KILLER CAME TO SEARCH ASKING: ‘ANY SIGN?’
IN THE early hours of June 3, 2011, trucker and part-time DJ Bobby Ryan left Mary Lowry’s house to set off for work. They had made love that morning and the couple were looking forward to the bank-holiday weekend. Mary lay in bed watching him pull on his clothes before he quietly crept out of her bungalow. He was never seen again.
Alarm bells began to ring when Bobby failed to show up to work and his Mr Moonlight van was later found abandoned in a nearby wood. As a missing persons investigation was launched, searchers spent days combing the area for clues.
Mary, desperate for information and willing to try anything to find Bobby, asks her brother Eddie to take her to a psychic.
EDDIE knew more than anyone just how desperate Mary was to find Bobby. He had driven his sister to meet a psychic in Nenagh, Co. Tipperary, in the hapless search for clues. ‘She wanted to see if it would help in any way,’ he later said.
The woman, who was well-known in psychic circles but was not openly public about her work, had previously assisted various families in a number of highprofile cases, including the murder of a Limerick man, Roy Collins, in 2009.
When she spoke to Mary that day, she gave her very specific information about what had happened to Bobby, leaving Mary with no doubt in her mind that something terrible had occurred.
The psychic told her that Bobby had been struck from behind and that he was dead. She also told her that the DJ had met her late husband, Martin, on the ‘other side’ and that there was no animosity between the two men. But she couldn’t tell her where Bobby’s body was.
The searches of the wood proved fruitless and it was clear Bobby was not going to be found there.
‘Searches had to be carried out with consent’
So now gardaí looked to the last place Bobby had been seen alive. The case was still a missing-person inquiry and there was no criminal offence associated with it. Searches at this stage, without any evidence of foul play, had to be carried out with consent. This was an intelligence-led inquiry, and as the missing man’s van had been found in the wood, the initial searches had focused on that area. With no sign of a body, or any suggestion that Bobby had been murdered, the focus moved back to the place where he had last been seen alive.
Meanwhile, Michelle Ryan had taken matters into her own hands. In the immediate days after her father’s disappearance she scoured the internet looking for missing persons groups that might be able to help. There, she came across a group called Searching for the Missing, a voluntary organisation headed up by Tosh Lavery, a retired member of the Garda Sub-Aqua Unit, and a former policewoman, Catherine Costello, who had worked with the Metropolitan Police in London and had been involved with the group for more than ten years. Michelle rang them and asked them if they could come to Tipperary to help find Bobby.
After the request from Michelle for assistance, Catherine had called on Abbeyfeale District Search and Rescue, a voluntary search organisation she had enlisted the help of many times before, to coordinate searches. Two volunteer members, Christy Kelleher and Jimmy Cahill, made their way to the wood to carry out an assessment of the area on Tuesday, June 7.
‘We went to the site where the van was found and had a good look around,’ said Christy.
‘We needed to access the wood in advance of planning any search. Once that was done we sent out a text to all of our members to try and get a team together to take part in a search the next day.’
On that same Tuesday, Catherine met Michelle at a quarry next to Mary’s farm, where she was in the middle of a spiritually led search for her father. Like Mary Lowry,
Michelle had also enlisted the help of a psychic, who came to visit the area where her father had gone missing and drew searchers to a quarry next to the farm, where, she told them, she believed Bobby would be found.
There were two quarries next to the Lowry farm, both with entrances leading on to the main road. The first was a disused facility that belonged to the O’Dwyer family and the second was a sand quarry, owned by the Kinnane family. The psychic indicated that Bobby was in the second quarry, and that he was still alive.
Michelle, desperate to believe the psychic was right, had asked another missing-persons group, Trace Missing Persons Ireland, to assist in a search of the quarry. On the Tuesday after Bobby went missing, Joe Blake, the founder of the charity, arrived at the quarry with his two cadaver dogs. The two dogs ran around the property, sniffing around boulders and rocks, where they detected something under an area of sand.
‘One of the dogs found something,’ recalled Joe. ‘But when we investigated, we found animal bones.’
