Missing (24 page)
Authors: Barry Cummins
There was a small river on Owey Island where Patrick and Ann would run across a small pathway to get to the other side of the river. The pathway was a couple of feet wide,
but Mary was so cautious that she lay on the pathway and crawled from one side to the other. She was very careful when out playing, but she never wanted to be left out either.
The family later moved a few miles to the mainland, first living in Burtonport, then Belcruit, near Cionn Caslach, while they began building a house in Burtonport. In March 1977
the future was bright, and Patrick, Mary and Ann Boyle were all in primary school and full of wonder and adventure. The three children naturally became excited when they were told they were going
to visit their Granny and Granddad Gallagher, Uncle Gerry and Auntie Eva and cousins Gregory and Gerard in Cashelard. They were to leave Cionn Caslach on 17 March and travel the forty miles down to
Cashelard to a memorial Mass for Patrick Gallagher junior, who had died eleven years before. They were to stay over and travel home the next day. Though the reason for the visit was a sad occasion,
it was also an opportunity to visit loved ones.
Early on St Patrick’s Day 1977 the five set off in the family car from Belcruit down the coast, through Dunglow, the Glenties, Donegal, on to Ballyshannon, and up to Cashelard.
Ballyshannon lies at the southern tip of Co. Donegal. The seaside resort of Bundoran is a couple of miles south-west; Finner Camp, along the coast just west of Ballyshannon, is
another prominent feature. Cashelard is three miles north-east of Ballyshannon, close to the border town of Belleek, Co. Fermanagh.
The Gallagher house in Cashelard is on a hill, with access by a narrow laneway. Today it is in ruins. The gateway, about eight hundred yards down to the right, is tied up. The house can be
reached only on foot, over a rusty gate and up an overgrown incline. The nearest neighbours are still the McCawleys. Their house is not visible from the Gallagher house but is up to the right, over
a wall and up the isolated laneway that holds the secret of what happened to Mary Boyle. Beyond the McCawleys’ house, also out of view, is a narrow roadway that can lead to the right and to
the border and Belleek or to the left and a turn back to Ballyshannon.
On the afternoon of 18 March 1977 Ann Boyle, her sister-in-law Eva Gallagher and her mother, Lizzie Gallagher, were in the kitchen. Charlie Boyle was chatting with his father-in-law, Patrick
Gallagher. Mary’s twin sister and her brother were playing outside with their cousins Gregory and Gerard to the left of the house, towards the forested area about thirty yards away. Gerry
Gallagher was working at the front of the house, doing odd jobs at a wall.
A quarter of a century after Mary Boyle’s disappearance her mother broke down when she told me of her memories of that terrible day.
We had travelled down to Cashelard on the seventeenth of March 1977 for the memorial Mass for my brother Patrick. We stayed over in the house in Cashelard where I grew up.
My mother and father were living there, and my brother Gerry, and his wife, Eva, and their two sons, Gregory and Gerard. In the early afternoon of Friday the eighteenth of March 1977 we had our
dinner in the house. I remember clearly we arranged it that the adults sat at one table and the kiddies sat at another table beside us. So we had our dinner; and the children went outside and
we were clearing up after dinner. The kids were playing out to the left of the house as you go outside the door. We could hear their voices. I remember my father saying something like ‘Is
those kids all right?’ I was sweeping the floor and I remember he said it again. I said, ‘I’ll check. I’ll look out.’ I looked out and could see Paddy and Ann and
Gregory and Gerard in a field. I asked them if they’d seen Mary, and one of them said, ‘We haven’t seen her since dinner time.’ Immediately I had this terrible
feeling.
What happened over the next couple of moments was a scene of utter panic. Ann Boyle knew immediately that something was wrong. Even before a search was under way, she knew
something was wrong.
Once the kids said they hadn’t seen Mary, I went back into the house in a terrible state. Charlie said to me that he was sure she would be found in a minute. But I
just had this feeling. I said to my mother that if she had a blessed candle in the house she should light it. I got some holy water and shook it out around the house as well. Then I thought of
the well close to the house. I ran out there to make sure Mary hadn’t fallen in there. There was no sign of her there. I started shouting, screaming her name. I remember telling my
brother Gerry and his wife, Eva, that Mary was nowhere to be seen. Gerry immediately ran off in the direction of our nearest neighbours, the McCawleys. I was in a total panic. I remember Daddy
saying to me, ‘Stop that shouting, Ann. The neighbours will hear you.’ But I just knew something was terribly wrong. I just had this feeling. The others thought that perhaps Mary
was around somewhere and would be back shortly. Then Gerry arrived back at the house from the McCawleys’ and said Mary had followed him when he was leaving the ladder back to the
McCawleys. Gerry had retraced those steps to the McCawleys’ house, but Mary was nowhere to be seen.
