Every year thousands of Irish people are reported missing and for those who are never found, their families are left with only questions. CIAN TRAYNORspeaks to some people who have searched – and continue to search – for missing persons
WHEN DAVID Linehan’s father went missing, he spent every day scouring derelict buildings, fields and bodies of water. Four-and-a-half months later came the moment he had been dreading.
In April 2001, a man picking periwinkles alongside Cork’s River Lee found a human foot, still in its shoe. Word reached Linehan, who made sure gardaí were notified before setting off in a borrowed rowboat to conduct his own search. It wasn’t long before he discovered his father’s remains washed up on the shore 15 metres from where the foot was found.
“The gardaí didn’t even look,” he says. “You can never really prepare yourself to find a parent or a loved one like that. You can’t. I was fairly traumatised by it.” Linehan’s father had not been seen entering the water, nor had he been seen at all after leaving his home on the night of January 3rd, 2001. The family, however, has come to terms with what happened despite an open verdict from the inquest.
“We were hoping against hope, but I immediately had it in my gut that he was deceased,” says Linehan, a 45-year-old painter from Cork. “Knowing my father, he had a lot of trouble in life; he suffered a lot of bereavement.”
As the one who took charge of the search, Linehan believes his family depended on him for answers. “It was a fairly heavy cross that I had to carry. I was hurting the same as everybody else but I couldn’t be burdening my family with that. The liaison officer appointed to us was a very compassionate gentleman but as far as State help went, that’s where it started and finished.”
The difficulty in simultaneously searching for a live person and a dead body had a profound effect on Linehan. While browsing the website missing.ws – set up by Fr Aquinas Duffy after his cousin Aengus Shanahan went missing in 2000 – Linehan stared into the faces of Ireland’s disappeared and wondered whether their families were going through the same thing.
“Once my father was found, I swore to myself I couldn’t in good conscience walk away from this because the family of the next person who goes missing will end up getting the same treatment.” Along with Duffy and Cormac Cremin, whose brother Pearse has been missing since 2000, Linehan successfully campaigned to establish a State-aided helpline in 2003 (funding was withdrawn by the Department of Justice two years later) and set up a network of support among the families of missing persons.
Linehan maintains his own 24-hour helpline through missing.ws so he can mobilise up to 20 other volunteers to search for missing persons in the South-West. Linehan gathers what information he can from the family, retraces the person’s last known movements and scours outward, rotating the workforce.
Though the searches have so far located 15 people, alive and dead, no two cases are the same, says Linehan. It could be suicide, murder, an accident, amnesia or someone deliberately disappearing. In one case, a man who vanished for seven years turned up without offering any explanation.
“It wouldn’t happen too often but we firmly believe a lot of those people [listed on the website] are out there and they’re aware that they have been reported missing. We have come across cases where people just didn’t want to be contacted. You have to satisfy yourself that the person is okay and they are who they say there are. If they don’t want to make contact with their family, that’s their right if they’re over the age of 18 and not vulnerable. But we think their families deserve to know they’re alive and we have an obligation to inform them. It’s a horrible experience to put anyone through.”
Linehan maintains that no one should ever give up hope of finding a missing family member alive, but acknowledges that the worst case scenario is when someone won’t be found and the ordeal is open-ended. “Closure is everything,” he says. “Everything.”
ANNIE DEVARIS HAS BEENseeking closure for more than five years. On July 2nd, 2005, she woke up early at her home in New Jersey and thought it odd that her brother Stephen had already left the house, as he wasn't working at the time.
Though the 32-year-old left a note for his parents to say he was heading down to the Jersey shore, something seemed amiss. He hadn’t taken his car and they couldn’t get through to his phone until five days later, when an Irish woman answered.
She had found a bag containing a phone washed up on Quilty beach in Co Clare, across the Atlantic. She had removed the Sim card and put it into her own mobile. When Annie looked at the map and saw it wasn’t far from the Cliffs of Moher, her heart sank.
Still, there was no passport or money in the bag, just Stephen’s glasses, a hat, a shirt, a camera and a journal – none of which yielded any clue.
