Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What events led to Sandra Collins' disappearance?
I was at work and Anne rang me, it was before lunchtime, and just said that she had gone out the night before to get groceries from the shop and she hadn't come home. And I said, right. And I said, had she had words like a ranting? And no, no, no, everything was fine. And I said, well, like, I said, she's a grown woman, you know. and she can come and go as she pleases now.
I said, I know it's not like her, but I said, sure, maybe she went to one of the friends' houses and there could have been a party or there could have been anything and she just stayed and she just hasn't come back yet. I said, I wouldn't be panicking. I thought it was unusual for her, but I thought, you know what, maybe there was a row or something and maybe...
Sandra left and said, you know, I'll just let you cool down now. And she just said it's not like her, like, and I don't understand it. She wouldn't leave me. Those were her words. She wouldn't leave me like this. And I thought to my own mind, but she's not obliged to be with you. She was all about her again. 24-7, she was coming back to her again. It was about her.
Her concern was a bit there for Sandra, but like, oh, how was I left?
Yeah.
Like more or less, how dare I be left for the night on my own? So I just said, well, there's not much I can do now anyway. I'm at work. So I said, when I finish work, I'll ring you. And are you going to tell your mother and Joe? And I said, no, I'm not going to say anything until I finish work. She might be back. So what's the point in causing more trouble and more hassle and more worry?
I said, no. So I came off the phone anyway and I went home. And I remember thinking when I went down to my own house, went in for my lunch, I remember thinking, good on you, Sandra.
good on you maybe all the talking we've done to you down through the years and with everything else everything else maybe we thought it wasn't sinking in but maybe it did sink in now and you just thought oh sad you you know i've had enough that's a good enough for her
and that was Tuesday and Tuesday night then after six o'clock I rang her and no she wasn't home so I said oh I better write I didn't want to go down to my mother and my stepfather Joe I didn't want to go down and then small but more bad news or more trouble but I had to go down and tell them so we went down and told them anyway and then we said should we go down to Killala
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Chapter 2: How did the family react to Sandra's absence?
And they said they'd come out and speak to us in the house and I wasn't like her and what have you, but not to be, not to go worrying too much, you know. So they came out then and they were talking to Anne and mum and dad and when we last seen her, when we last spoke to her, what was she wearing and I suppose I just sat there in a bit of a daze really.
This is Ghost, a Crime World subscriber exclusive series. Episode 5, Where Could She Be? You can understand Bridie's initial reluctance to tell her mother and Joe about Anna Grady's phone call. They were still immersed in the deep grief of losing James and had three small children to look after. Patrick was just 13 years old while Davy and Mary were 10 and 9.
And as you heard her say, there was a part of Bridie that hoped Sandra had maybe finally made her escape from their demanding aunt. The last Anne saw of Sandra on that freezing cold Monday night was when she left the house at around 7.30pm to go and buy some groceries in Baran's shop on Church Street.
It's since shut down, but back then it was about a five-minute walk away from their cottage on Courthouse Street. On the way, she called in to an elderly neighbour, William Johnston, to check if he needed anything. In the shop, she bought fire lighters, bread, milk, and a packet of sausages. She had a brief chat with the owner, Maura Buran, before leaving at around 7.45 p.m.
We don't know where Sandra went or who she spoke to over the next few hours. The last time she was seen publicly was at around 11.15 p.m. later that night, when she dropped into the country kitchen takeaway on Georgia Street. Although it was filthy weather outside, Sandra appeared to be dry. Colleen Gallagher was working behind the counter.
She knew Sandra to see and would later tell the Gardaí that she'd been her usual quiet and polite self and her demeanour was normal. She ordered one large bag of chips, left the takeaway, crossed the road and walked left, which was in the direction of her home. But Sandra never returned to No. 8 Courthouse Street.
When last seen, she was wearing a dark pink-coloured sleeveless fleece jacket with a hood, black boots and black trousers. The following day, Tuesday 6th December, Anne rang Bridie. Inevitably, there were questions about any possible boyfriends, someone who Sandra might have gone to stay with.
Bridie was made aware she'd been seeing a man who lived on one of the main streets across the road from the village inn. A man we now know was called Patrick MacDonald. But Anne claimed to be clueless about where Sandra could have gone or who she might have visited. She said she was baffled that it wasn't like her.
