Jo Jo Dullard (Suspected Murder)

On the evening of November 9th 1995 Jo Jo Dullard found herself stranded in Dublin after she missing her last bus home. The 21 year old had just moved back to her family home in Callan and was determined to make the 145km journey that night. Through a combination of bus journeys and hitchhiking she made it as far as the town of Moone. Still an hours drive from Callan she found phone box to call a friend and explained her predicament. As Jo Jo was on the phone a vehicle stopped to offer her a lift. She promised the friend she’d call from her next stop and replaced the receiver. Jo Jo has not been seen or heard of since and has become one of the many young women who have disappeared without trace in Ireland’s vanishing triangle.

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Sources: For a full list of sources please see the Facebook page.

Garda.iehttps://www.garda.ie › josephine-jo-...Josephine (Jo Jo) Dullard

https://www.irishmirror.ie › crimeJo Jo Dullard: Gardai investigating two new leads 25 years after Kilkenny ..

SundayWorldm.sundayworld.comTrucker saw 'screaming woman running naked' on night of Jo Jo ...

ChillingCrimeshttps://www.chillingcrimes.com › jo...JoJo Dullard

TheIrishTimeshttps://www.irishtimes.com › tagsJo Dullard

IrishExaminerhttps://www.irishexaminer.com › ari...The mysterious disappearances of Deirdre Jacob and Jo Jo Dullard

Irish Posthttps://www.irishpost.com › newsInvestigation into disappearance of Jo Jo Dullard 25 years ago upgraded to ...

The Sunwww.thesun.ieLarry Murphy 'identified as person of interest' in JoJo Dullard murder

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/crime-and-law/gardai-to-check-for-links-between-hennessy-and-unsolved-cases-1.3503563

https://m.sundayworld.com/crime/irish-crime/long-read-larry-murphy-and-irelands-missing-women/41490862.html

Independent.iem.independent.ieGardaí tried to identify Larry Murphy in CCTV taken on the day Deirdre ...

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Transcript

Jo Jo Dullard

I've wanted to cover a case from Ireland for some time. A special thank you to social media user “Relic” who suggested this case to me.

Just a quick note. The Garda is the police force of the Republic of Ireland. An individual officer is a Garda with Gardai being the plural. 

Josephine Dullard was born on January 25th 1974 and grew up in the town of Callan, County Kilkenny in Ireland. She was the youngest of five siblings, having three sisters: Mary, Nora and Kathleen and a brother Tom. To family and friends Josephine went by the pet name “Jo Jo”. Jo Jo never knew her father John, as he passed away 6 months before her birth. Sadly at age 9 Jo Jo also lost her mother, Nora. The orphaned child was taken in by her sister Kathleen, with whom she lived with until she was 16. 

Jo Jo loved music and as a teenager her bedroom walls were covered in posters of pop stars  like George Michael and A-Ha. Growing up Jo Jo had a pet dog named “Freeway” after the dog from the American television show “Hart to Hart”. Speaking in the Irish Independent in 2021 her sister Katheleen Bergin described Jo Jo as kind and loving with a sensitive character. As a young adult Jo Jo was 5 ft 4 or 163cm with a medium build and had dark shoulder length hair. She had some freckling around her nose and cheeks.

In her later teen years Jo Jo moved to Harold’s Cross in Dublin and started working as a waitress in one of the many bars in the city centre. She also enrolled in college and began a beauty therapy course. After a couple of years Jo Jo was finding it increasingly difficult to juggle the demands of work and study, and in the autumn of 1995 she made the decision to relocate back to Callan. The now 21 year old moved in with her sister Mary Phelan, Mary’s husband  Martin and their two children aged 5 and 8. The Phelans owned a 90 acre cow and sheep farm on the outskirts of Callan.

Jo Jo managed to secure a new full time job in Graingers Cafe in Callan. She was due to start her first shift on Monday 13th November. Before her new job began Jo Jo had a few loose ends to tie up in Dublin so she carved out some time to visit the city on Thursday 9th of November. One of the things Jo Jo needed to do was collect her last social welfare payment from the post office situated in the south of Dublin.

That morning Jo Jo left home at 8:30. She was wearing blue jeans and black boots and carried a small rucksack. She also took with her a black Sanyo portable cassette player with headphones so she could listen to music to keep her entertained. She caught a bus travelling north to Dublin, a journey that took approximately two hours to complete. From the Busaras central bus depot Jo Jo headed south to collect her welfare payment from the post office.  

