Missing (25 page)
Authors: Barry Cummins
The effect of Mary’s disappearance on her twin sister and her brother was immediate and deeply saddening. Ann, especially, became much quieter. Her twin sister had been
the more chatty one; often Mary would speak for Ann. Mary, Ann and Patrick had been on endless journeys and adventures in the fields and laneways around their homes on Owey Island and in Cionn
Caslach and Burtonport. Now one of the three members of the gang was gone. Despite her own anguish, their mother noticed the effect on her two remaining children.
Both of them were badly affected. It got to the stage that you couldn’t read Ann’s writing any more. She didn’t seem focused. She wouldn’t talk. Mary
wasn’t talked about for a long time. We just couldn’t. It was—it still is—heartbreaking. But we can talk now.
During the next few weeks the land around Cashelard and Ballyshannon was combed for clues. Hundreds of questionnaires were circulated in the Ballyshannon area. Five hundred
people helped gardaí climb Behy Mountain and surrounding mountainous terrain around the Gallagher home.
The Gardaí also investigated whether any strangers had been in the area of Cashelard that Friday afternoon. There were no reports of any outsiders driving or walking in the area. The
people who were attending the drama festival in Ballyshannon that weekend were also questioned, and their movements were traced, but nothing came of this either. While there had of course been
visitors to the general Ballyshannon area that afternoon, no-one was seen up in Cashelard near the Gallagher home.
To put it at its simplest, there are only two possible explanations for the disappearance of a little girl on a quiet afternoon in Co. Donegal. Either she was abducted or she
wandered into a part of the countryside where she accidentally met her death.
The landscape around Cashelard is dominated by marshy bogland. One of the first fears of gardaí and other searchers was that Mary might have become stuck in a marshy area and have fallen
into a ‘swallyhole’—a bog-hole that can become covered over with vegetation to give the illusion that it is firm ground. Such bog-holes can be up to twenty feet deep. However,
over the weeks and months after Mary’s disappearance gardaí searched every such bog-hole they could find around the Gallagher house. Nothing was found.
The missing child may have fallen into one of the rivers or lakes in the area; but each one was searched, and searched again. The Gardaí say they searched every inch of the surrounding
countryside. One detective, in explaining the extent of the search, recounted a distressing tale of how the body of a boy had been found in the north-west many years before.
We had been searching the bogland for Mary, and we searched the water. We covered every inch of this bloody mountain. And then a senior officer remembered how a body of a
young boy had been found in a tree. Yes, in a tree. This young fellow had disappeared maybe forty years before. It turned out he had been climbing a tree and had fallen into a hole in the tree.
The poor lad was identified by a medallion he wore. But it made us think: feck, we’re looking down all the time. What about looking up? Even though Mary was only seven years old, and
wouldn’t have been capable of climbing a tree in her wellies, we hadn’t been looking above our heads. We checked every tree. Nothing was found. But it just shows you. Sometimes you
need to take a step back and think: are there any areas we’re not covering? I think we searched every inch of the area around Cashelard. But it’s over twenty-five years later, and
still nothing. If Mary was close to her home, I really believe we should have, and would have, brought her home.
If Mary Boyle did not accidentally meet her death, somebody abducted her. This possibility has caused much discussion within the Gardaí, and a quarter of a century later
there are questions still to be fully answered about the movements of certain people that day. No-one has ever been arrested in connection with Mary Boyle’s disappearance, but certain people
have been questioned intensively. And there is one man—a convicted killer of three girls in Scotland and England—who the Gardaí would still like to question.
One detective who served in the region for ten years before Mary Boyle’s disappearance told me the Gardaí first investigated the movements of local men who would have been known as
potential suspects. All were ruled out.
There were at least six what you’d call perverts in the area, around the Donegal-Sligo area. These were fellows who’d be known to be unstable, and would have had
convictions or been accused of sexual attacks, mostly against women. None had ever gone as far as abduction, but we of course checked them out. We ruled them out early on. But I suppose these
were only the fellows we knew about. At the back of our minds was the case of that poor girl Bernadette Connolly in Sligo in 1970. They never got to charge anyone for that abduction and murder,
and we wondered if the same fellow was at work in Mary’s case. We still don’t know. But if Mary was taken against her will I think it’s like that saying: ‘Those who talk
don’t know, and those who know don’t talk.’
