Missing (28 page)
Authors: Barry Cummins
Philip was a sensible boy, and wasn’t foolhardy. He would never have willingly got into a car with someone he didn’t know. Therefore, he was either dragged into
a car in the space of a few seconds or he accepted a lift from a person he knew. We’re only guessing now, but it’s an educated guess. If he was dragged in by someone he didn’t
know, there would have been more of a chance of a struggle, or a scream, or Philip might have dropped his bag. Now, that might have happened and would certainly explain the bag being found
dumped close by a week later; but it’s almost unbelievable that a child could be basically kidnapped on a busy street and no-one to see anything. If I had to guess, I’d say someone
he knew stopped and offered him a lift, someone he trusted. If this is true, perhaps it was someone living in the Rathfarnham area, or who worked in the Rathfarnham area.
Some weeks after the disappearance of Philip Cairns a man contacted the Gardaí in Rathfarnham. What he told them was at first to intrigue them but ultimately to frustrate
them. He told them he had been driving along Ballyroan Road from Ballyboden Road between 1:20 and 1:30 p.m. on Thursday 23 October 1986—the time Philip is believed to have been abducted.
Close to Ballyboden Road he noticed a red car, which he described as being badly parked and obstructing traffic. He said he had seen a boy wearing a grey school jumper and carrying a bag
approaching the front passenger door of the parked car. The witness had been angered by the way the car was parked and told the gardaí he had written down the registration number of the car.
However, he no longer had the number. He had gone on to the airport, and while he was away his wife had cleaned out his car, and the number was lost. It was only after he learnt of the
disappearance of Philip Cairns that he remembered about the badly parked car.
Detectives gritted their teeth, and thanked the man for his help. They knew it wasn’t his fault: it wasn’t as if he had seen anything that he thought was really suspicious. It was
just frustrating that the man had the foresight to write down the registration number of the car, and then should lose it. He was able to describe the driver of the car as possibly about fifty
years old, with grey hair sticking up. The red car might have been a Renault or a Mazda.
In October 1989, three years after Philip Cairns’s disappearance, the Gardaí in Rathfarnham believed they might be about to unlock the mystery. The optimism developed after
detectives received four anonymous phone calls from a man who said he knew ‘who had killed Philip Cairns.’ The mystery caller, who has never been found, had phoned the confidential
number with particular information, which at first convinced the Gardaí that he was genuine. Over the course of four phone calls he told them that Philip had been driven away from Ballyroan
Road that day by a man whose identity was known to the caller. For weeks the Gardaí spoke to the anonymous caller, each time getting more information from the man, who seemed worried and
nervous. Then the calls stopped. By 23 October 1989 the man had still not been in contact, and Superintendent Bill McMunn of Rathfarnham went on television to reveal that the anonymous calls had
been made, and to appeal to the caller to get in contact again.
Looking back on that time, Bill McMunn, now retired, told me he now believes the calls may have been a cruel hoax.
This man told us he knew who was responsible for abducting Philip, and he called four times. Yet he wouldn’t give us the crucial information we wanted. And then the
calls stopped. The mystery caller may have met with an accident, or couldn’t call us again for some reason; or, as many of us subsequently believed, it might all have been a hoax.
It’s not right that someone would do that, if that’s what happened. We were trying to find a young boy: it’s a serious business; but we have to check out all leads, we have to
check out everything.
I was in the force for forty-three years, and despite all the successes, the unsolved cases do affect you. Gardaí don’t like to be beaten.
The abduction of Philip Cairns is only one of a number of distressing crimes to have been committed in the Rathfarnham area in recent decades. During the 1980s a now convicted
paedophile, Derry O’Rourke, lived in the area and appeared to be an upstanding member of the community, happily married and raising his five children. He was a prominent national swimming
coach, but beneath it all, over a period of thirty-two years, he was sexually abusing girls he was teaching to swim. From July 1970 until December 1992 he abused at least thirteen girls in changing
rooms and other places. In 1997 he was caught and jailed for twelve years for his litany of hidden abuse.