Jo Jo then spent a short while pondering what to do for the rest of the day. The return bus wasn't scheduled until early evening so she decided to head to a bar she used to frequent in the hope of running into people she knew. 

The venue Jo Jo visited was called Bruxelles Bar and was on Harry Street, situated off Grafton Street, one of the main shopping areas in the city centre. Jo Jo arrived at the pub and discovered that a friend was working a shift behind the bar; the pair started chatting. According to the website, “Ireland's Vanishing Triangle”, retired Garda detective Alan Bailey reports that another friend came into the pub at 2.30pm. Jo Jo spent the rest of the afternoon and early evening at the bar. 

Jo Jo returned to the Busaras bus depot between 9 and 10 pm but she had missed the last bus home to Callan. There is some ambiguity regarding why this happened. Most reports state that Jo Jo simply lost track of time as she was having fun talking with friends. The aforementioned website, Ireland's Vanishing Triangle, makes reference to an incident which caused Jo Jo to alter her plans and decide to stay in Dublin overnight. It says Jo Jo then changed her mind, but by this time had missed the bus. I'm not going to share details of the incident as I've only found the story mentioned in this one source. Whatever the truth of it, Jo Jo turned up at the bus depot after the final bus to Callan had left and found herself stranded.

Jo Jo discovered there was a bus that would take her as far as Naas in County Kildare, but this was still well over an hour's drive from her home in Callan, County Kilkenny. Jo Jo could have decided to try and find somewhere to stay in Dublin but she wanted to get home that night. She  decided to take the bus as far as she could and then try to hitch a ride back the rest of the way. Jo Jo hopped on the bus to Naas at 10.00pm.

The bus driver woke Jo Jo at 10.50pm when they arrived in Naas. At that time of night the town was quiet and still but Jo Jo decided to walk down the main street in the direction of home. She hoped to flag down a car and catch a lift. An elderly man noticed Jo Jo by the side of the road and pulled over to pick her up. The man drove Jo Jo 16 km down the road to Kilcullen. The man warned Jo Jo about hitchhiking and suggested she try and find an inn or bed and breakfast where she could spend the night. Jo Jo was undeterred and was determined to make it back to spend the night in her own bed. In Kilcullen she was able to to thumb down another lift, this time from a much younger man. He took her as far as the town of Moone, which was still over 70 km from Callan.

It was now 11.30pm and the streets of Moone were pretty much deserted. However, the road that passed through the town continued to get a steady flow of traffic. The M9 motorway now bypasses Moone but in 1995 the main road from Dublin to Waterford in the south east of Ireland dissected the town. This was long before mobile phones were commonplace and Jo Jo decided to make her way to a public phone box on the main road. She entered the telephone booth and made a call to her friend Mary (not to be confused with her sister). Mary had also secured a job at Graingers Cafe in Callan and was due to start the same day as Jo Jo. 

While on the phone Jo Jo kept the door of the booth open and attempted to thumb down a lift. This fact was later confirmed by numerous motorists who passed by. Jo Jo mentioned to Mary that she was hoping to make it at least as far as Carlow 16km away. She had a friend who lived there and planned to call on her to see if she could put her up for the night. As the friends talked on the phone Jo Jo suddenly stopped the conversation to say that a car had pulled up alongside the booth. Mary later said the line went silent for 30 seconds or so before Jo Jo came back and told her she had secured a lift. She was continuing her journey towards home and promised to phone Mary at her next stop.The telephone receiver was then replaced with a click. The time was 11.37pm. Jo Jo Dullard never arrived home and she has not been seen or heard of since. 

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When Jo Jo failed to return home her family contacted the gardai (the Irish Police) immediately. As was reported on RTE website in March 2021 the family believe the gardai did not take their sister's disappearance very seriously during the first few days. It seems their belief was that Jo Jo would eventually turn up safe and well . 

Standard Inquiries were made throughout the area and a sighting was reported of a woman said to resemble the description of Jo Jo in the town of Castledermot. This is just a ten minute drive south of Moone where Jo Jo was last seen. The sighting occurred at around midnight when a man who was about to enter a fish and chip shop saw the woman walking down the main High Street. She was heading in the direction of Carlow; this would have been the correct road along which to attempt to hitch a lift in that direction. The sighting was never confirmed.

