The Vanishing Triangle | Ireland
On the 28th of July, 1998, eighteen-year-old Deirdre Jacob was walking home in Newbridge, County Kildare. She had just returned from studying at St. Mary's University in London and was home for the summer holidays. Multiple witnesses saw her only yards from her family’s home – so close, she could probably see her front door. But Deirdre never made it inside. She simply vanished.
By this point, the Gardaí had hoped they wouldn't have to add another name to the growing list: since 1993 six young women had vanished within an 80-mile radius around Dublin.
The similarities between the cases were eerie, chilling even – and to this day, none of them has ever been solved.
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In March 1993, Annie McCarrick, a 26-year-old American student, was living her dream in Dublin. Born in New York in 1966, Annie had always been fascinated by her Irish ancestry. In 1987, she made the bold decision to move to Ireland permanently, settling in the seaside suburb of Sandymount.
Annie was the kind of person who embraced life fully. She loved the Irish countryside, particularly the Wicklow Mountains, and often took solo hiking trips to clear her mind. On Friday March 26, she called a friend, asking if she wanted to join her for a walk in the mountains. Her friend couldn’t make it, but Annie decided to go by herself, something she’d done countless times before.
She boarded a bus from Dublin city center, heading toward the mountains. A friend spotted her from the top deck and watched as Annie got off at Enniskerry, a picturesque village at the foot of the Wicklow Mountains. It was a clear afternoon; the village busy with locals and tourists. That was the initially believed to be the last sighting of Annie McCarrick.
However, later in the investigation, a doorman at Johnnie Fox's Pub in Glencullen, about four miles from where Annie was seen leaving the bus, came forward, claiming he saw her inside the pub with a man. According to his account, they were in the lounge area before the man paid cover charges for both of them to enter the cabaret section. After that, they disappeared into the crowd.
Annie had made dinner plans that evening with friends Hillary Brady and Rita Fortune. When she didn't show up and couldn't be reached, her friends grew worried. They contacted Annie's parents in New York, who immediately flew to Ireland. For six months, they searched desperately for their daughter, combing through the mountains with volunteers and police. But they found nothing.
The search was thorough. Flyers were posted, interviews conducted, and appeals made across media. Still, there was no trace.
The investigation faced immediate challenges. Annie's case didn’t initially receive the attention it deserved. She was a foreign student, and some officials seemed to assume she might have simply decided to leave Ireland.This dismissive attitude would become a recurring theme in several of the cases. It was a presumption that cost precious time.
Then, just four months after Annie's disappearance, the pattern began to emerge. On July 25th, 1993, 40-year-old Eva Brennan left her family home in Rathgar, Dublin, after lunch. She was never seen again.
Eva came from a well-known family in the community – they owned a pub, and Eva's grown children visited the family home daily. She wasn't the type to disappear without saying anything. She worked most of the time, and spent her free time at the family pub.
When Eva's parents didn't hear from her for two days – which was highly unusual – her father went to check on her apartment. When no one answered the door, he asked a barman from a local pub to help him break a window and gain entry.
Inside, they found Eva's jacket – the one she'd been wearing when they last saw her. This meant she had made it home safely after lunch. But what happened next remains a mystery. Where had she gone from there? And why would she leave without her jacket?
The investigation into Eva's disappearance revealed a troubling detail: she had been struggling with depression before she vanished. This led some to speculate that she might have harmed herself. However, the Brennan family was frustrated by what they saw as a lack of urgency from the Gardaí. A proper search for Eva didn't begin until three months after her disappearance. By then, any trace of her had vanished. Whatever had happened to Eva—who she saw, where she went, or why – was lost to time. Her name would be the second on a growing list of women who seemed to vanish into thin air.
The new year saw the disappearance of a third young woman. In January, 1994, twenty-two-year-old Imelda Keenan was starting fresh in Waterford City. Originally from Mountmellick in County Laois, she had moved to Waterford to be closer to her two brothers and was enrolled in a computer course at the Central Technical Institute.
Imelda lived with her boyfriend, Mark Wall, in an apartment on William Street, near the city center. Their relationship seemed stable, and Imelda was looking forward to completing her studies. On that January afternoon, she told Mark she was going to the post office – a simple errand that should have taken less than an hour.
She left their apartment at 1:30 PM and walked down William Street. A doctor's secretary who knew Imelda well saw her crossing the road at the intersection of Tower Hotel and Lombard Street. Another acquaintance also spotted her during this short journey. But Imelda never made it to the post office.
