Gardaí searching for the remains of Deirdre Jacob and Jo Jo Dullard, who were abducted and murdered in the 1990s, have returned to a site in Co Wicklow where excavations were carried out in an operation earlier this year.
The Garda team is acting on intelligence that murder suspect and convicted rapist Larry Murphy was involved in suspicious activity at the site around the time Jacob vanished in Co Kildare in July, 1998.
Returning to an area for a second excavation, especially just months after the first, is very unusual in Garda cold case murder investigations and reflects how seriously gardaí are treating the information the search is based on.
Murphy remains the prime suspect for the murder of Jacob, who was abducted close to her family home in Newbridge. Gardaí believe her abduction was spur of the moment and sexually motivated.
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Gardaí have been told Murphy may have allegedly buried something, possibly inside a vehicle, at the disused quarry site at Castleruddery Upper near the Wicklow-Kildare boundary.
Gardaí are now digging in the hope of finding the remains of either woman or other evidence. The families of Dullard and Jacob have been informed by gardaí about the new search.
An Garda Síochána said the area would be “searched and subject to excavation and forensic examinations over the coming days”. The Serious Crime Review Team, within the Garda National Bureau of Criminal Investigation, is leading the operation.
Jacob was 18 when she disappeared shortly after 3pm on July 28th, 1998, near her family home at Roseberry, Newbridge. A student teacher based in London, she was home for summer and was walking towards her home, having earlier been in Newbridge, when she vanished.
Dullard (21) was last seen on November 9th, 1995, while on her way home to Callan, Co Kilkenny, after socialising in Bruxelles bar, off Dublin’s Grafton Street. She called a friend from a phone box in Moone, Co Kildare, at 11.37pm, telling her a driver had stopped and she was going to take a lift. She was never seen again.
In November 2024, gardaí arrested a suspect – not Murphy – as part of the Dullard murder inquiry, though he was released without charge. Lands were also searched but nothing was found.
Murphy lived in Baltinglass, Co Wicklow, less than 10km from the site being searched, at the time the two women vanished. Now aged 60, he has been living abroad since his release from prison in 2010 after serving a sentence for rape.
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Though the search is being undertaken as part of the investigations into the killings of both women the site and Murphy are more closely linked to the Jacob investigation.
In February, when gardaí concluded a major excavation at the area they said the results of that operation would be analysed and the vast site further examined before the next phase of the investigations there.
That second phase of activity began last week when a new area was surveyed for the Garda by the Defence Forces, whose personnel carried out a technical ground survey.
On Monday afternoon, a yellow digger cautiously piled mounds of clay at the fringe of the disused quarry. Several other heavy machines carried the soil a short distance away as a small team of gardaí watched on.
Local woman Anna Brady described the scene as “unsettling”.
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She has been living on the road overlooking the quarry for nearly 40 years and said it was awful to think that two young women missing for so long could have been there for all these years.
“It’s an old quarry, that’s all, that’s all we know,” she said. “It was never a place where much dumping happened and it hasn’t been a quarry for a long time. It was a big hollow full of water.”
Brady said it was the third time a search had been carried out at the quarry as part of the investigation – the first took place more than a decade ago.
“They come and they go and then they come back again. It would be great if something was found for the sake of the families,” she said.
