‘She didn’t take her own life. I just want answers for my mum’
BERNA FIDAN, WHOSE SISTER ESRA UYRUN HAS BEEN MISSING SINCE 2011, SAYS SHE WILL NEVER STOP LOOKING FOR THE TRUTH ABOUT WHAT HAPPENED, REPORTS TOM GALVIN
IMAGINE the unbearable torture of knowing in your heart of hearts that your sister is dead, but being unable to prove that and, worse, fearing she has instead been held captive for 13 years. This is Berna Fidan’s life since her sister Esra Uyrun disappeared. A reoccurring nightmare she refuses to let lie until she has the answers that will bring her and her family closure. Her mum is now 80 and in ill health. Berna herself is injured at present. And Esra has a son, who is now a teenager. The agony is so overwhelming that Berna still has moments where “I’ll just shut myself in the room and sit there and cry”.
There have been few leads, some of them terrible hoaxes, with people trying to extort money from Berna’s family in return for helping them find her sister Esra. But despite the lack of hope, every year, on the anniversary of her disappearance on February 23, 2011, Berna can be found in Bray, Co Wicklow, where the trail ran dry in a CCTV black-spot.
Now, 13 years after Esra was last seen, Berna is sitting in a coffee shop in the seaside town a stone’s throw from where her sister’s car, a grey Renault Twingo, was abandoned. She has been at this spot at least 50 times.
“It doesn’t get any easier, if anything it gets harder, and more and more frustrating, because so much time is passing and nobody is coming forward,” she said. “We’re still at square one, because we just have no clue as to what happened.”
She is accompanied by a close family friend, Ilknur, who has been with her on those trips over from the UK, as well as a friend from Bray, Debbie, who has supported her annual campaign of appeals and postering.
“We can’t stop coming because we have no closure,” she says. “We have no evidence as to what actually happened. And we are praying that somebody will come forward because, at the end of the day, I just can’t believe that somebody just disappears off the face of the Earth and nobody has seen or heard anything at all.”
Asked if they believe there will be a time when they will stop this pilgrimage, the trio reply with an emphatic no.
“That’s not an option,” Berna says. “It feels like a nightmare coming over, because I know I’m going to come over here with hope, but by the last day I feel I’m coming back empty-handed again and that’s what gets to me more.
“I know, when I land and I see my mum, and she looks at me to say, any news? And I can’t give her any. I just want answers for my mum. She’s 80 now and she hasn’t been in good health for years. Since Esra went missing, she’s had a stroke. So her health has deteriorated.”
Ilknur interjects to say that after 13 years “we can’t even start grieving”. As time passed after Esra’s disappearance, her husband Ozgur moved back to London with their son.
“We did the falling apart at the very beginning,” adds Berna. “And I still fall apart from time to time, there will be times where, I’ll just be overwhelmed with it and I’ll just shut myself in the room and sit there and cry,” Berna says. “I’ve done counselling at the very beginning and I didn’t think that was for me. People say they don’t want to ask, I don’t want to upset you, but talking about her helps because I don’t want her forgotten. It puts my mind to rest if I know people haven’t forgotten about her.”
That fateful day in 2011, Esra left her home in Clondalkin, Co Dublin to go to the shop. She never returned. The car was found parked in front of the amusement arcade at the Bray Head end of the seafront, and the keys were later found in a takeaway restaurant in Dublin.
Berna flew to Ireland from the UK as quickly as she could. So confident was she that she could locate Esra, she booked a return flight and a seat for her sister, believing she would bring her back to her home for a time to “have a chat and clear her head”. Instead, she stayed in Ireland almost three months. Leaving with a broken life.
Then, people had suggested she had taken her life. Berna doesn’t believe that. But she also doesn’t believe she is alive.
“I don’t think she’s alive,” she says. “Because if she was she’d contact us. She was one of the most chattiest people you’d come across. And she would make friends with everybody she met. She was always on the phone to me, my mum, my daughter, her friends in the UK. Every day she would be talking to somebody.
“So, unless she’s being kept somewhere that she can’t make contact with us, which is an unbearable thought and I hate to think that is the case and that she’s suffering all these years. I’d never want her to suffer. But if she was alive and able to phone us, she would have done so by now.”
Stepping outside the coffee shop, Berna surveys the car park and upwards to Bray Head. She recalls her first visits, asking locals if they had seen her sister. People who had routines, like walking a dog, or jogging. There was the belief Esra had been seen going up towards Bray Head.
“I sat on that wall and waited for those people to come by. And I explained the situation and I was told, ‘I don’t ever remember seeing that girl here and I’m here every morning’.”
Berna had also been told, blatantly at one point, that Esra had taken her own life – just days away from her birthday when she had made plans to celebrate it. Sitting on the wall, Berna then remarks on the weather, and wonders how anyone could have done such a thing when it clearly would have been so cold.
“Where’s the body?” she asks. “We had this whole area searched from day one. Members of the public came out and walked the whole area. They used paragliders to look at areas they couldn’t get into. But not one shred of Esra’s belongings were found, nothing.”
After 13 years, so much has changed. Technology has developed and social media has allowed more and more people to connect without having ever met. Berna wonders why there is still silence and if any of her annual pleas are connecting at all.
“We did the posters from the first year, there isn’t anywhere you wouldn’t have seen her picture,” she says.
“It surprised me in Bray – when people say is this new, ‘I’ve never seen this before’. We want to make people aware that she’s missing still. But we bump into the public, as we’re putting up the posters, and people ask, ‘that poor girl, is she still missing?’ Obviously, they don’t know. I’m open to suggestions about what I can do differently, but I don’t even know anymore.”
Her poster campaigns take