‘Naked woman seen screaming’ on night Jo Jo vanished
A NAKED woman was seen running and screaming through the Co. Kildare village of Moone on the night Jo Jo Dullard vanished, sources have confirmed.
The information was given to gardaí by a truck driver in November last year and investigators have deemed the account to be credible.
The sighting, in November 1995, took place 9km from Usk Little where police started a search this week for another missing woman, Deirdre Jacob. The truck driver also spoke to a woman near the memorial for Jo Jo in November of last year.
He approached her and said: ‘Twenty-five years ago, I was passing through here at 11 o’clock at night, with the boss in a truck. I was only a chap at the time and there was a woman there, running naked in the street, screaming.’ The source told a Sunday newspaper the man was in Moone to refamiliarise himself with the village’s geography.
He then drove to Naas Garda Station and gave a statement to the Garda Serious Crime Review Team (GSCRT).
Deirdre and Jo Jo were among eight women who went missing in Leinster in the 1990s.
Gardaí upgraded Jo Jo’s disappearance to murder in June 2020, and began re-investigating.
Officers spoke to several people who made statements at the time.
The truck driver was one of them. Another senior source confirmed that the GSCRT took a statement from the man at Naas Garda Station last year.
The statement alleged that, having seen the naked woman, the driver stopped the car to let his boss run after her, ‘but the more he went after her, the more she ran’.
The new search for Deirdre Jacob, who vanished aged 18, started last week on a woodland site that is a nine-minute drive from where Jo Jo was last seen.
A senior source said the search was prompted by the fresh inquiry into Deirdre’s disappearance, but that investigators were not ruling out the possibility that evidence might be found relating to the other missing women.