Jo Jo wants to come home , help her finish that journey
As gardaí finally upgrade the case of her missing sister to murder after 25 years, in a heartbreaking interview Kathleen Bergin makes an appeal to the killer
THE winter before Jo Jo Dullard returned from Dublin to live in her home town of Callan in Co. Kilkenny, she paid her sister Kathleen a long-overdue visit. The reason she had not been home for a while, soon became clear.
‘She phoned one day and told me she was coming down for the weekend,’ Kathleen recalls. ‘“That’s brilliant,” I said. And then she told me that she wanted to bring a friend with her and that he wanted to meet the family. “Oh right, this sounds serious,” I said. “Mmmmmh,” is all she would say.
‘So I asked her; “Will there be a ring produced?” “You never know Kathleen, you never know.”
‘Well, she came down and I hadn’t seen her for a little bit. She had matured so much, I can still picture what she was wearing. A pair of Doc Martins, a beautiful long, flowing skirt — black and white with little flowers — and a white shirt. She looked just beautiful.
‘She said: “This is Mike,” and we all got on great. They stayed the weekend, we went out for drink, they cooked us a lovely meal before they left. He was travelling around, he was from America and he’d stayed longer in Ireland than he’d planned to.
‘They were going together for a while and she was fond of him. But it wasn’t to last, he went back to America.
‘He wrote to us, after he heard she went missing — he couldn’t believe it. It was lovely that he got in contact, he said to us: “If you ever need any help…” Like most of us, it was a complete shock, and it was difficult, trying to make sense of it.’
The memory of that wonderful weekend is something Kathleen Bergin cherishes
‘She was loved by everyone and she always knew that’
to this day. It is 25 years since her sister disappeared in one of Ireland’s most notorious missing person case. Earlier this week, Jo Jo Dullard’s disappearance was finally upgraded to a murder investigation by gardai. The announcement was made on Monday at a press conference in Kildare. ‘We are satisfied that Jo Jo is dead and that she met her death through violent means,’ Detective Superintendent Desmond McTiernan told the gathered media.
Jo Jo’s family had, in fact, come to that conclusion a long time ago.
‘In the very early stages of her going missing we knew it was serious,’ explains Kathleen. ‘As time went on, you started thinking; “Did she go back to Dublin that night?” And you have hope.
‘But after the first couple of years we knew in our hearts [she was dead]. But I suppose you don’t really accept it until a good few years passed. Mary, my sister, accepted it before me.
‘So when on Monday they confirmed to us that it was going to be a murder case, it was a relief but sad as well.’
For most of us over a certain age, Jo Jo Dullard’s name will be forever etched in our memories, along with those of the other young women who went missing in the Leinster area over a five- year period in the 1990s. Like Fiona Sinnott, Deirdre Jacob, Ciara Breen, Fiona Pender and Annie McCarrick, Jo Jo has never been found.
The dark-haired 21-year-old was last seen in Moone, Co. Kildare, where she was thumbing a lift from a phonebox, while on the phone to her best friend.
‘I have a lift, I’ll phone you again at my next stop,’ were the last words any of her friends or family heard from her.
In the intervening years there have been many theories and rumours about what might have happened to Jo Jo. Kathleen has heard them all. Her family has worked tirelessly to keep the memory of Jo Jo alive, doing everything they can to try and help jog someone’s memory about the events of that night, to try and persuade anyone who might have any information about her case to come forward.
Up until two years ago, it was her older sister, Mary Phelan, who acted as spokesperson for the family. But after she died from cancer, Kathleen stepped forward to speak on Jo Jo’s behalf.
The Dullard family, who lived in a small village about three miles from Callan in Co. Kilkenny, was always particularly close. They suffered several tragedies, long before Jo Jo went missing, that saw them pull together to mind each other as children and young adults. There were five children in the family — Tom, Mary, Nora, Kathleen and Josephine.
‘Our dad John died a few months before Jo Jo was born, from cancer,’ says Kathleen. ‘Tom was in the army at the time, living in Kildare, while Mary was working in Dublin. There was still myself and Jo Jo to rear. I was ten when she was born, she came everywhere with me.
‘Our mam, Nora, worked for a farmer over the road, she kept the house and worked on the farm, she was also a great seamstress and made bridesmaid dresses for local weddings. She was a very strong woman. But then she died at 51, from cancer. And God love her, but Jo Jo was devastated, she adored her and was only nine years old when she passed. It was just myself and Jo Jo in the house. They were tough years, but she was a great support and company, even though it was so difficult for her. She really missed her mam.’
The sisters moved into Callan when Jo Jo was a young teenager.
‘I got married when I was 22, to Seamus, and both Jo Jo and Mary were my bridesmaids,’ says Kathleen.
Although she struggled a little after her mother’s death, Jo Jo did well at school, she was good at sports and was mad about music and art.
‘In general she loved life,’ says Kathleen. ‘And she had a great support system around her. We all took care of her, she lived with
Mary for a couple of years and often visited Tom and his family. She was only 12 when the first of my four kids was born, so she was close with all her nieces and nephews, they looked up to her like a big sister.
‘She was loved by everyone and she always knew that, that’s how we knew she would have made contact that night if she could. She would never want you to worry about her, she would always phone home.’
After school, Jo Jo moved to Dublin for a couple of years to study to be a beautician. But it proved too expensive to study and live in the capital, so she put her studies on hold and worked in the Red Parrot pub on Dorset Street for a while. In the summer of 1995
she decided to move back to Callan, where she lived in a flat share and got jobs in a local restaurant and a pub. On Thursday November 9 she got the 6.30am bus to Dublin, where she needed to sort out her social welfare payments.