She went out to get the messages for the tea. But now that she's showered and she got all dressed up and put makeup on and all of this, but she said that wouldn't be unusual for her. She'd do that anyway. She'd do that anyway. They asked us, had she a boyfriend, and we knew about another fella. I knew about a fella that lived in a flat down in the town.
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Chapter 3: What were the initial search efforts for Sandra?
And I'd heard about him, but I'd heard then that she was, I'd heard they were going together and then I heard that they had broken up. Yeah, she mentioned him, all right.
She mentioned him to us.
I can't think his name now, but we went down anyway to him. Me, dad and mum called to his place and he came out to the door and I said about Sandra and he said, oh, I have nothing to do with her anymore.
Didn't he close the door?
And he just closed the door. He said, I have nothing to do with her anymore. I'm not going with her. I have nothing to do with her. And he closed the door.
Although just barely a teenager, Patrick remembers clearly those first few days after Sandra went missing and the growing panic his family felt as time went on and there was still no sign of her. It was an extraordinarily sad and bewildering situation to find themselves in, dealing with the Gardaí and hoping that someone might come forward with information that could help.
In many ways, their lives went on hold. The children continued to go to school, but afterwards, every afternoon for months, they returned to Killala with their parents to look for Sandra.
I got up, went to school as normal, and then Tuesday was the 5th. my mother told me that Anne had rang at lunchtime to Bridie, because Bridie was at work, to say that Sandra hadn't come home. At the time, I thought, oh, it's not like you. But then I thought, oh, maybe... I honestly thought maybe that there had been a row or something between the two of them, that Sandra had stormed off.
I didn't really... I didn't think, I didn't go into a real panic mode. I said, oh, I bet they've had a round or something's gone on between them. Maybe Sam just finally stood up to her and told her I've had enough of this and, you know, done what we were telling her to do, you know, just tell her no. Because we used to say to her, you don't have to do that, just tell her no, like...
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Chapter 4: What significant discoveries were made during the search?
And they told my younger brother and sister that obviously they didn't want to worry them. So they said that Sandra had gone off on a little holiday and she'd be back. But unfortunately, as the time went on, they couldn't let them be in the dark, so they had to tell them like that. She went out and we didn't know where she was.
Because the guards were coming in and out to our house, so obviously, you know, they knew something was up. Well, as the days were going by and by, it was beginning to think, you're beginning to get more and more concerned, like, and there was no sighting of her. And then I think she was about maybe two days gone, three days gone, and they'd moved her from, we'll say, the shop.
And the next thing, she had been seen in the takeaway, and I thought, oh, great. They've seen, you know, they've found something of her. And it was like, then I was questioning myself going, sure it's so small, like where could she possibly be?
It's a different thing if she was above and if we lived in Dublin or Cork or Galway or even Castle Barlach or even here in Ballina I'd say well there's loads of places that she could be but to think like that she was below in a village with three streets and two or three hundred people living in it I thought sure there's not a whole load with all due respects there's not a whole lot of places
that she could be. She couldn't, she didn't have a car, she didn't have a driving license, she couldn't drive. So, like, I kept thinking to myself, well, we're, you know, at this stage, she's bound, people are bound to be talking, or they were talking, like, oh, Sandra got missing.
So she knew, or whoever would have been, if she'd been in her friend's house and they'd been, you know, keeping her there or whatever, they would have said to Sandra, like, you know, come on, you'll have to go home or whatever. But it was, it was just concern and worry, like, because it was just so unlike her. But we kept expecting her to come back.
From the sounds of it, those first searches for Sandra were intense, with the full backing of the emergency rescue services and many of the local community out combing the fields, the ditches and the beaches. However, with the passage of time and knowing a lot more details about Sandra's life now than they did then, the Collins family have questions about the investigation into her disappearance.
We never really discussed that she had done anything or that she was dead. We were just trying to keep positive and we were going to school naturally and my mother was trying to keep the house going for myself and the younger ones. But, like, it was... Like, our neighbours and our friends were very good and very helpful and very kind, bringing food.
And it was almost like as if somebody had died, but obviously she hadn't died because there was no funeral or whatever. People were trying to help in the best way that they knew how because this had never happened in our area. As far as I knew, in Mayo, I'd never heard of anyone going missing.
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Chapter 5: What clues were found in Sandra's fleece jacket?
