Missing (10 page)

Kathleen’s husband, Séamus Bergin, told me that more needs to be done to find missing women in Leinster.

A detective who worked on Jo Jo Dullard’s disappearance agrees that the circumstances of her abduction and murder fit the profile of a serial killer.

Detectives have spent many hours teasing out different explanations of how Jo Jo Dullard was not immediately suspicious of the occupant or occupants of the car that she stepped
into in Moone. One report made to the Gardaí early in the investigation was by a woman who said she saw a woman matching Jo Jo Dullard’s description about to get into a car in Moone.
She had not come forward earlier because she was away on holiday and was unaware of the significance of what she had seen. She said she saw this woman walking towards a dark-coloured car, possibly
a Toyota Carina, which had stopped about fifty yards from the phone box. One of the rear doors was open. The Gardaí studied this reported sighting carefully. The make of car was vigorously
pursued by detectives. It did not lead anywhere but continues to be a line of inquiry.

This sighting raised the possibility that Jo Jo might have got into the back seat of a car. This would suggest in turn that the front passenger seat was occupied. Was it possible that the
front-seat passenger was a woman? This might have lulled Jo Jo into thinking she was safe in the car. Or was it occupied by a man who, like the driver, appeared to be normal? Or was Jo Jo
immediately suspicious of the occupant or occupants but, before she could get away, was pulled into the car? Might this be the car that was later spotted fifty miles south near Waterford, where a
barefoot woman was seen trying to escape from two men? All these ideas are credible, some of them more so than others. But they remain just speculation.

Jo Jo Dullard’s home town of Callan, eight miles south-west of Kilkenny, has been the scene of two separate killings in recent years. In May 1999 Marie Hennessy, a mother
of three, was beaten to death by her husband, Patrick Hennessy, who repeatedly struck her with a car jack. He attacked her on the side of the road, days after he was suspended from his job as
manager of the local Social Welfare office. He had been embezzling money and had been trying to conceal this from his wife. He was later jailed for eight years for manslaughter, a sentence severely
criticised as too lenient by Marie Hennessy’s family. In November 2001 two-year old Robyn Leahy was stabbed to death in Callan by her father, George McCloin, who then killed himself. He had
travelled to Callan from Dublin and first attacked Robyn’s mother, Lorraine, with whom he had previously split up, before killing their daughter. Both these incidents traumatised a closely
knit community already reeling from the abduction and murder of Jo Jo Dullard.

Jo Jo Dullard was the second of six women to disappear in sinister circumstances in Leinster between 1993 and 1998. Within months of her disappearance her sister Mary, having failed to get
satisfactory answers from certain gardaí in relation to her sister’s case, was calling for the reintroduction of the Murder Squad. This specialist team of detectives had operated in
the 1970s and 80s, travelling around the country, offering assistance to local gardaí dealing with any particularly complex murder investigation. In the light of the disappearance of four
more young women, Mary began calling for the establishment of a specialist Missing Persons Unit. Such a unit would be able to get to the scene of a disappearance quickly, without any needless delay
in deciding which Garda division had jurisdiction over the investigation. Valuable scientific evidence might also be salvaged, and psychological profiling of suspects might also prove fruitful.

The Jo Jo Dullard Memorial Trust was set up in 1998 by Mary and Martin Phelan with the assistance of John McGuinness. An honorary patron is the former President of Ireland,
Mary Robinson. It is often through the persistence of the trust that the issue of missing people has remained on the political and media agenda. The beliefs of members of the trust have often
clashed with the opinion of certain gardaí. An internal Garda document described the group as

This clash of opinions relates to the fact that many missing people have chosen to go missing. The Jo Jo Dullard Memorial Trust does not differentiate between the families of
missing people who have been murdered and the families of those missing people who have not been the victims of violence. To the trust, every missing person leaves behind a heartbroken family,
every case is tragic.

When Jo Jo Dullard disappeared she was wearing a black zip-up cotton jacket, light-blue jeans, and black boots with two-inch square heels. She had two weeks’ dole money in her possession.
No items of the clothing she was wearing have ever been found. There was no sign of a struggle along the roadside in Moone. Jo Jo Dullard’s lonely death is in total contrast to the warmth and
comfort of her extended family in Cos. Kildare and Kilkenny. In Co. Kildare her brother Tom and his family, including five of Jo Jo’s nieces and nephews, grieve for her. In Co. Kilkenny her
three sisters also grieve for their baby sister. Her sister Nora misses the little sister she nicknamed Jodie and often tells her other sisters that Jo Jo is with their Mam now and is safe. At the
Bergin home in Callan, Kathleen and Séamus showed me dozens of photographs of Jo Jo growing up: playing with her dog, Freeway, grinning with her three sisters on the porch, making her first
Holy Communion, lounging in a chair. This is where Jo Jo was safe; this is where she should be.

