The Women Who Vanished

The Modern Shadow Behind Why the Curlew Cries

Part Two: The Cases That Refused to Go Away

In Part One, I wrote about Bridget Cleary.
A young woman killed in Tipperary in 1895 because the people around her came to believe that she had been taken by the fairies and replaced with something else.
That story gave Why the Curlew Cries some of its older darkness. Folklore, isolation, strange beliefs surviving beside modern life.
But there is another shadow behind the book.

And this one is much closer to us.
Women disappeared from Irish roads, towns and homes during the 1990s. Some went out for the day and never came back. Some were walking home. Some were standing beside roads looking for lifts.

Some vanished within sight of places where they should have been safe. They became associated with a phrase that most Irish people of a certain age will recognise immediately.

The Vanishing Triangle.

I need to be careful with that phrase. There has never been proof that one person was responsible for all of these disappearances. The cases are different, the circumstances are different, and treating them as chapters in one great Irish murder mystery risks turning real women into characters in somebody else's story.

They weren't characters.

They had families.

They had plans.

They were expected home.

And they never came home.

The Vanishing Triangle
During the 1990s, a series of disappearances involving women became increasingly prominent in Ireland.
Among the names generally associated with the so-called Vanishing Triangle are Annie McCarrick, Eva Brennan, Imelda Keenan, Jo Jo Dullard, Fiona Pender, Ciara Breen, Fiona Sinnott and Deirdre Jacob.

RTÉ's Beyond the Vanishing Triangle looked again at these cases in 2023 and at the question that inevitably followed them: were any of them connected? [1

Gardaí themselves examined that possibility. Operation TRACE was established in 1998 to look for links between a number of disappearances and to consider whether one offender might have been responsible for more than one.
That did not establish that there was a single killer.

That distinction matters.
For me, though, the connection to Why the Curlew Cries was never really about a serial killer.

It was about something simpler and, in some ways, more frightening.

A person can disappear.

A road can hold the last confirmed sighting of somebody.

Years can become decades.

And an investigation can remain alive long after almost everything else about the world has changed.

Jo Jo Dullard

Jo Jo Dullard was twenty-one.
On 9 November 1995, she travelled to Dublin and spent part of the day with friends. That night she missed her bus home to Callan, County Kilkenny.

So she did something that would not have seemed particularly extraordinary in Ireland at the time.

She hitchhiked.

She travelled by bus as far as Naas, got a lift to Kilcullen and another to Moone in County Kildare.

At 11.37 that night she telephoned her friend Mary Cullinan from Moone. During the call a car stopped. Jo Jo told her friend that she had got a lift. That was the last known interaction anyone had with her. She disappeared into the night.  There is something horribly ordinary about that sequence.

A missed bus.

A phone box.

A lift home.

Those details probably mean more to people who remember Ireland before smartphones than they do now. There was no location being shared. No little blue dot moving across a screen. No message saying, I'm nearly home.

Sometimes somebody simply left one place and was expected at another. And between those two places there could be miles of dark road.
I

n 2020, Gardaí formally reclassified Jo Jo's disappearance as a murder investigation, stating that they were satisfied serious harm had come to her. Nobody has been brought to justice for her murder. And this is not merely an old file gathering dust.

In 2026, more than thirty years after Jo Jo disappeared, Gardaí carried out new searches on land near the Wicklow-Kildare border as part of the investigations into both Jo Jo Dullard and Deirdre Jacob. The searches finished in July. Gardaí said the results would not be released for operational reasons.

The investigations remain ongoing. 

Thirty years.
And somebody is still digging. That stayed with me.

Fiona Pender

Fiona Pender disappeared the following year. She was twenty-five years old and living in a flat on Church Street in Tullamore.
Fiona was also seven months pregnant.
She was last seen at approximately six o'clock on the morning of 23 August 1996.
The day before, she had been shopping for baby clothes with her mother.

Her body has never been found. There are details in missing-person cases that become unbearable precisely because they are so normal. Baby clothes are one of them. They tell you that somebody was planning for next month. Not contemplating disappearing.

Planning.
In May 2025, Gardaí announced that Fiona's case had formally been reclassified as a murder investigation. Extensive searches had taken place over the years and five people had been arrested and detained during the investigation, but nobody has been brought to justice. 

Then, on the thirtieth anniversary of Fiona's disappearance in August 2026, Gardaí issued another appeal. Thirty years later her family still does not have her body or the body of her unborn child. Or an answer. 

There are echoes here with Why the Curlew Cries, particularly around pregnancy and a woman in danger, but I want to be absolutely clear about something. My characters are not Fiona Pender. I did not take what happened to Fiona and turn it into entertainment.

It is the emotional truth surrounding cases like hers that found its way into the novel.
The idea of somebody expected to have an entire life ahead of them simply being gone.
And everybody left behind having to live with the empty space.

Deirdre Jacob

Deirdre Jacob was eighteen. On 28 July 1998 she walked into Newbridge, County Kildare. She was preparing to return to London, where she was studying to become a teacher. She went to the bank, the post office and visited her grandmother before walking home.

There are CCTV images of her in Newbridge shortly after half past two that afternoon.
She was last seen shortly after three o'clock near the gate of her family home at Roseberry. And then she was gone.  That one has always disturbed me. Not because it happened somewhere wild. Quite the opposite. Deirdre made it home, almost.

She was not miles away on an isolated mountain road. She had not vanished during some journey across the country.She was near her own front gate. Twenty years after her disappearance, Gardaí reclassified the case as a murder investigation. A file has been submitted to the Director of Public Prosecutions, but no prosecution has been directed. 

