Jean McConville is one of Northern Ireland's 'Disappeared' - people seized, murdered and secretly buried across the border in the Irish Republic by the IRA during the height of its campaign 30 years ago.
The only crime of the victims was to breach the IRA's self-styled code. Just how many people were 'disappeared' by the IRA as it acted as judge, jury and executioner is in dispute, but the IRA admitted in 1999 to nine such murders and gave a commitment to help locate the bodies.
Mother-of-ten Jean McConville (37) was abducted in Belfast by a 12-strong gang three weeks before Christmas 1972. The 'crime' of the Protestant woman married to a Catholic was alleged to have been to tend a dying solider wounded in an IRA attack outside her home at Divis Flats in west Belfast.
The Provisionals also accused her of passing information to British soldiers - a claim strenuously denied by her family.
To date only three bodies of the nine identified by the IRA have been recovered. In May 2000 the body of west Belfast man Eamon Molloy was found in a coffin at Faughart cemetery in Co Lough.
He was disappeared from his home in Belfast's Ardoyne in 1975 after being accused by the IRA of being an informer.
Five weeks after his remains were found the bodies of John McClory, 18, and Brian McKinney, 22, were discovered at Colgagh, Co Monaghan.
The West Belfast men were said to have been murdered by the IRA for stealing weapons and using them in armed robberies. A week before they disappeared they had been abducted and questioned by the IRA before being released.
Huge searches by gardai ontinued - on one occasion they spent 50 days digging on Templeton Beach near Carlingford, Co Lough for Mrs McConville - but nothing more has been found.
Other searches during the summers of 1999 and 2000 also failed to recover theremains of Columba McVeigh at Bragan, Co Monaghan; Danny McIlhone atBallynultagh, in Co Wicklow; Kevin McKee and Seamus Wright in Cloghallstown nearNavan, in Co Meath, and Brendan McGraw at Oriston near Kells, Co Meath.
Both the British and Irish parliaments have introduced legislation prohibitingany evidence recovered with the bodies from being used in the prosecution of theIRA killers.
PA