The no-body killings

Lots of victims are involved in crime, so they live very secretly. Trying to find out about their movements before they died can be very hard

IT WILL HAVE BEEN a year next week, but still there is no body for Jackie Kenny to bury. “Why would they not just shoot him? Why would they kill him and then take the body? Why would they do that on me? I’ve nowhere to go. No grave, no headstone, nothing.”

She knows James, her 28-year-old son and her only child, is dead. She knew it from the moment he went missing.

“You could read him like a book, and it just wasn’t coming out the way it should. Everyone was saying, ‘Maybe he’s just gone away for a couple of days’ – he’s gone here, he’s gone there. But I knew. I really do believe he’s dead.”

She doesn’t talk about the killers being caught or of justice being done. She only wants her son’s body back.

“I live here with my nephew now, and he does be out all day,” she says in her flat in Inchicore, in Dublin. “I’m sitting beside that phone, waiting and waiting for someone to ring, even to give me a glimmer of hope that I could get his body back to bury it.

“It was his birthday there in June. We went up the mountains and let off a load of lanterns. I’ve nowhere to put down flowers, talk to him, wish him a happy birthday. His anniversary is coming up now. We’ll have a Mass. It’s all we can do.”

Her mind races every time she thinks of what might have happened to him. “It’s very hard, you know? It’s in your head no matter where you are, where you go: how he was killed, and where he is now. He’s out there, buried up some mountain or hill. People are probably walking over him and they don’t even realise it.”

James Kenny-McDonagh, father to Jessica and stepson Cian, both aged 10, was an unemployed man for whom family and his horses were his big passions. He had no serious convictions, but gardaí believe some of his associates had long been involved in one of two feuding drug gangs in Ballyfermot.

Detectives believe Kenny-McDonagh became involved on the periphery of the feud in the latter stages of his life.

He was last seen in Bluebell, not far from his mother’s home, on October 27th last year. That evening his wine-coloured Mazda 626 was found burned out at Lock Road in Dublin, on the stretch between Peamount Hospital and the derelict Polly Hops pub.

The Garda believes he was abducted or lured to a remote spot by members of the rival criminal gang and then shot dead and buried. An extensive Garda search of the area where his car was found has yielded nothing.

Information from criminal sources has convinced gardaí that Kenny-McDonagh was indeed murdered as part of the feud. A criminal in his 40s who is centrally involved in the feud has been identified, via intelligence from the criminal fraternity, as having ordered the murder.

But there is no real evidence on which to ground a prosecution or even to make an arrest. There is also no information that might lead gardaí to the body. Kenny-McDonagh was murdered and vanished. One year on, the killers appear to be in the clear.

“The guards have meetings about the case regular,” says Jackie. “They come and tell me anything they can. But there’s nothing. Really there’s no information.”

JACKIE’S STORY HAS become increasingly familiar over the past decade. The ranks of the “invisible men” – those killed by organised crime gangs who bury the remains to conceal their crime – have been steadily growing.

Garda sources say that without a body such cases are virtually impossible even officially to classify as murder, but they commit to them all the resources of a conventional murder investigation.

“Even when people are shot in a particular spot and the body is there and you have on the scene immediately, if a killing has been properly organised it is very hard to solve,” says one source. “Normally you can find a getaway car and find out where it was stolen. You can check for CCTV of the killers going to and from a scene; you can do forensics, interview witnesses. Sometimes ballistics ties the killing to other shootings. So you have a web of leads to follow. But if there’s no body it’s hard to know where to start.”

Another source says in many cases days can go by before families even report their loved-ones missing, meaning the vital investigative period in the immediate aftermath of a murder is lost.

“Evidence like a gun, clothes the killers wore, a car, can all be well offside or destroyed before you know the person is missing, never mind before you find out that it looks like he’s been murdered. You sometimes would need to talk to dozens of people before you establish who was the absolute last person to see him alive and where that sighting was.”

Other sources say chatter picked up from underworld informants almost always accurately indicates why the person was killed and who was responsible. But specific information that might help solve the case – about the manner and location of the murder and where the body is buried or dumped, for instance – is much more difficult to come by.

One experienced detective says, “In most cases only a couple of people are involved in killing the person and getting rid of the body. And they’re tight. They’re trying to hide it, so they just don’t tell anyone the details.

“Loads of the victims are themselves involved in crime, so they live very secretly. Trying to find out about their movements before they died can be very hard. Without a body, it really can be a needle in a haystack.”

In the world of the secret gangland killing involving disposal of the body, getting a prosecution would be almost impossible without an admission and guilty plea from the killer.

The criminal-law barrister Michael O’Higgins SC says that although there is no “procedural bar” to a homicide-related prosecution in cases where a body is absent, they are more difficult to prosecute.

O’Higgins says the absence of a body often means the crime scene is never identified. This can be a major impediment to gardaí in gathering forensics and ballistic evidence, and in trying to identify people who were at or near the scene at the time.

“If the body has vanished from the face of the earth, you’re probably depending on a confession or somebody involved turning State’s witness,” says O’Higgins.

