Missing (5 page)
Authors: Barry Cummins
As the Gardaí appealed for information, a woman came forward to say she had served someone matching Annie’s description at the post office in Enniskerry that Friday evening; she
thought she had sold the woman three stamps for postcards. This would be in keeping with Annie’s habit of staying in regular touch with her friends and family by post. Unfortunately, there
was no closed-circuit television tape of Annie in the post office. This is the closest the Gardaí have come to placing Annie McCarrick in Enniskerry.
As the search entered its second week, a conference was held among detectives attached to Irishtown, Enniskerry and Bray Garda Stations. It was decided that a further appeal would be made for
information. A photograph of Annie was circulated to television and newspapers. And then a man came forward with information that would shed new light on Annie’s disappearance.
Sam Doran was working as a doorman at Johnnie Fox’s pub on the night of Friday 26 March. He phoned the Gardaí to say he recognised the woman featured on the missing person posters:
she had been to Johnnie Fox’s that night. Another doorman, Paul O’Reilly, also told the Gardaí that a woman matching her description had been in the back lounge of the pub at
about 9:30 that evening. It was a busy night, and the Jolly Ploughmen were playing into the early hours. Sam Doran was able to recall that the woman was in the company of a young man. He remembered
telling the couple that there was a £2 cover charge for the lounge; the young man had paid for both of them, saying something like ‘I’ll take care of that.’
If Annie McCarrick did get to Enniskerry by five o’clock that evening, and if she was the woman seen in the pub four hours later, where was she in the meantime? How did she get to Johnnie
Fox’s pub? She was known to be a keen walker and could definitely have walked the four miles in that time. If so, did she just meet the mysterious man at Johnnie Fox’s, or had she
arranged to meet him? Did she hitch a lift, or did she bump into someone she knew, someone who has never come forward? The Gardaí had, and continue to have, many such questions.
Assuming that the woman identified in the pub by Sam Doran and Paul O’Reilly was Annie McCarrick, detectives now had a description of a man they would like to question. He was described as
being in his mid-twenties, clean-shaven, of average build, with dark-brown hair. But despite repeated appeals for information, neither the woman nor the man has ever come forward. One detective
believes this is significant.
For one person to remain silent is not uncommon, but for two people not to come forward is highly unusual. If they were entirely innocent, surely one, if not both, would
have come forward, even years later. It made us think that perhaps the woman was actually Annie, and the man in question was the man who would later attack her. It’s still a valid theory;
but it doesn’t really get us any further. If it was Annie, nobody could identify the man she was with. Nobody saw them leave the pub.
There was another American woman in Johnnie Fox’s pub that night, who looked somewhat like Annie McCarrick; but this woman was with her mother. Detectives who would later
work as part of Operation Trace would revisit the description of the man seen in Johnnie Fox’s. One detective believes this unidentified man could hold the answer.
If you consider the description of this fellow—clean-shaven, in his mid-twenties, and with dark-brown hair—it actually matches a man who is the closest we have
really come to in recent years in relation to a suspected serial killer. This man only came to our attention years later for a horrific attack on a young woman in Co. Wicklow. During the attack
this man, who was in his mid-thirties by this time, tried to kill his victim. He had never come to our attention before. We suspect he has attacked other women. It would make you wonder if he
was the man in Johnnie Fox’s. But in other ways, the description of a clean-shaven man in his twenties with brown hair is one which matches thousands of men. But we haven’t ruled
this man out. He was always clean-shaven; he was always charming. And underneath it, he’s one of the most violent men I’ve ever encountered. And we definitely believe he has
attacked women before.
Within days of Nancy McCarrick arriving in Dublin in March 1993, her husband followed. Her brother, Tim Dungate, also travelled from New York, as did her brother-in-law John
Covell, who was married to Nancy’s sister Maureen. The four of them met gardaí to see how the investigation was going. Nancy remembers that they seemed at a loss to explain what might
have happened.
