8 people vanish without a trace!
Ireland’s strangest modern mystery concerns the sudden and unexplained disappearance of 8 people.
The island nation was gripped with fear, curiosity and paranoia in the 1990s when women began to disappear. The case, unsolved to this day, intrigued the country and the wider world. Though it was never proven that the disappearances were related, the most widely accepted theory is that the same perpetrator was behind the eight kidnappings.
The missing woman
Annie McCarrick, disappeared 1993. A 26 year old American student living in Sandymount, she was last seen outside Johnny Fox’s Pub in Glencullen, County Dublin.
Eva Brennan, 40. She disappeared in 1993. After leaving her parents house to return to her apartment she was never seen again.
Imelda Keenan, 22. Originally from Mountmellick, Co. Laois, Imelda disappeared on 3 January 1994 with the last confirmed sighting of her being in Lomarard Street, Waterford.
Josephine (JoJo) Dollard, 21, disappeared 1995. Vanished in the Moone area while hitch-hiking home from Dublin to Kilkenny one night; a witness saw her using a payphone. She was never seen again.
Ciara Breen, 18, went missing in 1998 from the Dundalk area
Deirdre Jacob, 18, vanished without trace just yards from her parents home as she walked home in 1998. This particular case is often said to be the most puzzling as the girl was almost home, passing motorists witnessed the girl approaching within yards of her parents drive-way, but for some reason, she never made it to her house. No trace has ever been found.
Fiona Pender, 25, stepped out of her flat one evening in 1996 and was never seen again. Fiona was seven months pregnant when she disappeared.
Fiona Sinnott, 19. In 1998 she was last seen leaving a pub in Broadway, County Wexford.
The last disappearance to be included on the list was Ms. Pender in 1998. Since then, no case of disappearances has been of a nature so unexplained and random as to be added to this list.
The Irish police exhausted every available avenue in the hunt for each of these girls but all leads lead to dead ends. There was a renewed appeal for information in 2012 as another missing woman case was chillingly similar to the Vanishing Triangle cases.
However, this lead, again, proved futile to solving the mystery. Several theories have been put forward on the disappearances and several suspects were detained and questioned but, sadly, the victims’ families have been left wondering.
Serial killer?
It is widely suspected that at least some if not all of the disappearances were due to a possible serial killer, acting either alone or with an accomplice, in the Leinster area in the 1990s.
Irish police have often claimed that Larry Murphy (a native of Baltinglass, a village well within the triangle) is the main suspect in at least some of the cases.