A CENTRAL concern arises again and again when talking to the families of those missing presumed murdered, says Fr Aquinas Duffy, who runs the Missing Persons Association website missing.ws. When he speaks of the pain of the families of those missing presumed murdered by drug gangs, he does so from personal experience.

His 20-year-old cousin Aengus Shanahan went missing from his native Limerick in February 2000. He’s believed to have been murdered by a local gang. Fr Duffy says his family has now accepted that Aengus was murdered, having received information in a series of anonymous telephone messages up until the middle of last year.

“The caller just didn’t leave enough information for us to locate the body,” he says ruefully. “The families just want the body back. That’s the priority for them, to have a burial. As the years go by it is really hard to explain the level of frustration, the not knowing. People can’t bear to think of what might have happened – it’s just too nightmarish.”

Fr Duffy says families “must never give up”. He strongly believes people involved in a disappearance-murder – or even their relatives, who might have gleaned vital snippets of information from them over time – may have a “qualm of conscience” and supply key facts, even years later, that would help find a body.

He points to the case of Patrick Lawlor. The 18-year-old was abducted by a drug gang in Clondalkin in 1998 and murdered after being blamed for losing a consignment of drugs that was seized by the Garda. New information was supplied to the Garda three years later, and his body was found buried along the banks of the Royal Canal.

In a similar case, gardaí found the remains of another young man who was murdered by a drug gang and his body disappeared. Niall Hanlon, a 19-year-old from Downpatrick Road in Crumlin, Dublin, was stabbed dozens of times in September 2001 as part of a feud between drug gangs in and around Crumlin. His body was buried in a grave in the grounds of St Kevin’s College VEC in Crumlin. Gardaí discovered his remains after being given information six months later, in February 2002, affording his family the dignity of a burial. Garda sources say the case underlines how drug gangs will sometimes brazenly dispose of their victims’ remains in urban areas, not bothering to go to remote locations far from the crime scenes.

Like many of the growing number of cases of people suspected murdered and disappeared by drug gangs, the killing is being reviewed by the Garda’s cold-case squad, which aims not only to find remains and prosecute killers but also to give as much information as possible to families left wondering what might have happened to their loved ones.

Fr Duffy says that while some victims were involved in organised crime, this should not diminish the Garda’s efforts to find the killers. “If we allow organised gangs to police certain areas or police their own members with guns and then conceal the bodies, we are left with anarchy.”

Case files: Missing presumed murdered

CHRISTOPHER GILROY,the chief suspect for a double gangland murder, was killed by the men he worked for as an assassin, gardaí believe. A heroin user and armed robber from Dorset Street in north central Dublin, he was 36 when he disappeared, in January 2009.

Gardaí believe he shot dead the 35-year-old heroin dealer Michael “Roly” Cronin and his 26-year-old minder, James Maloney, in Summerhill, in the north inner city, earlier that month.

The gunman arranged to meet them on a side street on the pretence of doing a drug deal. He got into the back of their car and shot them in the head.

The killer threw the murder weapon and clothing under a car close to the crime scene. They were found by gardaí, and held key forensic evidence that gardaí believe links Gilroy to the murders. They believe he was hired to kill Cronin and Maloney by the notorious Finglas gang once led by Eamon Dunne, who has since also been killed. Detectives believe Dunne’s gang was worried that Gilroy, an addict, was about to become a Garda informer and implicate them in the double murder of Cronin and Maloney, so they had him killed. Gardaí believe Gilroy fled to Spain and that Dunne used his contacts there to hire a gunman to shoot Gilroy and get rid of his body.

PAUL BYRNE, a 20-year-old father of two, was last seen outside his home at Kilmartin Green, Tallaght, on July 15th, 2009. The day before he disappeared, two men, believed to be drug dealers, called to the house he shared with his partner, Martina, to talk to him. They called again the next day, and Byrne reluctantly went to their car to talk again. When his partner went to check on him outside the house he was gone, apparently having got into the men’s Mitsubishi. The Garda believes he had crossed a local drug gang over a minor matter and was killed. His remains have never been found, apparently disposed of to frustrate the Garda investigation.

Byrne had a baby daughter at the time of his disappearance, and his partner has since had his second child.

When the remains of another missing man, Ken Fetherston, were found in a shallow grave in the Dublin Mountains in February last year, members of the Fetherston and Byrne families comforted each other at the scene as they waited for the body to be formally identified.

The Real IRA has since issued a statement calling for the return of Byrne’s remains to his family, saying he had been “needlessly killed by criminal elements”. A bigsearch operation and publicity campaign by his parents and three younger siblings, aged eight to 18, have yielded nothing.

ALAN NAPPERand DAVID LYNDSAY,both from Baldoyle in Dublin, were last seen alive in a car in Clane, Co Kildare, on July 23rd, 2008. Lyndsay, who was 38, was a known drug dealer and gang leader.

The Garda believes a split had emerged in his gang in the weeks before the double disappearance. The split occurred because one gang member, 30-year-old Michael Kelly from Swans Nest Road, in Kilbarrack in north Dublin, owed Lyndsay a large sum of money.