At some point a wristwatch was found on the roadside in Castledermot which could have belonged to Jo Jo. The family examined the watch and thought it may have been given to Jo Jo by an ex boyfriend. The ex-boyfriend was tracked down but he could not confirm whether it was the gift he had given her.

Days soon turned to months and before long a whole year had gone by without any tangible leads in the case. Jo Jo’s siblings found themselves increasingly frustrated by the efforts of Garda to find out what had happened to their little sister. The relationship between the family and Garda became particularly strained after a body found in the River Shannon was erroneously suggested in the press, seemingly with Garda support, to be Jo Jo Dullard. It turned out to be a miscommunication between the gardai and the press and the body was in fact a missing man from Limerick. In the eyes of the family this incident did little to instil confidence in the job the Gardai were doing.

In the autumn of 1996 the family clubbed together and hired a private investigator to see if they could find out anything new. A few valuable pieces of information came to light at this time.

A report came in of a woman matching Jo Jo’s description seen getting into the back seat of a dark coloured Toyota Carina. The location of this sighting was in Moone, near the phone booth where Jo Jo called her friend Mary. This was just after 11.30pm. Much speculation has been made about why the woman was seen getting into the rear seat of the car. This could suggest there was somebody already in the passenger seat and therefore two people in the car. Another story surfaced at this time which reinforces the idea of two people being in the car that gave Jo Jo a lift.

In February 1997 a taxi driver from County Waterford came forward and said that late on the night Jo Jo went missing he was driving near the town of Kilmacow in County Kilkenny, 90 km south of Moone. At 1.20am he passed a car parked in a layby with a man standing and urinating nearby. A young woman, said to match Jo Jo's description, jumped out of the rear car door and made a dash into the road. The witness noticed that the woman was barefoot. Another man got out of the car and went after the woman. He caught up with her and dragged her back to the car, assisted by the man who had been urinating. One of the men then noticed the taxi driver and they quickly bundled the woman in the car and drove off at speed. The car was a red Ford Sierra and had UK registration plates. 

The work  carried out by the private investigator uncovered someone who would become a major suspect in the eyes of Jo Jo’s sister Mary Phelan and other members of the family. According to an Irish Mirror article in April 2021, the man lived near Moone at the time of Jo Jo’s disappearance and owned property in the area, including a large area of land. Mary believed that information uncovered by the private investigator suggested this man had lied about his whereabouts on the night Jo Jo disappeared. 

The private investigator was able to talk with the man under the pretence that he was a tourist. During the interaction the PI noticed a nasty scar on the man’s face that, in his opinion, was from a wound that had not received medical attention. Ever since, the family have campaigned for this man’s large property to be searched. The blog “True Crime Ireland” recounts a story that the family received a letter from a woman who claimed to be an ex-girlfriend of the man. She alleges the man was abusive and violent. The family took the letter to the gardai but did not take a photocopy of it and say they haven't seen it since.

To this day the property has not been searched and I can't find any records of Garda commenting about this individual. The family have intimated that this unknown man has some standing within the community and has friends or possibly relatives who are politicians. In the  eyes of the family it means the individual is protected and this has prevented any meaningful investigation. Obviously this is a serious allegation and one that is impossible to comment on without further information.   

Despite the suspicious circumstances surrounding Jo Jo’s disappearance, the gardai officially classified the case as a missing persons investigation. The family continued to campaign for Jo Jo and to publicise the case throughout Ireland and across the world. Mary Phelen was very influential in leading the fight and did countless media appearances over the decades. She did everything in her power, even seeking assistance from both Bill Clinton and George W Bush. In 2003 Mary met with Ireland's Taoiseach Bertie Ahhern in an attempt to spotlight her sister's case and the subsequent investigation. Mary was also able to secure support from local Fianna Fail TD John McGuiness who has been a tireless supporter of the family. 

Over their years of campaigning Mary and other members of the family realised that they were not the only ones facing this nightmare. Between 1993 and 1998 at least 6 young women had disappeared without a trace in the province of Leinsier, an area of nearly 20,000 square km in the south east of Ireland. It has become known as Ireland's Vanishing Triangle.