What makes Imelda's disappearance particularly puzzling is the short distance involved and the number of people who saw her. Waterford's city center isn't large, and the route to the post office was straightforward. Yet somewhere in those few blocks, in broad daylight, Imelda vanished without a trace.
The investigation faced the same challenges that had plagued Annie McCarrick's case. Initial response was limited, and crucial time was lost. By the time a comprehensive search was launched, any immediate evidence had likely been compromised or lost entirely.
Another young woman gone. Another family left in the dark.
Then, before the year was out, the silence swallowed its next victim.
On Friday night, 21-year-old Josephine "JoJo" Dullard was trying to get home to Callan, County Kilkenny. JoJo had been living in Harold's Cross, Dublin, while juggling work and studying beauty therapy. But she was going through a rough patch – the pressure of balancing everything had become too much, and she'd recently dropped out of her course.
JoJo had made the decision to move back home to Callan to be with her family. On that November evening, she was returning home for what she thought would be a fresh start. But JoJo missed her direct bus to Callan. Not wanting to wait until morning, she decided to take the next available bus to Naas, County Kildare, planning to hitchhike the rest of the way, but she never made it home.
JoJo was last seen at a payphone near Moone, County Kildare, at 11:37 PM. She called her friend Mary Cullinan to say she'd be home soon. During the call, JoJo suddenly said she had to go because she was about to get a ride with someone. She ended the call and was never heard from again.
In 2020, Gardaí reclassified JoJo’s case as a murder investigation. She is now officially treated as a homicide victim.
A witness reported seeing JoJo leaning against the back of a dark-colored Toyota Carina, appearing to talk to someone inside the vehicle. Another unconfirmed sighting placed her walking along a road in Castledermot, County Kildare, but this was never verified.
Despite extensive investigations and public appeals, the car and its driver were never identified.
Then, yet again, the cycle repeated…
On the 23rd of August, 1996, 25-year-old Fiona Pender – seven months pregnant – left her home in Tullamore, County Offaly where she lived with her boyfriend, John Thompson. A model by profession, Fiona was excited about becoming a mother.
That morning, she left for what seemed like a routine outing. But she never came back. Her disappearance bore eerie similarities to Imelda Keenan’s – broad daylight, a familiar place, and no sign of struggle. Just... gone.
The investigation into Fiona's disappearance took a dramatic turn twelve years later in 2008. A hiker discovered a small wooden cross with "Fiona Pender" carved into it. The cross was found in the Slieve Bloom Mountains, leading investigators to believe that Fiona's body might be buried somewhere in this remote area.
From the beginning, police believed that Fiona was abducted by someone known to her family. The circumstances of her disappearance suggested this wasn't a random crime. However, despite their suspicions, the Gardaí never publicly released the name of their primary suspect. And ultimately: they never found Fiona or her remains.
Fiona’s pregnancy made her disappearance all the more devastating. It wasn’t just one life that was lost – it was two.
Seventeen-year-old Ciara Breen was the youngest of the vanished women. She was last seen on February 13th, 1997. She lived with her mother, Bernadette, in Dundalk, County Louth. Ciara was a typical teenager – sometimes testing boundaries, but generally close to her family.
On that February night, Bernadette last saw Ciara when they both went to bed at midnight. It was a normal evening, nothing out of the ordinary. But when Bernadette got up at 2 AM to use the bathroom, she noticed that Ciara wasn't in her bed. The window was open, and Bernadette initially assumed her daughter had snuck out – something that had happened before.
But Ciara never came home.
The investigation into Ciara's disappearance remained cold for years until 2014, when two witnesses came forward with new information about her last known whereabouts. This led to a breakthrough in 2015 when a man in his fifties, identified as Liam Mullen, was brought in for questioning. Mullen would have been in his thirties in 1997, making him a viable suspect.
Mullen denied any involvement in Ciara's disappearance, and without sufficient evidence, Gardaí couldn’t charge him. However, many people in the community believed he knew more than he was saying.
Ciara’s case also exposed a familiar flaw in how teenage disappearances were handled at the time. Because she’d snuck out before, it was assumed she’d done the same again. But those early assumptions cost time – time that might have made all the difference. When the alarm was truly raised, whatever clues there might have been, were already gone.
February 8th, 1998. Nineteen-year-old Fiona Sinnott spent the evening at Butler's Pub in Broadway, County Wexford, with her ex-boyfriend Sean Carroll – the father of her 11-month-old daughter, Emma. Despite their breakup, they maintained contact because of their child.
