‘Murdered’ has a horrible coldness
It’s been 20 years since Deirdre Jacob vanished from her home in Kildare. This week gardaí announced they now believe she was killed and her parents are hoping that someone will come forward and reveal what happened their beloved daughter...
WE KNEW it was coming, but there are words, when they are put together, have a very terrible, horrible coldness about them, and those words...’ Michael Jacob tails off momentarily, before clearing his throat, and continuing. ‘Those words together, “Deirdre Jacob” and “murder”...’
Michael’s wife Bernie, a retired HSE worker, is sitting beside him in a Newbridge hotel near their home in Co Kildare.
‘When we heard it on the eight o’clock news on Tuesday morning and seeing the word “murder” underneath Deirdre’s picture, it was tough seeing it,’ agrees Bernie, softly.
‘I found it very upsetting, seeing the pictures. To see it and hear it, it was so tough and even though we knew it was coming, I found it very difficult to listen to that.’ Every day of the last 20 years, since their darling daughter Deirdre disappeared, Michael and Bernie Jacob have hoped and prayed and searched and clung desperately to the hope she might one day be found alive.
Just after 3pm on July 28, 1998, primary school teaching student Deirdre, 18, vanished, as if into thin air. The last sighting of her was by a motorist and his daughter, who saw Deirdre cross the road near her home and step inside her garden gate.
Days turned to nights, weeks turned to months and months turned to years, as the Jacobs left no stone unturned in the painstaking search for Deirdre. But this week came the news they’d always dreaded.
Gardaí have now upgraded their investigation from a missing persons inquiry to a murder probe. Worse still, it has since emerged that the ‘Beast of Baltinglass’ Larry Murphy — convicted of kidnapping, raping and attempting to murder a businesswoman in Wicklow in 2000 and who police believe is linked to a number of unsolved violent attacks on women over the years — is the chief suspect.
The huge investigation has been run by Superintendent Martin Walker and Chief Supt Brian Sutton from Kildare Garda Station, along with the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation’s cold case unit and the Serious Crime Review Team. Since 1998, police have pursued 3,500 lines of inquiry, taken 2,000 statements and undertaken many searches for Deirdre. But no arrests were ever made.
The breakthrough came just after Michael and Bernie’s fresh appeal for information on the 20th anniversary of their daughter’s disappearance.
According to sources, recent statements to Gardaí have placed Murphy in Newbridge in the days before and after. He was working as a joiner in a local hotel and now a wooded area in east Wicklow and an isolated spot on the Laois/Carlow border have been identified as places of interest in the search.
For Michael and Bernie, however, they continue as they always have done, taking each day and development as it comes, stoically, pragmatically — and forever hopeful.
‘We don’t look forward to see where this might bring us to,’ explains Michael, who is retired. ‘If we were to rush out and read the papers, we’d be drawn down dozens of roads of speculation and that would whuzz our heads entirely.
‘We read newspapers but not about Deirdre. We treat this as everything over the years and we take it step by step. We know information is being worked through and we will wait until we are led further. We’ve a very close working relationship with the Gardaí, they keep us informed and we can gauge from that the progress being made. It prevents us from being deflected by speculative headlines. We wait until the Gardaí prove or disprove, like we’ve always done.’
Bernie agrees, adding: ‘Otherwise, it would do your head in.’
How any parent manages to keep going, putting one foot in front of the other, after a child simply vanishes, is impossible to fathom. And yet the Jacobs do manage to keep going, day after day, even after 20 years.
‘Bernie and I have served an apprenticeship of 20 years dealing with it, day in, day out, second in, second out,’ explains Michael. ‘We’ve learned it’s one step at a time. Gardaí are looking at people and places of interest. We’re not dwelling on the likely outcome. If there’s a lead, we wait for some solid outcome, then you think to the next step.’
Bernie says: ‘We’re still working on this and always trying to think of what we can do, what angle we can work on. We don’t give up, we’re on it all the time.’
Michael continues: ‘That’s how we’re keeping going. That’s what we’ve learned. It’s still a massive task in front of us and we might be quite a distance from a conclusion. You can’t jump all the hurdles or the last
‘If there’s a lead, we wait for some solid outcome’
‘We read the papers but not about Deirdre’ ‘It takes over your whole life, every moment’
fence before doing the circuit. We always concentrate on lines being brought to a conclusion, you must work that way.’
Michael and Bernie smile as they remember Deirdre, home from London for the summer after finishing up her first year studying primary school teaching at St Mary’s University in Twickenham.
Michael remembers: ‘It was such a changing experience, adjusting to this new way of life and study. Life itself was developing for Deirdre in a new track. She settled in very well and very quickly.’
The parents confess they didn’t get much time to miss Deirdre as she was back in Newbridge so often. She left for London in September but was home for the midterm break, then home again for the Christmas holidays and two weeks later she was back in Newbridge, working at St Conleth’s and Mary’s National School, her old primary school, to do her teaching practice, which she loved.
After her Easter holidays, summer was upon them and she was home again.
