For 25 years the disappearance of Jo Jo Dullard was treated as a murder investigation in everything but name – that changed four years ago when the Co Kilkenny woman was finally officially declared a murder victim, writes Barry Cummins.
It was during the Covid-19 pandemic that the case of one of Ireland's longest missing women was officially declared for what everyone had always known it was.
Jo Jo Dullard was murdered in November 1995. She is last known to have been in Moone, Co Kildare, on the night of Thursday 9 November 1995. Gardaí could even pinpoint an exact time - 11:37pm - the time Jo Jo rang her friend from a phone box in the village.
In today’s world, there are very few phone boxes still around. Some 29 years ago, they were the only means for many people to communicate. There were no mobile phones, no portable internet devices to drop pins for location.
Jo Jo Dullard had hitched lifts that night. After she missed the last direct bus from Dublin back home to Callan in Co Kilkenny, the 21-year-old had taken a bus to Naas, and then hitched a lift, firstly to Kilcullen, and then to Moone. She had no way to alert her friend Mary Cullinane to where she was until she reached Moone. That phone box and that phone call Jo Jo made is the last tangible piece of evidence in a missing persons case which has baffled detectives for decades.
Original investigation
Jo Jo's family had concerns about aspects of the original investigation.
Personal information about Jo Jo, that the family gave gardaí, ended up in the media.
When a body was found in the River Shannon in 1997, Jo Jo’s family were wrongly told it might be their loved one. It turned out that body was the remains of a man.
Expectations raised, hopes dashed, ongoing torment - these are experiences of so many families of missing people.
Jo Jo's sister Mary Phelan campaigned on two fronts: she wanted searches carried out within a 20-mile radius of Moone, and she raised concerns that gardaí were not following up on certain leads around the Kildare/Wicklow border.
She often spoke about one man who had a scratch on his face when he was approached by a private detective employed by Mary in the aftermath of Jo Jo's disappearance. Mary always believed this man's property should be searched, and was frustrated that it had not been.
Mary also brought families of missing persons together - she was one of the first people to reach out to other families enduring the same agony of a loved one who had vanished without trace. Mary’s love for her sister was matched by her ambition to do everything to find her.
She contacted anybody and everybody she thought could assist in raising awareness of missing people, including Bill and Hillary Clinton and George Bush.
She was instrumental in establishing a missing persons monument in the grounds of Kilkenny Castle, and she travelled to Dáil Éireann to urge politicians to do more for all missing people, including all the women who had vanished in Leinster in the 1990s.
There were the cases of Annie McCarrick and Eva Brennan who vanished in 1993; there was Imelda Keenan, disappeared in 1994; Fiona Pender in 1996; Ciara Breen in 1997; Fiona Sinnott and Deirdre Jacob in 1998.
There were also unsolved cases of women whose bodies were found long after they had disappeared: Antoinette Smith whose body was found buried in the Dublin mountains in 1988; Patricia Doherty whose remains were also found in Dublin, in 1992; and Marie Kilmartin, whose body was found on the Laois/Offaly border in 1994.
Even now in November 2024, none of those cases have been solved. Only in the last number of years have the cases of Annie McCarrick, Deirdre Jacob and Jo Jo Dullard been reclassified as murder investigations.
Case reclassification
The official reclassification is important. Since 1995, there has been speculation in the media that Jo Jo Dullard was murdered. As months became years it became the accepted public narrative that someone had abducted and murdered Jo Jo and hidden her body. It was only during the Covid-19 pandemic that gardaí publicly agreed.
To get to that point, cold-case detectives had pored over the original case file. They had conducted 'proof-of-life' enquiries which had proven negative.
Jo Jo had not chosen to set up a new life in another land - however ludicrous such a suggestion might be, it needed to be 'bottomed-out'.
Jo Jo was nowhere to be found, if she had met with some accident - perhaps struck by a car on the roadside as she hitched - her body would have been above ground. No trace of Jo Jo's belongings were ever found, including the somewhat durable Sanyo cassette player she carried with her.
There was no other logical conclusion - Jo Jo was taken away from the phone box in Moone and killed. Her body was then hidden, and a killer (most likely a man) tried to get on with his life.
Newbridge 2020 press conference
As detectives gathered at St Conleth’s Hall in Newbridge in November 2020 to hold a press conference they knew that among the case file paperwork were people who had given different accounts about their movements.
Officers knew that within the reams of original and subsequent documentation might be the answer to the mystery, including the information provided by Jo Jo’s family down the years.
With the case now classified as a murder investigation, gardaí had the authority to set up an incident room as if the murder had just recently happened, rather than a quarter of a century before.
A Senior Investigating Officer was appointed, and a team of detectives from Kildare was assisted by members of the Garda Serious Crime Review Team. Many of the gardaí taking up this cold-case investigation would have been children when Jo Jo vanished. Now, in 2020, in the midst of a pandemic they had come to a point where a complete re-investigation of the murder of Jo Jo Dullard would take place.
Mary Phelan did not live to see the day that gardaí finally declared her sister’s disappearance a murder investigation. She died in 2018 still wondering what had become of her youngest sister.
One person who was at the press conference in November 2020 was Kathleen Bergin, another of Jo Jo’s sisters, and who had taken up the mantle of campaigning on behalf of Jo Jo.
Kathleen stood with Detective Superintendent Des McTiernan of the Garda Cold Case Unit, appealing to the public to give information.
One point made during the appeal that day was that the Covid-19 pandemic had changed us all. Many of us had become more reflective, had found we had more time to ourselves and our thoughts and our memories.
Within that new world it was hoped that someone with information about Jo Jo might find a way to pass on the information they had held close for 25 years.
The appeal was difficult but important.
It was logistically difficult as those of us who attended needed to wear face masks. Prime Time interviewed Kathleen Bergin that day while maintaining social distance, and rather than shaking hands afterwards we exchanged elbow bumps. It was somewhat surreal, but it was the best we could do.
One detective told me that the pandemic had allowed officers some space to re-assess unsolved cases. With other types of crime on the decrease (for a few months) due to lockdowns, gardaí were able to read back over unsolved cases.
The pandemic allowed them to continue to put significant time into a cold-case review. Part of that review has led to the dramatic developments of this week, with a man arrested and a search under way in Wicklow.
As he gave an update on developments at Naas Garda station on Monday, Superintendent Paul Burke pointed out that anyone with information on the murder of Jo Jo Dullard who has not yet come forward is still urged to contact gardaí on 1800 666111.
Jo Jo Dullard is known to so many now as an unrecovered murder victim, forever linked with a phone-box in Moone, Co. Kildare.
To her family Jo Jo was a beloved youngest in a family of five. As well as Mary and Kathleen, Jo Jo also had another sister Nora, and a big brother Tom.
She loved music. She was a big fan of George Michael, Michael Jackson and A-Ha. She had a dog she named Freeway, after the dog in the TV show 'Hart to Hart'.
The last words we know were spoken by Jo Jo were as she stood in that phone box in Moone. At 11:37pm 9 November 1995, she told her friend: "I have a lift. See you Mary."
