‘Last roll of dice’: New bid to solve mystery of missing Annie McCarrick
American vanished here 27 years ago, but there is new resolve to uncover her fate, writes Catherine Fegan
INVESTIGATORS will travel from the US for “one last roll of the dice” to solve the mystery of missing American woman Annie McCarrick (above). They have identified a prime suspect and believe she was in the company of a man matching the suspect’s description at a café in Enniskerry, Co Wicklow, before she disappeared in 1993.
ANNIE McCarrick is 12 years old in the picture. She’s sitting on a wall, dressed in a pink T-shirt and grey shorts, holding her aunt Maureen’s bridal bouquet.
White ribbons stream from the stems, skimming her sun-kissed legs. She’s smiling innocently from ear to ear, unaware that the shot, one of several from a now-treasured family collection, would become a lasting reminder of all that has been lost.
“She never had her own wedding day,” says her aunt, Maureen Covell, speaking from her home in New York.
“None of the milestones we all take for granted were ever reached and that’s one of the greatest tragedies. She had so much living still to do. It’s been a very long 27 years without her, but she isn’t forgotten. She will never be forgotten.”
The mysterious disappearance in 1993 of the beautiful young American student is one of the biggest unsolved missing-person cases on Garda files.
The case remains open and is periodically reviewed, say gardaí, but a suspect has never been formally identified and there are currently no leads.
Annie had disappeared from her home in Sandymount, Dublin on Friday, March 26.
The last confirmed sighting of the tall, striking 26-year-old was made by a former work colleague on the No 44 bus to Enniskerry at approximately 3.30pm.
She told a friend she was going to the beauty spot for a walk.
Later that evening, just days before her mother was due to arrive from the US for a visit, Annie didn’t show up to collect her wages from the Baggot Street coffee shop where she worked.
On Saturday, when her friends arrived at her apartment for a dinner party, there was no sign of her.
A bag of groceries from Quinnsworth, which she had bought that Friday morning, lay unpacked on the kitchen table.
A few days later, on the other side of the Atlantic, Maureen Covell received a frantic phone call from her family in New York. Annie had gone missing, she was told, and her mother Nancy was going to Ireland to try to find her.
“I have a vivid recollection of first hearing about Annie’s disappearance,” says Maureen.
“You never forget something like that. My husband John was in the navy and we were living in Alabama. After I got that call, we bundled our five children into the car and drove to New York. My mind was racing. Once we got there, John got a flight to Ireland. He was convinced he would find her.”
****
Brian McCarthy had been working for the US Embassy in Dublin for 10 years when he got a call to come to the headquarters in Ballsbridge. It was Easter Monday, about two weeks after Annie’s disappearance. “The regional security officer contacted me and asked me would I meet these people,” he says of Annie’s parents, Nancy and John.
“It was a week or so after Nancy had come over and they weren’t happy with the attitude from the guards.
“Their approach in those days was, ‘Look, she’s 26. She’s taken off and can do what she wants.’ That’s why they ended up at the embassy, seeking further help.”
It was a worried call from Annie’s friends that first alerted Nancy McCarrick to her daughter’s disappearance.
They had arrived for the planned dinner party at the Sandymount flat on Saturday evening and nobody came to the door.
By the Sunday, after there was still no sign of her, gardaí were alerted.
Born and raised in Long Island, New York, Annie initially moved to Ireland in 1987. She studied at St Patrick’s Training College in Drumcondra and later at the National University of Ireland in Maynooth. Annie returned home to the US in 1990 but decided to move back to Ireland in 1993.
She had a quiet, unassuming personality but had a great sense of humour and enjoyed the company of others.
“She was like a younger sister to me,” says Maureen.
“There were nine years between us and we lived very close to each other so our lives were intertwined. Annie was very playful and she had beauty on her side. She had a busy social life and a wide circle of friends.”
Annie’s father John was a retired New York State parks police officer who later became a teacher at the Bayport-Blue Point High School. Nancy worked as a secretary in the finance office of a school.