‘She was meeting up with old school friends and the weekend before she went missing, she was up in Carrickmacross,’ remembers Michael. ‘She met a friend from Dublin, who she knew from teaching college and they bussed it up from Dublin to meet another college friend of theirs who lived up there. She was back home on the Monday evening.’
The day after returning from her girls’ weekend away, Deirdre went into Newbridge to organise a bank draft to pay for her upcoming term’s rent.
‘I spoke to her just before she went to town,’ Bernie remembers, of the last time she talked to her daughter. ‘I phoned her at home, it was the usual chat — she had to go to the bank and the post office to get the draft done.’
Deirdre left her home in Roseberry, around 1.5km from Newbridge town centre, at around 12.20pm. ‘It’s around a 25-minute walk — Deirdre was a swift walker, no dilly dallying,’ says Bernie. She called into her granny, who was living in the centre of town, but has since died.
‘She was with her granny for about half an hour, then she walked to the AIB bank and then the post office,’ Bernie says. ‘She was picked up eight times by cameras, at the back of the queue in the post office and at the bank. On the way back she dropped back in to see her grandmother and stayed a few more minutes. She was very close with her granny and loved to spend time with her, helping her around the house and having a cup of tea — she’s that type of person, very loving and helpful.’
At around 2.30pm, Deirdre set off for home — but she never made it.
When Bernie returned from work to find the front door still locked, she realised Deirdre had not come home. By 10pm that night, a huge search was getting underway.
Early in the investigation, a motorist came forward to say a few minutes after 3pm, he had spotted Deirdre going into her driveway. Michael says: ‘She walked across in front of them and as they passed, she’d walked through the garden gate.’ After that, Deirdre’s movements remain a total mystery. A massive search co-ordinated from a local farmer’s yard began that night and over the following days and weeks, spread all across the country, involving gardaí, the Civil Defence, sub-aqua units, the Order of Malta, local GAA club volunteers and businesses. It all came to nothing.
But then, ten days after Deirdre’s disappearance, a mystery man contacted the Leinster Leader newspaper and a number of garda stations to say he’d picked up a girl in Clane village and had given her a lift to Carrickmacross, in Co Monaghan. As a result, the search was diverted to counties Monaghan, Fermanagh and Tyrone.
‘He was able to feed back information in a way it seemed likely this girl he’d given a lift to could have been Deirdre,’ says Michael. ‘We felt we had a lead.’
For months, Michael and Bernie travelled north, desperately scouring the countryside for any clues as to Deirdre’s whereabouts.
‘It got to the dead of winter, in January and February, very, very wintry days, driving from one Co Tyrone village to the other and across the mountains, sticking flyers about Deirdre into remote phone boxes and dropping them into shops and pubs. We doled them out everywhere and drove around looking out for football matches. We got the parish priest in Lisnaskea to make an appeal at Sunday Mass.’
But their efforts came to a dead end — and with a cruel twist. The man who claimed he met Deirdre turned out to be a hoaxer.
Under pressure from Michael and Bernie, police put out the tape recording of his voice on RTÉ and within a few hours he was identified and arrested.
‘It’s almost like something you might read in a book, you can’t get your head around that this could happen in reality,’ says Bernie. ‘We’ve always felt that those four months of time lost when we were looking in the wrong place, was very valuable, crucial time.’
Michael, revealing great compassion, says: ‘But that sort of thing can happen in these cases. People latch on to it and make claims for reasons unknown to us. In this case the man had a trauma and he reacted in this very strange way. There’s nothing to be gained in trying to analyse it...’
And so the Jacobs — ever resilient and endlessly pragmatic — picked themselves back up, and got back to searching for Deirdre.
‘It takes over your whole life and you’re living every moment of it and painstakingly trying to come up with other ideas. Should I do this? Where did she go? Did she get a bus or a train?’ explains Michael. ‘We would be always optimistic, you have to have hope.’
Despite this week’s headlines, Michael and Bernie are still pleading with people to come forward.
‘We don’t have a breakthrough yet — this is why we’re pleading so much and we always will. We want to reach these people, maybe they’re in a different headspace now or remember things clearer. Maybe this is a burden weighing on them and they want to lighten the load. It’s a huge jigsaw with many missing pieces and by adding more to the jigsaw hopefully the picture will become clearer.’
It’s been more than 20 years since the Jacobs lost their daughter, but can they ever grieve?
‘I don’t know about this word grieving — it gets tagged on to a lot but I think there are other words to describe it and I think that managing how you live is closer to it,’ says Michael. ‘In some way you need to try and fit yourself into the normal ways of living and do as many of the normal things as you can. That does help you to focus on the real issue.
‘We have a deep faith, I’d say it helps us. One never expects to be in the spotlight so much and especially for this reason. Life continues in all aspects and you have to keep going.’
And they carry their beloved daughter with them, always.
‘It’s all the time — you might see someone and imagine for a moment, oh God, that looks like Deirdre,’ says Michael. ‘Or you drive out the gate or it flashes before me, that’s where Deirdre was, in that garden gateway. Even if you try to shade it out of your mind you don’t — morning, noon or night, it’s always there.
‘Deirdre’s always there...’