Ireland’s Dublin Death-Dealer
In October 1998, the Irish Garda set up a six-man squad to track down a suspected serial killer responsible for the deaths of six young women aged between 17 and 26 who disappeared in the historic Leinster region of Ireland to the south of Dublin. Known as Operation Trace, it had come up with no leads by 2001 and was slimmed down to a staff of two.
Information about the six missing women and other cases the team had looked at were put into the Canadian Violent Crime Linkage System and every detail was fed into a serial killer profile system set up in the British National Crime Faculty in Bramshill College, Lancashire, England. The geographic profiling developed by the Canadian Detective Inspector Kim Rossmo was also employed there. But in October 2006 a detective took the files to the FBI academy at Quantico to be analyzed by the bureau’s computer program ViCLAS—Violent Crime Linkage Analysis System. The FBI’s profilers would also run them though their specialist computer systems.
The bureau was also provided with information on suspects on suspects, such as Robert Howard from County Laois, who raped and killed at least one young woman in London, but had been cleared for the murder of 15 -year-old schoolgirl Arlene Arkinson, who went missing after attending a disco at Bundorn in County Donegal with friends in August 1994. She was last seen in a car driven by Howard. She has never been seen again, but the defence argued that the prosecution had to show that she was dead and painted her as a troubled teenager who talked of running away. After more than 21 hours of deliberation over six days, the jury acquitted Howard. The court was never told of his previous conviction in England and there have been allegations that his activities were covered up by the security forces.
The Garda say that Operation Trace established that no single suspect could have been responsible for all six disappearances, but that in three cases the possibility of a serial killer exists and they are still appealing for any information from the public.
“They’re still out there,” said a spokesman. “There are still people who know and who are covering for the perpetrators.”
But definite leads have been rare. In September 2005, the Garda arrested the chief suspect in the disappearance of Fiona Sinnott, along with another man and three women. The arrests were made after fresh information about the possible location of her body came to light. None of those held was charged but the Garda excavated a field near Killinick in County Wexford. Nothing was found.
Fiona Sinnott was from Bridegtown, County Wexford, and has been missing presumed dead since 9 February 1998. She was last seen leaving the Butler’s pub in Broadway near Rosslare at closing time with her former boyfriend and the father of her baby daughter, Sean Carroll. Their daughter, Emma, was 11 months old at the time.
Carroll has told the Garda that he spent the night at Sinnott’s cottage in Ballycushlane, County Wexford, and that she was there next morning when he left.
In July 2005 two sites in the Mulrankin area, near her family home in Bridgetown, were excavated by the Garda after a clairvoyant contacted the Sinnott family. Again nothing was found.
“The one thing that marks the killer out is his ability to get rid of the body—which usually leaves us with no forensics, DNA or MO,” says Brian McCarthy, a veteran private eye who has been on the trail for nearly ten years, on and off.
McCarthy was hired by the family of missing 26-year-old Irish-American student Annie McCarrick, who was studying literature in Dublin. He suspects that the man who was responsible for the disappearance of McCarrick, who went missing after visiting Johnny Fox’s pub in Glencullen in the Dublin Hills on 3 March 1993, was also involved the cases of at least two other missing women—Deirdre Jacob and Jo Jo Dullard. All three were of a similar age and were last seen on their own, and they all went missing in an area less than 30 miles in diameter covering counties Kildare, Wicklow and Dublin. But that it as far as the evidence takes him.
Eighteen-year-old Deirdre Jacob was last seen on 28 July 1998, walking to home to Roseberry, Newbridge in County Kildare. She was a trainee schoolteacher and described as a very balanced person—not the type of person who would disappear voluntarily.
Beautician Jo Jo Dullard, aged 21, vanished on 9 November 1995 after making a call from a public phone box in Moone, County Kildare. She had phoned a friend to say she intended to hitch-hike from there to her home in Callan, County Kilkenny after missing the last bus. She hung up, saying a lift had arrived. Around that time a woman answering Jo Jo’s description was seen leaning in the back door of a dark-coloured Toyota Carinatype car. The car and its driver have never been traced.
“There is linkage there, but no physical evidence—not even a piece of clothing,” says McCarthy.
The serial killer theory was scoffed at when the Garda originally began investigating the disappearance of McCarrick back in March 1993. However, her father John McCarrick was a retired policeman. When he went to a Garda station to report his daughter missing he was shocked. The officer who dealt with him did not have a notepad, so he wrote the details on the back of his hand.
Far from content with this approach, McCarrick pulled strings back in the US. Eventually, the American ambassador Jean Kennedy Smith and Vice-President Al Gore lobbied the Irish government on behalf of the McCarrick family, prompting one of the largest missing persons investigations in Irish history. Meanwhile the McCarricks offered a $150,000 reward for information.
Five years after Annie McCarrick disappeared, Operation Trace was set up at Naas Garda Station. Soon they identified seven other missing people who fitted a similar disturbing pattern. They were young women, all from Leinster, of a similar age, leading busy, seemingly happy lives until they vanished without trace. They were not victims of suicide, accidents or organized crime. But the most troubling feature of all was that, as they were assumed to be dead, no trace of their bodies had ever been found.
“The facts speak for themselves,” says retired detective inspector Gerry O’Carroll. “For decades we had virtually no missing women; now we have up to ten in a relatively small area around the east coast, with various common threads. I believe these women were victims of one or two serial killers working together.”
O’Carroll has looked at the missing women’s cases as part of his investigation of the 1999 slaying of 17- year-old Dun Laoghaire schoolgirl Raonaid Murray. He became convinced that the suspected murders of Annie McCarrick, Deirdre Jacob, Jo Jo Dullard and Fiona Sinnot were linked to those of 26-year-old part-time model Fiona Pender and 17-year-old Ciara Breen.
Fiona Pender, from Tullamore, County Offaly, was seven-and-a-half months pregnant when she disappeared on the evening of 23 August 1996. She was last seen leaving the flat she shared with her boyfriend in Church Street in the town. She had spent the previous day, shopping for baby clothes and was in good spirits, while Ciara Breen disappeared from her home in Batchelors Walk, Dundalk, in the early hours of 13 February 1997, taking no possessions with her.
Like Brian McCarthy, Gerry O’Carroll was intrigued with the fact that no bodies had been found. It then dawned on the detectives that there may have been earlier cases where the perpetrator was not so adept at concealing the evidence. Looking back through the files it appeared that the killer’s first victim may have been 23- year-old Phyllis Murphy, who was found raped, strangled and partially hidden in bushes in the Wicklow Mountains in 1980.
The body of 23-year-old Patricia Furlong was dumped in the Dublin Mountains only a few miles from Glencullen in July 1982. She had been raped and strangled. The late DJ Vinnie Connell was convicted of her murder ten years later, but the verdict was overturned by the Court of Criminal Appeal.
Five years after Patricia Furlong died, 27-year-old mother-of-two Antoinette Smith from Clondalkin on the outskirts of Dublin vanished after attending a David Bowie concert at Slane Castle in Meath. She had returned to Dublin and went to the Harp Bar on O’Connell Bridge before moving onto a discotheque in Parnell Street. Nine months later ramblers discovered her remains in a shallow grave at Glassamucky Breakers, Kilakee in the Dublin Mountains. She, too, had been raped and strangled. Her head was reported to have been covered by a plastic bag.
Three years later, on the same stretch of mountain bog where Antoinette Smith’s body was found, a man unearthed a woman’s hand in the turf bank he was clearing. It belonged to 30-year-old mother-of-two Patricia
