Credit: Dangerous Minds

Like so many others, Annie McCarrick left her native United States of America to connect with her heritage and move to Dublin, Ireland.

She’d first visited in 1987 and had fallen so totally for the country that she’d spent the next couple of years on and off studying there, before returning to New York to finish up her studies at Stony Brook University.

It seemed that all of this was to prepare for a jaunt across the Atlantic because by the time her studies were complete in January 1993, McCarrick had made the necessary arrangements to move to Dublin full-time. She’d arranged two part-time jobs for herself as a waitress and was ready to start her life properly.

Within two months, she was gone. Nobody has seen her since.

The case made headlines, as you can imagine, but this was a single disappearance in one of the major cities in Europe. Especially one that happened in the wake of St Patrick’s Day. It was a tragedy, but one that was known to happen at times like that. However, within a year, two other women were gone. Eve Brennan, another Dublin resident, in July 1993, and then Imelda Keenan, who disappeared from her hometown of Waterford City on January 3rd, 1994.

These three disappearances, and the relatively short distance between them, especially between McCarrick and Brennan, upgraded these from tragic news stories to the first stirrings of a national panic of a serial killer or kidnapper operating in the major cities of Ireland.

Three disappearances are frightening enough, but over the next four years, a further five women disappeared, one a year, until two in the final year of 1998. Jojo Dullard, Fiona Pender, Fiona Sinnot, Clara Breen and Deirdre Jacob.

The international outcry that followed this caused the national guard of Ireland, An Garda Síochána, to set up a task force dedicated to bringing the people responsible for the disappearance of these women (and who knows what else) to justice. This task force, called ‘Operation Trace’, has been active ever since and has offered a reward of €10,000 for information that results in the recovery of a body. While a body hasn’t been recovered, a few suspects have been unearthed in the 30 years since McCarrick’s disappearance.

The first major candidate that officials thought could be responsible for these atrocities was Larry Murphy. In 2000, he made headlines across Ireland for the alleged kidnapping, rape and attempted murder of a Carlow businesswoman, and the presence of a pre-dug grave strongly suggested that this wasn’t the first time he had acted in this manner. He was questioned regarding the disappearances but denied any involvement. Considering he didn’t so much admit to the abduction and assault of the woman from Carlow as boast about it with a sick amount of pride, there’s a chance he had been telling the truth.

Murphy remains the main suspect in the Deirdre Jacob case and a person of interest in the Annie McCarrick and JoJo Dullard cases. He’s not the only one, though. People have been arrested for the murder of Clara Breen and JoJo Dullard, with a new suspect arrested for the murder of McCarrick occurring as recently as June 2025. However, none of the charges have stuck at the time of writing. Perhaps this will change in due course, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Because after all, for years, ‘Operation Trace’ was operating under the assumption that all these cases could be traced back to a single man or group of men responsible, that these actions were so heinous that they could only be done by a few truly sick people, and the truth is that there are a lot more men capable of actions like this than anyone would like to admit. The ‘Vanishing Triangle’, as the locations were referred to, might have suggested on the surface that this was turf that a serial killer might have operated on.

As time has gone on, though, it’s become more likely that these are all individual cases that just happened to occur within months and miles of each other. It’s just this dangerous to be a woman, it turns out, and we could have asked any woman in our lives and discovered the exact same thing. One hopes, for the sake of the women lost, that their abductors are brought to justice. It’s the most anyone can hope for anyway.