A frequent complaint about Netflix true-crime documentaries is that they take a straightforward chain of events and pad them out with extraneous detail. The opposite could be said of the first episode of Missing: Beyond the Vanishing Triangle (RTÉ One, Monday, 9.35pm), which reinvestigates the unsolved disappearance of the young American woman Annie McCarrick from Dublin in March 1993.
The story has been told before, most recently on television by the Irish-language series Scannal, in April 2022. But Missing has uncovered new details, including reports from McCarrick’s family back in the United States that she had been physically abused by an acquaintance she had made since moving to Ireland.
Also new is the testimony of Margaret Wogan, who reported seeing a woman matching McCarrick’s description at a cafe in Enniskerry, Co Wicklow, the day she went missing.
“At the end of her shift she was ready to go around four o’clock ... and the American woman came in with a man and they ordered some food,” Wogan’s daughter Una recalls. (Wogan died several years ago.) “Two things I do remember very clearly were that the man was shorter than Annie and that he had a square face ... That’s what stood out to her about him.”
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There is closure, of a sort, at the end too, as the Garda upgrades the case. “It makes a huge difference to hear that her case has been upgraded to a murder investigation,” says Annie’s mother, Nancy. “You never know, it might prompt someone to come forward after all these years.”
But in other ways the documentary falls short. The reference in the title to a “vanishing triangle” from which a number of women disappeared in the 1990s suggests that McCarrick’s disappearance will be re-evaluated against other cases, such as those of JoJo Dullard and Deirdre Jacob. But the triangle is never referred to again, neither by her family nor by the Garda.
[ The myth of Ireland’s ‘vanishing triangle’Opens in new window ]
Stranger yet is the decision to devote the final 15 minutes of the episode to two entirely separate crimes, the killings of Patricia McGauley and Mary Cummins by Michael Bambrick, who was convicted of manslaughter in 1998. These deaths were terrible events, and the gardaí who secured the conviction should be commended for their doggedness.
But was there a suggestion in the 1990s that the McGauley and Cummins deaths were part of the “vanishing triangle” disappearances? If so, this should have been explained clearly, with archive footage or interviews with journalists working on the stories at the time. If not, why shoehorn them into the final quarter of the episode? These two women deserved better than to be tacked on as an addendum to another tragedy.
The “vanishing triangle” has been a horrible reality for the families of all those missing women. What’s especially haunting is knowing that someone watching RTÉ on Monday evening probably knows what happened to McCarrick.
Thirty years after her disappearance, it is entirely proper that the broadcaster revisit the story. But to lump together unrelated cases seemingly for the sake of convenience feels like a contrivance too far. For once the Netflix maximalist approach to true crime might have yielded better results.