26 year old Annie McCarrick was an American student who vanished from Johnnie Fox’s pub in Glencullen, County Wicklow in March 1993. (Please note, there is some debate about where Annie was last seen.) Jo Jo Dullard was next to vanish in 1995. In August the following year Fiona Pender, who was 7 months pregnant, disappeared from her home in Tullamore, County Offaly. Ciara Breen went missing from Dundalk in February 1997. Fiona Sinott vanished without a trace from Bridgetown, County Wexford in February 1998. 18 year old Deirdre Jacob disappeared while walking home from her grandmother's shop just outside Newbridge, County Kildare in July 1998. Two other cases are occasionally added, these are the disappearances of Eva Brennan from Rathgar in 1993 and Imelda Keenan from Waterford in 1994. 

There has long been talk that all these young women could be the victim of a serial killer hunting along the roads and small towns of southern Ireland. Operation Trace was established by Garda commissioner Pat Byrne in 1998 to look into this claim and they specially focused on six of the aforementioned missing person cases. The two they did not examine were Eva Brennan and Imelda Keenan. The six person team looked into men from across Ireland who had a history of sexual offending.  No concrete evidence was found to connect the cases and  Operation Trace was disbanded in 2003. One of the men investigated by Operation Trace was a convicted rapist and attempted murderer. At the time they found no clear evidence to tie him to the crimes but as of 2021 he has been officially called a person of interest (some reports state suspect) in three of the cases. Much more on this person and Operation Trace shortly. 

Over the years persons of interest or potential suspects have appeared on the radar. Firstly there is the well connected, unnamed man from Moone whom I have already mentioned. I have also read a theory that Jo Jo was abducted by two Englishmen who lived in the area. They were known to travel throughout the south east of the country regularly and would break into phone boxes in small towns and villages to steal the money. I do wonder if that theory is linked to the incident witnessed by the taxi driver. The red Ford Sierra that the barefooted woman was attempting to escape from had UK number plates.

I have read about two men from the town of Kildare who are said to have given false statements about their movements on the day Jo Jo vanished. I am not sure if these men are the two English men I have referred to or different men altogether. There is another local theory that the person responsible was the friend of a known local sex offender. I haven't been able to find much information about this story. 

The blog True Crime Ireland talks of a man in his 20’s who was seen in a  diner in Castledermot around the time a woman (thought to be Jo Jo) was spotted in the town. They say this man has never been traced. 

In 2012 the organisation Trace Missing Persons Ireland posted on social media to say that a traveller well known in the Kildare and Port Laoise area was now a suspect in the Jo Jo Dullard case. The man was believed to be responsible for other crimes and was said to still drive a van throughout the region. No evidence had been found to formally link him to the crime so the man had never been arrested. This is a curious piece of information which I have failed to find any more detail about. It is not a widely circulated story and I have only found this solitary reference to it. 

A potential suspect came on the scene after 24 year old Philippines national Jastine Vadez was abducted from the roadside in County Wicklow on May 19th 2018.  Jastine had moved to Ireland with her parents three years previously. Bystanders witnessed Jastine  being forced into the back of a Nissan Quashqai and contacted gardai. CCTV footage was quickly found that gave the car registration. The car belonged to 40 year old Mark Hennessy, a construction worker from Bray, County Wicklow. He was married and had children.

Details of the abduction went out in news reports and the public were asked to look out for his car. A woman named Christine Connolly spotted Henessy’s car and contacted Gardai, she then pursued the car to make sure Hennessy did not get away. 

Garda caught up with the car and surrounded the vehicle. They believed Jastine could still be in the car. Hennessy, who was high on drugs, remained in the driving seat of the car and with a shrug of the shoulders took a stanley knife to his forearm. Seconds later he was shot dead by a Garda. They were operating under the assumption that Jastine was in the car and in imminent danger. Tragically, Jastine had already been murdered by Henessy and her body was later found in Rathmichael, south of Dublin. 

There was an obvious sexual motive to the crime and the nature of the assault and murder  made Gardai believe that this was not Hennessy’s first violent offence. Hennessy had not known Jastine and the abduction had been opportunistic.  This led Gardai to suspect he could be involved in the disappearances of  Annie McCarrick, Deirdre Jacob and Jo Jo Dullard. Hennessy’s DNA was taken but obviously as no physical evidence or bodies had been found in these cases, testing could not be carried out. More recently I cannot find many references that mention Hennessy as a suspect in Jo Jo Dullard’s disappearance.

Jo Jo’s sister Mary Phelen sadly passed away after a battle with cancer in April 2018. Her sister Kathleen promised Mary and the rest of the family that she would pick up the baton and continue the quest to find out what happened to Jo Jo. Over the last five years there have been some very significant developments in the case.

