Mick Rooney | Journalist & Broadcaster

On the morning of November 11th, 2024, Gardai case investigators served an arrest warrant on a man aged 55 under suspicion of the murder of Jo Jo Dullard who disappeared 29 years ago. The man was detained for questioning at Kildare Garda Station under the provisions of section 4 of the Criminal Justice Act 1984. No charges have yet been brought forward and he is the first suspect to be arrested in the case. The Dullard family were made aware of the arrest shortly after 7 am this morning. (He was later released without charge the following day and a file is being prepared for the Irish DPP). Currently gardai are executing two separate search warrants on properties and land located at Ballyhook over the Kildare/Wicklow border. Early Tuesday afternoon, the 55-year-old-man, from a prominent Wicklow political family was released without charge. Gardai believe he was the last person to see Jo Jo Dullard alive and from very early on in the case investigation he was a person-of-interest befor...

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...

 A series from Radio Espial about Ireland's so-called Vanishing Triangle of missing women.    

Since we recorded our original Timeline on the Marie Kilmartin case, we have been in contact with her daughter Áine once again and would like to bring you the following update that sheds a great deal more background on the case. However, we felt the information provided stretched far beyond just a short few minutes of update. So much, that we have decided on an unplanned Radio Espial Episode 50. I want to state that what follows is not one of our normal case Timelines and Analysis. It is testimony and an account of the tireless work and research Áine has carried out into her mother’s initial disappearance in 1993, the later discover of her body at Pim’s Lane, a bogland, six months later. Marie Kilmartin’s case is classified as a murder case by An Garda Siochana and included a series of arrests between 1994 and 2008. No one has yet been charged with her murder as of 2024. Following our broadcast of the Marie Kilmartin Case Timeline, Áine, her daughter posted a very lengthy comment on t...

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 s...

On Sunday, March 22nd, 2015, 31-year-old Dean Roche set out from his home at Hebron Park, County Kilkenny, Ireland by taxi to travel to Ballyfoyle, a journey north through the county of about 20 mins plus. Dean Roche had travelled there to purchase a cheap car he had spotted for sale on social media.  He reached the car seller’s private property and after about an hour completed the sale and received the car logbook. After leaving the seller, he crashed the car a short distance away and headed back on foot in the direction he had come. The events of the rest of that evening remain clouded in mystery as to what did and what specifically occurred. What is certain is that several incidents of trespassing and attempted house burglary were reported to local gardai that night, and an incident of a car stolen from the premises of a resident. Dean Roche was reported by witnesses to have been in the general Ballyfoyle area that night after 9 pm.  Later, a woollen Manchester United hat ...

On Tuesday 3rd May, 1988, two people were sighted on horses around the area of Powerscourt, County Wicklow, Ireland. One was recognised as Lynda Kavanagh, the other person was not immediately identified, but believed to be Priscilla Clarke, the Kavanaghs live-in nanny. Two days later, Lynda Kavanagh’s body was recovered from the local River Dargle. Priscilla’s body was never recovered and her family were never able to bring closure and finality to her disappearance. She was aged 25 at that time and the mystery of her disappearance has lasted for 36 years.  

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 ...

The Stardust fire was a fatal fire which took place at the Stardust nightclub in Artane, Dublin, Ireland, in the early hours of 14th February (Valentine's Day) 1981. More than 800 people were attending a disco there, of whom 48 died and 214 were injured as a result of the fire; in later years suicides of survivors and family members were also linked to the event. The club was located in what was formerly known as Butterly Business Park, now renamed Artane Business Park, opposite Artane Castle Shopping Centre. The escape of the disco attendees was hampered by chains and padlocks on multiple exits, by barred windows, and further by failure of the lighting system. Initially, the cause of the fire was not conclusively determined; an initial determination of arson was later found to have been one of a number of hypotheses, and unproveable. Due to the arson finding, and despite criticism of safety points, the owners of the building claimed and received public compensation, and were not l...

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 a...

Brian Kinsella went missing from his family home in Gracedieu Heights in Waterford, Ireland on the 17th November 2021. He told his parents that he was heading to a phone shop to have his new device looked at after having problems with it. This was just after 9 am. He was due in work at 12 pm at Musgrave’s Cash & Carry where he worked for his daily shift. He never turned up for work and soon it was established that he also never visited the phone shop in Waterford. He was last seen on CCTV near Grattan Quay in the town at 10.10am that morning. No trace of him or the reasons behind his disappearance were ever discovered. He was reported missing on the day of his disappearance at 7 pm. An extensive local, land and sea search began soon afterwards lasting many weeks and months right into February 2022. His case soon captured local and national media attention in Ireland due to the efforts of his family and friends. To this day, in 2024, substantive leads have never emerged. Subsequ...

At the time of her disappearance Fiona Sinnott was living in the rural village of Ballyhitt, Broadway, County Wexford, Ireland, some 120 kilometres south of Dublin City. Fiona was a young single mother, and her daughter Emma was eleven months old at the time of her mother’s disappearance. 19 year old Fiona Sinnott spent the night of Sunday February the 8th 1998 socialising with a group a friends in Butler’s Pub in Broadway Co. Wexford not far from her rented home. Fiona’s friends described Fiona as being happy that night, and in good spirits. However, her friends would later tell Gardai that Fiona was also complaining of pain in one of her arms. Fiona had been the victim of domestic violence in the past and the report of pain in her arm raised the suspicions of Gardai when examining the case. Also in Butler’s Pub that Sunday night was Fiona’s ex-boyfriend and the father of her child, he did not join Fiona and her friends and spent the night drinking at the bar alone. At roughly midnigh...

