25: TRIANGLE. PART 2

December 14, 2022·45 min·4 clips

Stranded in Dublin after a messy pub scene, Jojo Dullard decides to hitchhike 57 miles at night.

Host Jana opens by recapping the six women covered in part one and transitions immediately to the remaining victims. JoJo Dullard, 21, left Dublin on the night of November 9, 1995, after missing her bus home to Kilkenny when her ex-boyfriend's current girlfriend arrived at the pub and reclaimed him. JoJo took a late bus to Naas and then began hitchhiking toward Kilkenny despite it being over 90 kilometers away. She received two rides, the second dropping her in the village of Moon around 11:30 p.m. She called her friend Mary from a payphone, stepped away briefly, and returned to say she had found a ride with two men — this was the last contact anyone had with her. A taxi driver came forward a year later to report seeing a barefoot woman matching JoJo's description being physically dragged back into a red Ford Sierra with British plates near Kimikau; a second witness reported a dark Toyota Carina. Fiona Pender, 25, disappeared on August 22, 1996, while seven months pregnant; she was last seen entering her apartment with her mother the previous evening, and her boyfriend claimed not to know her whereabouts. One witness reported seeing two men loading a bulky carpet-wrapped object into an SUV on Church Street that same night but no verification was ever made. Fiona's wealthy boyfriend John Thompson and his family were arrested in April 1997 but released without charge. Sierra Bream, 17, disappeared on February 13, 1997, after sneaking out of her home in Dundalk; she had been secretly communicating with an older man and investigators later uncovered a local pedophile ring they believe targeted her. A man named Liam Mullen was named as the chief suspect in Sierra's murder by an Irish newspaper in 2017, but he died before any charges were brought. Fiona Sinnott, a young mother with an 11-month-old daughter, disappeared from Ballyhit, County Wexford, on February 8, 1998; a farmer burned bags containing her mail before he knew she was missing, destroying potential evidence. Deirdre Jacob, 19, vanished on July 28, 1998, within yards of her family home after running errands in New Bridge, becoming the last officially recognized victim of the Vanishing Triangle. Claire Boylan, 36, disappeared in March 2003 after telling her parents she was meeting a friend — the friend denied any such plans — and is sometimes linked to the series despite being outside the main timeline. In 1998 Irish police established Operation Trace to investigate the disappearances, but it produced no substantial leads despite a 10,000-euro reward. The Gardaí's primary suspect across several cases is Larry Murphy, convicted of rape in 2001, who was stopped in a 2000 attack on a woman in the Wicklow Mountains when two hunters intervened. Murphy had a verifiable connection to victim Deirdre Jacob through carpentry work at her grandmother's shop. Jana argues that Murphy likely did not commit all the crimes, noting earlier witness descriptions of two men — one tall with brown hair, one shorter — and the theory that the perpetrators became more careful over time as they avoided detection.

As heard by us

A careful look at a pattern of disappearances that still resists closure.

The episode stays with the women, the missing stretches in the timeline, and the lack of urgency around the disappearances. Jana moves from the named cases to the wider pattern they point to, and that gives the piece shape without forcing an ending it does not have.

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Why you'd press play

Press play if you want a case-driven look at the Irish Vanishing Triangle.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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