WITHOUT
TRACE

IRELAND’S MISSING

BARRY CUMMINS

Gill & Macmillan

For every missing person

For further information visit www.barrycummins.com

You may reach me in confidence at

missing@barrycummins.com

For further information about missing persons cases please visit

	www.missing.ie
	www.missingpersons.ie
	www.searchingforthemissing.net
	www.garda.ie

You may contact the Missing Persons Helpline at 1890 442 552

The Searching For The Missing Group can be contacted on 085 2092119

The Missing Persons Association can be contacted on 087 9609885

If you have any information about any of the cases featured in this book, or indeed any other missing persons cases, please call the Garda Confidential Line—1800 666 111

Contents

Cover

Title page

Dedication

For further information

Chapter 1: Predator

Chapter 2: IRA Disappeared

Chapter 3: Hidden Bodies

Chapter 4: Two Boys

Chapter 5: Unidentified Bodies

Chapter 6: For the Record—Priscilla Clarke

Chapter 7: Missing in Kerry

Chapter 8: Trevor

Chapter 9: Mystery in Mayo

Chapter 10: Limerick’s Missing Men

Chapter 11: Missing from Darndale

Chapter 12: Failure to Find Bodies

Chapter 13: Stranger than Fiction

Acknowledgments

Copyright

About the Author

About Gill & Macmillan

It is not known what Larry Murphy planned to do with the body of his victim, had he managed to murder her on the night of Friday 11 February 2000. He had a white plastic bag over his victim’s face as she fought to get out of the boot of his car when two hunters happened upon the scene at an isolated spot in west Co. Wicklow. Just as the hunters approached, the woman showed super-human strength in forcing her way out of the boot, getting her feet on to the ground. Larry Murphy immediately fled the scene in his 1997 Kildare registered Fiat Punto. The two hunters, Ken Jones and Trevor Moody, recognised Murphy as he sped past them. They approached the woman who had now collapsed semi-conscious. In the darkness she had crawled into barbed wire in an effort to escape. The two men who had just saved the woman’s life brought her to Baltinglass Garda station, where the extent of what the woman had suffered in the previous hours soon became apparent. A Garda removed a headband which was tied around the woman’s wrists, and the officer also removed a bra which was tied around the woman’s neck. Both items had been used by Murphy that night to tie the woman’s hands and to gag her. The woman was taken by the Gardaí to the sexual assault unit at a hospital in Dublin, and some hours later she made a detailed statement to detectives. Officers were impressed at her amazing resilience, her battle for life and her determination to see her attacker brought to justice. The 27-year-old woman, who had survived Murphy’s murder attempt, suffered extreme brutality that night. She was abducted in one county, bound and gagged and forced into the boot of Murphy’s car and then driven to locations in two other counties where she was repeatedly raped by the 35-year-old married father of two.

Just hours after the attack, Larry Murphy was arrested at his home which was just a few kilometres from where he had tried to suffocate his victim. A team of Gardaí called to his two-storey detached home on the quiet Boley Road outside Baltinglass shortly after 8 am. By now the officers knew that Murphy was their prime suspect. He had been identified by the hunters who had stumbled upon the scene of rape and attempted murder in the nearby woods, and the Fiat Punto used in the attack was parked in the spacious driveway outside his house. Murphy opened the door to the Gardaí and turned back into the house as they followed, as if he already knew why they were there. The Gardaí knew that Murphy had a legally held firearm in the house, and they immediately asked where it was to ensure it was secure. Murphy’s wife came into the room where he was standing with the detectives, asking what was going on. Murphy turned to his wife of six years and said ‘I raped a girl last night.’ Detective Sergeant Jim Ryan from Carlow station arrested Murphy in the house and cautioned him. Murphy replied, ‘I don’t know why it happened. I am terribly sorry.’

Larry Murphy would later plead guilty at the Central Criminal Court to four charges of rape, one charge of false imprisonment and one of attempted murder. He also admitted stealing cash from the handbag of his victim. He was given six sentences of 15 years’ imprisonment for false imprisonment, rape and attempted murder. When you added in the sentences imposed for robbery and assault causing harm, Murphy was given prison terms which when added together amounted to 97 years. However, the judge directed that all the sentences were to run concurrently, with the last year of each sentence being suspended, so Murphy was effectively given what amounted to a 14 year sentence. On the day he pleaded guilty, Larry Murphy fainted as he stood before Mr Justice Paul Carney in a packed courtroom.

Murphy immediately settled into life at Arbour Hill Prison where he was of exemplary behaviour during his ten and a half years in prison. Although on paper he was supposed to serve a sentence of 14 years in jail, Murphy, like most other prisoners, benefited from the ludicrous situation where a quarter of a prisoner’s sentence is taken away if they are of good behaviour behind bars. So for the crimes of abducting a woman by punching her in the face, putting her in the boot of his car, subjecting her to multiple rapes, and attempting to suffocate her to death, ‘model prisoner’ Larry Murphy served ten years and six months in jail before being released in August 2010. He refused to take part in a sex offenders’ treatment programme while in jail and refused to speak with any prison officer or fellow prisoner about the reason for his imprisonment. The woman who had survived Murphy’s attack that February night in 2000 had been fully prepared to give evidence if the case had gone to trial. Because Murphy pleaded guilty to the attack, the full details of what he did on one night in three counties never came out in court.