“John was a gentle giant,” recalls McCarthy.
“He was a big man physically. He was very open… what you see is what you get, typical Irish-American. He was a very decent man.”
During that initial meeting in the embassy, McCarthy remembers trying to gather information about Annie from both parents.
“Nancy was totally distraught,” he recalls.
“With John it was more bewilderment about what was going on and had taken a more negative view towards the initial Garda response. For me, it was a process of going back through her past, her boyfriends, her background, was she seeing anyone, if anyone had a clue that could point us in the right direction.”
****
By the time Brian McCarthy was engaged with the McCarrick family to assist in the case, a full-scale investigation involving up to 100 officers was well in train. It was led by former assistant Garda commissioner Martin Donnellan, a detective inspector in Donnybrook at the time.
“It’s a case I still think about all these years later,” he told the Irish Independent last month. “We left no stone unturned.”
The investigating team quickly interviewed family and friends to establish Annie’s last movements. They sourced a set of dental records and fingerprints and swabbed for DNA in the apartment that she shared with two female flatmates.
Extensive house-to-house enquiries were made by gardaí, armed with an accurate description of her clothing, including a distinctive handmade cardigan with special buttons.
Hundreds of officers and volunteers fanned out across the bleak, uninviting mountains, digging and searching in water drains and gullies seeking any trace of the young woman.
With her two room-mates gone for the weekend, Annie left her apartment to walk the short distance to Quinnsworth in Sandymount. Receipts, time-stamped at 11.02am, show she bought ingredients to make desserts for Café Java, where she was due to work the next day.
CCTV footage then shows her in the bank, which she later leaves and heads back in the direction of her apartment.
From the phone box outside, she rang a friend and asked her if she wanted to go to Enniskerry. A second call was made to two friends she invited over for dinner the following night. She left the apartment later that day, shortly after 3pm, to take the number 18 bus to Ranelagh.
“The last known sighting of her was on that bus,” says McCarthy. “I interviewed that girl who was on the bus and she is adamant that it was her. She got off the bus before Annie did, so that was the end of that. But I believe she [Annie] went to Enniskerry.”
****
Two weeks into the search, a man came forward with information. He was a doorman at Johnnie Fox’s pub who had recognised Annie
‘It just broke her father. He got old so fast. Total heartbreak’
in a missing person’s poster because he had seen a woman fitting her description in the venue on the night Annie disappeared. The woman was in the company of man in his 20s and wearing a waxed jacket.
A traditional music band was playing and he remembered telling the couple that there was a £2 cover charge. Her companion paid and continued to pay for her throughout the evening. No one saw the woman leave the pub, and the man who was with her has never been identified.
Gardaí believe the sighting was genuine, particularly because neither party has ever come forward to identify themselves and rule out Annie as the woman.
It was confirmed she had also been to the pub several times before.
However, the sighting, believes McCarthy, was a case of mistaken identity. According to him, Annie never entered Johnnie Fox’s and the entire focus on the venue is wrong.
“She was never there,” he says. “We found an American female who looked very like Annie who lived out there, she worked in the stables.
“We had gotten a call one night saying that Annie was in Johnnie Fox’s so we headed out there, hell for leather, and there was a woman sitting at the bar talking to her friends. She had an American accent and from behind she looked the image of Annie. We could see where the mistake was made.”
Efforts to shine a light on Annie’s case reached far and wide. US ambassador Jean Kennedy Smith and vicepresident Al Gore lobbied the government on behalf of Annie’s family.
A year after her disappearance, in 1994, John McCarrick arrived back in Ireland offering a $150,000 reward for information.
With him were US lawyer Michael Griffith, hired and flown over to assist in the efforts, and Jeremy Wetherell, a former British intelligence officer who ran a private security business.
“Myself, John and Jeremy set up an emergency conference room at the Berkeley Court Hotel in Dublin,” recalls Griffith.
