Let’s hope Deirdre’s parents find answers

AFTER 20 years of waiting for their daughter, Michael and Bernie Jacob finally know something about her disappearance. Sadly, their hopes have been shattered that Deirdre – who, in one of the most heartbreaking missing persons cases in the country, seemed to dissolve into thin air on her short walk home from Newbridge on a summer day – is still alive. But they seem determined to make the best of the new development.

‘We were devastated when we heard it was going to be treated as a murder case,’ says Michael about the girl who would have turned 38 this year and was robbed of her dream of becoming a schoolteacher.

Sources say that convicted rapist Larry Murphy is the chief suspect and that gardaí are hoping for enough new evidence to charge him. It appears he was working as a joiner locally in the days leading up to Deirdre’s disappearance. Gardaí plan to have CCTV footage of Deirdre from that fateful day digitally enhanced to see if it can jog memories, and there’s talk of remote areas in Wexford and Kildare being searched.

It all sounds promising as if the net is tightening around the chief suspect.

Except that we have been here before, just two years ago when the tragic disappearance of schoolboy Philip Cairns returned to the spotlight.

THE choreography was similar, with a milestone anniversary seeming to trigger a frenzy of Garda activity. In Philip’s case it was 30 years since he disappeared in Rathfarnham on his way back to school after his lunch break.

The Garda made a plea for assistance, while information was leaked that paedophile Eamon Cooke was in the frame and that a witness had come forward with significant revelations about the radio station owner.

Eamon Cooke, like Larry Murphy in the Deirdre Jacob case, had long been a person of interest in Philip’s disappearance. He had died from cancer earlier that year and when gardaí visited him, he confirmed parts of the witness’s story of having seen Philip in the radio station.

However, Cooke refused to give any clues to the whereabouts of Philip’s body.

At the time, the internet was a hotbed of conspiracy theories claiming that Cooke’s role in the affair was only peripheral. There were rumours that it was an open and shut case concerning a Dublin paedophile ring that involved clerics and other top people.

Yet Philip’s mother Alice closed her ears to the drip feed of information. In an RTÉ interview, she ignored the heated speculation, calmly saying that all she wanted was to give her lost son a Christian burial.

In the end she was justified. Philip’s schoolbag, found on the lane by his house some days after his disappearance and the supposed key to the mystery, was discovered to contain no DNA to link it to Cooke.

Suddenly the case against the supposed chief suspect became rather more tenuous. Even more extraordinary was the failure of gardaí to have had the school bag tested earlier for DNA.

It’s inevitable that a certain amount of speculation will accompany any attempt by the authorities to revive interest in an old case.

BUT when the new leads prove rather more threadbare than we are initially led to believe, it can seem as if the information campaign is designed as much as a PR move to bolster confidence in the Garda as a realistic stab at solving a case.

Time will tell if this current bout of activity around Deirdre Jacob’s disappearance leads to a substantial breakthrough.

In the meantime we must trust that her anguished parents don’t unduly raise their hopes of finding her body.