Kelly split from the Lyndsay gang with another criminal, 34-year-old Anthony Foster. In July 2008 Foster was shot dead at his home in Cromcastle, north Dublin, as part of the feud.

Just days later, gardaí believe, Kelly lured Lyndsay and 39-year-old Napper (right) north of the Border on the pretence of paying them the money he owed Lyndsay. They were shot dead somewhere in the North and their bodies dumped, possibly in the Irish Sea.

In May 2009 the PSNI searched a house in Rathfriland, Co Down, and found traces of the men’s dried blood. The double disappearance has never been solved, and the bodies have never been found.

Kelly, the chief suspect, was shot dead last month outside an apartment block on the Clongriffin estate, in north Dublin, in a drug-related attack. He had spent most of last year hiding in Spain from his many gangland enemies in Dublin.

SEAN DUNNE,a well-known armed robber and drug dealer who disappeared in Spain in 2004, is presumed murdered. Dunne, a 34-year-old father of two, was originally from Donaghmede, in north Dublin.

In 2000 he moved to a house in Ratoath, Co Meath, where he was shot in a murder attempt in 2003. He relocated to Alicante, from where he operated a wholesale drug business, sourcing large consignments of drugs from international gangs and selling them in smaller batches to Irish gangs.

Gardaí believe the disputes he was imbroiled with in Ireland, with both paramilitary and gangland figures, followed him to Spain and that his murder and the disappearance of his remains were most likely organised by Irish criminals.

Dunne had convictions for assault and theft. At the time he disappeared, the Criminal Assets Bureau was seeking about €4 million from him after assessing him for unpaid taxes on his income since the mid 1990s.

He was reported to have owned a number of properties in Spain when he disappeared. He had laundered about €1 million of what gardaí believed to be the proceeds of crime. The bureau identified 13 properties owned by him as well as land in Co Meath, and later sold it.

He had six holiday homes in the Donegal villages of Portnablagh and Creeslough. One included a gymnasium with sauna and jacuzzi.

WILLIAM "JOCK" CORBALLY, a 44-year-old from Ballygall Parade in Finglas in Dublin, was last seen alive on February 28th, 1996, by two friends who gave him a lift to Chapelizod.

Such are the difficulties in these investigations that Corbally’s inquest was held only last year, a decade and a half after his murder. It was the first inquest coroner Dr Kieran Geraghty had presided over involving a murder in which the body was never found.

Assistant Garda Commissioner John O’Mahony told the inquest that on the night he was last seen Corbally went to meet people in Ballyfermot, apparently to collect drugs and money.

A witness told gardaí the men Corbally had gone to meet took him to a field at Kingswood in Baldonnel. He was dragged from the car and severely beaten by three men with a small pickaxe handle, a lead pipe and a baseball bat. Gardaí believe he might have been shot before his body was buried. The inquest recorded a verdict of unlawful killing.

Corbally (left) was killed because the notorious Finglas gang leader PJ Judge believed he was an informer. Judge was himself shot dead outside a pub in Finglas in 1997, probably by the Provisional IRA. The witness who supplied gardaí with information about the Corbally killing was shot dead in 2003. Corbally’s family spent years searching for his remains, but they were unsuccessful.

PATRICK LAWLOR, a 23-year-old single man from Darndale, north Dublin, was last seen leaving his family home at 6.30am on December 16th, 2004.

The family got a tip-off that his car was at the back of Dublin airport, and they found it there with his jacket inside.

Two years after the disappearance, Lawlor’s friend James Purdue was shot dead in a drug-related killing in Donaghmede, north Dublin. Gardaí believe Lawlor (below) was killed and his remains dumped or buried and that the killing was drug-related.

A north-Dublin crime gang selling drugs across Dublin and Co Meath and into the Border counties are the main suspects. The leader of the gang, who is from north Dublin but living in another country, has been at the centre of a major Criminal Assets Bureau investigation. He is believed to have amassed considerable wealth from drug dealing.

Lawlor’s family have vowed never to give up looking for him, and have sustained a high-profile campaign in Darndale and Coolock seeking information about what happened to him. Despite that campaign, however, and searches in north Co Dublin where they believed they might find the remains, the body of the petty criminal has never been found.

STEPHEN FINNEGAN,a 19-year-old from Baldoyle, north Dublin, disappeared on February 2nd, 2000. His silver Honda Civic was found in Howth four days later. On the day he disappeared he drove from his home, on Willie Nolan Road in Baldoyle, north Dublin, to meet people known to him, but what happened when he reached the harbour village has never been established.

Finnegan’s mother, Linda, believes her son (right) was shot dead by a local dealer on the day he was last seen and his body disposed of, possibly off Howth Head.

Towards the end of December 1999 Finnegan is believed to have found drugs owned by a dealer from north Dublin. This criminal figure believed Finnegan was about to give the Garda information about the drugs.

Finnegan is believed to have been put under immense pressure by the dealer, with repeated phone calls and threats to his life, and was beaten by him in the weeks before he disappeared. The Finnegan family believe this episode is linked to the teenager’s disappearance.

The Finnegan family still hope that, almost 12 years after the disappearance, somebody will come forward with information.