23-year-old woman in Norwich in October 2001. The body of Hayley Curtis was found buried in a shallow grave
along a lay-by in Hampshire in January 2002 by a couple out walking their dog. She had been reported missing by her family only two months after she disappeared, as she had been known to go missing
by herself before. The English police believe that the man who was arrested in Ireland in January 2002 after the alleged rape in Cork might be the last person to see Hayley Curtis alive. An
examination of this man’s history has not revealed any links with any of Ireland’s missing women.

This case is just one example of murders committed in other jurisdictions being considered by the gardaí investigating Ireland’s ‘missing, presumed murdered’ cases. As
one senior garda put it, ‘Criminals do not respect borders.’

The work of Operation Trace involved both a reassessment of the original investigations and the following up of new lines of inquiry. More than five thousand people were
interviewed and four thousand statements taken, leading to more than seven thousand lines of inquiry. The detectives looked at every conceivable motive that might link some or all of the cases;
they looked at the different months in which the women disappeared, the days of the week, and the time of day. The phases of the moon were even assessed and logged to see if any link might be
established. A number of searches were carried out in Leinster, Connacht and Ulster, some of them at the request of the families of the missing women. Sniffer dogs trained in Britain were used to
search fields and bogs. Detectives used metal probes, which they stuck deep into the ground at the various sites; these were then assessed by the sniffer dogs to see if anything suspicious might be
buried there. But nothing was found.

A number of graveyards were also looked at, to see whether any efforts might have been made to hide bodies there. In the investigation into the disappearance of two of the missing
women—Fiona Pender and Fiona Sinnott—the idea had already been raised that the bodies of the women might have been hidden in graveyards, but detectives could find no evidence of this.
Old graveyards were also looked at as possible places where killers might try to hide their tracks. One detective told me they once thought they had found such a grave.

By December 2001 Operation Trace had not established any clear links between any of the cases of missing women. With all conceivable lines of inquiry examined, the six
gardaí on the Operation Trace team had begun to be reassigned to their original duties. The OVID data-base was closed and is now locked in a room at the Carlow-Kildare Divisional
Headquarters in Naas, together with all the files on the missing women. But the investigations into the missing women are still continuing at individual Garda stations, and members of the Operation
Trace team still reassemble to investigate any leads that suggest that two or more cases might be linked.

Detectives from Operation Trace were in attendance at the Central Criminal Court in October 2002 as a jury unanimously found John Crerar guilty of the murder of Phyllis Murphy in December 1979.
Unlike the cases that Operation Trace was assigned to examine, the discovery of Phyllis Murphy’s body had given the Gardaí a crime scene, from which the necessary evidence was gathered
that would eventually lead to the case being solved twenty-three years later. Members of the Operation Trace team played a prominent role in the prosecution of Crerar, conducting a number of
interviews, preparing the book of evidence, and keeping safe the clothing and other scientific evidence that other gardaí had held for more than twenty years. John Crerar had no previous
convictions and was apparently a dedicated family man. Like Larry Murphy, he continues to be of considerable interest to the gardaí investigating a number of unsolved crimes, including the
cases of missing women.

From the time Operation Trace was set up in September 1998 to the time it was decided to reassign members of the team to their original duties, no other women disappeared in
sinister circumstances in Leinster. One detective believes there could be a number of reasons for this.

One detective who worked on Operation Trace pointed out that drawing assumptions about any of the cases is hazardous.