Missing Persons Day, hosted by the Irish Department of Justice, is an annual commemorative day for families and friends to remember their missing loved ones. Missing Persons Day also provides a nationwide platform to appeal to the public for information on missing persons. Radio Espial's Brian Goggin reports on his experience of this year's event at Croke Park, Dublin.    

In June 1973, seven-year-old schoolboy John Joseph Horgan from Palmerstown, Dublin was bludgeoned with a wooden club in a field close to his home while his mother was out visiting her next-door neighbour in hospital. She had entrusted the neighbour’s grandmother to watch over her son until she returned home. This is one of the most complex and disturbing murder cases we have ever covered. A case Irish authorities chose at the time to shove into what we refer to as Ireland's Pandora's Box.  

Larry Murphy is an Irish convicted criminal and predator of women. After his conviction for kidnapping, repeatedly raping, and attempting the murder of a young Carlow businesswoman on 11th February 2000, in the Wicklow Mountains, he was jailed in January 2001 for 15 years with a third of his sentence suspended or later reduced in prison. His release from Arbour Hill prison less than 10 years later drew widespread public and media criticism. His name has been erroneously and consistently connected to multiple cases in Ireland’s Vanishing Triangle—a series of missing and murdered women in the Leinster region throughout the 1990s. He is most often associated with the disappearance of Irish woman Deirdre Jacob close to her home in Newbridge, County Kildare in 1998. A file for prosecution was submitted to the Irish DPP but was later rejected on the grounds of insufficient evidence. To date (2024), Larry Murphy has only ever been charged, tried and convicted of offences in relation to his 2...

In this final episode in our Missing & Murdered series, we examine The Forgotten Cases (Part 3). The episode follows on from the first two parts - six much lower profile unsolved cases of missing women, some presumed and some confirmed murdered. These cases are often considered on the periphery of the mythical Irish Vanishing Triangle and have sadly been neglected by the media, authorities and others in recent years and we should be honouring their memories and showing them the proper respect and support that they deserve.  

For the past three decades, through news media articles in print, TV and radio shows, podcasts, documentaries and dramas, we have been sold an unproven illusion, that one or more serial killers were rampant in Ireland during the late 80s and 90s. And one devious suspect was responsible for multiple such cases of missing person cases and the deposition of bodies found in the vicinity of the Dublin and Wicklow mountains and the man who may have been responsible for many of those cases is Larry Murphy. It’s time we addressed the core media myth of Ireland’s Vanishing Triangle and its real origins. Here is your first clue. No Irish police investigation ever mentioned the phrase ‘Vanishing Triangle’. Operation Trace was not set up with the specific intention of finding Ireland’s Serial Killer. In episode 51 of Radio Espial - Missing & Murdered: Ireland’s Vanishing Triangle - Misinformation, Brian Goggin explored the origins of media misinformation across a number of cases. In this epis...

Marie Kilmartin, 35, of Beladd, County Laois, Ireland attended work at a local day-care nursing home (Portlaoise Area Social Services – P.A.S.S.) at 11 am on 16th December 1993. At 3.45 pm, two of Marie's female co-workers dropped her home and watched her walk to her front door. When Marie's housemate arrived home from her job at 6 pm, she found that Marie was not there and none of the lights in their house had been switched on. The housemate also found the house alarm was set and Marie's groceries were still unpacked hanging on a kitchen chair. A later forensic examination of Marie's home uncovered no evidence of a break-in, nor what may have led to her sudden disappearance. Gardaí did discover that around 4:20 pm on the same day, 16th December, a phone call was made to Marie's landline phone which lasted for two and a half minutes. The call was traced to a payphone in Portlaoise near St. Fintan's Hospital. A witness would later come forward stating that she sa...

Patricia Furlong (21) from Dundrum, Dublin spent the night of Friday, July 23rd, 1982 with friends at her local pub, the Nine Arches. Just before midnight, some of the group of friends decided to head to the late night Fraughan Festival held at Johnnie Fox’s pub, Glencullen, in the Dublin Mountains. In the early hours of the morning she was witnessed leaving the venue to go on a walk with a man described as dressed in an ‘all-white-suit’. Patricia never returned to her friends at the venue. Around 8 am on Saturday July 24th, two teenage girls out for a morning walk discovered Patricia’s dishevelled body lying in a field. She was dead following a brutal strangulation with her own upper clothing. Within weeks, a man emerged as a prime suspect, but it would be many years later before he was finally charged with the murder of Patricia Furlong. Nothing proved straightforward in this case… a case 42 years later that still remains unresolved. It will be a lesson to police, families and the g...

Eva Brennan, 39, of Rathgar, County Dublin, went missing on Sunday, 25th July 1993 after leaving her parents’ home in Terenure, South Dublin and walking the 15-18 minute distance back to her apartment at Madison House on Rathgar Road. Her missing person cold case is often included in Ireland's so-called Vanishing Triangle of women who went missing on the East coast of Ireland from the early to late 1990s. Eva was formally reported missing to An Garda Siochana on Tuesday, July 27th by her father Davy Brennan when relatives had not heard from her since the recent Sunday afternoon. While it is believed Eva did return to her apartment on the Sunday afternoon, because the jacket she was wearing to her parents’ house was later found in her apartment, no witness sighting or CCTV footage recorded her on the journey home. A delayed missing person inquiry was opened in the first week of her disappearance, thorough and forensic searches (of land and water) for Eva in the locales of Rathgar ...

Ciara Breen, 17, from Dundalk, County Louth, Ireland went missing on 13th February 1997, on Bachelor’s Walk where she lived with her mother in a small terrace house. She was last seen by her mother Bernadette, who said at the time that they had both gone to bed just after midnight. That day they had gone to a local café for evening dinner then returned home. According to Bernadette, she was due to get the results of a biopsy the following morning from Blackrock Clinic and Ciara was worried about this. The two had a short conversation on Bernadette’s bed before both going to sleep just after midnight. After 2 am, Bernadette got up to go to the bathroom and discovered Ciara was not in her room, nor her own bedroom. It was not the first time Ciara had snuck out during the night. She had left a window on the latch on the bottom storey of the house and it is believed she did so, so that she could climb back in. It is considered the most likely scenario in Ciara's case that she decided ...

Sophie Toscan du Plantier, a 39-year-old French woman, was killed outside her holiday home at Toormore, Goleen, County Cork, Ireland, on the night of 23rd December 1996. Her badly beaten body, still dressed in white nightwear and outdoor boots, was discovered by a neighbour the following morning close to an entrance gate at the bottom of her holiday home driveway. British journalist Ian Bailey, who lived several kilometres from Toscan du Plantier's home in Ireland, was a suspect arrested twice by the Garda Síochána, yet no charges were laid as the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) found there was insufficient evidence to proceed to trial. Bailey lost a libel case against six newspapers in 2003. He also lost a wrongful arrest case against the Gardaí, Minister for Justice, and Attorney General in 2015. In 2019, Bailey was convicted of murder by the Cour d'Assises in Paris, and sentenced to 25 years in prison. He was tried in absentia in France after winning a legal battle aga...