With the help of authorities in both countries, the family were able to piece together what happened: Stephen had left in the middle of the night to take a one-way flight to Dublin, where he rented a car and left it near the Cliffs of Moher.
“The gardaí indicated that when a person takes their own life off the cliffs, typically their body turns up within a couple of hours or days. That no body was ever found is unusual and makes moving on difficult, but I feel like I know in my heart and mind that’s what happened.”
Given that his grandparents are Irish, Stephen felt a connection with Ireland and had visited several times. He’d even been to the cliffs before, taking a photo of his hand holding a postcard over the edge – an image that has come to hold a troubling significance at home.
“I just thought he was taking some time to himself; maybe he needed to clear his mind,” Annie says. “He had lost his job so he was definitely not in a good place, mentally. He had wanted to become an actor and had written some plays. I think he took a lot of rejection from that field and then tried to do something different, like an office job. So to lose your job having tried something new . . . ” She stops herself. “He was trying to find himself and find the right fit . . . but just couldn’t make a connection there.”
The case remains open, but once there has been no development for seven years, a death certificate can be sought – a move Annie feels will help bring closure.
“We kind of look at the ocean as his grave,” she says, recalling the time she visited Ireland in 2007 to trace the route she assumes Stephen took. “The day I went to the cliff it was so foggy and cloudy I couldn’t see anything. It almost felt better . . .” she trails off, her voice straining, “like maybe I wasn’t supposed to see it.”
TEN YEARS AFTERthe disappearance of Trevor Deely, his family still has no idea what happened to him. As one of Ireland's most high profile missing person cases, the key facts are ingrained in many people's memory. Trevor, then 22, spent the night of December 8th 2000 out at a Christmas staff party in Dublin.
After leaving Buck Whaley’s nightclub, he returned to his office at Bank of Ireland Asset Management, off Leeson Street, where he checked emails, had a cup of tea with a colleague and set reminders for work due the next day. It was a stormy night during a taxi strike, so he took a blue ACC golf umbrella as he left and was seen on CCTV walking down Haddington Road towards his flat in Ballsbridge at 4.14am. He rang his best friend, Glen, leaving a message saying he had a great night and would talk to him later. But Trevor has never been seen or heard from since.
There have been more than 320 lines of inquiry, four liaison officers for the case and annual appeals for information. In December, gardaí released an aged-enhanced image that has put Trevor’s face on lampposts across Dublin city once more.
“The biggest disappointment is that despite all the efforts of the family, friends and work colleagues, we’re still no further on than we were on December 8th, 2000,” says Trevor’s father Michael. “That’s the hardest thing to deal with: you’re working away every year and not moving it forward. But we will not give up.”
There have been plenty of false alarms, but no promising leads and the family refuses to speculate. Trevor’s brother Mark spent months in Ballsbridge investigating every possible route he could have taken.
Among the possibilities explored was a connection to Alaska, as Trevor had visited a friend there the previous month. Senior gardaí and Trevor’s sisters have both travelled there to retrace his steps, to talk to who he talked to, but it was a dead end.
Trevor’s phone was on until the following Monday but no one has ever recovered it or the umbrella. The canal, Michael says, has been checked and re-checked, drained from lock to lock.
“Anything is possible,” he says with a sigh. “But the gardaí have never found anything or been able to say definitely what happened. They’re like ourselves: they just don’t know.”
Michael Deely remembers how, early on during the campaign, a friend tried to reassure him by recounting the case of a young man returning after five years missing. “It totally threw me,” he says. “I couldn’t get it out of my head. ‘Are we going to be left like this? Having to continue our lives, seeing his nieces and nephews growing up, seeing all life going on through birthdays and anniversaries every year?’ Here we are 10 years on, and that’s even longer than that.”
Though Michael’s friend had meant well, it’s only now, down the line, that such stories offer a significant glimmer of hope. The Deely family has no reason to believe Trevor was met with any harm. They remain optimistic someone knows something – however small it may be – that they will eventually feel compelled to unburden. Until then, Michael says, they can only satisfy themselves that they’re doing everything they can to keep Trevor in people’s minds.