Gerry Gallagher is the last person known to have seen Mary Boyle. In the panic that engulfed him and the rest of the family after it became apparent that Mary was missing he had
run back immediately towards the McCawleys’ house. When he couldn’t find her he ran back to the house and told Ann and Charlie that Mary had followed him earlier that day when he was
bringing the ladder back to Patrick McCawley. It was a story he was to relive again and again.
After finishing his dinner, Gerry Gallagher had gone outside the house and picked up a ladder from the front yard to bring back to his neighbour, who had lent it to him
earlier. He set off over a wall and over a rough, hilly pass of marshy ground, along a broken track that acted as a short-cut to his neighbours’ house. Mary saw her uncle head off with the
ladder and decided to follow him. Her brother, sister and two cousins were playing nearby, but Mary wanted to go on a walk, following her uncle. The walk takes only a couple of minutes.
Mary and her uncle spoke to each other as they walked, but it was difficult to have a proper talk, because he was carrying a large ladder over rough terrain and was some distance ahead of his
niece. Eating her sweets, Mary followed him at a distance, her black wellington boots getting ever more muddy as she continued on her latest adventure. It was about 3:30 p.m.
About seventy yards from the McCawleys’ house Gerry Gallagher came upon a muddy patch in a laneway where the depth of mud would cover an adult’s wellingtons up to six inches. Mary
saw the muddy patch and hesitated. She could see the McCawleys’ house and asked her uncle if that was where he was going. It was at this point that he saw her turn back in the direction of
her grandparents’ home. He continued on the last leg of his journey with the ladder, and stayed about twenty minutes chatting with Patrick McCawley. It was now about 4 p.m.
Ann Gallagher had grown up in the same house, and so she knew the surrounding area, the nooks and crannies, like the back of her hand. Once she realised that one of her
daughters was missing, and despite her panic, she was able to think of the likely danger areas if Mary had wandered off.
I immediately thought of Lough Colm Cille, which is some distance from the back of the house. I ran down there in a total panic. I remember there were three men out on a
boat on the lake and I called out to them to see if they had seen a wee girl. They said they hadn’t, and that a man had just asked them the same thing. I saw Gerry: he had thought of the
same thing and had gone down to the water too. I asked the men if they could contact the Gardaí for us. We had no phone in the house. The men said they would call the Gardaí in
Ballyshannon.
The men Ann Boyle spoke to that afternoon did not hesitate in contacting the Gardaí. This was the era before mobile phones; the nearest phone was about half a mile away.
On of the men, ‘Happy Harry’ Coughlin, knew a lot of local people. He made his way to a phone and contacted the Gardaí in Ballyshannon. Garda records show the call being made at
about 6:30 p.m., some two-and-a-half hours after Mary was last seen by her uncle Gerry.
The three men in the boat on Lough Colm Cille that day were to become important witnesses in the Garda investigation. Harry Coughlin would later tell one detective that he and his two friends
had had their eyes peeled for gardaí while they were poaching on the lake and so would have spotted any vehicles or people, or indeed would have heard any sounds out of the ordinary. The
Gardaí knew that the three men watching and listening intently for any sudden or unexpected movements would have been the best witnesses to spot anything out of the ordinary. They heard
nothing.
Inspector P. J. Daly at Ballyshannon Garda Station immediately took charge of the investigation. When the alarm was raised there were still some hours of daylight left. Conscious that the Boyle
and Gallagher families had checked the main likely areas that Mary might have wandered off to, the gardaí took a decision immediately to call in an army helicopter from the nearby Finner
Camp to help in the search. With the helicopter hovering over the mountainside, dozens of gardaí and local people combed the countryside around the Gallagher house. A drama festival under
way in nearby Ballyshannon, and those involved, hearing that a little girl was lost or missing, came up to Cashelard to give a hand. As the hours went by, Ann and Charlie Boyle had terrible
thoughts of their daughter lying injured somewhere close by.
As dusk turned to night, the search had to be called off until morning. It was just too dangerous to walk on the marshy, hilly ground in the dark.
