Three decades after the disappearance and murder of Josephine “Jo Jo” Dullard, the Garda investigation into who took her life remains rooted in the community where she was last seen alive.
The man arrested early on Monday morning and being questioned by detectives about the murder of the 21-year-old Co Kilkenny woman in November 1995 is from a well-known family in the Kildare-Wicklow area where the arrest and searches took place.
Ms Dullard had made it that far – to the village of Moone in south Kildare – before vanishing without trace on the night of November 9th that year.
She was trying to hitchhike the remainder of her journey home – from Dublin city centre to Callan in Kilkenny. After socialising in Bruxelles Bar in Dublin she missed the last bus to Callan so got a bus to Naas before hitching two lifts to Moone.
At 11.37pm she called a friend from a phone box in Moone to tell her she would be home soon and that a car had just stopped for her. That was the last time any of her friends or family heard her voice.
Gardaí believe she was taken away from the roadside and killed, perhaps in an attack that was sexually motivated and opportunistic.
However, her remains have never been found and, before Monday, nobody had ever been arrested for questioning. Due to the lack of progress in the case for so many years, gardaí cannot be sure why and where Ms Dullard was killed.
Indeed, it was not until 2020 that the case was upgraded from a missing person’s inquiry to a murder investigation, much to the frustration of her family. They have campaigned hard in their search for answers over the last 29 years. In the early days, they even hired a private detective.
Once the investigation upgrade occurred, the Garda team working on the case was assigned more resources and had greater powers, including to secure search warrants and make arrests.
The detention of the suspect – a 55-year-old – on Monday and searches carried out at two properties and lands is effectively the culmination of the investigative work done in recent years.
The timing of the Garda operation did not arise from any information that came to light after a public appeal was made last weekend on the 29th anniversary of Ms Dullard’s disappearance. That was the latest appeal by her family, with Ms Dullard’s sisters – Mary Phelan, now deceased, and Kathleen Bergin – having been especially determined over the last three decades.
Under the Garda commissioner Pat Byrne, the Garda established Operation Trace in 1998 as part of the investigation into the disappearance of six women in the Leinster area. In addition to Ms Dullard, the women were Deirdre Jacob, Annie McCarrick, Fiona Pender, Fiona Sinnott and Ciara Breen.
However, no links between the cases were ever found and different suspects have been identified in all six cases. The man being questioned about the murder of Ms Dullard has never been a person of interest in any other case and has no criminal convictions.
