{"id":309309,"date":"2026-02-21T05:53:10","date_gmt":"2026-02-21T05:53:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/309309\/"},"modified":"2026-02-21T05:53:10","modified_gmt":"2026-02-21T05:53:10","slug":"the-search-for-the-irish-women-who-have-gone-missing-in-the-vanishing-triangle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/309309\/","title":{"rendered":"The search for the Irish women who have gone missing in the Vanishing Triangle"},"content":{"rendered":"

Patricia Doherty was the first to vanish. The 30-year-old mother-of-two, who worked as a prison officer in Mountjoy Jail, disappeared two days before Christmas 1991.\u00a0<\/p>\n

She had earlier spent much of that day purchasing presents in The Square shopping centre in Tallaght. It was six months later that a man out cutting turf in the Dublin mountains found Patricia\u2019s buried body.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"PatriciaPatricia Doherty went missing in 1991 and was found murdered in June 1992.<\/p>\n

She was identified by dental records and rings she wore. Her front door house key was found close to her body. Patricia was one of two women whose bodies were recovered six months after they had vanished.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The other case was Marie Kilmartin, who disappeared from Portlaoise in mid-December 1993. For 176 days Marie\u2019s body lay submerged in a watery grave. A large concrete block which her killer had placed on top of her chest, ensured her body stayed rigid beneath bog water at a remote spot on the Laois-Offaly border.<\/p>\n

Just like Patricia Doherty\u2019s case, Marie Kilmartin\u2019s body was only found by chance during turf cutting. Just like Patricia\u2019s case, Marie\u2019s case remains unsolved. Marie\u2019s daughter \u00c1ine continues to campaign for the State to do more to solve her mother\u2019s case and all such cases.<\/p>\n

\u2018Vanishing Triangle\u2019<\/p>\n

The other six women to vanish in unexplained circumstances in the 1990s have never been found. They are all murder cases, garda\u00ed now acting on the belief that all six missing women were killed and their bodies hidden in places which have never been located.<\/p>\n

The term \u2018Vanishing Triangle\u2019 has been applied by the media to the part of Leinster from where the women disappeared. I\u2019ve never liked the term (I don\u2019t know why), but I have come to accept it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s true there is a geographical concentration of misery brought about by killers who have hidden their victims. If you link the dots that join Dundalk to Tullamore to Wexford and back to Dundalk, it does concentrate the mind.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Within that triangle not only did 17-year old Ciara Breen vanish from Louth, and expectant mother Fiona Pender disappear from Offaly, and mother-of-one Fiona Sinnott go missing from Wexford \u2014 but Annie McCarrick, Jo Jo Dullard and Deirdre Jacob also disappeared from within that shape.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Six women missing without trace, all murdered. Six killers getting away with murder, unless of course two or more of the cases are linked, and a serial killer was targeting women in the 1990s.<\/p>\n

Dashed hopes<\/p>\n

These troubling matters have long been parsed by garda\u00ed, but it\u2019s the families who have had to endure the decades of real turmoil.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve written books and broadcast TV documentaries about these cases. It\u2019s my job to try and sum up the enormity of the scandal that killers were able to roam Irish roads in the 1990s and abduct, murder and hide women.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I still struggle to find adequate words. But quite simply it is shocking that it happened, and it is deeply disturbing that these cases have not been solved.<\/p>\n

Hopes have been raised so many times that breakthroughs were imminent. I remember standing outside Tullamore garda station in 1997 after five people were arrested in connection with the disappearance of Fiona Pender.\u00a0<\/p>\n

All day I waited for news of a development, but eventually all five were being released without charge.<\/p>\n

\"FionaFiona Pender was seven months pregnant at the time she went missing in August 1996. <\/p>\n

In 2014, I stood at a forest in the Slieve Bloom mountains where trees were being felled in preparation for an excavation of an area in a search for Fiona.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Garda\u00ed had received information Fiona might have been buried in soil where saplings had later been planted. But after a number of weeks that search ended without success.<\/p>\n