“We did a press conference and we offered a reward. We didn’t have money to pay for it, but we were hoping that if someone knew something, they would come forward and we would worry about that the money later.
“We’d had about 300 phone calls – about 295 of those were from mystics. They had all these theories and leads that went nowhere. People who meant well but who had nothing to tell us really.
“Then there were the cranks. I agreed to meet one man in Stephen’s Green [who] said Annie was working for the CIA and had transistors in her teeth.”
**** McCarrick and Griffith appeared on ‘The Late Late Show’, appealing for help, but still there were no leads.
Back in the States, Annie’s family began to lose all hope of ever seeing her again.
“To be perfectly honest, I gave up praying that we would find her after about two years,” says Maureen.
“Thinking about what was done to her, how she died, it absolutely haunted us. It came to the point that I finally said: ‘I think we are not supposed to know how she died.
“We have to accept that the circumstances were not good and that perhaps it was good that we didn’t know’.”
Like many parents whose children are lost in tragic circumstances, John and Nancy went their separate ways. The unconditional love for Annie, which underpinned their strong marriage, now drove an irreparable wedge between them. Nancy remarried but that too ended.
“I last spoke to John about a month before he went into hospital,” says Brian.
“Annie was on his mind all the time. He always ended up going back to that phrase, ‘Someone out there knows.’
“It just broke him. You could just see him physically deteriorate. The weight walked off him. He just got old so fast. Total heartbreak.”
John died in 2009 not knowing what had happened to his only daughter. The search for answers had consumed the best part of his life, costing him his marriage, hundreds of thousands of dollars, and his health.
Nancy, who has shied away from talking to the press in recent years, found solace in her faith.
“My sister is much stronger than I believe I would ever be,” says Maureen.
“She has a deep-seated faith and that has helped get her through this awful tragedy, but there is no finality. It stays with her.”
****
Ten years after Annie’s disappearance, former FBI agent Kenneth Strange began to take an active interest in her case. He had a personal connection – Annie had gone to school with his sister Maura and John McCarrick was his teacher in high school.
“I was working overseas with a federal agency in 1993 when Annie went missing,” he says.
“Then in 2003, when I had moved to California,
I saw there had been no resolution with the case and I began taking an interest, corresponding with Nancy.
“I found out there had been several private investigations as well as the Garda one. I walked Mrs McCarrick through the process and we filed a missing persons complaint with the FBI.
“A few years later the FBI sent over some agents from the behavioural analysis unit to look into the case.”
Annie was one of six women who disappeared in a 130km area outside Dublin between 1993 and 1998.
Like Annie, the bodies of JoJo Dollard, Ciara Breen, Fiona Sinnott, Fiona Pender and Deirdre Jacob were never found.
Convicted rapist Larry Murphy has emerged as a prime suspect in the Jacob case and those examining the cold cases have not ruled him out in the other probes. He was released from prison in 2010 after serving nine years for the brutal kidnap, rape and attempted murder of a woman in the Wicklow mountains in February 2000.
“I believe Annie was the victim of a serial killer,” says Strange. “I have a feeling it’s someone she would never have guessed would do something so heinous to her.
“I think she is tied to the other women because of the geography of where they went missing.”
Strange’s former high school classmate is John Covell, Maureen’s husband, who along with Griffith and McCarthy, are hoping to finally solve the mystery of Annie’s disappearance.
“We have a lot of skin in the game,” says Strange.
“I am an investigator by trade and there is that part of me that wants to solve this case and then there is the sentimental part because of the connection.”
Griffith was due to visit Dublin in March for a meeting with a Dublin-based criminal lawyer who is assisting in the new probe. Then Covid-19 came along.
The privately banded team of men hope to meet later this year, with a view to asking gardaí for access to the files.
“We don’t see why they shouldn’t,’ says Griffith.
“We think if we put our heads together we can resurrect this case and solve it. One last roll of the dice.”