It was shortly after 8.15 pm on Friday 11 February 2000 when Larry Murphy approached his victim. The businesswoman had minutes earlier locked up her premises in Carlow and had walked to her car which was parked in a car park around the corner. As she approached her car she unlocked it with a central locking key fob. She noticed a man standing about 20 feet away. All of a sudden the man came around the back of the woman’s car demanding that she give him her money. Almost immediately he punched the woman in the face and forced her into her car. He pushed her over to the passenger seat and he sat into the driver’s seat and forced her head down on to the handbrake with his left elbow. He picked up the woman’s keys from the ground beside the car and started the engine. He drove a short distance to a more secluded section of the car park where he forced her to remove her bra and he tied her hands tightly with it. He again demanded money and he took £700 from the woman’s handbag. The money was in Bank of Ireland bank bags which the woman had meant to lodge earlier that day. He took off the woman’s boots and he took a GAA headband that he had found in her car and tied it around her mouth to gag her. He took the woman out of her car and pushed her towards the car he had parked next to. It was a dirty grey-green Fiat Punto. He forced the woman into the boot of the car, sat into the driver’s seat and drove off with the radio turned up loud. The abduction had taken a matter of seconds. Murphy and his victim were now gone from Carlow and nobody had seen a thing.

The woman who survived Murphy’s attacks that night showed incredible presence of mind during her ordeal. Only someone who has been through such an attack can understand what was going through her mind, but amid the terror she must have felt in the boot of the car, she was doing her best to take in her surroundings, to remember as much detail as she could. There was a smell of oil or metal in the boot, and she felt a small football. The woman was later able to tell the detectives she could sense the car was being driven out of Carlow on the road to Athy. There were two severe bumps in the road which the woman later pointed out to the Gardaí. She felt those bumps on the night she was abducted. She told detectives that after travelling for about ten minutes on the road for Athy, she sensed that the car turned right and that this road had more twists and turns. The car travelled along this road for maybe 12 or 13 minutes. She recalled how the car then slowed down and it turned on to a very bumpy road. After a minute or two on this road, the car stopped.

Murphy dragged his victim out of the boot and forced her into the car by the driver’s door. He had parked at an isolated dirt track at Beaconstown near Kilkea in Co. Kildare. The location was close to where he had first met his wife at a disco many years before. The woman looked around for any lights in the distance, but there were none. Before he took his victim out of the boot, Murphy had reclined the driver’s seat fully so that it was resting close to a baby seat in the back of the car. He forced the woman into the car, pulled down her lower clothing and raped her a number of times. When he had finished this attack he allowed her to move over to the passenger side of the car. The woman’s hands by this time had turned blue because they had been tied so tightly with her bra. Murphy began speaking to her, telling her he was married. He loosened the knot on her wrists, then took her back out of the car and put her into the boot once again. The woman pleaded not to be put in the boot, but Murphy said he had to. He told her he was going to bring her back to Carlow, but instead he drove towards the Wicklow Mountains.

The woman later told the Gardaí that the car was then driven a further distance for around 20 minutes. As she lay in the boot she could sense they were on roads with lots of turns, and that they were passing through crossroads. They seemed to be on a main road for a while before turning again on to a country road. Murphy would later tell the Gardaí that after raping the woman in Beaconstown he had forced her back into the boot of his car and had driven to a forested area at Kilranelagh in Co. Wicklow. Murphy worked as a self-employed carpenter and knew the backroads of Counties Carlow, Kildare and Wicklow like the back of his hand. He knew how to get from one location to the next on country roads with no street lighting, where there was little chance of any other traffic being on the road. He told the Gardaí how he had driven from Beaconstown past Kilkea Castle towards Boltonhill. By going this way he avoided the nearby village of Castledermot. He then drove towards Tinoranhill crossroads, crossing the county border into Wicklow. He quickly crossed over the N81 Baltinglass to Blessington road and drove along a narrow country road to Tuckmill and then turned right to Spinans Hill and Kilranelagh. He drove down a dirt track and turned the car around so that it was facing the way it had come. Once he finished attacking the woman here Murphy would be ready to drive off quickly. He pulled in to the side of the track and opened the boot once again.

