Garda still lays flowers at site Phyllis found
A RETIRED garda still lays wreaths at the spot where Phyllis Murphy’a body was found after she was brutally murdered, more than 40 years after her killing.
The 23-year-old Kildare woman was raped, beaten and strangled in December 1979 in a case that shocked the nation.
Phyllis’s family had to wait nearly 23 years for justice until improved DNA techniques led to the conviction and life imprisonment of former soldier John Crerar in November 2002.
In a moving TG4 documentary on the case this week, retired garda Finbar McPaul visits the remote wood near the Wicklow Gap where Phyllis’s body was found nearly a month after her murder.
During the Marú Inár Measc documentary, Mr McPaul recalls the freezing winter which handicapped
‘No evidence, had it been warmer in mountains’
the search for Phyllis back in 1979, but which eventually worked in their favour.
‘We were lucky in the sense that when Phyllis was found it was so cold up in the mountains that she was protected,’ he says. ‘Had it been warmer there would have been no soft tissue and no evidence.’
Phyllis’s brutal slaying stunned the country at a time when murders in Ireland were much rarer.
Almost 3,000 people turned out to look for her when she suddenly disappeared at a bus stop after Christmas shopping.
Her distraught family said she would never get in a car with a stranger, and it was always assumed she must have known her killer. It eventually emerged Phyllis used to babysit Crerar’s children, although the killer had insisted he never met her. Phyllis, a factory worker at
Curragh Knitwear, was staying in digs in Rathangan at the time of her death. She had just spent the afternoon doing Christmas shopping in Newbridge when she went missing shortly after 6:25pm.
It was a huge relief for the family when Crerar was eventually arrested. The father of five of Woodside Park, Kildare, was 54 when he was convicted. A colleague originally gave Crerar an alibi, claiming he was at work when Phyllis disappeared. But he later admitted that he lied to gardaí in 1980 and Crerar had arrived at work late.
■ Marú inár Measc airs on TG4 on Wednesday at 9.30pm