The headline news this week turned a key to another place and time, locked in a corner of my mind.
A lost time of phone boxes, hitchhikers, bank drafts, personal stereos, of missed last buses. A place where lads went out lamping for want of something to do, in the borderlands just beyond the Pale.
This past came rushing at me on hearing of the dig being carried out back at home in west Wicklow. The gardaí connected it to the investigation into two of Ireland’s most high-profile unsolved criminal cases, the disappearance of Deirdre Jacob and Josephine “Jo Jo” Dullard.
I was the same age as they were, living in the same place, when all this was happening in the 1990s. I recognised my local terrain instantly on the TV news. The search was at a disused quarry between Baltinglass and Blessington, in the damp, bleak, hilly open ground typical of where I grew up. Isolated and vast, it looks like nowhere else.
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A visiting friend once darkly remarked how he could kill me there and then and bury my body in the mountains and no one would ever find me. He didn’t mean it of course, but it is one of those places. He didn’t know yet about the so-called “Vanishing Triangle”; or of the grim roll call of young women who were my peers, disappearing without trace.
Student teacher Deirdre Jacob (18), from nearby Newbridge went out to the bank and the post office and never made it home in 1998.
In 1995, Jo Jo Dullard (21), from Kilkenny, spent a night out in Dublin and missed the last bus home. She got a bus to Naas and thumbed lifts as far as Moone, her Sanyo Walkman for company. Hitching was a common mode of transport then, even for girls. She called a friend from a phone box to say a lift had come, and then disappeared.
Annie McCarrick, Ciara Breen, Fiona Pender, Fiona Sinnott. All went missing in that decade, in cases that defined the triangular area and became part of us, shaping our life experience and view of the world, changing how we lived our lives.
But Deirdre and Jo Jo really brought it close to home. Their disappearances were the backdrop to our coming of age on the Wicklow-Kildare border.
The soundtrack to that time in my mind is Runaway Train by Soul Asylum. The song’s video showed missing women, their faces, ages and dates of disappearance flashing up, with the lyrics: “Seems like I should be getting somewhere ... Somehow I’m neither here nor there.”
Weird things happened there when I was growing up. I used to do my school homework in a local pub called The Cooperage, where the owner Frank McCann busied about the place as I worked. In 1992, the year I was doing the Junior Cert, McCann murdered his wife Esther and baby daughter Jessica, by burning them to death in a house fire.
I sometimes felt the area was a kind of twilight zone, a place with a strange lack of definition and a geographic no man’s land-ness.
As a young woman, there was an awareness you were in an at-risk group, under threat due to your demographic. Back then, there was little or no CCTV – and certainly no smartphones – tracking our every move. The disappearances of women seemed to happen more, because they could. We lived with the likely reality these missing girls were buried in the land around us. There was also the creeping fear that a murderer was at large.
The most chilling part was the fact that their bodies were never found. They were simply missing in this Irish Bermuda triangle. The agony of their families seemed worse for the lack of answers, which left them locked in a limbo of hope and fear.
We didn’t know then about Larry Murphy.
He was a local carpenter and kept under the radar throughout the 1990s. Murphy didn’t come into the frame until the year 2000 when he kidnapped, repeatedly raped and tried to strangle a Carlow businesswoman. The details were horrifying. He abducted her from a car park, punching her in the face, tying her up and forcing her into the boot of his car, stopping only to rape her repeatedly.
He would have murdered her too, but for two local men out hunting with rifles and powerful lamps, in a rural practice known as lamping. They saved Murphy’s terrified victim, and identified him as her attacker. He was sentenced to 15 years for rape and attempted murder.
After that, the women stopped disappearing.
Deirdre Jacob was the last to vanish in 1998 and Murphy remains the prime suspect in her murder.
He is not the chief suspect in the case of Jo Jo Dullard; another man was questioned in 2024 about her killing. While the excavation that took place this week is effectively a search for the remains of either woman, or other evidence, gardaí have not linked the murders of the two women.
The news was like opening a capsule into another time, one those of us who were there will never forget.
If there is a significant development in either case – and let’s hope so – it may eventually herald closure for their families in the first instance, but also for everyone who grew up in the long shadow of their disappearances.
Larissa Nolan is a freelance journalist
