John Sweetman

In the living room, they found a black PVC bodysuit and rope.

These weren't things her family recognised.

This wasn't a side of Elaine they knew existed.

The family didn't believe Elaine had a boyfriend, but Frank remembered that around four years earlier she had told him she was seeing a man, an architect he thought she said, and he was shocked when she told him he was married and that he tied her up and performed sordid acts.

She soon told him it was over and she never mentioned him again.

Gardie stripped Elaine's bed and found what looked like bloodstains on the mattress, but with the sheets over the top being clean, these stains appeared to be old.

John went home and got into Elaine's HP laptop, logging into fetlife.com, and finding what he believed was Elaine's profile, under the name Chained Brunette.

Several further searches of Elaine's apartment were to occur over the following days, involving other members of the Gardaí, and all devices and digital evidence was handed over to the Computer Crime Investigations Unit at Harcourt Square.

At Step Aside Gardaí Station, other items from her apartment were sent, including a gas mask and printed material relating to BDSM and the Gorian lifestyle.

They also had the notebooks and Elaine's passport, bank documents, a savings book and the spare keys to the fiat.

The Computer Crime Investigations Unit were able to retrieve messages from Elaine's phone and laptop.

There were several conversations about sex fetishes and conversations with a person named David, but there was nothing untoward or particularly worrying in anything to or from Elaine that they could see, and there was absolutely no correspondence with anyone about meeting up on the day she went missing.

By Tuesday, Gardaí issued their first missing person statement about Elaine.

A man saw this and came forward.

He believed he had seen her.

On the evening she disappeared, around two hours after Elaine had left her dad's house, the man had been out running in Shangana Park alongside the cemetery when a woman he believed to be Elaine stopped him and asked for directions to the pedestrian railway bridge that leads towards the beach.

He pointed the way, later recalling that she didn't engage in conversation.

She seemed in a hurry and moved on quickly after they spoke.

A short time later, as he made his way back, the man saw Elaine again, this time on the footbridge itself, heading in that same direction.

Using an app on his phone, Map by Run, which had recorded his exercise, he was able to place the time between 5.45pm and 6.15pm.