The Vanishing Triangle

by Claire McGowan

Is the violent death of women actually more common in Ireland than we’d like to admit?

Seems like

It’s a common and heartbreaking theme in many of these cases, that the parents of the missing simply can’t go on, broken by the years of uncertainty and pain. So often they die before their time, in their fifties and sixties.

This throwaway comment made me think about how we judge women, how we are blamed for our own rapes and murders. There was a feeling in the media reports that Annie, a young woman abroad, raised near New York, had no sense of danger in Ireland.

She had been walking in the countryside alone – is that enough to put you in danger? When I was a child – I was eleven when Annie went missing – I regularly went off on my own, roaming about our village and even further into the country. I walked and rode my bike, sometimes for miles, and I enjoyed being in nature by myself. If I was allowed to do this while still at primary school – and my parents were on the protective end of the spectrum, so I wasn’t given as much freedom as some of my friends – surely Annie, at twenty-six, would have felt safe to do the same.

As children, we were aware not to get into a car with a stranger, although the definition of a stranger is pliable in rural areas where perhaps you know someone to see, but not to talk to. Anyway, knowing it’s not safe doesn’t matter – there’s often no other way to get home.

There are only a few main train lines, and even when you arrive at Dublin airport it’s not unusual to wait an hour for a coach going north, only to find it’s full and you have to wait another hour for the next. In many rural areas, taxis are hard to find and need to be pre-booked.

If Annie wanted to go out for the day, and stay late for a drink, she would have needed to walk, or take a lift, or both. Perhaps because of this lack of transport in Ireland, if you see someone you know even slightly out and about without a car, it’s common practice to offer them a lift, and for them to accept. Certainly in the eighties and nineties, when we still thought that non-sectarian murders didn’t really happen, it was completely normal.

Once I noticed this aspect of Annie’s disappearance – that she had been travelling about the countryside alone – I saw parallels with another of the cases. In 1995, on a cold dark November night, another young woman would go missing in the vanishing triangle, never to be seen again. This time she would die – because surely she is dead – because she missed a bus, rather than because she caught one.

When I was in my teens I never hitch-hiked, but I knew people who did, and I definitely got lifts from people I didn’t know all that well. When we started driving, I had friends, young female friends, who picked up hitch-hikers.

She didn’t show up for her job in a pub the next day, a Friday. That was when her family knew she was missing – but all the same it took three days to interest the Gardaí in her case. Certainly no one started looking for her until the Monday.

Then, some time later, a taxi driver came forward to say that he’d seen something the night Jo Jo went missing – a woman in bare feet, trying to run from a car while a man peed near it, and being pulled back into it by the hair. He thought there were two men with the girl. It took him over a year to report it.

You have to wonder why these possible witnesses didn’t intervene, or if they somehow weren’t able to, if it’s the kind of thing you just drive past and you’ve already gone by the time your brain reminds you that wasn’t normal.

It’s another element that seems to recur throughout these stories – people see something suspicious, but they don’t do anything about it. They don’t call the police. They keep silent.

In 1997 a body was found miles away in the River Shannon, badly decomposed. It took weeks to confirm that this was not Jo Jo; in fact, it was a man’s body. But her family had to find out by hearing the announcement on the radio like everyone else, since the Gardaí had not told them before the news was made public.

Another Christmas disappearance: I wonder if there’s a pattern, or if it’s just that people go out more around then, they drink more, and maybe they let their guard down.

While she was walking down the dark path, she passed the man who would murder her. Before this, he’d never done anything out of the ordinary, or not that we know of. He earned good money as a telecoms engineer, was married with a young child. That night he’d been drinking steadily, also out at his work Christmas do, and as he passed Marilyn, some notion took him, something made him pull her into the bushes, rape and strangle her, and leave her naked body discarded there.

It seems incredible, but, interviewed on a Crimeline documentary about it, detective Alan Bailey said, ‘They never show it, these men.’ I found that terrifying, the idea that such violent murder leaves no trace.