Last summer, I sat for hours in my car outside a house in Clondalkin, west Dublin, which was being searched for the body of Annie McCarrick. Those currently living at the house had no link to the case, but their back garden was being excavated by garda search teams chasing down a lead that a body might be buried there since 1993.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"AnnieAnnie McCarrick. File photo: Garda Press Office<\/p>\n

I watched as cadaver dog Fern, who had been part of the search which recovered the body of Tina Satchwell in her home in Youghal, was brought to the house in Clondalkin. It\u2019s a matter of continuing controversy that garda\u00ed still don\u2019t have their own cadaver dog, and have to borrow Fern from the PSNI.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Fern gave no indication of anything at the house search in Clondalkin, and garda\u00ed eventually announced the search had ended with no trace of Annie being found.<\/p>\n

Garda\u00ed have searched in all types of terrain for the missing women. Officers have been waist deep in bog water in Dundalk searching for Ciara Breen. Ciara was only 17 when she vanished. She\u2019s labelled as one of the missing women, but she was just a child.<\/p>\n

\"CiaraCiara Breen was only 17 when she vanished from her home in Dundalk in 1997.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Searchers have excavated vast acres of farmland for Jo Jo Dullard. They\u2019ve drained a man-made lake in Co. Wexford looking for Fiona Sinnott. They\u2019ve excavated a pet cemetery in Co. Wicklow looking for Annie McCarrick, all without success.<\/p>\n

But sometimes families want garda\u00ed to search locations, and officers either don\u2019t do it, or are too slow. Sometimes families have conducted their own searches.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Fiona Sinnott\u2019s family excavated the foundations of a house extension looking for Fiona. It\u2019s both admirable and somewhat numbing to think of Fiona\u2019s uncle and brothers searching the ground for her body.\u00a0<\/p>\n

More recently the Sinnott family were heartened by a fresh Garda search in south-east Co. Wexford, but again no trace of the murdered woman was found.<\/p>\n

The killers<\/p>\n

Some of the investigations have led officers to believe some missing women knew their killers, and that the cases are isolated crimes.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In others, such as Jo Jo Dullard and Deirdre Jacob, it\u2019s long been believed the women were murdered by random attackers, but now it\u2019s clear from this week\u2019s search of a quarry in Co. Wicklow that garda\u00ed are following a theory that the same killer may have targeted both women.<\/p>\n

Jo Jo disappeared late at night from a phone box in Moone, Co. Kildare, in November 1995. Deirdre vanished from the gate of her home in Newbridge in the middle of a bright afternoon in July 1998.<\/p>\n

Abductions happen in a split second. I know from reporting other attacks down the years that an attacker might punch a victim hard in the face without warning to stun them and then immediately force them into a vehicle.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Within seconds the victim has vanished from where last seen. Within minutes they can be many miles from their last known location. And for decades their bodies can then remain hidden.<\/p>\n

As long as there are searches underway there is hope. Search techniques and equipment are vastly different today than in the years when Jo Jo and Deirdre vanished. And there are new investigative tools which also might assist.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Amid the tens of thousands of leads that have been amassed in the cases, the onset of AI could be very useful in trying to find any possible links between any of the missing women.<\/p>\n

So many women\u2019s murdered bodies lie hidden in Leinster. So many killers escaped justice. I\u2019d venture a guess many of those killers are still alive, going about their daily lives today.<\/p>\n

That angers me. I can\u2019t imagine how the families of the women feel.<\/p>\n

Barry Cummins is the author of Missing<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Patricia Doherty was the first to vanish. The 30-year-old mother-of-two, who worked as a prison officer in Mountjoy…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":309310,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[56556,61,60,43],"class_list":["post-309309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-violence-against-women","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309309","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=309309"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309309\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/309310"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=309309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=309309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=309309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}