And again, the investigation continues.
The land searched in Wicklow in 2026 was examined as part of the investigations into both Deirdre and Jo Jo.

Two young women.
Two cases separated by almost three years.
And nearly three decades later, Gardaí were still standing in a field looking for answers. [

That image could probably sit inside Why the Curlew Cries without me changing very much. Not because I wrote these cases into the book. Because that is the sort of thing the book is about. Old cases are not always dead cases.

Fiona Sinnott

Fiona Sinnott disappeared in February 1998.
She was nineteen years old and the mother of an eleven-month-old daughter. She lived at Ballyhitt near Broadway in County Wexford and was making plans for her daughter's first birthday. On 8 February, Fiona went to Butler's Pub in Broadway with friends. She left around midnight. It was the last confirmed sighting of her. 

A motorist later reported seeing a man and woman near Kisha Cross around that time, with two other young men nearby. Gardaí have repeatedly appealed for those people to come forward. They never have.  Again there is that awful simplicity. She left a pub.
That is it. A completely ordinary sentence until you add and she was never seen again.
In July 2025, Gardaí carried out another search on open ground in County Wexford. By that point the investigation had generated thousands of documents, more than 500 statements and six arrests over the years.

The search ended.
The investigation did not. The problem with a good story There is something we do as writers that becomes dangerous when we move from fiction into real crime.

We look for patterns.
It is almost impossible not to. Put several unexplained disappearances on a map and the mind immediately starts drawing lines between them. That is how stories work.

Cause.
Effect.

Connection.

Resolution. 

Real life owes us none of those things.The phrase Vanishing Triangle itself creates a story before we know whether one actually exists. It suggests a defined place, a pattern and perhaps even one person operating inside it.

That may not be true.
These women may have been victims of entirely separate crimes.
Some of the cases historically grouped under the term may have no connection to any of the others.
We do not know.
And perhaps we do not know is the most important sentence in this entire article.
Because that is what their families have had to live with.
What found its way into the book
When I started writing Why the Curlew Cries, I was interested in what happens after everybody else has stopped looking.
What does an old investigation become?
A box?
A file number?
Photographs in an envelope?
Names in somebody's notebook?
And what happens if one person cannot leave it alone?
That became part of Jack Dawson.
Jack is not some brilliant detective who sees what everyone before him missed. I never wanted him to be.

He is a good, damaged man trying to finish something his dead partner started. He keeps going. Sometimes that matters more than brilliance.

The real investigations discussed here are obviously far larger and more complicated than anything in my novel. They involve generations of Gardaí, search teams, forensic specialists, witnesses and families who have spent decades refusing to let the names of the missing disappear with them.
But that refusal to stop looking lodged somewhere in the book.

So did the roads.
The fields.

The houses sitting alone.

The ordinary journey that suddenly has no end.

And the idea that somewhere, perhaps quite close to where everybody has already looked, there may still be an answer. They are still missing. It would be convenient for this article if these stories belonged to the past.

They don't.

Fiona Pender's thirtieth anniversary appeal was issued in August 2026.  Gardaí searched land connected with the investigations into Jo Jo Dullard and Deirdre Jacob in 2026. 

Land was searched in connection with Fiona Sinnott's murder investigation in 2025. These are not legends. They are active investigations. That is the difference between this part of the story and Bridget Cleary. Bridget's grave is known. We know who killed her.

More than a century later we can argue about why, about folklore and gender and politics and everything that surrounded what happened inside that cottage.

The families of these women do not even have that certainty. For many of them there is still only the last sighting.

The last telephone call.

The last walk home.

And then nothing.

Why the Curlew Cries is fiction.

But some of the things casting shadows across its pages are not. And perhaps that is why the curlew seemed the right bird for the title.

You can hear its cry travelling across an empty landscape long after you have lost sight of where it came from.

Sources and further reading
RTÉ, “Why were these missing person cases not solved?” / Beyond the Vanishing Triangle (2023).

An Garda Síochána, 30th anniversary appeal: disappearance and murder of Josephine “Jo Jo” Dullard (2025).

An Garda Síochána, investigation into the disappearance and murder of Jo Jo Dullard (2020).

An Garda Síochána, update on 2026 searches in the investigations into Jo Jo Dullard and Deirdre Jacob.

An Garda Síochána, 30th anniversary of the disappearance and murder of Fiona Pender (2026).

An Garda Síochána, investigation into the disappearance and murder of Fiona Pender (2025).

An Garda Síochána, public appeal concerning the disappearance and murder of Deirdre Jacob (2023).

An Garda Síochána, renewed appeal on the disappearance and murder of Fiona Sinnott (2023).

An Garda Síochána, renewed appeal concerning Fiona Sinnott (2017).

An Garda Síochána, 2025 search in the investigation into the disappearance and murder of Fiona Sinnott.

Books and further reading

Barry Cummins, Missing: The Unsolved Cases of Ireland’s Vanished Women and Children (Gill Books). A detailed examination of Ireland’s long-term missing-person cases, including Jo Jo Dullard, Fiona Pender, Fiona Sinnott, Deirdre Jacob and Operation TRACE. 

Further information
Alan Bailey, Missing, Presumed (Liberties Press). Bailey served for thirteen years as National Coordinator of Operation TRACE and writes from direct experience of Garda investigations into several of the women associated with the Vanishing Triangle. Further information

Claire McGowan, The Vanishing Triangle: The Murdered Women Ireland Forgot (Little A). A more recent examination of eight women who disappeared in Ireland during the 1990s, and of the wider social and cultural context surrounding the cases. Further information