According to Sean, he walked Fiona home to her house in Ballyhitt after their night out and stayed the night, sleeping on her couch. Fiona complained of a sore arm that had grown more painful overnight. She said she was going to see a doctor and planned to hitchhike to the local medical centre.
Sean said he gave her three pounds for the doctor's visit before leaving with his mother, who was taking him back to their home where baby Emma had spent the night.
Fiona never made it to the doctor, and she never returned to collect her daughter.
When Gardaí looked into Fiona’s supposed medical visit, they found something troubling: no clinic or hospital in the area had any record of her ever arriving. There was no appointment. No sign she’d ever left the house.
Then the case took a stranger turn. When investigators searched Fiona’s home, they found it unusually bare. Her clothes were gone. So were all of baby Emma’s belongings. Neighbours recalled seeing black garbage bags outside the house in the days after she vanished. But when Gardaí went to look, the bags were nowhere to be found.
Later, a local farmer contacted the Gardaí. He had found black bags containing clothing and documents with Fiona Sinnott's name on his property. He initially thought it was just illegally dumped trash – something that happened regularly on his land. It was only after hearing about the teenager’s disappearance that he realised what he’d stumbled upon.
Police believed someone had deliberately cleared out Fiona's apartment to make it appear she had run away. But the evidence suggested something far more sinister.
The case resurfaced in 2008, when a marble plaque in Fiona’s memory - set to be unveiled at a cemetery on Our Lady’s Island - was stolen the night before the ceremony. The timing felt intentional. A calculated move to inflict maximum pain on Fiona’s family. And it suggested something even more chilling: that someone, possibly involved in her disappearance, was still watching.
Initially, Fiona’s case wasn’t linked to the other Vanishing Triangle cases. But in time, investigators reconsidered. The circumstances, the lack of evidence, the suddenness of her disappearance – it all fit the pattern.
July 28th, 1998. Eighteen-year-old Deirdre Jacob was back home in Newbridge, County Kildare, for the summer holidays. A student at St. Mary’s University in London, she looked forward to these visits – time with family, old friends, familiar streets.
On that July afternoon, Deirdre was walking home to her parents' house. A route she’d taken countless times. Multiple witnesses saw her along the road – just yards from her front gate. She was so close, she could likely see the house. But she never made it inside - she simply vanished…
The proximity to her home made Deirdre's disappearance particularly baffling. This wasn’t a case of someone going missing in remote countryside, or between towns. Deirdre was on her own street, within sight of safety. And yet, she disappeared—without a sound, without a trace.
Deirdre’s case was the tipping point. Later that year, Gardaí launched a dedicated unit investigating these disappearances as a potential series. The aim was to look at these cases not as isolated incidents, but as part of a larger pattern.
Her case was reclassified as a murder investigation in 2018
By 1998, that pattern was impossible to ignore. Six young women had gone missing in an 80-mile radius around Dublin over just five years. All of them vanished without warning. None of them were ever found.
Operation TRACE marked a shift in how the disappearances were handled. Rather than treating them as isolated cases, Gardaí began looking for connections – re-examining evidence, conducting fresh interviews, and considering the possibility of a single perpetrator.
But the investigation faced serious challenges. Years had passed. Early efforts were flawed. Memories had faded, and physical evidence was lost. With cases spread across multiple counties, coordination was difficult.
Still, patterns began to emerge. The locations formed a cluster – suggesting someone familiar with the area. And the total absence of remains hinted at a killer who knew how to hide them.
A €10,000 reward was offered for information leading to any of the missing women. However, it was never claimed.
As Operation TRACE progressed, one name stood out: Larry Murphy. A convicted rapist, Murphy’s timeline and location placed him near several of the disappearances – including those of Annie McCarrick, JoJo Dullard, and Deirdre Jacob.
His crimes came to light in February 2000 when two hunters stumbled upon him in the Wicklow Mountains. He was caught in the act – strangling a woman he had abducted from Carlow. The victim survived, and Murphy was arrested on the spot. The details were chilling. Murphy had abducted the woman, driven her deep into the mountains, and was in the process of killing her when the hunters arrived. He was later convicted of rape and attempted murder, and sentenced to 15 years in prison, serving only 14.
