{"id":647356,"date":"2026-10-07T09:34:08","date_gmt":"2026-10-07T09:34:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/647356\/"},"modified":"2026-10-07T09:34:08","modified_gmt":"2026-10-07T09:34:08","slug":"brother-of-cork-man-found-dead-in-london-34-years-after-going-missing-says-family-has-closure-we-needed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/647356\/","title":{"rendered":"Brother of Cork man found dead in London 34 years after going missing says family has ‘closure we needed’"},"content":{"rendered":"

The family of a\u00a0Cork man who has been found dead in London<\/a>, having gone missing 34 years ago, have paid tribute to garda\u00ed and said it has given them the \u201cclosure we needed\u201d.<\/p>\n

Patrick \u2018Patsy\u2019 O\u2019Sullivan was 35 at the time of his disappearance. He was last seen by his family at Lombardstown, Mallow, over the Easter bank holiday weekend in April 1992.<\/p>\n

He was working as a chef in Killarney and was due to return home for a Christening, but the alarm was raised after he failed to turn up at the event.<\/p>\n

Mr O\u2019Sullivan was known to travel for work for weeks at a time, but would always maintain contact with his family.<\/p>\n

Over the course of the last three decades, following his disappearance, efforts were made collaboratively by members of An Garda S\u00edoch\u00e1na and Mr O\u2019Sullivan\u2019s family to locate the Mallow native.<\/p>\n

Jerry O\u2019Sullivan said yesterday that his brother disappeared willingly in 1992 due to being a gay man. Homosexuality was only decriminalised in Ireland in 1993.<\/p>\n

Jerry told the The Echo that he and his family were shocked after being notified of his brother\u2019s death in August and learning that he had moved to London to start a new life.<\/p>\n

Jerry said his brother changed his name in 1995 to Patrick Aldridge, which contributed to a lack of leads provided on his missing person\u2019s case over the years. Aldridge was the surname of Patrick\u2019s partner, who predeceased him in 2022.<\/p>\n

Ill for a number of years<\/p>\n

Jerry revealed that Patrick had been ill for a number of years prior to his death on July 5, 2024, having gone partially blind before dying as a result of urinary sepsis.<\/p>\n

\u201cI haven\u2019t been able to say this previously, but my brother was a gay man, and back in the early 1990s, it wasn\u2019t really accepted \u2014 so that\u2019s why he left and started a new life,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

\n \u201cI\u2019m not ashamed of him in any way, we as a family never had any issue or argument with him about it.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cI take solace in knowing that he did actually live a good life, his life \u2014 one that he didn\u2019t have here in the \u201990s due to the hatred people had for who he was.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

When Jerry and his family were told that Patrick had died, he said the news was \u201ca hard pill to swallow\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cOn August 7, Garda PJ Roche called me and asked if I would be available on the following Monday,\u201d said Jerry.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cPJ would have been in contact with us on a regular basis, giving me updates and things like that, so the last thing I expected him to tell me was that Patrick had been found.<\/p>\n

\n \u201cThey gave us the news and told us he had been found deceased, which was a hard pill to swallow. I was always hopeful that he would be found, but all the DNA they tested from John Does over the last 10-15 years was negative. So it came as a huge shock to us.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

Jerry said he believes his brother \u201cthought he was doing the right thing\u201d by leaving Ireland due to being gay.<\/p>\n

\u201cI got a lot of grief when I was younger because of his sexuality,\u201d said Jerry. \u201cIt can\u2019t have been an easy decision for him to leave his two parents and six siblings, so I must give him credit for doing something like that.<\/p>\n

\u201cLife has changed since then, I take comfort in knowing [being gay] is more accepted now, but there was a lot of cruel people back then.\u201d<\/p>\n

Discovered his identity<\/p>\n

Jerry said that prior to his brother\u2019s death, he was being cared for by a woman who discovered his original identity.<\/p>\n

This same woman paid for Patrick\u2019s cremation and, at his request, spread his ashes with the ashes of his partner at a place they frequented in London.<\/p>\n

Jerry said this woman then made attempts in 2024 to locate his family back in Ireland, which went unnoticed until now.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe person I really have to thank is the woman who looked after him. She found a piece of paper in his flat from when he changed his name in 1995, and she kept that in the hopes of finding us,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe posted something online in 2024 looking for a connection, but unfortunately nothing ever came of it.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe is an incredible lady. She was the only one who had the key to unlock all of this,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe actually paid for his funeral, which is something that I will hold dear to her forever \u2014 because it is an astonishing thing to do for someone you barely knew.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thanked garda\u00ed<\/p>\n

Jerry also thanked the garda\u00ed who worked on his brother\u2019s case, including Detective Superintendent Joanne O\u2019Brien, Superintendent Niall O\u2019Connell, Detective Inspector Anna Marie Guiney, Detective Sergeant Derek Barnett, Detective Lisa O\u2019Sullivan, and Garda PJ Roche, who he said never let his family go without an update on the investigation.<\/p>\n

\u201cBetween them, they gave us the closure we needed,\u201d said Jerry.<\/p>\n

Jerry further revealed he will be travelling to the UK in November to meet with a number of people who knew his brother over the last three decades.<\/p>\n

\n \u201cI\u2019m hoping that we weren\u2019t far from the back of Patrick\u2019s mind, that he never forgot about us.\n <\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ll get to meet a few of his neighbours next month, and the woman who cared for him. I want to meet as many people as I possibly can to get some bit of information on his life.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I get back, we\u2019re going to do something here for him, maybe a memory box and getting his name put on a headstone.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The family of a\u00a0Cork man who has been found dead in London, having gone missing 34 years ago,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":647357,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[79,61,60,78692,43],"class_list":["post-647356","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-cork-news","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-mallow","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/647356","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=647356"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/647356\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/647357"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=647356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=647356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=647356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}