The woman could hear the sound of water near by, and when she was forcibly taken once again from the boot, she could see a light in the distance with a yellow hue. The water was a fast flowing brook, and the light was from a large house way off in the distance. When the car had stopped in this location, the woman sensed it was on a slope and when she heard the water near by she thought Murphy was going to drive into a river or lake. He forced the woman back into the driver’s seat and raped her. He then forced her over to the passenger seat and raped her again. Each incidence of rape was becoming more aggressive. Murphy told the woman that his life wasn’t worth living. He said he would never see his wife and children again. He said his two boys were aged 2 and 4 and he told her their names. Murphy told the woman a mixture of truth and lies. He told her he was from Baltinglass, that his name was Michael and that he worked in Dublin. The woman feared more and more for her life as every second passed. She managed to pull up her trousers, and she could sense that Murphy was getting panicky. He took the headband which he had previously used as a gag and tied her wrists behind her back. However, he was fumbling a lot and he didn’t tie it properly. He tied the bra around her mouth then took her back out of the car and put her into the boot once again. He closed the boot and came back a few seconds later and opened it again. He told her to face inwards, and it was then that she noticed the brown can of furniture polish beside her.

The woman tried not to let Murphy see that her hands were now loose. As Murphy pushed her to turn her around and face into the boot, she tried to spray the contents of the can at Murphy’s face, but no spray came out. Murphy was now very agitated. He closed the boot again and there was silence. He opened the boot again and this time he was holding a white plastic bag. The woman noticed it had red writing on it. Murphy put the bag over the woman’s head and tried to suffocate her. The woman began using her hands to try and remove the bag. Murphy then tied the woman’s hands very tightly behind her back with the headband. He again tried to suffocate her with the bag. He took the bag in his hand and put it over her mouth. She began to feel lightheaded and couldn’t breathe. She somehow managed to get her right leg out of the boot, and kept struggling. Suddenly she had her two legs out and her feet were on the ground. Murphy still had the bag over the woman’s face. The next thing she knew he was gone. Seconds later, as she stumbled into nearby barbed wire, the two hunters who had happened upon the horrific scene were by her side assuring her that she was now safe.

After fleeing the forest Larry Murphy decided not to go home immediately, but instead drove to the village of Stratford. He had grown up as part of a large family just outside the village and knew the area well. He called into the snug of the Stratford Arms pub and bought a bottle of Powers whiskey and a bottle of red lemonade. He gave the barman a £20 note and got £3 change. The Gardaí would later wonder if Murphy had deliberately gone to the pub in an effort to establish an alibi. Or perhaps he went there to try and work things out in his mind. He had told the woman a lot of personal information about himself, and he had been disturbed before he had managed to murder her. The two hunters who happened upon the scene had also got a good look at his face and his car. Perhaps Murphy quickly realised that the game was now up. He had brought his victim too close to his home, too close to where he was known. He drove the short distance home from Stratford to the Boley Road, just north of Woodfield. He found his victim’s underwear in his car and he put them in her bag which he had placed in the boot. When he got home he washed his hands and face and drank a quarter of the whiskey. It was the first drink he’d had all day. He got into bed beside his wife, but he didn’t sleep very well.

The following day after he was arrested and taken to Baltinglass Garda station, Murphy made a statement to Inspector Pat Mangan and Detective Garda Mark Carroll. Carroll was the Garda who the previous year had arrested father-of-five John Crerar for the murder of 23-year-old Phyllis Murphy, who had been abducted and killed in December 1979. Crerar had abducted Phyllis as she waited for a bus in Droichead Nua and had later hidden her body in the Wicklow Gap, over 30 km away. Crerar had evaded justice for 20 years before he was caught due to advances in forensic science which showed a definite DNA match between his blood and the semen found on Phyllis’s body. Inspector Brendan McArdle of the Garda Technical Bureau had organised for a review of the forensic evidence in the case, and this had led to the breakthrough using a new method for extracting a DNA profile from very minute samples. Along with dozens of other men, Crerar had given a blood sample in early 1980, and these samples had been kept safe for two decades by Gardaí Finbar McPaul and Christy Sheridan. It was only when McArdle brought the samples to a laboratory in England that advances in DNA technology allowed for a full DNA profile to be extracted from the samples, and Crerar was finally caught. The proven crimes committed by Crerar and Murphy were very similar in nature. Both had used their own vehicles to abduct and rape a woman; and both had used considerable violence to overpower their victims. The criminals themselves were also very alike. To the outside world both men had appeared happily married, and both had children. Neither man had any criminal convictions. One of the few differences was that it took 20 years for Crerar to be brought to justice and be put away for life. It took just a matter of hours for Murphy to be caught for the crime he later admitted, and he would only serve just over a decade in prison.