Acting on the psychic’s information, Michelle went to the Gardaí, begging them to thoroughly search the quarry. During a daylong operation, Garda searchers, assisted by a digger, dug up thousands of tonnes of sand in the hunt for Bobby. They found nothing.
Catherine Costello had pulled up in her car on the Tuesday, when Joe Blake’s two dogs were running around sniffing for clues.
While Michelle, her mother Mary Ryan and Joe searched the area around the quarry, Catherine joined the Abbeyfeale District Search and Rescue at Bansha Wood, making her way up to the farm a short time later. When she pulled into the yard, a figure immediately appeared from one of the sheds. It was Pat Quirke, brazenly watching her every move as she made her way towards Mary Lowry’s front door.
Inside the house, Mary was seated at the kitchen table, dabbing her eyes with a tissue and struggling to contain her emotions.
‘Do you mind if I ask you a few questions about Bobby?’ asked Catherine, explaining her role and putting her at ease. It was clear Mary knew her boyfriend intimately,
‘Mary was concerned that he’d taken his own life’
supplying Catherine with details about his weight, height, eye colour and date of birth.
A psychological assessment was next. ‘Was Bobby depressed?’ Catherine asked. ‘Had he ever talked about suicide? How was his demeanour the morning he left?’
When Bobby had disappeared initially, Mary had been immediately concerned that he had taken his own life. But now, after he hadn’t been found, she was beginning to realise that something else might have happened. She knew that he had plans for the future, that he was in good form when he’d left that morning and that he would never do anything to upset his family. So now, when Catherine asked her if there was any suggestion that he might have taken his own life, she categorically rejected the idea. ‘Absolutely no way,’ she told Catherine, ‘he was a happy-go-lucky guy.’
Bobby had told her that when his marriage had broken down seven years previously, it was the worst time of his life and if he hadn’t jumped off a bridge then, he never would. His attitude to life was, she said, ‘I will get out of this mood as soon as I get into it.’
Mary began to open up to Catherine, explaining that she was overwhelmed by all that was happening and that her brain had gone into overdrive trying to piece together what might have happened. She thought Bobby had parked his car in the wood and maybe gone off with one of his friends to Lisdoonvarna in Co. Clare. She told Catherine he was ‘mad into music’.
The night before he’d disappeared, she said, they had sat up listening to music and Bobby had been in great form. She remembered him tapping his leg up and down to the beat of a new tune. The next morning, after he left, she described how she had sat up in bed to wait for the sound of his van leaving, and that it had taken him longer than usual – maybe five minutes, maybe seven minutes, maybe even longer.
Believing the delay could prove relevant, Catherine noted down the times. These things were playing on
Mary’s mind now. Before Catherine left, the women exchanged numbers and promised to stay in touch.
On the Wednesday after Bobby’s disappearance, search volunteers Christy and Jimmy arrived at Bansha Wood with a 33-person team.
‘We were up there from 9am,’ said Christy. ‘Due to the fact that the van was found in the woods it was assumed that this was a case of suicide. If a person parks a van in a wood they are not going to go two or three miles away to die by suicide, so the focus was on the wood. We combed that place and found nothing.’
Meanwhile, a few days after the Garda search of the farm, Garda Conor Ryan returned to Fawnagowan to meet Pat Quirke there. Pat had been asked to empty the slurry tanks on the farm so they could be checked, in case Bobby had somehow fallen in. Pat took Garda Ryan to inspect two tanks. One was a tank that collects waste through a slatted floor in a cattle shed, which Garda Ryan noted was empty. The other was an open tank that contained a small quantity of slurry.
Pat was on hand to assist with a tractor and a vacuum tanker, so that the slurry could be sucked out and spread in the adjoining fields. While he was there, Garda Ryan, a farmer himself, asked Pat if they were the only two tanks on the farm. Pat told him they were. What he failed to mention was the existence of another tank, a little-known run-off tank behind the milking parlour.
Few people knew of the existence of that third tank, so Garda Ryan was easily misled. Pat had good reason to keep its existence to himself.