‘ I was talking to her on the Wednesday, on the phone,’ says Kathleen. ‘The last time I saw her in person was the week before that, when I called to her flat. She was doing great and was happy to be back in Callan.
‘She was trying to decide what her next step in life was going to be, the beautician’s course was always in the back of her mind.’
Once finished her errands, Jo Jo went to Bruxelles Pub to spend the afternoon with some friends. That evening she walked over to
Busáras, but had missed the last bus back to Kilkenny. Instead, she got on a bus to Naas in Kildare and from there thumbed two lifts, one to Kilcullen, the next to Moone, where she called her friend Mary f r om a phonebox at about 11.30pm.
‘It was a different Ireland back then,’ says Kathleen. ‘We all used to thumb lifts, it wasn’t unusual. Thank God for that phonebox in Moone, we can prove 100 per cent she was there. It’s what happened to her after that, that’s what we don’t know.
The first Kathleen heard anything was amiss was the following evening, at about 6pm when the manager of the pub phoned as Jo Jo hadn’t arrived for work. Kathleen told him Jo Jo had probably been held up at her restuarant job. The manager rang back half an hour later. Jo Jo’s friend Mary was with him and he told Kathleen about her phonecall with Jo Jo the night before. Kathleen was immediately concerned. ‘She would have rung one of us,’ she says. ‘She’d have known we would have been worrying straight away and there’s no way she’d have put us through that.’
After contacting as many friends and family as she could think of, Kathleen rang the guards.
‘Because she was over 18 they had to wait so many hours before they’d do anything,’ she says. ‘I knew she just wanted to get home.’ She rang them several times again that night.
The next day, Saturday, they got a locksmith to open the door to her bedroom in her flatshare.
‘Her friend Mary came in with us and we went through everything,’ says Kathleen. ‘It was all there, her post office book, everything. This was not a girl who was going away anywhere, she had planned to come home.’
Her disappearance was made public by gardai on the Monday evening. ‘It went nationwide that night and we’re still looking for her to this day,’ Kathleen says.
In the weeks and months after Jo Jo went missing, her family and community came together to do everything they could to find her.
‘ It’s horrific,’ Kathleen says. ‘You’re lifting up a barrel, you want to lift it and you want to find her. But at the same time, you don’t want to lift it and find her. There’s a horrible, sick feeling in your stomach, to think you’re out there looking for her body in woods.’
It was an excruciating time for the Dullard siblings, who had young families.
‘You couldn’t keep it normal all the time and it had an effect on them, growing up over the years,’ Kathleen says of Jo Jo’s nieces and nephews. ‘You take each day as it comes, but all the time, you’re trying to make sense of it all. How can this happen? Ireland is a small island, surely to God we could find something?
‘I remember getting up one day and I just had to go out and search, I couldn’t sit at home any more. I was ready to bring the kids with me and pretend we were going for a walk, which is terrible. In the end my sister-in-law took care of them that day.’
It was decided that Mary would speak for the family and for a number of years her tired and drawn face became almost as familiar as Jo Jo’s.
‘She was brilliant, I don’t know how she did it,’ says Kathleen. ‘I think it wore her down, she was so driven to get answers for Jo Jo.’
Despite repeated appeals, very little i nformation was ever unearthed about what actually happened to Jo Jo that night. There was a sighting reported of a girl being bundled into a car in Kilmacow, south Kilkenny, but little else since then.
Her eldest brother, Tom, died in 2004 of a massive heart attack at the age of 51. Her sister Mary died in 2018 17 weeks after a cancer diagnosis.
‘It was heart-breaking, she had put her own life on hold for so long,’ says Kathleen. ‘We’d often go into Kilkenny for a coffee and a browse, we’d always chat about Jo Jo. She pulled the car in one day and she said to me: “Kathleen, what can I do? I haven’t done enough.” And that was when she wasn’t well.
‘I told her: “Mary, you’ve done more than any else, don’t ever think that. Jo Jo and Mam would be ever so proud of you.”
‘We can’t stop the years from passing, our children have grown up and we have grandchildren, life moves on, but Jo Jo is there the whole time.
‘Even to this day you sometimes think you should be out there still looking, but where to look? I hope she’s not forgotten, because this did happen and you’d be afraid that if that person is still out there, it will happen again.’
Just before Mary died, the family started making fresh efforts to get Jo Jo’s case looked into again.
At the beginning of this year a review was begun by the Garda Serious Crime Review Team and the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation.
‘We had meetings with senior garda officers over the summer,’ says Kathleen. ‘They did a lot of inquiries, took every single statement again, went back to everywhere that Jo Jo lived.’
On Monday Garda issued an appeal to anyone who met or saw Jo Jo that night, or has any information in relation to her murder to please come forward.
They also revealed that Jo Jo had her Sanyo stereo cassette player (model MGP21) with her at the time of her disappearance and are asking i f anyone saw i t after November 9, 1995, or received such a cassette player, to contact them.
‘We’re hopeful,’ says Kathleen of the latest push to find her sister. ‘We know in our hearts that someone knows or has a suspicion about what happened to Jo Jo. Whatever has been holding them back, it must have been out of fear.
‘We’re trying to look at it from their point of view. They might be thinking; “How can I come forward after all these years? I’ve held on to this and never told anybody.”
‘They will not be judged, we want them to know that f rom the bottom of our hearts. We need them to help us, it’s so important they do that for us.
‘Finding Jo Jo would give us a release, an absolute release. It would be the biggest gift, just to know where she is, because she’s out there on her own.
‘She wants to come home and I know Mary and Mam want her home, with her remains resting beside Mam in Kilkenny. At the moment we can’t do anything for her. At least if we had a resting place we could go sit down, have a chat and put flowers on her grave.
‘Please, help Jo Jo finish that journey home.’
‘Finding Jo Jo would give us a release’