The statement Larry Murphy made to Mangan and Carroll is the most he has ever admitted about his crimes. In the statement he seeks to rationalise some of his actions. He claims he had just driven into Carlow that night ‘to get a bag of chips’. He said he was planning to visit people at Bennekerry near Carlow town, but he had not had any dinner and so decided to go for chips in Carlow. He said he had parked in a car park and was walking down the path when he saw his victim walking towards him. “I had never met the girl in my life. I don’t know what came over me. I just flipped,” he said. “I said to her give me your money. I hit her then.” Murphy’s language in his statement to the Gardaí is very telling. He says that after forcing his victim into her own car she was sitting beside him with her head on his knee. What he doesn’t say is that he had punched her in the face, fracturing her nose, and then forced her into the car and violently held her head down on the handbrake with his elbow. He says he ‘asked’ her to remove her bra, rather than telling how he had terrorised the woman who was already fearing for her life. He does admit in the statement that he raped the woman, but he makes no reference to the extreme violence he used. The statement to the Gardaí is again revealing of Murphy’s warped mind. While acknowledging that he had raped the woman, he later on claims he ‘had made love’ to the woman and they ‘had sex’. Later that Saturday when he was questioned by Detective Sergeants Dominic Hayes and Gerard McGrath of the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation, Murphy denied that he had tried to murder the woman with a plastic bag. He again used the phrase ‘making love’ to describe his actions, while also acknowledging that he had raped the woman.

Because Larry Murphy subsequently refused to take part in a sex offenders’ treatment programme while in prison, his comments in the hours after his arrest are important. Although he later pleaded guilty to charges of attempted murder and multiple rape, his initial denial of the murder attempt and his belief that raping a person could be considered as ‘making love’ are very troubling.

For ten years and six months Larry Murphy kept his head down in prison. Released from Arbour Hill in August 2010, he is subject to the terms of the Sex Offenders Act. He must notify the Gardaí of where he is living within seven days of changing his address. He must give his name and date of birth, which is 7 February 1965. He is one of over 1,100 convicted sex offenders who have been released from prison and who live among us. There are 300 other sex offenders still serving sentences and who will be released in the future. Murphy was 35 years old when he was taken into custody, and 45 when he walked out of Arbour Hill. During his time in prison he was a model prisoner, working in the carpentry shop in Arbour Hill. During the day he would wear a green army type jumper which he bought through mail order. He seemed to regard this as his uniform for work. In the evening time he changed into other clothes. He kept his appearance as it was before he was caught for rape and attempted murder. He remained clean shaven and kept his hair relatively short. Unlike other prisoners, he did not put on any weight and kept himself fit. In the last few years of his sentence he was in a single cell on the ground floor of the North Block (N1) of the prison. Unlike other prisoners, Murphy did not have any ‘girlie’ calendars or posters in his cell. He had a TV and a DVD player and had access to domestic television channels and some British ones. He also had a chest of drawers and a table in his cell which he made himself in the carpentry shop. His carpentry work was much sought after and he made several items for some of the prison officers.

Nothing seemed to bother or faze Murphy during his time in prison. At one stage the prison authorities decided to move him to Cork Prison following a minor infringement of prison rules. When he was informed of the move he didn’t question it and had his bags packed and left at the reception the day before the move was due. When he was brought back from Cork to Arbour Hill, he was put in a cell with another prisoner in the North Block—on the N2 wing. The other prisoner, from Dublin, was serving a relatively short sentence, but he and Murphy seemed to hit it off. When another double cell became available downstairs on N1, Murphy and his cell mate moved to share a new cell on the wing where Murphy had served much of his sentence. Of the 160 or so prisoners at Arbour Hill Prison, around 30 are on N1, with around 40 upstairs on N2, and the other 90 or so in other wings of the prison. When his cell mate finished his sentence, Murphy asked that his new friend be allowed to ring him in prison. Murphy moved back into a single cell on N1 where one of his near neighbours was John McDonagh, who was jailed for life for the rape and murder of 17-year-old Siobhán Hynes whose body was found at an isolated beach in west Co. Galway in 1998.

Every morning Murphy left his cell at 8 am to get his breakfast. After spending a day in the carpentry shop he went to the recreation area, walking the yard and playing football with other prisoners. He would chat with prisoners and prison officers about sport and other trivial matters but never engaged in conversation about the reason for his incarceration. Before returning to his cell each night he brought a jug of milk with him to make a cup of tea while reading or watching television. Lights go out in the prison at 11 pm, but each cell has a reading light which Murphy could control to continue reading if he wished. His cell on N1 had a window with natural light. The window was made up of nine small panes of glass with a lip at the top to pull down and let air in.

Among the other prisoners at Arbour Hill is David Lawler, also from Baltinglass in Co. Wicklow. Lawler is serving a life sentence for the murder of 41-year-old Marilyn Rynn whom he attacked as she walked home in Blanchardstown in west Dublin in December 1995. Marilyn was just a few minutes’ walk from her home after attending a Christmas party when she was randomly attacked and strangled to death by Lawler. Her body lay undiscovered for 16 days in Tolka Valley Park, but Lawler’s DNA was still at the scene. Many of the prisoners at Arbour Hill are murderers serving life sentences. The longest serving prisoners in Arbour Hill are English serial killers John Shaw and Geoffrey Evans who have been in custody since 1976. By the time the two men were caught and convicted, they had abducted and murdered 23-year-old Elizabeth Plunkett in Co. Wicklow and 23-year-old Mary Duffy in Castlebar. Shaw and Evans used a rowing boat to bring Elizabeth Plunkett’s body out off the Wicklow coast where they threw her overboard after tying a lawnmower to her body. They also weighed down Mary Duffy’s body when they put her in Lough Inagh in Co. Galway. The bodies of both women were later recovered. If Shaw and Evans are ever released from custody, the British police will seek to question them about their whereabouts in the years before they came to Ireland. Evans has suffered from ill-health in recent years, and in December 2008 he fell into a long-term coma at a Dublin hospital.

