Jo Jo case in limbo, 23 years on

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July-August 2018

N 9 November, 1995, 21-year-old Jo

Jo Dullard was travelling home to

her ﬂat in Callan, County Kilkenny.

She caught the 9pm bus from

Dublin to Naas, and hitched a lift

with ﬁrst one and then another man as far as

Moone, in County Kildare. From a phone box

in the village, she made a call to her friend

Mary. Their conversation was interrupted

when a car stopped beside the phone box in

response to Jo Jo’s waving hand. Jo Jo returned

to bid a hurried goodbye to her friend, assur-

ing her she would be home that evening, and

hung up the phone. No-one has heard from Jo

Jo since that night.

Ofﬁcial response to Jo Jo’s disappearance

was initially muted, as her frantic family

reported a four-day delay in those early, cru-

cial days. The investigation rapidly gained

momentum, however, and the missing Kilk-

enny woman became headline news, as gardaí

and Dullard’s family made repeated requests

to the public for information, in local and

national newspapers, and a variety of tips and

rumours fuelled the nationwide search.

Dullard’s disappearance has now been the

subject of two separate dedicated investiga-

tions in addition to the initial inquiry:

Operation TRACE, which was established in

1998 to explore possible connec tions bet ween

the disappearance of a number of other

women in a geographical area dubbed the

‘Vanishing Triangle’; and, most recently, one

established in 2017, based in Naas Garda sta-

tion, in direct response to pressure from her

family.

Jo Jo’s sister, Mary Phelan, who passed

away in April, spoke to

The Irish Mirror

last

year of her disappointment with the progress

of the case to date, alleging a number of

Re-enact the events

of the missing

21-year-old Kilkenny

woman, consult the

FBI, be proactive –

or nobody new will

come forward!

Jo Jo case in limbo, 23 years on

by Caitriona Kirby

Members of Dullard’s family

and John McGuinness TD insist

that an individual local to the

area where Jo Jo was last seen

warrants further investigation

NEWS

failures on the part of the Garda over the

years. According to Saoirse McGarrigle, Phelan

claimed to have been informed by a “senior

garda” that ofﬁcers “knew the identity of the

man who abduc ted, raped and killed Jo Jo”, but

that the investigation “won’t go anywhere”.

Phelan insisted also that an unsigned letter she

received from a woman claiming knowledge of

the case was never “acted on” by the Garda.

The relationship between Jo Jo’s family and

the Garda, strained from the earliest days of

the investigation, disintegrated entirely in Janu-

ary 1999 during Operation TRACE, when an

anonymous Garda source leaked information

on an abortion obtained by Jo Jo a few months

prior to her disappearance, and suggested that

this “may have caused Jo Jo to feel suicidal”.

The

Evening Herald

quoted, at the time,

Phelan’s response to the revelation:

“Whoever that garda was, he has betrayed

a conﬁdence. My brother told the Garda about

the abortion in strictest conﬁdence.

She had an abortion in England three weeks

before she disappeared.

But she was not feeling down. She was in

good spirits on the night she disappeared”.

Alan Bailey, the national coordinator for

Operation TRACE, reﬂects that the Garda’s ina-

bility to “mend the damage” in the relationship

with the family was one of his biggest regrets.

He agrees that a member of the Garda was

responsible for the leak, but reiterated what he

wrote in his 2014 book on Operation TRACE,

Missing, Presumed –

that he has no idea who

was responsible, and could offer no insight as

to the motivation for that leak, insisting, “this

malicious act was, at the very least, not done

by or on behalf of anyone at Operation TRACE”.

Bailey does acknowledge that reports of Jo

Jo’s abortion were, in part, responsible for the

split between TRACE’s investigative focus, and

the ‘popular’ assumptions attached to the

case; though he also positions these various

theories of her disappearance within the f rame-

work of the “heightened speculation” that

attaches itself to high-proﬁle cases, writing,

“We were met, during the course of our

enquiries in the Moone area, with the sugges-

tion that ‘the dogs in the street’ knew who had

abducted and killed Jo Jo, and were later

accused of all being par ty to a government con-

spiracy to cover up the suspect’s identity.

Equally, it was claimed, ever ybody know where

her body was buried, yet the Gardaí had done

nothing about it”.

Two suspects have emerged in these con-

ﬂicting narratives of the case. Members of

Dullard’s family insist that an individual local

to the area where Jo Jo was last seen warrants

further investigation. John McGuinness (TD), a

long-time advocate for Jo Jo’s family, empha-

sised this point in conversation, noting that

one of their chief criticisms of the investiga-

tions to date is that gardaí “never

investigated the lands” in Kildare which

they believe are connected with Jo Jo's

disappearance.

Bailey, however, insists that this individ-

ual has been questioned, and that enquiries

were made connected with the land in ques-

tion, and he suggests that another man,

whom he pseudonymously refers to as

Michael Henry in

Missing, Presumed

, was a

focus in the TRACE investigation. At the time

of Jo Jo’s disappearance, Henr y had recently

completed “a lengthy prison sentence for a

very serious sexual assault” and a number of

witnesses claim he was travelling the same

route from Dublin that night. There were,

unfortunately, according to Bailey, evidentiar y

issues with the case – elements of the witness

statements, for instance, which later proved

unreliable, undermining any potential case for

prosecution.

Mary Phelan, however, had dismissed the

latter suspect, couching this angle as further

evidence of an attempt to derail and deﬂect

the investigation; further machinations of a

“government conspiracy”, which had already

attempted to “smear” Dullard through revela-

tions of an abortion, and suicidal ideation.

John McGuinness is also critical of the latest

investigation into Dullard’s disappearance,

which he views, at best, as a continuation of

a Garda refusal to more actively investigate

the case. Referring to it as a “desktop inves-

tigation”, he has called instead for a complete

re-enactment of the case in line with American

techniques and approaches to missing per-

sons cases. He argues that this failure to

either adapt a more proactive approach, or to

request help directly from law-enforcement

agencies such as the FBI, “troubles” him a lot,

and he suggests that the systemic refusal to

do so on the part of the Gardaí prevents any

potential new witness from coming forward.

“Someone”, McGuinness is convinced, “knows

something”.

July-August 2018

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Even the Garda’s unsolved-

cases coordinator sympathises

with the family's perception

of a “government conspiracy”,

which had already attempted

to “smear” Dullard through

revelations of an abortion, and

suicidal ideation

Jo Jo Dullard Alan Bailey, national coordinator for Operation TRACE