When the man questioned about the murder of Annie McCarrick in 1993 was finally released without charge on Friday afternoon, he stepped into the Dublin sunshine to a waiting pack of photographers and TV crews, and quickly disappeared.
It is now just over 32 years since the killing of the New Yorker. The initial Garda investigation was poor. It looked in the wrong places. Against that backdrop, it is a crime that will be very hard to solve.
When suspects arrested on suspicion of serious crimes are released without charge, it is often confirmed in a media statement from Garda Headquarters. In most instances it references a file being prepared for the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP).
On Friday, there was no reference to any such file being sent for a decision around charging the McCarrick murder suspect with any offence. He has not been publicly identified. It simply adds to the sense that so much time has passed since Ms McCarrick vanished that whoever killed her will never be brought to justice.
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In 1998, amid growing concern at a number of cases involving women vanishing in the east of the country, the Garda set up Operation Trace, aimed at determining if any of the cases were linked and whether a serial killer was involved. It eventually concluded the cases were not connected. Far from a serial killer at work, or multiple strangers preying on all of the women, a much more familiar narrative has since emerged. It is now strongly suspected that most of the women were killed by a man known to them; the enduring, depressing, feature of femicide.
Ms McCarrick, who vanished on Friday, March 26th, 1993, from Sandymount, south Dublin, where she lived, was one of the women included in Operation Trace. Gardaí now suspect she was killed by a man known to her and who she had once been very close to.
The other cases included in Operation Trace were: Fiona Sinnott, Josephine Dullard, Deirdre Jacob, Ciara Breen and Fiona Pender.
Gardaí suspect Ms Sinnott, Ms Pender, Ms McCarrick and Ms Breen were all murdered by men known to them and their bodies disposed of to conceal the crimes in an era before the proliferation of the CCTV systems and mobile phones that now often unmask killers.
In the cases of Ms Dullard and Ms Jacob, it is believed they were abducted and killed in sexually motivated opportunistic attacks, which are highly unusual.
A file was sent to the DPP in 2021 in relation to the killing of Ms Jacob, who went missing close to her home in Newbridge, Co Kildare, in July, 1998. However, no charges were directed against the suspect, the convicted rapist Larry Murphy. The case was a reminder, if one were needed, that slow or botched police work when the women vanished is now very hard to overcome.
Because the bodies of the victims were not found, they were treated as missing persons cases and not given the urgency, or resources, of a murder inquiry. And that simply handed an advantage to the killers. Forensic and other physical evidence was lost, while witnesses were not interviewed when their recall was freshest.
However, renewed investigations have sought to solve the crimes decades later. In three of the six cases, arrests or searches have occurred since late last year, including this week’s moves in the McCarrick investigation.
Last month, two sites in Co Offaly and Co Laois were excavated by gardaí looking for the remains of Ms Pender. She was aged 26 years and was seven-months pregnant when she vanished from her home in Tullamore, Co Offaly, in 1996. Nothing was found in the recent searches and the suspected killer is a man who was close to her.
Last November a man was arrested, and later released without charge, in connection with the disappearance and murder of Kilkenny woman Josephine ‘Jo Jo’ Dullard (21). She vanished in Moone, Co Kildare, in 1995. Lands were also excavated last November in the Kildare-Wicklow area, though neither her remains nor any other evidence was found.
Garda sources said the investigations would continue. And in the case of Ms McCarrick, the ongoing search in Clondalkin this weekend keeps alive a hope that a breakthrough could be made. However, the combination of poor initial investigations, and now the passage of decades since these women were killed, has proven an, as yet, insurmountable challenge for today’s detectives.