From the minute Larry Murphy went into prison he had a release date on his file. The prison authorities quickly did the mathematics when the sentence was imposed by Mr Justice Carney in May 2001. Murphy had been in custody since the day of his arrest on 12 February 2000. If he was of good behaviour, Murphy and the prison officials knew he would only serve three-quarters of the 14 year sentence imposed on him. Murphy would have been just a day or two in his new surroundings at Arbour Hill when he would have known that all he would have to serve in prison was ten and a half years, or 126 months, just over 4,500 days. He kept his head down and did his time quietly, and as August 2010 approached he began making preparations for his release. He applied for a renewal of his driver’s licence and he also applied for a new passport.

During his time in prison Murphy declined invitations to speak with the Gardaí as part of their enquiries into the disappearances of a number of women in Leinster. Gardaí investigating cases such as the disappearance of 26-year-old Annie McCarrick in the Dublin-Wicklow Mountains in March 1993, and of 21-year-old Jo Jo Dullard in Moone, Co. Kildare, in November 1995, would very much like to get into the mind of an admitted abductor, rapist and would-be killer such as Larry Murphy. Based on the crimes that Murphy admitted, it would be of great assistance to the detectives to know more about Murphy’s motivations, his thought processes, his pre-planning or lack of it.

Murphy had either put a good deal of planning into his abduction of the woman in Carlow that February night or it was, as he said just hours after his arrest, simply a spur of the moment attack. If his car had been stopped by the Gardaí that night before he had attacked his victim, there would have been nothing suspicious, nothing to alert the Gardaí to the danger this man posed. All the Gardaí would have seen was a baby seat in the car, a football and a can of polish in the boot, and perhaps a white plastic bag. Who would have known that this ‘happily married’ man was about to use the plastic bag to try and suffocate his victim. He didn’t have ropes or duct tape or anything else suspicious with him in the car and he improvised very quickly by using the woman’s own clothing to tie her up and gag her. How long had he thought of doing that? How long had he fantasised about doing that? Had he practised it?

Murphy refused to assist the Gardaí with their enquiries into cases of missing women in Leinster. Perhaps with his knowledge he might have given detectives an insight into such crimes from the mind of the abductor. What is particularly galling is that even though he refused to speak with the detectives, Murphy still gets a quarter off his prison sentence for good behaviour.

Another issue is the fact that Larry Murphy used his car to imprison his victim and transport her dozens of kilometres to two locations where he then raped the woman repeatedly. Surely there should be some sentence which could be introduced to ban people like Murphy from ever owning or driving a vehicle again. When you consider that he also tried to murder the woman as she lay trapped in the boot, it is clear that he used his vehicle for the beginning of his attack, for the duration of his attack, and for what he intended would be the end of the woman’s life. Yet he is still entitled to a new driver’s licence and to drive another vehicle.

Larry Murphy is just one of dozens of very dangerous individuals who have either been released from prison in recent years, or who will be released shortly. In April 2009 double-killer Michael Bambrick was released from Arbour Hill Prison after serving three-quarters of his sentence for two counts of manslaughter. Bambrick had confessed to killing his wife Patricia McGauley in a bedroom of their home in September 1991. He also admitted killing Mary Cummins, whom he had brought back to his house in west Dublin in July 1992. On both occasions Bambrick had dismembered the bodies of his victims and hidden them on waste ground. He was given a 17 year prison sentence, but was released after serving just 12 years and nine months because, like Murphy and countless other violent people, Bambrick got a quarter off his sentence because of ‘good behaviour’. Other violent people who will be released in years to come include Simon McGinley and Barry McGee. On paper McGinley is serving a 21 year sentence for raping an 86-year-old woman in the north of the country, but in effect he will only serve 15 years and nine months if he is of good behaviour. McGinley was previously jailed for raping a 13-year-old girl in 1997. Barry McGee was jailed for 15 years in 2003 for raping two Australian women whom he held captive at knifepoint in their flat in south Dublin. The court heard that McGee subjected the women to every possible humiliation, degradation and indignity. He may well be released sometime around 2014 if he is of good behaviour. By then he will only be in his thirties.

