Missing by Barry Cummins Read Free Book Online

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     whether the person who killed Annie killed other women later on. But we must also consider if the person who killed Annie had killed before.
    The Gardaí were also conscious of the murder of a nineteen-year-old woman, Patricia Furlong, strangled at Glencullen, Co. Dublin, in July 1982. Glencullen is just two
miles north of Enniskerry and very close to Johnnie Fox’s pub. A Dublin disc-jockey, Vincent Connell, was convicted of the murder in December 1991, but his conviction was quashed by the Court
of Criminal Appeal in April 1995. Connell, who was later convicted of assaulting a number of former girl-friends, died in 1998 while continuing to protest his innocence.
    As the Gardaí pieced together the movements of Annie McCarrick in the twenty-four hours before her disappearance, there was nothing to suggest that she had planned to disappear. She was
going about her normal everyday life. Though her body has not been found, everyone involved knows she was abducted and killed. Back in New York, Nancy McCarrick confirmed to me that she knows Annie
was murdered.
    It was so hard for me to leave Ireland and return to New York in May 1993. But I just had to. There was no news—nothing. We knew early on that Annie had been murdered.
     But you always wonder if she’ll return. You do that for ever: your head tells you otherwise, but you still wonder. Logically, I know she’ll never come home. I know she was killed.
     But sometimes it just hits you again. It might be a birthday, or Christmas, but sometimes it can be a smell, or when someone says something nice, that I think of Annie. And then it hits me all
     over again. Some of the detail of the months after Annie’s disappearance is a bit muddled. But the pain never ends.
    Annie McCarrick had been sharing an apartment at St Catherine’s Court in Sandymount for a few weeks before she disappeared. Her two flatmates were Jill Twomey and Ida
Walsh. They had met Annie when she responded to an ad about sharing the apartment. They instantly took a liking to her and offered her a room in the apartment. They last saw her just before nine
o’clock on the morning of the day she disappeared; she was sitting up in bed knitting, and Jill and Ida were heading out. They were going down the country for the weekend, and the three
wished each other a happy weekend before Jill and Ida pulled the front door shut.
    Annie later left the apartment to walk the short distance to Quinnsworth in Sandymount. She bought ingredients to make up some desserts for Café Java, where she was due back at work the
next day. The receipt for the ingredients shows that she paid for the goods at 11:02 a.m. She then went to the AIB branch in Sandymount; she wanted to change her account from the Clondalkin to the
Sandymount branch. When she arrived in Dublin in January 1993 she had stayed with her friends Hilary and Philip Brady at their home at Cherrywood Avenue, Clondalkin. She was also storing a car she
had at the Brady home, but she had now settled into her apartment in Sandymount. The closedcircuit television tape of Annie in the AIB branch in Sandymount shows her going about her normal life.
There is nothing out of the ordinary. After leaving the bank she walked back to her apartment, where she later phoned Anne O’Dwyer to see if she wanted to join her for a walk in Enniskerry.
She also phoned Hilary Brady to arrange that he and his fiancée, Rita Fortune, come over for dinner the following evening. She didn’t leave the apartment again until around 3:15 p.m.,
when she left to jump on the number 18 bus for Ranelagh.
    Annie had been friendly with the Brady family for many years. Soon after she arrived in Ireland in 1988 to begin her studies at St Patrick’s Training College in Drumcondra she began going
out with Philip Brady. This was one of two serious relationships she had while she studied in Ireland. She later met Dermot Ryan, a fellow sociology student at St Patrick’s College,