The first of these occurred in 2019 when an Irish priest, father Willie Purcell from Kilkenny, came forward and presented Gardai with an anonymous letter he had received. The details of the letter have never been divulged and apparently no names were mentioned in the note but it is said to have contained details concerning the disappearance of Jo Jo Dullard.  

The next year witnessed a significant step forward in Jo Jo’s case when it was reclassified from a missing persons to a murder investigation. This happened following a review initiated by Garda commissioner Drew Harris in February of 2020. The commissioner had met Jo Jo’s family in 2019 and was persuaded that a review of the evidence was timely and necessary. It is unclear whether the anonymous letter had any bearing on this decision. 

The review was carried out by the Serious Crime Review Team, led by Detective Superintendent Desmond McTiernnan. The investigative team went over original case notes and re-interviewed witnesses from 1995. 1600 lines of inquiry were painstakingly reviewed and 550 statements were re-examined. 

The review team undertook a victimology analysis and proof of life inquiry. They concluded that the evidence pointed to Jo Jo being deceased and that her death had been met through violent ends. Finally, after over three decades, Jo Jo’s case was being treated as murder. The family had believed this was what had happened more or less since the day Jo Jo disappeared. It does seem baffling that this decision was not made earlier.

With this new development Jo Jo’s sister Kathleen appealed for people to come forward with information. They said that false statements were given by certain people in 1995 and it was not too late to rectify this. The family just wanted Jo Jo back with them so their little sister would no longer be alone and they could give her a Christian burial. At this time the gardai asked for help in tracking down the Sanyo portable cassette player Jo Jo had with her when she disappeared. They asked if anyone remembered receiving one as a gift around Christmas 1995. The model number was MGP21 and it was black in colour.

After the upgrading of the case to a murder investigation  a person of interest was identified by Gardai and his name began to be openly reported in the press. It was someone who had been looked into by Operation Trace back in the early 2000’s. His name was Larry Murphy and he was a carpenter from Glenealy, County Wicklow..

On February 11th 2000 then 34 year old Murphy abducted a 28 year old woman from Carlow, in the Wicklow mountains. This location is about an hour and 15 minutes drive south of Dublin. The woman, who is known only as “Jill” (not her real name) was attacked in a car park and bundled into a car as she left work with the day's takings.

Murphy physically assaulted Jill, tied her hands together with her own bra and forced her into the boot of the car. He drove the car 14.5km away to the grounds of Kilkea Castle where he raped her. Jill believed she was going to be murdered as he kept telling her things that could easily identify him. After the assault he once again put her into the boot of the car and drove her to Spinans Cross in the Wicklow mountains. Here he raped Jill again. I will not share details of this but it was an horrendous and sustained assault. He then forced her back into the boot and closed it shut. Moments later he opened the boot and put a plastic bag over Jill’s head, attempting to suffocate her. Jill fought back hard and seconds later the bag was off and Murphy was running away. Jill looked up to see two men walking towards hers. Their names were Trevor and Ken. They were out “lamping” (or hunting) foxes and happened upon the situation in the nick of time. Murphy fled at the first sight of the men.

Trevor and Ken got Jill in their vehicle and set off for the gardai station. As they drove, Jill recounted the awful details of the previous couple of hours. On hearing the description of her attacker both men were reminded of an incident that had occurred four years previously. A local woman had been sexually assaulted by a man in a pub in the village of Imaal in the Wicklow mountains. Both Trevor and Ken suspected the same man had attacked Jill. They knew his name, he was a local carpenter named Larry Murphy. 

The next morning Murphy was arrested. Bizzarely Murphy admitted to raping Jill once but claimed that on the second occasion the sex had been been consensual. Obviously the gardai did not buy this for one second and he was charged with rape and attempted murder. Larry Murphy ended up pleading guilty and was sent to prison. 

Murphy soon came to the attention of Operation Trace, the task force set up to investigate the missing women of Ireland’s Vanishing Triangle. Assistant Garda commissioner Tony Hickey, who was head of Operation Trace, did not believe that this was Murphy’s first offence of this nature and said he had all the hallmarks of an accomplished killer. A witness put Murphy in the car park outside Jill's place of work for some time before he attacked her. This was evidence that he had planned to carry out the attack and it was therefore premeditated. Operation Trace began to investigate whether any connections could be found between Murphy and any of the missing women in Ireland's Vanishing Triangle. 

