Missing (23 page)

Detectives who have investigated the cases of missing women believed to have been murdered are acutely conscious that having a prime suspect does not mean the case is solved.
There is always the possibility that the prime suspect, while capable of killing, might not in fact have committed the crime. The Gardaí are mindful of one case from the 1970s in which a
young woman had a row with her boy-friend and stormed off. A short time later she was abducted and murdered by a complete stranger. At first detectives looked at the boy-friend as a suspect, based
on the ill-feeling between the two of them on the night the woman disappeared. From a prosecution point of view the boy-friend had a motive and opportunity. It was more than two months before the
killer was caught, and the utterly distraught boy-friend was cleared of any suspicion.

There was also a case in the early 1980s in which a young woman was murdered by a married man she had met only that day. By sheer coincidence she had earlier been in the company—unknown to
her—of another sexual deviant. At first the Gardaí thought this man was the killer, but after a number of months they established that he wasn’t and that it was the other, the
‘upstanding’ man, she had met later that day.

When the door was locked on the Operation Trace investigation room in December 2001 many gardaí privately felt that the detectives should have been left to continue
their work full-time. There was always the possibility that the computer system was about to throw up a link between two or more of the disappearances. Perhaps the next piece of seemingly innocuous
information to be given to a garda might unlock the mystery of where the bodies of the women lay. Other gardaí argue that all possible leads had been exhausted, and it was pointless to leave
the detectives in a room in Naas with no more leads to work on.

The commitment of the gardaí who worked on Operation Trace could never be called into question. All of them worked long hours, often in their own time, in an effort to bring closure for
the families of the missing women. Members of the Operation Trace team had many other successes in their careers, solving many murders and other serious crimes; but Operation Trace did not achieve
what the public wanted it to achieve.

Was Operation Trace a failure? Certainly it failed to establish any links between any of the cases of missing women in Leinster; but there always remains the possibility that none of the cases
are linked. The feeling of the Gardaí is that the abduction and murder of Annie McCarrick and Jo Jo Dullard may be linked, and the disappearance of the Droichead Nua teenager may be linked
also; but the tens of thousands of pieces of information gathered by OVID failed to show any firm links. Many detectives feel that Operation Trace was established too late, believing that something
similar should have been operational soon after Jo Jo Dullard’s disappearance and therefore before Fiona Pender, Ciara Breen, Fiona Sinnott or the Droichead Nua teenager had disappeared.

While Operation Trace failed to find the women’s bodies, it did throw the spotlight on new suspects in a number of the cases. Nine people, including a number of women, were questioned
during the operation, and investigations into the activities of these people continues. The Gardaí were always conscious that they were collating information relating to sexual deviants and
violent men who were either already convicted or strongly suspected of carrying out attacks. There was always the possibility that those responsible for murdering the missing women had never come
to the attention of the Gardaí. One detective, however, believes that most if not all of the names of the murder suspects are contained in OVID.

Members of the team are still in regular contact to discuss certain suspects whose names cropped up repeatedly in their original investigation. They still get calls from
fellow-gardaí around the country about men who may be responsible for the disappearance of women in Leinster. The number of phone calls and tip-offs from members of the public increases
whenever any murder cases are reported. Whenever any fresh and credible leads are found, members of the Operation Trace team reassemble to investigate the information. OVID remains on stand-by in
Naas Garda Station, but it needs to be fed.

It was the disappearance of the Droichead Nua teenager in July 1998 that sparked the intense concern by the public and the Gardaí that led to the establishment of Operation Trace. As well
as a massive search by local gardaí of bogland, rivers, fields and roads around Co. Kildare and beyond, it was hoped that the Operation Trace team might be able to throw up a
computer-generated lead that would bring the teenager home. Her disappearance is one of the most eerie occurrences this country has known, the eighteen-year-old apparently disappearing from the
gate of her home in broad daylight. If, as is feared, she was abducted, it was one of the most audacious and most cruel crimes Ireland has known. But there is no proof that a crime was even
committed, and that is what scares those closest to the case. Unlike other cases of people who have vanished without a trace, the response time of the Gardaí to this disappearance could not
be faulted: the young woman was reported missing within hours of her disappearance, and extensive searches began the same night. This was far faster than any of the other missing women cases; and
yet not a shred of evidence was found on the roadside, not one witness could be found who could throw light on what continues to be an agonising mystery for her parents.

In the years since then a number of possible suspects have been identified. Most of these violent men are in prison for other offences. Indeed, for whatever reason, this was to be the last such
unexplained disappearance of a young woman in the 1990s.

M
ary Boyle is Ireland’s youngest missing person; but her case is one of the oldest. Long before the disappearance of thirteen-year-old Philip
Cairns in 1986, or the disappearance of women in the Leinster area in the 1990s, something terrible and so far unexplained happened to little Mary Boyle. Six years old, going on seven, she vanished
in March 1977 at Cashelard, near Ballyshannon, on the southern tip of Co. Donegal.

What happened to the little girl who was last seen eating a packet of sweets? It’s a heartbreaking question that her parents, Ann and Charlie Boyle, her twin sister, Ann, and older
brother, Patrick, still ask every day. It’s a case that has touched the hearts of the gardaí who worked on the original investigation, all of them now retired.

