The Vanishing Triangle

by Claire McGowan

You might think this sounds like an American story, from a land of lonely highways and armed cops, but in fact it happened near Dublin, Ireland, in a populated area and in broad daylight.

Lol come on

Between 1993 and 1998, eight women went missing from an area roughly eighty miles around Dublin, leading some to nickname it the ‘vanishing triangle’. There was speculation about a serial killer, responsible for some or all of these cases. It’s worth noting that not everyone likes this name, or believes it was the same person who killed the women, although almost everyone agrees they must be dead.

I was eleven when the first disappearance took place and sixteen when they ended, but I don’t remember hearing anything about them at the time, no news reports, no warnings that women and girls were going missing.

Instead, I first heard about the cases when I was almost thirty, researching a series of novels about a fictional missing persons unit. At the time I was shocked – how could so many women vanish and it was barely even talked about?

Why were all these cases unsolved, with no leads at all, no bodies ever found?

Misogyny

My aunt – who never married, went to mass every day, and would pointedly send me out of the room if something even vaguely risqué came on TV – was a huge true crime fan, and had a house stuffed with books about the Moors murders, 10 Rillington Place and other gruesome stories.

The women are just gone, and I wasn’t going to uncover new evidence that hadn’t been seen before. A team of six Gardaí worked on the disappearances every day for three years and ultimately found nothing new. Besides, in-depth books about the cases already exist, written by crime journalists and even by a detective on the task force.

I’m taking a different tack – I want to look at how and why so many women could go missing without a national outcry, without the disappearances even being linked for so long.

Why, in so many of the cases, the same excuses were made for a disappearance: she’d been depressed, she must have killed herself; she’d had an abortion, she must have been unhappy; she’d had boyfriends, she must have gone off with a man.

Misogyny!

These disappearances took place at a time of great change, in a country trying to drag itself out from centuries of misogyny and religious dogma. It wasn’t until 1997 that divorce was legalised in Ireland, for example. It was illegal to be gay until 1993, a date that I always have to go back and check, because it can’t be true, it just can’t. It is, though.

And in 1992, the year before the first disappearance, a fourteen-year-old girl was placed under house arrest by the state, to stop her leaving Ireland to have an abortion. She had been raped by an older man who later went on to attack another young girl.

due to the fact of the border, which at this stage both existed (in that it was real, a line on a map) and didn’t exist (in that there was nothing there, no checkpoints or barriers – Schrödinger’s border), he was able to simply cross over to Ireland from the North and stay there for three years, as the RUC in Northern Ireland desperately sought an extradition warrant.

In so many cases, these men were protected by silence, by moving them quietly along when they committed crimes, so that more children and women could be hurt, more lives destroyed. It was not just the Church that did this, but also the IRA and even the state itself.

We even won the Eurovision Song Contest four times in the nineties, and qualified for the World Cup twice. Are some of these Tiger-time properties, the hotels and luxury estates, hiding dark secrets in the foundations? Or did the disappearances perhaps not fit with people’s view of Ireland as wealthy, successful, effervescent, and so they weren’t given the attention they deserved?

At the time of these disappearances, the news was also full of the Northern Irish Troubles, and the shaky progress of the peace process between 1994 (the year of the first ceasefires, which eventually broke down two years later with a huge bomb in London’s Canary Wharf) and 1998, when the Good Friday Agreement was signed.

They are a random mix of women, of different ages and different backgrounds, with no apparent common ground or connection between them, which in itself is a little unusual, given how small Ireland is. I’m always surprised that, when I talk about this project, people’s first question is, ‘Were they sex workers?’ (though usually they don’t use this term).

I’ll also include some cases from other parts of Ireland, such as Arlene’s. This is because I think the border has been used as an excuse too often – a way to let guilty men escape, to wash hands of responsibility, pretend that a determined predator could not have simply driven over a line on a map that by the late eighties was barely even manned.

That, unfortunately, is the end of that part of the story. With no bodies and no hard evidence, Murphy has never admitted to or been convicted of any other crime, and he got out of prison in 2010 – five years less than he was sentenced to.

Jastine was murdered in 2018. It was the year Ireland repealed the Eighth Amendment and legalised abortion – in fact just six days after Jastine’s death. The year after it elected a gay Prime Minister with immigrant parents.

Although they were acquitted, the case stirred up a maelstrom of misogyny, and the woman involved was doxxed – that is, her name made public online – and the man who did it fined only £300. She wept in court, as the barrister asked why she hadn’t screamed, pointed out that there were ‘middle-class’ girls downstairs who would have helped her, even though some of those girls were passed out drunk.

Fucking shitstains

Think of the depths of hatred that invokes. To say, I want you, a stranger, to have to carry an unwanted baby or make the trip back from England, bleeding and sore, because I am angry a famous man I don’t know was accused, and not even convicted of rape.

2018 was also the year of another rape case in Ireland, a seventeen-year-old attacked on a country lane, where the girl’s pants were held up in court and the jury was asked whether a woman who wasn’t up for it would really wear something like this.

The following year, a woman in Northern Ireland (let’s not forget, part of the UK) faced jail for buying abortion pills online for her teenage daughter. This is our modern Ireland. The progress that we’ve made since the nineties is real, but it’s not enough, not yet.

This type of case is hard. There is no body, often no forensics, no DNA, no crime scene, nothing. Gardaí can only wait for a body to turn up some day, or for someone to talk.