It was just beyond their comprehension. Annie wasn’t the first woman to go missing in Ireland, but she was the first of a number of women to disappear over a short
number of years. But back then the Gardaí just couldn’t explain it. It was new to them. I remember suggesting that Annie might have responded to a particular ad for someone to work
with animals. The ad was in relation to a place on the way from Dublin to Enniskerry. I remember asking if they had questioned this man, and a garda said, ‘Oh, Mrs McCarrick, you
don’t think Annie responded to the ad, and the man thought to himself that he’d keep her; no such thing could happen.’ It was just beyond their experience. Now it’s
different, they know that there are people capable of these terrible deeds. Gardaí worked extremely hard on Annie’s case, but it was so new to them.
Though the disappearance of Annie McCarrick is still officially classified as a missing person case, every detective who worked on it knows it is a murder inquiry, and was so
from very early on. As detectives began to consider where Annie’s body might have been buried, they were conscious of the unsolved murders of two women whose bodies had been left less than a
mile apart in the Dublin Mountains in 1987 and 1991.
In July 1987, Antoinette Smith, a mother of two from Clondalkin, Dublin, was abducted and murdered. She had attended a David Bowie concert at Slane, Co. Meath, and was last seen getting a taxi
with two men in Westmorland Street, Dublin, to go to Rathfarnham. The taxi driver dropped his three passengers close to Rathfarnham in the early hours of the morning. Antoinette’s body was
found in April 1988 in a bog at the Feather Bed at Killakee in the Dublin Mountains. She had been strangled, and a plastic bag had been placed over her head. The Gardaí are satisfied that
she was murdered by two attackers. At Christmas 1991 Patricia Doherty, a prison officer and mother of two from Co. Kerry was abducted and murdered. She also was strangled. Her body was found in
June 1992 just three miles from her home in Tallaght at Glassamucky Borders, Killakee, less than a mile from where Antoinette Smith’s body had been found four years before. It was found by
ramblers after dry weather caused the turf bank where she was buried to subside. No-one has ever been charged in relation to these horrific murders, which have devastated two families. One
detective says that the Gardaí feared that Annie McCarrick had suffered a similar fate.
If you look at the similarities in both those cases, both Antoinette Smith and Patricia Doherty were strangled and their bodies buried in relatively close proximity in the
Dublin Mountains. We have particular information to suggest two men may be responsible for the murder of Antoinette Smith. Neither of those terrible murders has been solved as yet. So, the
persons responsible for those separate murders are still out there—killers who know the Dublin Mountains; killers who knew where they could work undetected as they sought to hide their
crimes by burying the bodies. In searching for Annie we were conscious of those murders; but it was only years later, when Operation Trace came on stream, that all these cases were really
looked at for links. One thing that cannot be denied: whoever murdered Antoinette Smith is still out there, and whoever murdered Patricia Doherty is still out there. It’s often speculated
whether the person who killed Annie killed other women later on. But we must also consider if the person who killed Annie had killed before.
The Gardaí were also conscious of the murder of a nineteen-year-old woman, Patricia Furlong, strangled at Glencullen, Co. Dublin, in July 1982. Glencullen is just two
miles north of Enniskerry and very close to Johnnie Fox’s pub. A Dublin disc-jockey, Vincent Connell, was convicted of the murder in December 1991, but his conviction was quashed by the Court
of Criminal Appeal in April 1995. Connell, who was later convicted of assaulting a number of former girl-friends, died in 1998 while continuing to protest his innocence.
As the Gardaí pieced together the movements of Annie McCarrick in the twenty-four hours before her disappearance, there was nothing to suggest that she had planned to disappear. She was
going about her normal everyday life. Though her body has not been found, everyone involved knows she was abducted and killed. Back in New York, Nancy McCarrick confirmed to me that she knows Annie
was murdered.
It was so hard for me to leave Ireland and return to New York in May 1993. But I just had to. There was no news—nothing. We knew early on that Annie had been murdered.
But you always wonder if she’ll return. You do that for ever: your head tells you otherwise, but you still wonder. Logically, I know she’ll never come home. I know she was killed.
But sometimes it just hits you again. It might be a birthday, or Christmas, but sometimes it can be a smell, or when someone says something nice, that I think of Annie. And then it hits me all
over again. Some of the detail of the months after Annie’s disappearance is a bit muddled. But the pain never ends.