Another violent man from Rathfarnham who appeared to be a committed family man is now serving a life sentence for murdering his wife and a baby girl in 1992. Frank McCann—who, like Derry
O’Rourke, was a prominent member of the swimming community—was convicted in 1996 of deliberately starting a fire at his home in Butterfield Avenue, Rathfarnham, in September 1992. His
wife, Esther, and an eighteen-month-old baby girl whom the McCanns were rearing died in the blaze. Local people who witnessed the fire were traumatised by being powerless to do anything to save the
victims from the raging fire that engulfed the house. McCann had used a fire accelerant to start the fire, which he lit while standing in the front doorway and throwing in a match as his wife and
the baby girl slept upstairs.
Another violent man from Rathfarnham is a single man who is now serving a life sentence for raping one of his nephews at a place in the west of Ireland in 1993. This man also admitted sexually
assaulting three other boys at his home in Rathfarnham and at hotels around the country on dates between 1989 and 2000. He was also convicted of taking pornographic images of children in the
bedroom of his home. This violent man was thirty years old when, in 1989, the first of the known sexual assaults occurred. He did not come to the attention of the Gardaí until eleven years
later, in June 2000, when one of his victims found the courage to contact the Gardaí.
On 12 November 1994 the Gardaí issued a computer-modified photograph showing what Philip Cairns might look like at the age of twenty-one. The process used photographs of
Philip’s parents and siblings at a similar age, and tried to interpret Philip’s appearance eight years after his disappearance. The technique is similar to the one used as part of a
fresh appeal for information on Ireland’s only other long-term missing child case that is not a parental abduction, that of seven-year-old Mary Boyle. Despite the ‘aged’
photographs of Mary Boyle and Philip Cairns, neither appeal ever led to a definite sighting.
Because Mary Boyle has an identical twin sister, her family has been able to see exactly what Mary would look like as an adult. In contrast, the ‘aged’ photograph of Philip Cairns
was the first opportunity Alice and Philip Senior had to see what their eldest son would have looked like as a man.
The part of Co. Dublin where Philip Cairns disappeared is a densely populated suburban area, with Templeogue and Rathfarnham to the north and Firhouse, Knocklyon and Ballyboden
to the south. Assuming that Philip stayed on the same side of the road as he walked south from his house towards Coláiste Éanna, he would have been walking on the footpath with
oncoming traffic to his immediate left. If an oncoming car stopped on the near side of the road and then travelled on in the same direction, it would have brought Philip back past his house and to
a junction that links roads to Tallaght, Templeogue, and Rathfarnham. Another possibility is that he was abducted by a person in a car that stopped at one of the side roads to Philip’s right
as he walked; this car might then have driven either north towards Templeogue or south towards Ballyboden. Philip may also have crossed the road, so that he would have had the busy road to his
right as he walked; however, this would have been unusual, as he would have had to cross back later to get to the school. If he was on this side of the road and was driven away by a car that came
up behind him, the car would have travelled towards the junction with Ballyboden Road, where a turn left leads to Rathfarnham and the turn to the right leads to the Dublin Mountains at Killakee and
Tibradden.
Detectives have had to consider many possibilities that can leave even the most focused of minds confused. These possibilities assume that the motorist did not make a U-turn, something that
might have stuck in the minds of other motorists. There are no reports of any such U-turns being made. There is also the possibility that whoever abducted Philip did not travel very far but drove
towards one of the nearby estates, avoiding the main roads. There is not one report of a boy being seen in a distressed state in a car in south Co. Dublin that day.
It is possible that whoever left Philip Cairns’s bag in the laneway a week after his disappearance holds the key to catching the abductor. That person might be able to
pinpoint the site of the abduction and so narrow the search, even now.
There is also the possibility that the person who left the bag is the person who abducted Philip. This hypothesis is credible when we consider that Philip’s normal practice was to put the
bag over his head and wear it across his chest. The bag had not been cut or damaged in any way, so that if he was wearing it over his head it would have taken a number of seconds for the abductor
to take it off and throw it on the roadside, an action that would have been unusual for someone trying to cover their tracks.