“You’re always hopeful that this is the year and this is the piece of work that will break the logjam,” he says. “You certainly need to cling on to the hope that this thing will be sorted. If you were without hope, you’d be lost altogether. I don’t know how you’d live.”
There are, of course, many missing person cases where just one added factor has made all the difference. When a 17-year-old named Finbarr went missing last April, the fact that he was a minor allowed authorities to accelerate the search when his bed was found empty one school morning.
The family car was gone, no one in the town had seen or heard from Finbarr and rumours quickly circulated. People began calling to the house to offer condolence.
“It was like a wake,” says his older sister Aoife. “When everyone’s running about in a panic, you can’t think.” Gardaí established he’d driven to Dublin Airport and booked a flight to Madrid using his father’s credit card.
“We felt so naive,” says Aoife. “We were thinking, ‘how would he know to book flights?’ He had never travelled alone before. We didn’t know if he was with people or if someone had lured him away.”
Credit card records also showed that Finbarr had booked a hotel in Madrid but from there, his movements were untraceable as he’d withdrawn large sums of money from several bank machines before leaving Ireland. Interpol staked out the hotel’s reception but he had already moved on.
Finbarr was under pressure. It was only in hindsight that his family could understand where he was coming from. His mother’s illness had demanded much of him and he wasn’t getting on with his father.
“Normal growing up stuff,” says Aoife. “But he was doing his Leaving Cert and he couldn’t cope with the whole lot. He just buckled under it; didn’t feel like he could turn to anybody.”
Distraught, Aoife called Missing in Ireland Support Services, a helpline set up by voluntary counsellors in 2009, reasoning that if contact could be made with Finbarr, she needed to know the right thing to say.
Crucially, Finbarr had taken his mobile phone with him, turning it on intermittently. With the help of Missing in Ireland, Aoife learned how to utilise those windows of opportunity, urging Finbarr to come home and, if necessary, leave again under better circumstances.
Five days after he disappeared, Finbarr got in touch. He had been through Valencia and was making his way south but was adamant he would not return.
“It took a good while, but he caved in from the pressure of family and friends texting and leaving voice messages. I think he believed, naively, that he could go away and no one would miss him. He didn’t realise what he put us through.”
Finbarr returned home after 10 days and has since undertaken counselling, as well as working a part-time job to pay off the money he owes. The family’s relief at having him back safe is only punctured by news of other missing person cases, which now hold an uneasy resonance.
“My heart goes out to the families of missing people because I know what they’re going through and how traumatic it is,” Aoife says. “Our ordeal was short lived. Thank God it was a happy ending.”
'It's a real burden on families'
Of the 45,576 people reported missing in Ireland between 2003 and 2009 (the latest dates for which figures are available), 367 cases are still open.
As helpline co-ordinator for Missing Persons Support Services, Eoin O'Shea has been in contact with approximately 90 relatives of people who have gone missing in the past year, establishing relationships that give him an insight into every aspect of the ordeal.
"The challenge facing the families of the missing is reaching a point where they can maintain, tolerate and manage their lives – even in the presence of this ambiguous loss.
"One thing we're told time and time again of the long-term missing is that even if their loved ones found out they had died – as terrible as that would be – it's preferable to not knowing."
There are many issues that inform the kind of support the helpline provides: not only the circumstances of the disappearance and the relationship with the missing person, but the emotional experience, the reactions the family receive from others and the practical implications of dedicating themselves to a search.
"It's a real burden on families. It can affect people's mental and physical health. We had been in contact with one mother who suffered a stroke directly in relation to the stress of her son going missing and the level of loss she was experiencing. That's not an isolated case. We hear of people's mental and physical health declining over time when a loved one goes missing." Any glimmer of hope, O'Shea says, must be kept alight.
"It's important to have hope as a method of coping. There is a very real possibility that the person will show up. It does happen."
Missing Persons Support Services can be contacted on 1890-442 552 or missingpersons.ie