Annie McCarrick had been sharing an apartment at St Catherine’s Court in Sandymount for a few weeks before she disappeared. Her two flatmates were Jill Twomey and Ida
Walsh. They had met Annie when she responded to an ad about sharing the apartment. They instantly took a liking to her and offered her a room in the apartment. They last saw her just before nine
o’clock on the morning of the day she disappeared; she was sitting up in bed knitting, and Jill and Ida were heading out. They were going down the country for the weekend, and the three
wished each other a happy weekend before Jill and Ida pulled the front door shut.
Annie later left the apartment to walk the short distance to Quinnsworth in Sandymount. She bought ingredients to make up some desserts for Café Java, where she was due back at work the
next day. The receipt for the ingredients shows that she paid for the goods at 11:02 a.m. She then went to the AIB branch in Sandymount; she wanted to change her account from the Clondalkin to the
Sandymount branch. When she arrived in Dublin in January 1993 she had stayed with her friends Hilary and Philip Brady at their home at Cherrywood Avenue, Clondalkin. She was also storing a car she
had at the Brady home, but she had now settled into her apartment in Sandymount. The closedcircuit television tape of Annie in the AIB branch in Sandymount shows her going about her normal life.
There is nothing out of the ordinary. After leaving the bank she walked back to her apartment, where she later phoned Anne O’Dwyer to see if she wanted to join her for a walk in Enniskerry.
She also phoned Hilary Brady to arrange that he and his fiancée, Rita Fortune, come over for dinner the following evening. She didn’t leave the apartment again until around 3:15 p.m.,
when she left to jump on the number 18 bus for Ranelagh.
Annie had been friendly with the Brady family for many years. Soon after she arrived in Ireland in 1988 to begin her studies at St Patrick’s Training College in Drumcondra she began going
out with Philip Brady. This was one of two serious relationships she had while she studied in Ireland. She later met Dermot Ryan, a fellow sociology student at St Patrick’s College, Maynooth,
and they dated for about two years. After Annie and Philip Brady broke up they remained on friendly terms, and Annie kept in regular contact with the Brady family, including Philip’s brother
Hilary and his fiancée. On the day she disappeared she was looking forward to preparing dinner the following evening for Hilary and Rita.
Hilary Brady was concerned almost immediately about Annie. It was around eight o’clock on the evening of Saturday 27 March 1993, and he and Rita were standing outside Annie’s
apartment. He was ringing the doorbell, but there was no response. This was not like Annie: if she had to cancel the dinner engagement, surely she would have phoned. The apartment was in darkness.
Hilary couldn’t remember Annie’s phone number. He still had her home number in New York from many years before. It would be the afternoon in New York, and John or Nancy would definitely
have Annie’s phone number. ‘Nancy, I’m standing outside Annie’s apartment in Dublin, but I don’t have her phone number,’ he explained. Nancy gave him the number,
and they had a brief chat. Hilary tried the number, but there was no answer. It was now dark. They went for a drink in a nearby pub and tried again later. There was still no answer. The couple
decided there wasn’t much else they could do at that hour of the night, so they headed home.
The next day Hilary called into Café Java in Leeson Street. What he was told only increased his concern. Annie had not turned up for work. She had been due in the day before, and had not
phoned to say she wouldn’t be in. It was quickly established that the last time anyone had seen her in work was about three o’clock on the Thursday afternoon. Hilary phoned
Annie’s flatmates, who had arrived home from the country. She wasn’t in the apartment. The ingredients she had bought were still in a plastic bag on the kitchen table. Hilary Brady made
another phone call to John and Nancy McCarrick in New York. ‘No-one’s seen Annie. She hasn’t been to work. She’s not at home.’
Annie McCarrick was a confident woman, chatty and friendly. She made many friends in Ireland from the time she first arrived in 1987. For Annie McCarrick to decide to go for a walk alone in the
foothills of the Dublin-Wicklow Mountains was the act of a confident and resourceful woman. When she arrived back in Ireland in January 1993 her work papers weren’t in order, but she just
couldn’t wait to get back to Ireland, to her friends. When one job fell through because of problems with her work visa, she wasn’t too bothered: she just began looking for another job.
On 17 March 1993—nine days before she was murdered—she joined thousands of people in O’Connell Street, Dublin, where she celebrated St Patrick’s Day. She missed her family
back in New York, but she was where she wanted to be.