In Ballyshannon Garda Station a discussion took place between a number of gardaí. Piecing together the information from Gerry Gallagher and Patrick McCawley, they saw there was a slight
chance that instead of heading back towards her grandparents’ home, Mary might have walked on past the McCawleys’ house. This would have brought her to a quiet roadway that to the right
would lead to Lough Colm Cille and to the left to another quiet country road. But it is likely that if she had walked this way, either Gerry Gallagher or Patrick McCawley, or both, would have seen
her. Neither saw or heard anything during their conversation, which had lasted about twenty minutes. On the other hand, the 450 yards between the Gallagher and McCawley houses was searched by
dozens of people that evening. There was no sign of Mary—not even a wrapper from the sweets she was eating when she set off to follow her uncle.
On hearing the first details of Mary Boyle’s disappearance, and knowing the layout of the countryside, the Gardaí feared the worst. If she couldn’t be found after a few
hours’ search over what was a relatively small area, perhaps she wasn’t lying injured: perhaps she had been taken against her will. It was just a possibility, and twenty-five years
later it is still just a possibility, though a realistic one. It was against this background that at 6 a.m. on 19 March 1977 the search was extended for miles around Cashelard.
The landscape around Cashelard is dotted with lakes, rivers, streams, ponds, bog-holes, and drains. All were searched in March and April 1977, and indeed many have been
searched again since then. Nothing was ever found. As well as Garda divers, other divers came to lend a hand in the search. The Sligo Aqua Club, Ballyshannon Canoe Club and Bundoran Inshore Rescue
Team searched the lakes and rivers. As well as Lough Colm Cille there were nearby Lough Uinsinn, Lough Aghvog, Lough Nagolagh, Lough Meenasallagh and Lough Atierna. It was exhausting work, but the
divers were spurred on by the thoughts of a little girl lying alone somewhere, and her inconsolable parents hoping against hope.
Local alsatians were used as sniffer dogs in the search from the second day. It would have taken too long to get sniffer dogs up to Co. Donegal from the Garda Dog Unit in Dublin. The RUC across
the border in Co. Fermanagh were also contacted. The Gardaí say that every river and lake was searched in the immediate locality. Every search that could be done was done.
In the days immediately after Mary Boyle’s disappearance, Ann and Charlie Boyle were hoping that perhaps Mary might have wandered off the beaten track on her way back to
her grandparents’ house. Perhaps someone had picked her up wandering on the road and was just minding her. Ann Boyle told me she has many vivid memories of the following few weeks, but in
other ways the memories are all jumbled together.
We stayed in Cashelard, and the house was packed tight with people. Charlie would be out helping in the search, and another brother of mine, Michael, was heavily involved in
the search. I just felt so sad. Mary wouldn’t have known the area. Cashelard was my home. Mary wouldn’t have known where she was. Patrick and Ann were so upset. It was to affect Ann
for a long time afterwards—her twin sister gone …
It was such a sad time for us, but we had such support from people. People came from as far as Co. Mayo and Co. Down to help search for Mary.
Within days, as the search of the Cashelard countryside was yielding nothing, the Gardaí decided to take a somewhat unorthodox approach. Conscious that Mary and her twin
sister, Ann, were close, and with all other avenues yielding nothing, Detective-Garda Martin Collins and Detective-Garda Aidan Murray arranged a reconstruction, after informing the Boyle family.
Aidan Murray recounted the tale as if it was yesterday, the strain of the unsolved mystery evident in his voice.
The last known sighting of Mary Boyle was by her uncle Gerry, about seventy yards from the McCawley house, in a quiet, muddy laneway, which would be about 370 or 380 yards
from her own grandparents’ house. And these are the only two houses in the immediate area. What we decided to do was to bring Mary’s twin sister, Ann, on the same journey under the
pretext of doing an errand or something like that. We thought that because they were twin sisters, and because we knew they were very close, that perhaps Ann might do whatever Mary had done,
and might lead us to Mary. Maybe something would catch her eye and she would walk this way or that way. We had gardaí dotted around the laneway, so she was never in any danger. What we
did was, Martin Collins walked with Ann towards the McCawleys’ house, and at about the same location that Mary disappeared he said something like, ‘Oh, Ann, I’ve forgotten
such-and-such; could you run back to your Nana’s and get it for me?’ So Ann turned back to walk the same walk that Mary had walked—over marshy, bumpy land.
Now we were keeping a very close eye on Ann, but we were lying low, out of sight, trying to see if, being a twin, Ann might do the same as Mary had done, whatever that was. As she started to
walk back towards her grandparents’ house she couldn’t see the house. There are some hills and trees in this area, you see. At one stage she stopped and seemed to sway, not knowing
where the house was. Was it over this little hill or that one? But she got her bearings—and got back to the house. It was worth a shot, but nothing came of it.