Just up the road in Grange, Mary Phelan told me her special memory about the night Jo Jo went to her debs’ dance.

On 26 May 2002 a National Monument for Missing People was unveiled in the grounds of Kilkenny Castle. The steel monument, featuring the hand-prints of members of the families of
missing people, is in a quiet part of the castle grounds, surrounded on three sides by flowers and bushes. A number of families did not attend the unveiling: they are not in a position to grieve
openly with others. But a large number of families did attend, including those of Jo Jo Dullard, Fiona Pender, Ciara Breen, and Fiona Sinnott. President Mary McAleese unveiled the monument and was
escorted around to meet the families by Mary Phelan. As Jo Jo’s sister made a speech thanking everyone who had made the day special, she broke down. Mary Phelan has been at the forefront of
the tireless campaign for the monument and the establishment of a Missing Persons Day. But she, and all Jo Jo Dullard’s family, would dearly love one thing: to have Jo Jo’s remains
returned to them.

Mary Phelan also firmly believes that the person who murdered her sister will kill again.

F
iona Pender, a 25-year-old model and hairdresser, was seven months pregnant when she was abducted and murdered in August 1996. Her killer also set
in train a series of events that, four years later, would end in Fiona’s father taking his own life.

The Pender family, from Connolly Park, Tullamore, has suffered unimaginable pain. Before Fiona’s abduction and murder they had already lost a loved one. Fiona’s younger brother Mark
was killed in June 1995 when his motorbike hit a lorry near Killeigh, just south of Tullamore. Today the surviving members of the family are Fiona’s mother, Josephine, and her other younger
brother, John. Josephine believes she knows the identity of the person who may have murdered her daughter.

Josephine Pender does not believe that Fiona was the victim of a serial killer, a view shared by many of the gardaí who worked on the case. In April 1997 three women and two men were
arrested and questioned. All five were released without charge twelve hours later. The last person known to have seen Fiona Pender was her boyfriend, John Thompson. He said goodbye to her at about
six o’clock on the morning of Friday 23 August 1996. Fiona, who was suffering from a bout of heartburn, was still in bed as he left their ground-floor flat in Church Street, Tullamore. He had
a busy day’s work ahead at his family’s farm at Grange, Co. Laois, about eight miles away.

The next evening John Thompson received a phone call at the farm in Grange. It was Fiona’s mother, Josephine. ‘Where’s Fiona?’ she asked. ‘I’ve been around to
the flat. She’s not there.’ ‘I thought she was with you,’ he replied. ‘I’ll be in to you shortly.’ Later that night John Thompson and Fiona’s mother
and father and her thirteen-year-old brother walked into Tullamore Garda Station. Fiona had not been seen for more than thirty-six hours. It is most probable that she was already dead.

The last time Josephine Pender saw her only daughter was at seven o’clock on the evening of Thursday 22 August 1996. The two had spent much of the day together, making two trips to the
Bridge Shopping Centre in Tullamore. Fiona was in good form. Her baby was due in just over two months’ time. John was working long hours at his father’s farm. Fiona was on the look-out
for a new home for themselves and the new baby. The flat in Church Street was too small, a bed-sitter with a kitchen in one part of the large room. Fiona had decided that once the baby was born she
was going to take it home to her mother’s house, where they could both rest for a few weeks, hoping that within a short time she and John and the baby would have a nice place of their
own.

On that last day that Josephine and Fiona would spend together they met at Dunne’s Stores at the Bridge Centre, a few minutes’ walk from Church Street. They did a bit of shopping and
then decided to head back to the Pender family home at Connolly Park, about ten minutes’ walk away. It was raining, so they got a taxi. Fiona’s father was in the house, getting himself
ready for a fishing trip. Tired after the walk around the shops, Fiona sat down and cradled her tummy. She picked up a copy of
Hello
and began flicking through it. She found a photograph
of the singer Eric Clapton on a fishing trip catching a salmon; she showed it to her father, getting his own fishing gear together, and they laughed. The expectant mother was just hours away from
being abducted and murdered.

Fiona Pender was the eldest of the three children of Seán and Josephine Pender. The second was Mark, two years younger than his sister; John is the youngest. He was
thirteen when his only sister vanished and sixteen when his father took his own life. But the first tragedy to hit the Pender family occurred when John was only twelve, when his older brother was
killed in a motorcycle accident.