Marilyn’s family started to worry when she didn’t turn up for Christmas dinner a few days later. Even though she was killed very close to her home, her body was not found until 6 January, which must have made for an unendurable few weeks for her family, her parents and brother and sister, nieces and nephews. Questions were asked about why she wasn’t found for so long, when her route home would have been obvious, and she wasn’t buried or hidden. It makes you wonder, if it took two weeks to find her, how hard they have looked for women whose bodies were most likely actually hidden, who have never been found.

As in one of the earlier murders, however, the cold temperatures preserved the DNA, and Lawler became the first person in Ireland to be convicted this way. Gardaí could see that he had searched the internet for information about DNA and how long it remains viable. The case must also be one of the first where computer technology was used to help convict. If not for those two factors – DNA and technology – I wonder if he might still be free today.

There’s another side to it, of course: if he had nothing to do with them, and Marilyn was his only victim, then just how many sexual predators were there in Ireland at this time?

Get a taxi, as if they don’t cost a fortune (£60 in a black cab from the centre of town to where I live in London, and we’re always being told how unsafe Uber is). Text me, as if your friend would stay awake till you got home and do something if you didn’t check in (I usually forget anyway). As if the driver might not attack you anyway, like John Worboys, the so-called ‘black cab rapist’.

Sharing a cab with strangers was quite common in Ireland at this time, as a way to cut the cost, and again as a result of poor public transport links. So taxis aren’t necessarily safe, and anyway it’s dark by half three in the afternoon in winter; are we supposed to be home by then?

just as I was finishing this book, a man in the UK was convicted of raping and killing the female friend he had walked home from her own birthday party. So if you can’t take a taxi, or a trusted lift, or a random lift, or walk, what can you do?

ultimately it’s down to these men not to attack us. There must be better ways to keep women safe than by imposing a virtual curfew, or a tax, via expensive trips home, on not getting raped and murdered.

It was becoming obvious that there were a lot of cases I needed to include in a study of those years, 1993 to 1998. As the names stacked up of women who were either dead or missing, I became more and more disturbed by the failure of the police to solve most of these cases or even to link them.

The story about Father Brendan Smyth, one of the most notorious abusers, broke in 1991, but he didn’t go to jail until 1994, because, as we’ve seen, he simply went over the border and was protected there, even as the RUC tried to issue extradition warrants.

the IRA had done exactly the same thing, and also protected sexual predators. As a Northern Irish Catholic, I had grown up believing that the RUC, the Northern Irish police, was deeply flawed and biased.

In some parts of Ireland, the IRA was seen as an alternative police force, and you could call them if your house was burgled or joy-riders took your car. All through the nineties it was common for the IRA to give ‘punishment beatings’ – usually breaking the knees with a baseball bat – for offences such as dealing drugs or stealing cars. But I didn’t know that the IRA had covered up for men in their ranks who hurt children and women.

As I mentioned, the night that the woman who might have been Annie McCarrick went to Johnnie Fox’s pub, she was in the company of a man who was described as something of a yuppie. Later, though, it was alleged that this man was in fact an IRA member, who’d been sent south of the border after assaulting the daughter of another member of that organisation.

I would not associate the word yuppie with an IRA member, but I suppose a terrorist could easily wear a waxed jacket, if that’s all it meant.

There is also precedent for this kind of thing happening in Republican circles, men being quietly moved on after committing crimes – after all, the organisation liked to dispense its own justice, often by way of knee-capping or a bullet in the head.

His brother had actually confessed to him in 2000, but it appears he didn’t tell the police this, or do anything about it, even when his brother started working at a youth club. Aine, who waived her right to anonymity in court, has said that her uncle tried to pressure her into not going public, and even to obtain a court injunction so the story would not come out in the press.

These cases show how the IRA functioned to shield men like this. How politics trumped other crimes, like rape, like child abuse. How Ireland was so ruled by ideology at the time that women and children were being crushed in the middle.

It wasn’t just the Church and the IRA that protected dangerous men. In some ways, the state itself, and the criminal justice system, did too. In many of the cases in this book, when a man is finally caught for killing or hurting a woman, he’s found to have committed violent crimes before.

