The Vanishing Triangle

by Claire McGowan

In the crime stories I write, we will always find the answers. We’ll discover exactly what happened to the missing person, why they disappeared, if someone took them or if they ran away themselves. The guilty will be brought to justice, every time, and the bereaved will find some comfort.

Things don’t always have meaning, they just happen and we don’t know why.

drunk. So much misogyny was released by that case that some Irish men reportedly were planning to vote no in the abortion referendum, just to ‘get back’ at women in general. 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.

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 progress that we’ve made since the nineties is real, but it’s not enough, not yet.

In some ways this must be the cruellest thing of all – the terrible persistence of hope.

On the other hand, there was so much sexual shame around, so much silence about our bodies, so much secret abuse.

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

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.

She looks very young, full of life.

and John McCarrick died in 2009, only in his sixties. 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.

It took him over a year to report it.

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.

wonder what it must be like, to know a body has been found, and perhaps partly hope that it is your sister or your daughter, because then at least you’d know,

it’s still our responsibility somehow not to get attacked.

But is that really the best we can offer as protection against a total stranger pulling you off the street, raping and murdering you, leaving your naked body behind to freeze and rot on waste ground, and be found days later, or not at all? Is there no onus on these men, you know, not to do it?

the rape conviction rate in the country was just 1 per cent, the lowest in Europe, and two prominent cases in 2018 would demonstrate that this culture is sadly alive and well.

There was almost always a trail of rapes, of assaults, even of attempted murders behind them, and yet they were still free to repeat their crimes.

Indifference can be fatal. Until we treat every case, every unsolved murder and every suspicious disappearance as equally important, we can’t hope to build up a true picture of what killers are doing. That’s how they get away with it.

the Magdalene Laundries

Research?

Child X case reminded us that the government felt it owned women’s bodies, even those of children who had been raped.

Casey died in 2017 without ever facing criminal charges, although the police were apparently aware of it from 2001 onwards.

This was shown with the death of Savita Halappanavar in Ireland in 2012. It was an agonising case: she knew that she was having an unavoidable miscarriage and that she was dying too, and still nothing was done for her. She asked repeatedly for doctors to help hasten the miscarriage before she developed sepsis, but they refused, and so she died. Her terrible death in large part led to the overturning of the eighth and the legalising of abortion.

As well as Jo Jo’s, there were other cases where judgement and shame surely played a factor in how thoroughly the women were looked for, how they were treated after their deaths.

In the UK, something like 1,000 people are reported missing every day. Most of them will quickly be found – around 99 per cent within a year – but that still leaves a significant number who can’t be located.

night, although they didn’t yield any useful clues). In some ways, the triangle women were unlucky to disappear just before the technological revolution, if we can say there are degrees of luck even among the murdered.

They often got off on some technicality,

knowing that being a child was no protection, and neither was staying out of politics.

A missing person could simply step over that imaginary line, or be taken over it, and become someone else’s problem.

In the UK generally, two women every week are killed by former or current partners. Domestic violence is not an issue we’ve left behind in the nineties.

silence is a huge factor.

The truth is that the men who do these things, the monsters, are the same men who live in our homes.

Maybe that’s the hardest thing about these cases. To accept that we will just never know for sure.

Silence reigns,

It seems that even when women are the ones offering the lifts their lives are in danger. And that there’s a hierarchy of death. If you are beautiful, blonde, a mother, a married woman, then people will care about your murder. If you aren’t, you might be out of luck.

where you’re grieving, except grief relies on certainty and you don’t even have that. You’re just stuck, waiting to feel the wound that’s been inflicted on you.

that the missing person is not the only family member who’s lost when they disappear.