There are only two possible explanations for Mary Boyle’s disappearance. Did a desolate patch of marshy ground swallow up the little girl? Or is there a more sinister answer? Was she
abducted from the quiet Donegal countryside that Friday afternoon? Is there a person in Co. Donegal or beyond who is responsible for Mary’s disappearance? Whatever the reason for her
disappearance, why has no trace of her been found a quarter of a century later?

Mary Boyle disappeared seven years after the murder of ten-year-old Bernadette Connolly, who was abducted thirty miles away in Collooney, Co. Sligo. Bernadette’s body was found four months
after her disappearance in a bog drain in Co. Roscommon. Mary Boyle and Philip Cairns remain Ireland’s only long-term missing children who are still the subject of intense Garda
investigations.

Everyone who knows anything of the story of the missing girl has a hypothesis; but no-one has an answer. The gardaí who worked on the case believe the key to this mystery lies somewhere
in south Co. Donegal.

Mary Boyle’s uncle and godfather Gerry Gallagher is the last known person to see Mary. It was about 3:30 on the afternoon of Friday 18 March 1977, and he was carrying a
ladder back to the house of his neighbour, Patrick McCawley, in the quiet countryside of Cashelard, three miles north-east of Ballyshannon. His little niece followed at a distance, her black
wellington boots occasionally getting stuck in the mud along the isolated laneway between the Gallagher and McCawley houses. The walk was only about 450 yards but was over marshy ground. No cars
could travel along this laneway. Its main use was as a short-cut between the Gallaghers and their nearest neighbours.

Gerry Gallagher chatted with his niece as they walked, but the conversation was stilted, because he was carrying a heavy ladder and Mary couldn’t keep up with her uncle’s big
strides. About seventy yards from the end of the journey, Gerry, with the ladder over his shoulder, made his way through mud up to six inches deep. Mary, who was only 3 feet 11 inches tall,
hesitated. She pointed over her uncle’s shoulder and asked him if he was going up to that house in front of them. He said he was, and he saw her turn back in the direction of his own house,
from where they had begun their short walk. He turned to continue his journey. Mary Boyle would not be seen again.

Mary Boyle was three months short of her seventh birthday when she disappeared. She was a bubbly character, a chatterbox, always smiling for photographs. She was wearing her
favourite lilac-coloured hand-knitted cardigan, and her brown jeans were tucked into her black wellington boots when she disappeared. She was born on 14 June 1970 at the Sorrento Maternity Hospital
in Birmingham to Ann and Charlie Boyle, both natives of Co. Donegal. Shortly after Mary’s arrival her twin sister, Ann Theresa, was born. Twins run in both Ann’s and Charlie’s
families, but the arrival of beautiful twin girls bowled the proud parents over.

A quarter of a century later I met Ann and Charlie Boyle in their home in Burtonport on the west coast of Co. Donegal. This is the home they were in the process of building in 1977 when they
lost their little daughter. But in one way Mary is in the house: she smiles down on visitors from a large photograph above Charlie’s seat. It’s a photograph of the three Boyle children:
the twin sisters and their brother, Patrick, taken just before March 1977.

Though Ann and Charlie Boyle are both natives of Co. Donegal, they met and married in Birmingham. Ann grew up on a farm at Cashelard, near Ballyshannon, where Mary was to disappear years later.
Charlie Boyle was an island man, from Owey Island, one of the many small islands that dot the western coast of Co. Donegal. He left school at fourteen, and in the late 1950s, hearing tales of money
to be made on building sites in England, he left Owey Island and his beloved Co. Donegal to make his living as one of the large Irish community in Birmingham. One of his five brothers was already
in Birmingham, and within a short time Charlie was working as one of Birmingham’s youngest builders. At a dance in Birmingham he met Ann Gallagher from Cashelard, and in 1967 they were
married. Two years later Ann gave birth to their first child, Patrick, in Birmingham, and on 14 June 1970 Mary and Ann were born.

Looking back on their time in Birmingham, Ann and Charlie Boyle find it sad and ironic that a conscious choice they made about their family’s future was to lead inadvertently to a terrible
event in their home country. Charlie told me it was his choice that the family should return to Co. Donegal.

In 1972 they said goodbye to their friends in Birmingham and brought three-year-old Patrick and the two-year-old twins home to Co. Donegal. Five years later, Mary Boyle would
disappear.

On 17 March 1966, while Ann Gallagher was living in Birmingham, one of her older brothers, Patrick, aged thirty-two, was killed in a tractor accident at Cashelard, three miles
north-east of Ballyshannon. It was the third calamity to hit the Gallagher family. Another of Ann’s brothers had died when he was only three months old, and one of her sisters had also died
at a very young age.

After returning from Birmingham, the Boyle family first settled on Owey Island, from where Charlie had left for England two decades before. He began working as a fisherman, and the Boyles fitted
in perfectly in the closely knit island community. There were fifteen or twenty people on the island at this time, with the mainland towns of Anagaire, Cionn Caslach and Burtonport just a short
distance away. Owey Island gave the Boyle children a wonderful open playground of streams, fields, old walls, hidden nooks, and crannies, all within a short distance of their home. Ann Boyle told
me that while living on Owey Island, Mary was the most cautious of the three.