Ireland in the eighties and nineties was a place of turmoil, change, confusion.

What I most recall about a Northern Irish childhood at this time is the simultaneous feeling of safety and danger. On the one hand, I lived in a small village where everyone knew each other, and it was considered safe for me to walk home alone from the age of ten, and let myself in with a key.

what we worried about was being accidentally shot by the soldiers who crouched in the he...

We had good reason to be scared of them – I remember at least two occasions in the nineties where teenagers were shot by soldiers, in 1990 and 1992. And of course we were afraid of being killed by the terrorists, caught up in a bomb blast or hit by a stray bullet.

One day in April 1989, when I was seven, a bomb went off at the police station in Warrenpoint, the next town over from where I lived, just two miles away. A young woman, Joanne Reilly, was working in the hardware shop next door; she was twenty years old, and a Catholic, not that it matters. She died when the bomb went off.

Even in my own tiny village, Rostrevor, two police officers had been shot in the street outside the post office in 1983.

Newry police station, just around the corner from what would be my secondary school, was attacked with a mortar in 1985. Nine people died, the youngest nineteen years old. Two of them were Catholics. The violence was ever-present.

Our parents had been taught that Northern Irish Catholics would only rise up if they found professional jobs. They had also, more subtly, been taught that outbreeding the Protestants would one day tip the balance and perhaps lead to a united Ireland, and maybe this was true – the demographics are about to shift any day now in favour of a Catholic majority, as early as 2021 by some predictions, and who knows what will happen with Brexit.

People married young and had big families: six children was the norm at my school. The truth about paedophile priests was starting to come out, a challenge to everything we’d been taught about respecting the clergy, obeying the Church even when it seemed ridiculous.

Our ‘family planning’ education took place as part of religion class, which says it all really.

Ireland was a country in the grip of painful change, trying to prise off the fingers of Church control, struggling with its self-identification as one of the few true Catholic countries left.

I went to a primary school even further into the countryside, which still had open fires and outdoor loos, and where, on summer days, we would be let out early to roam the fields near the school, picking dandelions and dodging sheep poo.

Going back as far as 1979, a woman vanished from the town of Newbridge, about thirty miles from Dublin, where the final disappearance would also take place in 1998. Phyllis Murphy, who was twenty-three, went missing on 22 December while out shopping; as we go on we’ll see how many of these disappearances occur around Christmas.

Her other possessions were dumped in different places, her clothes set on fire by the side of the road. Her body was found almost a month later, in a forest in Wicklow. She had been raped and strangled. In a harbinger of a later case in 1995, the cold temperatures at this time of year would preserve her body, and eventually condemn her killer, though not for two decades and not until DNA testing was in common use.

Although this case seems far outside the scope of the disappearances – fourteen years before the first missing woman – it shows that killers may strike once then either never do it again, or be more careful about leaving a trail.

Her body was left in a field, not even hidden, and hundreds of people were in the area where she was murdered. In this case, Gardaí had a chief suspect, a man facing countless allegations of violence against women both before and after Patricia’s death, but weren’t able to convict him until 1991. He was in prison until 1995, when he got out on appeal, and died in 1998, the year of the last disappearances.

There was also Antoinette Smith, in 1987 – there are no suspects at all in her murder. She was twenty-seven, the mother of two young girls, separated amicably from her husband. He minded the kids while she went off with a friend to a David Bowie concert at Slane Castle, then into Dublin to go drinking.

A Dublin taxi driver said he’d picked up a woman who sounded like Antoinette that night, along with two men, taking them a few miles out of town towards a place called Rathfarnham. That’s also a town that would feature in later cases. The men had given him an uncomfortable feeling, the driver said, making jokes about killing him and taking the car.

No one was ever caught for murdering Antoinette, and her body wasn’t found for almost a year, buried in bog land near Glencree, County Wicklow. This is very close to Enniskerry, which is where Jastine Valdez was abducted, and also where the first triangle disappearance took place in 1993.

Her younger daughter was four when she died. In 2019 her daughters – Lisa and Rachel – launched a new appeal for information. They haven’t forgotten their mother, even though her death was over thirty years ago, and they think her murder was planned, not opportunistic, that she knew her killer.

It’s not in the vanishing triangle, but a fact I’ll keep coming back to is that Ireland isn’t very big – only 300 miles at its longest point; there’s nothing to suppose a determined killer wouldn’t be prepared to drive over the border in search of prey, especially given the border barely existed by then.

No one knows what happened to Inga after she got off the ferry, or if she met someone on board, got talking to them, took a lift, but her body was found in woodlands near Ballycastle two weeks later.

Inga had been raped, hit over the head, and her neck was broken. In many of these cases the women had been strangled, but to actually break a neck takes great force, and could suggest someone with some form of combat training.

I find it interesting that several of these disappearances or murders took place near Christmas – does it bring out the violence in people? Or was the same person often out hunting at this time of year? Or just another coincidence? Patricia’s body was eventually uncovered six months later in the bog, by a man cutting turf at a place called Lemass Cross, less than a mile from where Antoinette Smith’s body had been left.

So that’s five murders in the years before the disappearances, four of them in the same triangle area where the missing women vanished. All unsolved for years, four of them still so. No links between the victims.

It is significant that, even with bodies and crime scenes and possessions left out for anyone to find, only one of these murders has been officially solved, and even then the killer was free for twenty years before DNA evidence and a tenacious police officer led to his arrest.