Her killer, nicknamed ‘the Monster’, was called Michael Murphy (no relation to Larry), and he had done this many times before, including strangling an elderly woman to death in the eighties, and assaulting several other women in 1997. Yet he served just eight years for that murder, and six months for the sexual assaults – he got longer for some robberies he’d also committed.

Colgan was not long out of prison for raping two other women in quick succession, one of whom was seventy-nine years old. Both of these attacks took place in late 1991, and yet he was out of prison by 1999.

Colgan was out of the picture for the triangle disappearances, but I include this case to show how dangerous it is not to heed the warning signs when men hurt women.

Larry Murphy, the Carlow rapist, got out of prison in 2010 after just nine years. As he committed his crime before the Sex Offenders Act came into force in Ireland, he’s not officially monitored at all, and has since lived in Amsterdam, Spain and also apparently south London, where I live now. He’s only in his fifties.

the chief suspect in her case was known to move around a lot between different parts of Ireland and the UK. He had to, because everywhere he went he would hurt a woman, usually a young girl.

I used to go to country discos too, in hotels or parish halls, under-age discos with a mineral bar and no alcohol, a fug of smoke and hairspray and cheap aftershave, where even at that age you couldn’t cross the dancefloor without being groped by some farmer’s son from the next village over.

The man who drove Arlene to the disco that night and, according to him, dropped her safely back outside her house, would later murder another teenage girl in England. Yet he was ruled out of the investigation into Arlene’s disappearance, and wasn’t put on trial for her murder until 2005, by which time he was already in prison for murdering the other young girl.

The fact that, instead of charging him, the RUC went round to the house of Arlene’s sister, Kathleen, who had four young children herself, and knocked her door in with a sledgehammer, put her in handcuffs and arrested her partner, then brought in JCB diggers to rip up her garden. Kathleen has since launched a civil suit against the police for their actions.

I find this so hard to believe, even knowing what I do about the RUC at this time, even knowing what else happened that year, the bombs and shootings and wobbling peace process. It still shocks me, and maybe that’s good – we should be shocked by how this keeps happening, older and powerful men being listened to and the girls and women they hurt not being believed.

I then stumbled on an article that might have explained why the case was handled so strangely – Robert Howard was rumoured to be a police informant.

A senior member of the IRA punishment squad in the eighties and nineties, who was responsible for rooting out and killing informers, has for a long time been alleged to have also been ‘Stakeknife’, a high-level informant for the RUC and Army within the IRA.

Kathleen Arkinson, Arlene’s sister, talking about the bewildering decision of the RUC to break down her door rather than arresting the obvious suspect, said that if Howard got away with it, someone else would die. She was right about that. In April 2001, in Dartford, Kent, another girl went missing. Hannah Williams was fourteen, a working-class girl who had run away before, and it would be almost a year before she was found dead.

Even when he eventually went on trial for Arlene’s murder, as we’ve seen, he was acquitted. So although everyone knows what probably happened to Arlene, he got off, meaning no justice for her family. Meaning no closure. Meaning he didn’t have to say where he’d put her. Still no body, no grave to visit. No answers.

For example, two years after Arlene went missing, in 1996, a burial was taking place at a country churchyard not far from where she lived, when something else was uncovered. A body was already there in the ground, not in a coffin. This being Ireland, and the peace process so fragile, the gravediggers and priest simply never told anyone.

It tells you a lot about Ireland in the mid-nineties, how weak the peace was, and how thoroughly people had been schooled not to talk about what they knew. Even when it was a matter of a dead teenage girl. Even a priest, a pillar of the community, had been silenced by the culture, the fear. People would rather a family suffered in agony than risk speaking out.

A fourteen-year-old girl had been raped by a neighbour, and since there was no abortion in Ireland and wouldn’t be for almost thirty more years, her family took her to England to get one. When the state learned about this – the family had asked if the Gardaí would need the DNA evidence from the foetus in order to prosecute the rapist – it invoked the constitution, forced her to return home, and took away the family’s passports. On appeal, this judgement was struck down, but by then the girl had had a miscarriage. The man who raped her served just three years in prison.