Barry McGee and Simon McGinley will be subject to the Sex Offenders Act when they are released from prison. Larry Murphy has been subject to the same Act since his release in August 2010. The Act provides some comfort that there is some degree of monitoring of very violent people who live among us. However, many Gardaí believe the Act should be strengthened. “If a sex offender who is normally clean-shaven grows a beard, there should be a legal obligation on that person to come to us so that we can take a fresh photograph. Likewise, if a bearded rapist shaves his face, he should also provide us with a new photograph,” says one detective. “We should have stronger laws allowing for access to the property of convicted rapists, especially if they live on farms or other locations with a long access road to their house. We should have more resources to be able to call to the door of sex offenders at any stage, day or night. They should not be allowed to drive a car, and they should not be allowed to live anywhere near the scene of their previous crimes. And of course they should be tagged. There should be a device around their ankle so that we know where they are at all times.”

The crimes of false imprisonment, multiple rape and attempted murder committed by Larry Murphy have been logged by the Gardaí on a special computer programme named ViCLAS. The Violent Crimes Linkage Analysis System logs all details of violent crimes and looks for links between solved crimes and unsolved ones. Murphy’s admitted violations are among more than 4,000 violent crimes which have been logged by the Gardaí at the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation. The computer system began operating in Ireland in 2005 but also includes details of violent crimes going back a number of decades. One feature logged in relation to Murphy’s crimes is the initial ‘blitz’ attack which saw him punch his victim in the face, tie her up and force her into the boot of his car in a matter of seconds. The savage violence of the multiple rapes he subsequently carried out are also examined, as is the fact that he later began talking about his family before he tried to murder his victim.

The Gardaí have carried out extensive searches at the scene of Murphy’s attack at Kilranelagh forest, and also at his nearby home as part of their efforts to learn more about this man. They have examined the ground around the detached garage to the side of the house as well as the land around the house, but nothing has been found. Detectives have wondered if the plastic bag Murphy used to try and suffocate his victim was a weapon that he just happened to find in his car, or had he planned to use it to commit murder.

The only unsolved murder in recent years where a plastic bag was tied around the head of a victim was the murder of Antoinette Smith, whose body was found buried in the Dublin Mountains in April 1988. Antoinette had disappeared from Dublin city the previous July after attending the David Bowie concert at Slane. Two plastic bags were still tied around Antoinette’s head when her body was found by chance by a man out walking on bogland at Glendoo mountain near Glencree. Garda investigations later led detectives to discover that a woman matching Antoinette’s description had taken a lift in a taxi with two men from Westmoreland Street in Dublin city to Rathfarnham in the early hours of Sunday 12 July 1987. These two men have never been located. One was described as being soft spoken, having a Dublin accent and an easygoing temperament. He had dark hair and was tall—the taxi driver could remember the man’s knees sticking into the back of his seat. The other man had dark collar-length hair parted in the centre and brushed back over his ears. He seemed to act ‘the hard man’ and did most of the talking. The two men and the woman matching Antoinette’s description all sat in the back of the taxi and got out at Rathfarnham village. If the woman in the taxi was not Antoinette, she has never come forward to rule herself out of enquiries.

In the period from 1987 to 1998 at least ten young women disappeared in Leinster in suspicious circumstances. The bodies of three of those women were subsequently found by chance. Those of Antoinette Smith and Patricia Doherty were found buried in the Dublin Mountains. Patricia disappeared in Tallaght in December 1991, and her body was found the following June by a man stacking turf. The third body to be found was that of mother-of-one Marie Kilmartin, who disappeared in Portlaoise in December 1993 and whose body was found in a bog drain on the Laois/Offaly border in June 1994. All three murders remain unsolved. The disappearance of seven other women also remain unsolved. Annie McCarrick and Eva Brennan disappeared in Dublin in 1993; Jo Jo Dullard disappeared in Co. Kildare in 1995; Fiona Pender vanished in Tullamore in 1996; Ciara Breen vanished from Dundalk in 1997; mother-of-one Fiona Sinnott disappeared in Wexford in 1998; and an 18-year-old woman disappeared from Droichead Nua on a summer’s day in July 1998. Fiona Pender, Ciara Breen and Fiona Sinnott are all believed to have been murdered by people they knew. All seven cases remain unsolved.

In the years after Larry Murphy abducted the woman in Carlow, there were no similar type disappearances. The person or persons responsible for the murders of women like Antoinette Smith, Patricia Doherty, Annie McCarrick and Jo Jo Dullard had stopped their activities. Had the killer or killers died? Were they in prison? Had they moved abroad? What had happened?

Larry Murphy’s wife and children moved out of Baltinglass and severed contact with him in the wake of his conviction for multiple rape and attempted murder. Murphy is quite entitled to live back in Baltinglass if he so desires, or in his native village of Stratford, or in Castledermot in Co. Kildare where he lived for a number of years. Equally, he is entitled to live in any other part of the country as long as he informs the Gardaí of his address within seven days of moving in. It is likely he will continue to seek work as a carpenter. He is a perfectionist in his work and can turn out everything from a rocking chair to a doll’s house. Before he was exposed as a rapist Murphy was very well regarded as a craftsman and did work in many homes in Kildare and Wicklow. One family later told the Gardaí that they had trusted Murphy so much that they had thought nothing of allowing him access to an attic by entering the bedroom of their sleeping daughter.