Operation Trace did not believe that all six cases were connected and thought three of the women were most likely harmed at the hands of people they knew. However, the detectives involved theorised that Jo Jo Dullard and possibly two other cases, those of Annie McCarrick the American student who was said to have been last seen at Johnnie Fox’s pub in Glencullen and Deirdre Jacob who vanished on her way home from her grandmother's shop in Newbridge County Kildare,  had most likely come to harm at the hands of a stranger. The task force needed to investigate any links between these three cases and particularly looked for any possible involvement by Larry Murphy. 

There were some similarities between the cases, not least that all three women disappeared within a 50km radius. Superintendent Jerry O’Connel from Operation Trace, together with Garda detective Alan Bailey, visited the UK national crime faculty at Bramshill College, Hampshire during the early 2000’s. They consulted geographic profiling experts and, according to an article in Sunday World in April 2022, it was the opinion of the UK experts that Murphy could have been involved with the disappearance of Annie McCarrick, Deirdre Jaocb and Jo Jo Dullard. 

Some circumstantial links were found between Murphy and the three cases. In the case of Annie McCarrick it was rumoured that Murphy socialised in the pub where she was last seen. Some witnesses have said Murphy was a customer at Deirdre Jacob’s grandmother's shop. In the case of Jo Jo Dullard, Murphy was living in Castledermot when she went missing. Casteldermot is the location where a witness saw a woman resembling Jo Jo hitchhiking at around midnight on the night she disappeared. Operation Trace also found that a local Garda sergeant had suggested Murphy as a suspect in Jo Jo's disappearance very early on in the investigation, as Murphy had a reputation in the community of violence against women. 

In connection with Jo Jo’s case, attempts were made to discover what car Murphy was driving in November 1995 when the 21 year old vanished. Could it have been a Toyota Carina, the car a witness saw a woman get into near the phone booth? In 2000 at the time of his arrest Murphy was driving a Toyota Corolla. Investigators also wondered if the taxi driver’s report of the woman escaping a red Ford Sierra parked by a layby could be connected to Murphy. Did he have an accomplice? It was discovered that Murphy had disposed of a car which was in perfect working order at Christmas 1995. He had apparently scrapped it at an illegal dump. Further details about the car could not be found. 

Behind bars Murphy refused to cooperate and denied investigators requests for interviews.Operation Trace spent a huge amount of time and effort looking into Murphy but they found no  real evidence connecting Murphy to any other disappearances. Operation Trace was closed down in 2003.

In prison Murphy kept himself out of trouble and was described as a model prisoner. He was able to secure early release and left prison in August 2010. Though he was subject to some post release supervision, controversially,  Larry Murphy was not added to the sex offenders registry. He was sentenced one month before the act came into law in 2001. 

After his release from prison Murphy has attempted to maintain a low profile and has not been in trouble with the law or committed any crimes. He has lived under numerous aliases in the Netherlands and in various places throughout the UK. 

Over the last decade or so there have been several developments which have now led to Larry Murphy becoming a person of interest in the disappearance of Jo Jo Dullard and two other missing persons cases.

In 2012 and 2013 searches were carried out in the countryside around Wicklow, these included the inspection of a couple of isolated lakes. This was after an ex-cellmate of Larry Murphy came forward to say shortly before leaving prison Murphy had confessed to him the murder of 18 year old Deirdre Jacob. According to the ex-cellmate Murphy had pulled over to ask Deirdre for directions before attacking her with a hammer.  Deirdre fought back and he killed her. He hid her body in a lake.

In response Murphy gave a rare interview to Irish television channel TV3 on their “Midweek” program. He denied any involvement with any missing persons cases or potential murders. He said if the gardai had any evidence to the contrary they would already have arrested him.

Things moved up a gear when Deirdre Jacobs' case was officially upgraded to a murder investigation in 2018. This was after the gardai received, in their words, credible and corroborated information about Deiredre’s disappearance. Shortly afterwards Larry Murphy was announced as the chief suspect in the case. the gardai attempted to interview Murphy in 2018 to assist them with their inquiries but he refused to cooperate. In February 2020 all evidence linking Murphy to Jacobs was sent to the director of public prosecutions. As of yet there has been no further development in this matter. It is believed that the ex-cellmate Murphy is alleged to have confided in is not seen as credible.