If a local suspect could not be found, the other possibility, and one that remains to this day, is that a person from outside the locality, possibly a foreigner, abducted Mary
Boyle. It is such speculation that has led to the name of one of Britain’s most evil killers being linked with that of Mary Boyle. After an extensive investigation the Gardaí believe
that on the day Mary Boyle disappeared a Scottish child-killer, Robert Black, then thirty years old, may have been travelling in Northern Ireland. An analysis of the employment records of the
poster delivery company he worked for shows that he travelled from England to make deliveries at some time in the early part of 1977. He travelled by ferry to Northern Ireland and drove around the
eastern part of the North delivering posters. Unfortunately the paper trail does not extend to showing whether or not he travelled as far west as the Co. Donegal border; but the fact that such a
violent man—who would later abduct and murder three girls in Scotland and England—was travelling in Ireland in 1977 is something that the Gardaí have always had in their
minds.
Robert Black, a native of a suburb of Edinburgh, is serving eleven life sentences in Britain for sexually assaulting and murdering three girls and kidnapping two others. By the time he had been
given his first life sentence—for kidnapping and sexually assaulting a six-year-old girl in Scotland in July 1990—he had already kidnapped and killed at least three girls. It would be
another four years before the full extent of these crimes would be revealed and his name would be linked with a number of unsolved cases of murdered and missing children, including that of Mary
Boyle.
On 20 May 1994 Robert Black stood in the dock at Newcastle Crown Court as a jury found him guilty of murdering three girls. They had been abducted and murdered over a five-year period in the
1980s and their bodies hidden within an area 26 miles wide dubbed the ‘Midlands Triangle’, encompassing parts of the English counties of Nottinghamshire, Staffordshire, and
Leicestershire. Black, a balding man with a thick beard, stood impassively as he was found guilty of the murder of eleven-year-old Susan Maxwell from Northumberland in 1982, five-year-old Caroline
Hogg from Edinburgh in 1983, and ten-year-old Sarah Harper from Leeds in 1986. He was also convicted of kidnapping fifteen-year-old Teresa Thornhill in Nottingham in 1988.
Black was convicted after the jury was told of his previous conviction for sexually assaulting the six-year-old girl in 1990 and of circumstantial evidence that put him and his van at the scene
of each of the abductions. He was given ten life sentences for the abduction, sexual assaults, and murders, to add to the life sentence he was already serving. As he was being led from the dock he
turned to the police who had solved the three murders and said, ‘Well done, boys.’
Robert Black was thirty-five when he killed eleven-year-old Susan Maxwell in 1982. The police in Newcastle, conscious that Susan might well not have been his first victim, began to make contact
with police forces in a number of other countries, including the Gardaí in Co. Donegal.
At the time of Mary Boyle’s disappearance Robert Black was thirty years old and was working as a long-distance delivery driver for a poster company. His work took him all over England,
Scotland, and Northern Ireland. It is now believed that on the day of Mary Boyle’s disappearance he was probably in Northern Ireland. There is no evidence that he was in the Republic on the
day Mary disappeared, but a petrol receipt discovered by British police in 1994 shows that he bought petrol somewhere in the North in March 1977. Unfortunately the receipt does not give the exact
date in March, but this fact, coupled with other information gathered by detectives, leads them to believe that Black was in Northern Ireland on 18 March. It would be another five years before he
would abduct, sexually assault and murder eleven-year-old Susan Maxwell; but police in England now believe that by 1977 Black may already have killed two other girls in England—one in Norfolk
in 1969 and another in Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire, in 1973. But in March 1977 nobody knew what Robert Black had done, or the terrible deeds he would later do. He was in a position to travel freely
around Britain and Ireland and as far as France, which he is also known to have visited during the 1970s and 80s.