The woman who survived the attack by Larry Murphy later married her long-term boyfriend. He had supported her when she went to the Central Criminal Court to see her attacker jailed. This woman showed fantastic courage and presence of mind on the night she was attacked. She also displayed incredible physical strength in fighting her attacker as he tried to suffocate her, and she subsequently displayed incredible emotional strength in her determination to see Murphy brought to justice. In the more than a decade since she survived the attack, the woman has quite understandably chosen not to speak with journalists, including this author, and she has shown great determination in moving on with her life.

Many members of the public are rightly concerned that a man who admitted trying to suffocate a woman to death is now back living among us. In the months before his release, an online petition generated thousands of contributions from people pleading that Larry Murphy not be released from jail. However, the die was cast many years ago when the 14 year sentence was imposed, and the Director of Public Prosecutions chose not to appeal the sentence on the grounds of undue leniency. The sentencing judge had been legally bound to consider that Murphy had pleaded guilty at an early stage and had no previous convictions. Nevertheless, considering the totality of what he subjected his victim to after abducting her, it is possible that the Court of Criminal Appeal might well have increased the sentence if it had been asked to do so. Another issue which has still not been dealt with by successive governments is the lack of a mandatory sentence for attempted murder. There is a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment if you commit murder, but the sentence for attempted murder is at the discretion of the sentencing judge. Whatever way you look at it, considering the crimes of false imprisonment, multiple rape and attempted murder which Murphy admitted, the sentence he eventually served did not reflect the gravity of what he did on the night he says he merely went into Carlow for chips.

It was the discovery of a leather cowboy boot that first alerted searchers to the body of Danny McIlhone. It was 8 November 2008, and 18 months since members of the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains (ICLVR) had begun a fresh search for the Belfast man who had been killed and secretly buried by the IRA in 1981. Danny was one of nine people the organisation had acknowledged abducting, killing and secretly burying in the 1970s and early 80s.

Danny was one of the last to disappear. He vanished from his home at Pearse Tower, Ballymun in north Dublin, in May 1981. His brother Christopher had reported him missing to the local Gardaí, but for almost two decades there was no news of Danny’s whereabouts. Then in May 1999 the IRA formally acknowledged it had killed Danny. Passing on information through intermediaries, the IRA pointed out a section of land near Lackan in Co. Wicklow where they said Danny was buried. Because the IRA had left the body of another missing man in a newly purchased coffin in Co. Louth that same May, there was widespread expectation that recovering the other bodies would be a relatively simple exercise. Nothing could have been further from the truth. In the remote area of Ballynultagh near Lackan, the Gardaí sifted through tons of soil in the summer of 1999, but the terrain was vast and eventually, with no sign of Danny, they had to call off the search. It would be more than nine years later, following more detailed information from the IRA, that a fresh and extended search would recover the remains of the 21-year old.

The successful search for Danny McIlhone actually began in 2007. Two former English detectives, Geoff Knupfer and Jon Hill, were now the lead investigators for the ICLVR. Both had prior experience of searching for bodies which had been secretly buried. A person or persons from the IRA who knew what had happened to Danny was already communicating directly with the commission. New information had been coming since 2005. It had taken that long for trust to be built up. When searches had first begun in 1999, information was being passed to the commission through Catholic priests. Now, IRA members, or others who had information, realised they could speak directly with members of the commission and that it was in complete confidence. There was no comeback. Information was provided to the commission that after being abducted in Ballymun, Danny had been taken to a building in west Co. Wicklow where he was questioned by the IRA. Danny had tried to escape and had been shot a number of times. His body had then been buried on open moorland close to Ballydonnell brook at Ballynultagh, east of Lackan.

The fresh search for Danny was methodical and time consuming. Layer after layer of soil was carefully lifted from the ground by mechanical diggers and minutely examined by archaeologists working with the commission. A study of the terrain had shown that the course of Ballydonnell brook had been altered slightly in the years since Danny had been buried. Hurricane Charlie in 1986 and other storms had caused some displacement of vegetation. The commission had identified 22 acres of moorland to be searched. The area was surveyed, photographed, mapped and measured. Grids measuring 20 m by 20 m were superimposed on the map and each grid was given a reference number. On 8 November 2008 Danny’s body was found in grid 82. It was very close to the original Garda search.

Danny was still wearing his trademark tan-coloured leather boots with a heel. When Garda liaison officer Detective Inspector Jody Crowe later showed the boots to Christopher McIlhone, he identified his brother’s footwear. A DNA test showed that the body found in Ballynultagh was a 300,000 to 1 match with the McIlhone family. Because Danny’s body had been in the soil for so long, it wasn’t possible to determine the exact cause of his death. However, the inquest into his death later heard that the commission had information in its possession that Danny had been shot more than once during his attempt to escape from the IRA. The jury found Danny died as a result of gunshot wounds in an unlawful killing by a person or persons unknown. The coroner described the killing as a ‘terrible crime’. Danny is now laid to rest at Milltown Cemetery in west Belfast.