The remote location of this crime - and the brutality of the attack - immediately drew comparisons to the missing women. There were other reasons to suspect him too. Murphy was a carpenter by trade. He had worked in multiple locations across the region – there were even unsubstantiated reports that he had worked at Deirdre Jacob’s grandmother’s shop. His knowledge of the Wicklow Mountains, where several of the women were last seen, suggested he knew exactly where to hide a body. Even his own brother, Tom Murphy, spoke out. He said: “There’s nobody gone missing since [he’s been arrested], and I find it difficult now to believe that he wasn’t involved.”
But no matter how compelling the circumstantial evidence, there was no direct link. No bodies. No DNA. No eyewitnesses placing him with the victims. Murphy denied everything. And without proof, prosecutors had no case.
The fact that no similar disappearances occurred during his incarceration was hard to ignore. Still, investigators couldn’t say for certain. Maybe the timing was a coincidence. Or maybe the person responsible – whoever it was – had simply stopped.
While Murphy remained the primary suspect in several cases, investigators also explored other connections. Eva Brennan and Fiona Pender's disappearances were potentially linked to two murder cases: those of Antoinette Smith and Patricia Doherty.
Antoinette Smith, a 27-year-old separated mother of two, disappeared in July 1987 after attending a David Bowie concert. Almost a year later, her body was discovered in a shallow grave in the foothills of the Dublin Mountains. She had been sexually assaulted and murdered.
Four years later, 34-year-old Patricia Doherty went missing while Christmas shopping. Her remains were found six months later – less than a mile from where Antoinette had been buried. She had been strangled.
The proximity of these two gravesites to locations tied to the Vanishing Triangle cases raised difficult questions. Could the same killer be responsible? Was there a connection that had gone unnoticed for years? But without physical evidence, nothing could be proven. The cases were separated by time, by victim profiles, by motive.
Investigators also had to ask another hard question: were the disappearances even connected at all?
The clustering in time and place was compelling. But each case had its own circumstances, its own leads and theories. Some detectives worried that treating them as part of a series could actually slow progress – forcing them into a pattern that might not exist.
Author Claire McGowan, in her book The Vanishing Triangle, suggested that some of these cases might have been mishandled from the start. She pointed to how societal attitudes—especially toward young women—may have shaped early investigations. Several of the women had been out at night, traveling alone, or navigating difficult relationships. Rather than being treated as victims, they were too often dismissed as having walked away from their lives.
This attitude was especially clear in Annie McCarrick’s case. As a foreign student, it was assumed she had simply decided to leave Ireland without telling anyone. In Ciara Breen’s case, assumptions about teenage rebellion delayed what should have been an immediate response. Those lost days—and the evidence that may have disappeared with them—can never be recovered.
McGowan also explored other disappearances with similarities to the Triangle cases. Some occurred outside the 1993–1998 window, but the patterns—location, method, age—remained familiar. Still, no definitive links were ever proven.
And of course, this all happened in a time before widespread CCTV, GPS, or DNA databases. Mobile phones were rare. Social media didn’t exist. Women could disappear more easily back then—and once they were gone, there were far fewer tools to bring them back.
Even so, the cases have never truly faded.
In 2020, a retired FBI agent and an Irish private investigator re-examined Annie McCarrick’s disappearance. They uncovered new witness testimony that contradicted long-held assumptions – casting doubt on the report that Annie had been seen at Johnnie Fox’s Pub. According to this witness, she never made it that far.
Not every case once suspected to be part of the Vanishing Triangle held up under scrutiny. In 2012, the murder of Aoife Phelan – another young pregnant woman – briefly raised alarm bells. But the man eventually convicted of killing her would have been too young to be involved in the 1990s disappearances. It wasn’t connected.
Still, there’s hope. Advances in forensic science are giving investigators a second chance at old evidence. DNA analysis continues to improve. New databases and technologies have already helped solve other cold cases. These tools may yet bring answers.
But the passage of time has done little to ease the pain for the families left behind.
There’s one final detail that continues to haunt investigators. In Fiona Sinnott’s case, a memorial plaque – meant to be unveiled in her memory – was stolen the night before the ceremony. This wasn’t random. It felt personal. Deliberate. A final act of cruelty from someone who knew exactly what they were doing. It reminded everyone that the person responsible for Fiona’s disappearance might still be out there. Watching. Waiting.
And so we end where we began: with silence. With seven women – Annie, Eva, Imelda, JoJo, Fiona Pender, Ciara, and Fiona Sinnott – gone without a trace.
Someone knows what happened to them. And until that someone comes forward, these families are left to live in the space between hope and heartbreak.
The investigation is cold. But it is not closed.
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