There are people in Co. Donegal who claim to have met Robert Black in the years before and after Mary Boyle’s disappearance. He is reported to have travelled across the border to Anagaire
and Dunglow, close to where Mary’s family live today in Burtonport. Those who say they met him describe a strange but smiling and friendly man with a Scottish accent who drove a white van.
After the meticulous piecing together by police in Britain of the movements of Robert Black since the early 1970s—using petrol receipts, delivery logs, shop receipts, and eye-witness
accounts—it is the informed opinion of the Gardaí and police in the North that Robert Black was in Ireland in early 1977 and was most probably in the North the day Mary Boyle
disappeared four or five miles from the border.
In July 1994 the Gardaí were invited to meet police in Newcastle to discuss the possibility that Robert Black might have been involved in the disappearance of Mary Boyle or in the murder
of Bernadette Connolly in 1970. Inspector (later Superintendent) Michael Duffy and Detective-Sergeant Aidan Murray travelled from Ballyshannon to Newcastle to liaise with police from England and
Scotland. On further investigation it was thought that Black was not a likely suspect for the abduction and murder of Bernadette Connolly. However, he was certainly a likely suspect in relation to
Mary Boyle. A number of years later the Gardaí learnt of the reported sightings of Robert Black in the Dunglow area of Co. Donegal in 1976 and 78. Inspector Duffy decided that Black should
be questioned about the disappearance of Mary Boyle.
I retired from the force in 1998, but shortly before I did we received information from a number of people suggesting that Robert Black might have been around Anagaire and
Dunglow in the 1970s. We always knew that we could put him over the border at around the time Mary disappeared, but now we had reports that he had been in this jurisdiction. I decided that we
were in a position now to seek to question Robert Black about Mary’s disappearance. I wrote to Garda Headquarters requesting that we be allowed travel to Britain and interview Black. I
hadn’t received a reply before I retired. I don’t know where the request lies now. But I should say that, while I think Black should be interviewed about Mary, we never closed our
minds to every other possibility.
Neither English nor Irish law allows the questioning of a prisoner about a crime without their consent, unless they are formally arrested. Many in the English police, seeking to
solve other unsolved murders, believe that a ‘carrot and stick’ approach should be used in relation to Robert Black. As things stand, he will be eligible to apply for parole in 2029,
when he will be eighty-two years old. Having exhausted every other line of inquiry, many think that a trade-off with Black, however unpalatable—granting parole when he is no longer physically
capable of killing—might be the only way to find out whether he has any knowledge of other missing and murdered children.
Ann and Charlie Boyle are well aware of the name of Robert Black. They have heard the stories and read the newspaper articles, many of which have drawn conclusions, but without proof. For Ann
and Charlie Boyle, if Black, or someone of his sort, was responsible for their daughter’s disappearance, it is the not knowing that is the worst thing.
In 1978, a year after Mary Boyle disappeared, her grandfather Patrick Gallagher—Ann’s father—died. Ann told me that within a short time the home she had grown
up in became derelict.
Daddy died in 1978. He was so upset at Mary’s disappearance, and then we lost him. Mammy later came to live with us here in Burtonport. She was supposed to stay two
weeks, and she ended up staying nine years. She had Alzheimer’s when she died. My brother Gerry owned the house in Cashelard, but he closed it up in 1981. He and Eva and the kiddies moved
a short distance away.
When I met Ann and Charlie Boyle at their home in Burtonport there was a busy feel. They are now proud grandparents, and as we spoke about their lost daughter, their grandson
Ultan—Patrick’s son—played with jigsaws spread out on the sitting-room floor. Both Mary Boyle’s siblings are now married and have children.
In November 1994 a computer-modified photograph was issued by the Gardaí that showed what Mary Boyle might look like at that time, seventeen years after her disappearance, using a process
developed by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in Alexandria, Virginia. Mary would have been twenty-four at that time. Unlike other cases of missing people, however, the Boyle
family already knew exactly what Mary would look like, for the simple reason that Mary has an identical twin sister. The Boyle family have been able to see just what Mary would have looked like at
different times in her life: on her Communion day, as a teenager, going out with friends, getting married, having children.