In the autumn of 2021 a search was carried out in a wooded area called Brewel East near Newbridge. This is under 20km from where Deirdre Jacob was last seen. Consultant forensic archaeologist   Niamh McCullagh from Queen's University assisted with the operation. 

Gardai said this new search was not due to any one piece of evidence but there were stories in the press as to why it was being undertaken.  Apparently a  witness had come forward who said they had seen a car reversing down the road near the woods with an open boot at the time Deirdre Jacob went missing. It was also reported that a person was seen dragging something into the trees. Press reports principally linked the search to Deirdre Jacob but Gardai said they had not ruled out finding evidence relating to other cases of missing women, including Jo Jo Dullard. Nothing useful was said to have been found during the search.

Numerous press reports now mention Murphy as a person of interest in Jo Jo’s case, but some   go further. Patrick O’Connell, writing in the Sunday World in July 2022, says Murphy is the chief suspect in the disappearance of Jo Jo Dullard, as well as those of Deirdre Jacob and Annie McCarrick. It is believed Larry Murphy still resides in the UK and no charges have been brought against him in connection with any of the cases I have mentioned.

Developments continue to be announced in this saga. As I was writing this podcast episode the gardai announced that Annie McCarrick’s case had been officially upgraded to a murder investigation. They also said that while Larry Murphy remains a person of interest and someone they would like to talk to about Annie's case he is not the number one suspect. As Annie was American, investigators from the USA have also been looking at her case. They have said for several years they have an unnamed chief suspect after witnesses said they had seen Annie with a man on the night she disappeared. It remains to be seen what this development will mean for the investigation into the suspected murder of Jo Jo Dullard. Reading a few recent articles it's clear that investigators are trying to keep open minds and not get tunnel vision when it comes to Larry Murphy.

Murphy has not been the only line of inquiry investigators have been following in Jo Jo’s case in recent years. In November 2021 information was released in the media about a new lead that was currently being worked by Garda. Technically it wasn’t new as it had been brought to the attention of the authorities back in 1995 but had not been fully explored at that time.

In November 2020 a truck driver contacted Gardai to make a statement about a disturbing incident he had witnessed in the town of Moone on the night Jo Jo disappeared. He did this in person at Naas Garda station. Before doing so he had driven through Moone to familiarise himself with the place as it had been many years since he had driven through the town. Moone was the town where Jo Jo was last seen and from where she made the phone call to her friend Mary.

Around midnight on the night of November 9th 1995, a lorry driver and his boss were driving through Moone. Out of nowhere they saw a naked woman running and screaming in the street. The driver pulled over straight away and the man's boss jumped out of the cab and went after the woman. This made the woman run even faster and she continued to flee. Unable to catch up with the woman, the men found a phone booth and contacted a Garda station. The Garda who answered the phone informed the men that they would send a car to investigate. 

The men returned to their vehicle and went on their way. A couple of days later they saw the missing person reports about Jo Jo Dullard on the news and went to a Garda station to make an official statement. The men were told that the woman they had seen could not have been Jo Jo as they had a sighting of her 7.5km away in Castledermot at around the same time. No statement was taken from the men. I believe the lorry driver was contacted by the Serious Crime Review team when they started re-examining the case in February 2020. Although a statement had not been taken, the lorry driver's name must have been in the case notes. 

How this report tallies with the other sightings of the night is unknown but it sounds like an incredibly important point which could lead the investigation in a different direction.

Jo Jo's sister Katheleen continues the quest to bring Jo Jo home. She believes Jo Jo’s killer will have told someone about what they did. The killer’s own family may well have their suspicions about him. Even if a person has already made a false statement Kathleen says it is not too late to come forward and change it. The Irish Mirror reported in November 2021 that Kathleen has said there will be no judgement or retribution from the family for people who change their statements. They just want Jo Jo back. 

Every November there is a gathering to remember Jo Jo. In 2022 people congregated at Kilkenny Castle courtyard and walked to the national missing persons monument in the castle grounds . The monument was commissioned by the Jo Jo Dullard Memorial Trust which was established by the family and funded by the National Millennium Committee Project. The work Jo Jo's family has done for missing persons cases has helped families in similar predicaments across Ireland and beyond.

The monument inscription reads: “This sculpture and area of reflection is dedicated to all missing persons. May all relatives and friends who visit find continuing strength and hope”.

If you have any information about the disappearance of Jo Jo Dullard you can contact the Gardai Confidential line on 1800 666 111.