Mary Boyle (born 14 June 1970) was a six-year-old Irish girl who disappeared on the County Donegal-County Fermanagh border on 18th March 1977. To date, her disappearance is the longest missing child case in the Republic of Ireland. The investigation into her disappearance has been beset by allegations of political intervention and police incompetence. While arrests were made over many years, nobody has ever been charged in connection with her disappearance. Mary Boyle was last seen at 3:30 pm on 18 March 1977 near her grandparents' rural farm in Cashelard, near Ballyshannon, County Donegal. The family, including Mary's mother Ann, father Charlie, older brother Paddy, and twin sister Ann, had gone to Mary's maternal grandparents' house on St Patrick's Day from their home in Kincasslagh in The Rosses, further up the coast. They stayed at the grandparents home overnight into the day of her disappearance. In total, there were eleven people at the household gathering, si...

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 ...

The Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home (also known as St Mary's Mother and Baby Home) operated between 1925 and 1961 in the town of Tuam, County Galway, Ireland. It was a maternity home for unmarried mothers and their children and run by the Bon Secours Sisters, a religious order of Catholic nuns, that also operated the Grove Hospital in Tuam. Unmarried pregnant women were sent to there to give birth and interned for a year doing unpaid work. In 2012, the Health Service Executive (HSE) raised concerns that up to 1,000 children from the Home might have been sent to the United States for the purpose of illegal adoptions, without their mothers' consent. Subsequent research discovered files relating to a lower number of 36 illegal foreign adoptions from the home and concluded that allegations of foreign adoptions for money were "impossible to prove and impossible to disprove". Local historian Catherine Corless published an article documenting the history of the home in 2012...

Aer Lingus Flight 712 crashed while flying from Cork to London on 24th March 1968, killing all 61 passengers and crew. The aircraft, a Vickers Viscount 803 named St. Phelim, crashed into the sea off Tuskar Rock on the County Wexford coastline. Although the investigation into the crash lasted two years, a cause was never fully determined. Early causes proposed in several investigative reports from 1970-2000 included a bird strike, a missile or target drone, or mechanical and structural failures on critical flight controls. The flight left Cork Airport at 10:32 on Sunday morning for London, Heathrow. The flight proceeded normally until a call was heard by another Aer Lingus pilot with the radio message of "twelve thousand feet descending spinning rapidly". There was no further communications with the aircraft and London ATC informed Shannon ATC that they had no radio contact with Flight 712, EI-AOM. London ATC requested Aer Lingus Flight EI 362 (flying Dublin-Bristol) to sear...

Farah Swaleh Noor was 40 years old at the time of his death. He arrived in Ireland in December 1996, claiming to be a Somali called "Sheilila Salim" whose family had been killed in Mogadishu during the Somali Civil War. Subsequent investigations revealed that he was in fact a Kenyan. He was granted Irish citizenship in March 1999 because he had become the father of an Irish-born child. Noor had four previous convictions for offences including intoxication, threatening and abusive behaviour and assault. Noor had faced eight charges of disorder and assault, one involving a sexual assault in which a knife was found at the scene by gardaí. He was convicted on three occasions but never served time in jail. Noor lived in a number of areas in Dublin, including Dún Laoghaire and Firhouse, as well as the inner city before moving in with his then partner Kathleen Mulhall. Gardaí described him as being particularly violent towards women. On the 20th March, 2005 sisters Linda and Charl...

Adrian Bestea from Romania, whose badly beaten body was stuffed into a suitcase and dumped in Dublin's Royal Canal on the 8th July 2001, was brutally murdered. Marina Sourovtzeva, his Russian girlfriend, later claimed he had been violent towards her, so she sought the services of three men to evict him from her flat. However, this action had unforeseen consequences. In July 2002, Dublin Circuit Criminal Court heard that Romanian Adrian Bestea was murdered after Marina Sourovtzeva hired three Russians to teach him "a lesson" for his violent attacks on her. Two of three other men: Igore Derjhack and Dimitro Vasilibech would also be convicted of their involvement. Sourovtzeva (31), a Russian national, of Strand Road, Sandymount, pleaded guilty to false imprisonment and assault causing harm to 21-year-old Mr. Bestea at the Strand Road flat on July 8, 2001. This is a Radio Espial feature of this murder and a body in a suitcase. It will not be the last one featuring similar c...

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...

Fiona Pender (25) was last seen around 6am at her ground-floor flat on Church Street, Tullamore, County Offaly, Ireland on the morning of Thursday August 23rd 1996. She shared the flat with her boyfriend John Thompson. Following a several-month spell living in London from November 1995, the couple had returned back to County Offaly, Ireland in the spring. Fiona left school at 15 years of age after her Intermediate Certificate. A hairdresser by trade and occasional part-time model, Fiona was a bright, outgoing and positive young lady who always wore a smile on her face. She had trained with Kassard’s Salon and also taken up some modelling work with a friend’s agency (Emer Condron). At the time of her disappearance, Fiona was seven months pregnant and had spent the previous day out shopping with her mother. She was reported last seen by her boyfriend at the couple’s flat before he left for work. Fiona vanished without trace and for over 27 years has never been located. Following cold cas...