That was the main thing. When I look back on it now, how silly I was holding on to the hope that they wouldn't find her deceased. And now I wish they had so, so much. But that was quite difficult. I can remember them diving and they had all the gear on and us sitting in the back of the car and just watching and hoping and praying.
To have your fingers crossed like every time they come up, no, no, and you're thinking, oh shit. she's not here like sure you know but still you couldn't they couldn't obviously rule it out or we couldn't rule it out a hundred percent either
People were concerned about what could have happened to her, where she could have gone, and people were worried, like, everyone in Killala would have known her, but would have known her as this shy, reserved, quiet girl that was very kind to people. It was quite surreal, really, because we'd never had any, you know, any interactions with the girls ever in our lives.
You know, this was totally out of the ordinary. But, like, I have to say now, they were quite professional when they'd come in, and you know, everybody in the house had to be questioned. And then they went through all her belongings in the house and things were taken out of the house. And the people, we had to be fingerprinted because they had to fingerprint the house to get her fingerprints.
And it was quite surreal to come home from school to do your homework. And I smile because I just think, oh my God, when I think back to it, how traumatic really it was and how... how unbelievable it was when I say it out loud. We had to face into that and it just almost became a norm. We just kind of got accustomed to it.
Mainly my aunt was questioned because obviously she lived with her, she was with her the day she was missing. But then it went out to us and to my mother and father and to Bridie obviously and
But I have to say now, yeah, like in the beginning, it was surreal to see these, especially when they came in with the uniform, it wasn't too bad when they were in clean clothes, but when the car was parked outside our house, I mean, it was like, oh, you know, surreal. When I think back on it now as an adult,
It was New Year, and then we'd moved from 2000 to 2001, and I thought, oh God, we're in another year, even though it was only a month, technically, realistically speaking about it. And I thought to myself, even when I think back on it now, I thought, well, they can't sustain, nobody could sustain that level of searching for forever, really.
And I thought, well, if they haven't found you in this length of time, then what's going to happen now?
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Chapter 6: How did Sandra's personal life complicate the investigation?
So then we thought, well, she didn't do that, so she certainly wouldn't, if she wanted to go off and start a life of her own someplace else, she wouldn't do that to try and make it look like she was dead. So I was like, no, this is not her. My mother said, oh no, this is not Sandra. So that was when we really started to kind of panic.
So obviously they had to dive the area around the pier to see was her body there. But we knew, we knew deep down in our own heart and soul that this was a waste of time, that somebody had left it there to make it look like she jumped in. We were only told about the half pound of sausages.
We weren't told about it in the beginning, like about the pieces of paper, because they would have forensically examined it themselves. We didn't know about that until a number of years later. We just knew that there was a half pound of sausages in the bucket at the time. They had their reasons. It was...
part of an investigation and maybe they didn't want us to tell such and such a one or you know there was pieces of paper and there was this phone number or maybe they didn't want us to ring the phone numbers ourselves or possibly tamper with or hinder an investigation so I understand looking back now why they did that and in a way I'm glad that they did because you know that would have driven us demented and wondering you know what these phone numbers were I understand their reasoning for it they had their own protocol to follow
The pieces of paper would indeed turn out to be a very significant part of the investigation into Sandra's disappearance. But as Patrick has told us, for a very long time, the Collins family didn't know of their existence. They now know that on one of them was the mobile phone number of a local man. On the other was a number for an abortion clinic in the UK.
It's more than a quarter of a century since Sandra was last seen alive, so it stands to reason that for some people the memories of those first few days back in December 2000 are a little hazy. Marie Sweeney, who runs the village inn with her husband Aidan, doesn't recall the details of any massive search, although she believes people did look for Sandra.
What she does remember clearly is Sandra coming into the pub on that very last day to collect the special cans of Guinness that her aunt liked to drink and got ordered in each week. As she waited for Aidan to get the cans from a back storeroom, Sandra played with their daughter Emily, who was just two and a half at the time.
It's a memory that has stayed with Marie all these years, the sight of Sandra laughing and smiling as Emily ran to and from her. Now she thinks about Sandra's daughter, the daughter she gave up for adoption, who was only a few months younger than Emily, and the other child she was pregnant with at the time she disappeared.
You know, you hear stuff, and you think, oh, well, she'll be back in tomorrow, or she's gone up the road, or she's... You just don't think that she's gone. You just presume she'll be back, or she might have got a train to somewhere. You know, you might just... Nothing.
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