Danny McIlhone was the fifth victim of the IRA whose body was recovered since May 1999, but he was only the third victim to be found following an excavation. One body was returned by the IRA, and another was found by chance on a Co. Louth beach. At least six other bodies of people the Provisional IRA acknowledge killing have not yet been found, and members of the IRA are also widely suspected of being responsible for the disappearance of three other people. The disappeared victims ranged from a widowed mother of ten to a man whose wife was pregnant with their first child; from young men living in Belfast and Dublin to a 56-year-old man who was last seen heading for Mass in Crossmaglen in south Armagh. Contrary to the perception that all abductions happened in the North, two men were abducted and killed in separate incidents in Dublin. Most of the actual killings and secret burials were carried out in the Republic, with bodies still lying in unmarked graves in Counties Louth, Meath and Monaghan. Two more cases were added to the list of the disappeared in 2009, bringing the total still missing to ten. One of the ten is believed to be buried in France, and his death is blamed on the INLA, but the other nine all lay unrecovered in Ireland and all nine were either admitted by, or widely blamed on, the IRA.

Shortly after 7 am on Friday 28 May 1999, a priest walked into Dundalk Garda station and told a Garda that a short time earlier a coffin had been left at nearby Faughart Cemetery, and that it contained the body of Éamon Molloy who had vanished from Belfast in May 1975. The priest was passing on information from the IRA, which had recently acknowledged that it was responsible for the killing and secret burial of nine people during the Troubles. In the wake of the Good Friday Agreement, and following years of pressure from the families of some of the disappeared, the IRA now confirmed that in the period from 1972 to 1981 it had caused eight men and one woman to disappear. As well as Éamon Molloy, the IRA said it had killed mother-of-ten Jean McConville, who had been abducted by a number of men and women from her Belfast home in 1972. The organisation also said it had secretly buried the bodies of Kevin McKee and Séamus Wright in 1972; Columba McVeigh in 1975; Brian McKinney, John McClory and Brendan Megraw in 1978; and Danny McIlhone in 1981. It was also known that the IRA was responsible for the murder of SAS Captain Robert Nairac who had been shot dead and his body then hidden in Co. Louth in 1977. The IRA statement of May 1999 laid bare the fact that the organisation had abducted, killed and buried nine people from within nationalist communities. However, the IRA list of 1999 was incomplete. It would be 11 years later before the organisation would admit responsibility for the death of another missing man—Joe Lynskey in 1972. And IRA members are suspected of involvement in the disappearance of three other men—Peter Wilson in 1973, Gerard Evans in 1979 and Charlie Armstrong in 1981.

When the Gardaí went to the scene at Faughart on 28 May 1999, they found a coffin which had been placed under a tree in a corner of the graveyard. Officers immediately sealed off the area as senior Gardaí were alerted to the find. In previous days and weeks word had been coming through that the IRA was going to give locations as to where the bodies of their victims lay buried. Shortly before the IRA gave back Éamon Molloy’s body, they visited his mother and his former wife. They told both women that his body would be returned to them. Some of the other families of the disappeared were also visited by the IRA or by intermediaries and told the bodies of their loved ones would soon be returned to them. Senior Gardaí and members of the recently established ICLVR had effectively been on standby waiting for word. When the coffin was found in Faughart Cemetery, word quickly spread that it was the body of Éamon Molloy, last seen in Belfast 24 years previously. The coffin was brand new, so obviously Éamon’s body had been dug up from wherever it had been all that time. A decision was taken that the coffin would not be opened in the cemetery. Local scenes of crime officer Detective Garda Gerard Murray escorted the coffin to the Dublin City Morgue. It was then opened by state pathologist Professor John Harbison. Detective Superintendent Martin Callinan from the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation and Detective Garda Eugene Gilligan of the Garda Technical Bureau were present when Professor Harbison studied the remains.

The complete body of Éamon Molloy was in the coffin along with a quantity of earth from where he had been exhumed. Such was the legislation to protect the IRA from any criminal investigation arising from giving locations for the bodies of their victims that the Gardaí were precluded from analysing the soil in the coffin, and indeed they never even carried out any enquiries as to where the coffin came from in which Éamon’s body had been deposited. Although Éamon had obviously been the victim of a crime, the IRA had been assured that no criminal investigation would be carried out. The recently enacted legislation meant that the Gardaí were officially not enquiring into where Éamon had lain for over two decades, or in what location he had been killed, or indeed the identities of those who had abducted, killed and buried him. The main function of the Gardaí was to ensure Éamon was identified as quickly as possible to allow his family to finally lay him to rest.

IRARUCIRA