CLOSE relatives of the missing Co Kilkenny woman, Ms JoJo Dullard, have come to terms with the thought that she may be dead, and would like to be able to bury her in her home town.
"If it's meant to be that she's gone, then we would like to be able to bring her home," her sister, Ms Kathleen Bergin, said yesterday. She said it was hard to describe the mixed feelings of hoping for a decent burial, but knowing this would mean the end of any hope that her sister was still alive. "In a way we are hoping it is her, but then we're not. It's hard to explain," she said.
The major discrepancy between the body found in the Shannon estuary late last week and Ms Dullard's description at the time of her disappearance is that she is believed to have been wearing short black boots, although this is not definite.
"She had bought new boots, and they weren't in the flat so we assumed she was wearing them," Ms Bergin said.
Gardai plan to take the clothing found on the Shannon body to Callan to see if family members can identify them.
Ms Dullard went missing on the night of November 9th, 1995. She had travelled from her home in Callan, Co Kilkenny, to Dublin to collect two weeks' dole payments, went drinking with friends in the city and missed the bus home. She managed to get a late bus to Naas, Co Kildare, and hitchhiked to the village of Moone, from where she telephoned a friend from a callbox just before 11.40 pm.
During the call she jumped from the box to flag down a car and returned to the telephone to tell her friend she had got a lift. Later unconfirmed sightings placed her walking through the village of Castledermot, the next village on the Dublin Kilkenny road, at about midnight.
She never arrived home, and despite intensive searches by gardai, the Army and Civil Defence volunteers no trace of her was found.
The first apparent breakthrough for gardai investigating the case was in early 1996 when a woman claimed to have been in a car with Ms Dullard and two men on that night. However, she did not prove to be a reliable witness.
Early this year a taxi driver told gardai he saw a woman apparently struggling to escape from a British registered car near Waterford on the same night.
Two British men who had been travelling in the State in November 1995. and had been arrested and detained by gardai in Kilkenny for breaking into public telephone coin boxes, were later questioned in Britain about the Dullard case. The Garda said last week that officers had established they had stayed at a guesthouse in Cork, and that they were no longer considered suspects.