A more credible possibility is that if Philip knew his abductor, the bag was removed later at an unknown place. The abductor may then have thrown the bag some distance from the scene of the
abduction, where it was found by some schoolchildren; or he may have kept the bag and then left it in the laneway himself a week later. If it was left by the abductor, detectives believe this was
only to try to throw them off the scent. It is not thought likely that a person who had committed such a violent and callous act would have risked capture close to the scene of the crime, unless it
was to throw some type of smokescreen over the investigation.
When all the available evidence is weighed up, the most likely explanation remains that the bag was left by an innocent person, whose conscience probably still troubles them.
The search for Philip Cairns has extended to a number of continents. While the feeling of many detectives is that the answer to Philip’s disappearance lies somewhere in
south Co. Dublin, every conceivable lead has been followed up. One hypothesis that received some attention was that Philip was abducted by a religious cult. This possibility was privately examined
by the Gardaí—indeed premises owned by certain religious groups were searched—but this line of inquiry was ruled out in the early weeks of the investigation. The idea had been
fuelled by the fact that two of Philip’s religion books were missing from his schoolbag when it was found; but it ignores the fact that a geography book was also missing, and that all these
books had been in Philip’s bag only because he had those particular classes that afternoon. The Gardaí also point out that the kind of religious groups that might be capable of such an
action are quite rare in Ireland, and such people might well have stood out in south Co. Dublin. Whoever abducted Philip Cairns is more likely to be someone who was able to blend into the community
and not arouse suspicion.
Another idea put forward was that some other unknown person might have abducted Philip and taken him abroad. In the years since the disappearance of Philip Cairns there have been reported
sightings as far away as America and Argentina. All reported sightings are investigated, but none have ever stood up as genuine.
Detectives have also been frustrated by a number of people using Philip Cairns’s name when they are stopped by the police in different countries. Either through malice or idiocy, a number
of young Irish men arrested for various offences in England and Scotland have been known to give their name as Philip Cairns. The Gardaí have been immediately alerted, and an inspector and a
detective-sergeant have been despatched to investigate the reported sightings, only to return empty-handed, having established the true identity of the culprits.
Alice and Philip Cairns have suffered a number of false hopes and hoaxes since their son disappeared. Some mistakes have been genuine and without malice; but a number of people
have acted in a callous manner towards a family whose grief has been laid bare for everyone to see. This is a family who know what most probably happened to their thirteen-year-old son and brother
but who naturally still hold out hope that something positive may some day develop. A person close to the family told me of the added traumas that the family has had to suffer down the years.
I’ll never forget the night that the schoolbag was found in the laneway. One garda in his excitement actually came into the house and said, ‘Philip is around;
we’ve found his bag; we’ll have him back home in the next half hour.’ Can you imagine hearing that and waiting that night, and waiting, and nothing: Philip doesn’t come
home, Philip doesn’t ever come home; can you imagine?
And while that’s an example of a false hope that happened through over-enthusiasm or stupidity, there have also been really sick people who’ve targeted the Cairns family. One man
once phoned them up pretending to be a garda at a station in north Dublin, saying that he’d found Philip and that he was bringing him home. Again the family waited, and of course nothing
happened. That man phoned from what sounded like a busy Garda station, so he was in some type of office when he made this hoax call. What type of sick person does something like that?
A female garda stayed with the family for weeks after Philip went missing. Some of the phone calls were very upsetting. But you have to answer the phone: the next call could be the one.
A number of newspaper articles have suggested that Philip Cairns was the victim of more than one attacker, and that he might have been murdered because he was about to expose a
paedophile ring. These distressing articles quote an unnamed source who has never confided this information to the Gardaí. Such articles have caused untold pain to Philip’s family, who
are adamant that Philip had nothing troubling him in the weeks before he disappeared. The articles have also angered the gardaí involved in the case.
