Chapter 1: What happened to Elizabeth Plunkett on August 28th, 1976?
A quick warning before we begin. This series contains descriptions of sexual violence and could be upsetting for some people. So please keep this in mind when listening. This is Brutus Bay in County Wicklow. I'm just ready to bawl my eyes out here. It's so sad to be here. To think that this is the last place where she was alive is very emotional.
It's taken Bernie and Kathleen, Elizabeth Plunkett's sisters, almost 50 years to come here. It's surreal to be back here. There was a day like today that Elizabeth left home to come here in 76 for it all to go terribly wrong, you know. Bernie and Kathleen are at McDaniel's Pub, the last place Elizabeth was seen alive on August 28th, 1976.
It's only now, after all these years, that they feel able to come here to honour Elizabeth's memory in this place. No matter how many years go by, it's never the same. And she's still only 23 years of age in our minds. Because we're mothers now, we feel responsible for her. We never, ever wanted to mention the word British Bay. We couldn't even say it. I'm Ros Purcell from RTE Documentary on 1.
This is Stolen Sister. Episode 2, Missing. That weekend in British Bay, like, the place was buzzing with people from everywhere. Nicky Crennan was a Garda stationed in Wicklow Garda Station. It was around 10.30pm on Saturday the 28th of August 1976 when Elizabeth Plunkett had left McDaniel's Pub in British Bay and Nicky Crennan remembers that weekend.
McDaniel's Pub would be bustling at the seams. The hotel, which is no longer any longer, Rockfield Hotel, was only half a mile away from it. There was a dance there that night as well for the weekend. There was a lot of people around, but I'm wondering, did Elizabeth go left or right?
Standing outside McDaniel's pub, Bernie and Kathleen are trying to understand what their sister might have been thinking when she was last seen alive. Was she going to come back to Dublin? Was she going to wait at the caravan? I know if I had a row, I'd go outside and I'd huff and puff outside and I'd light a smoke and I'd go back in.
It's such a beautiful rural place, you'd think you'd be as safe as anything. Elizabeth was seen leaving the pub, and we know this by statements taken by Gardaí at the time. I remember Saturday night, the 28th of August 1976, I left home with my husband, Albert Green. Marianne Green lived near British Bay, and her son was working in McDaniel's pub that night.
After 11pm, she drove with her husband to McDaniel's pub and saw Elizabeth on the road. We'd only just parked the car when I saw a girl coming from the direction of the pub. Mary Ann's statement, like all the statements in this episode, is being read by an actor. She passed in front of our car and came down the steps onto the rough surface on my left-hand side.
This girl looked about 18 or 19 years, slim build and medium height, fairly brownish complexion. The girl passed by our car on the left hand side and passed behind other cars on my left. I don't know which way she went after that. She was wearing white slacks and a t-shirt. The t-shirt was white and a dark colour. The word Santa Pe was on the front in dark letters, either black or dark blue.
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Chapter 2: What clues emerged during the search for Elizabeth?
Damien had had that argument with his friend Joe and Joe remembered how it was quickly dealt with after Elizabeth left the pub. About five minutes after Elizabeth walked away from us in McDaniels, Damien and I went out to Damien's car. We both leaned on the side of the car and made up our dispute about the motor car that was the cause of the argument between me and Damien.
After a couple of minutes, not more than ten minutes, Damien and I went into the pub and looked around for Elizabeth. We got a bit alarmed and I noticed that Damien was getting a bit worried. And now Damien started to look everywhere for Elizabeth. He went to find his sister Mela. Damien came to me and he said, do you know where Liz is? And I said, no.
He said, will you have a look in the ladies' toilets and see if she's in there? So I went in and I said, no, she's not in there. So he says, well, she's gone. He says, she's disappeared. I don't know where she is. So we immediately went out and started looking for her. But out on the roads, in the dark night, Elizabeth had no chance against two men with bad intentions.
There's all sorts of things happening with this way, so they fit it in nicely in a lot of ways, you know. They, the two-man guard that Nicky Crennan is talking about, were John Shaw and Geoffrey Evans, who had fled England from rape charges, come to Ireland and spent a year in prison for various robberies. They were now driving on the Wicklow Country Roads.
We drove down to British Bay. We turned left onto the seafront road.
We were going towards McDaniel's pub. A man called David James MacDonald was driving in the same area at the time and later gave a statement to Gardaí.
About 200 yards at the Wicklow side of Staunton supermarket, coming towards me I saw a girl walking on her right hand side. This girl had her head tilted down and appeared to cover her eyes with her hand as if to shield them from the glare of my headlights. She had black hair to her shoulders and she was wearing a blue t-shirt and white slacks.
After passing her by, I drove to the roundabout beyond the beach club and turned around and came back again. I then saw the girl again and she seemed to have moved about 50 yards. The girl was walking slow enough and was definitely not drunk or stumbling.
It was around this time that Shaw and Evans also noticed Elizabeth.
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Chapter 3: Who were the suspicious men seen around Brittas Bay?
I know Liz. She would never have got into a car without knowing who they were. I know she wouldn't because she was my friend and we used to talk about things like that. We were always terrified of anything like that. What happened next must have haunted David James MacDonald because in his gut he knew something was off and he turned to his friend sitting in the passenger seat.
I pulled near the supermarket and said to my friend, should I go back and see if everything is all right? And my friend advised me to go home as we might be sticking our noses into something that didn't concern us.
It was at this point that Evans went back up the road to get John Shaw.
He then picked me up.
I sat in the back and the girl was in the front seat. She was wearing pants and a jumper with writing on it. Back at McDaniel's pub, Elizabeth's friends couldn't find her anywhere and were all confused as to what was happening. Mary-Anne Green, the woman who was waiting for her son to finish work, was sitting outside McDaniel's pub.
Ten minutes after the girl passing, the people started to leave the pub. I remember a voice of a man calling Elizabeth about four times. but he was one of about four people. The thought ran through my mind that the girl who had passed down the steps earlier was the girl he was calling.
Elizabeth's friends were not going to find her because by this stage, she was in the car with John Shaw and Geoffrey Evans.
She told us she'd had a row with her boyfriend. We were talking about normal things for a while in the car and then we started messing with the girl.
I find it really distressing to imagine what Elizabeth was going through now, as she must have been really beginning to panic.
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Chapter 4: What did witnesses report about Elizabeth's last moments?
And at home in Ringsend, Elizabeth's then 14-year-old sister Kathleen was baking. I was in the kitchen with my mum making Sunday dinner and we always made apple tarts on a Sunday morning.
You know, these routines that were set in stone with, you know, the jelly being made and this marifat peas would be steeping from the night before and you'd be washing cabbage and then while the oven was on, sure you might as well throw in a few apple tarts. So much of the detail in this series has never been publicly told before, including what was going on inside Elizabeth's family home.
There was a knock on the door and I went out to answer the door and this girl said, is Elizabeth there? And I said, no, she's gone away for the weekend. Can't no more of it. And I came back out to the kitchen. My ma said, who was that? And I said, somebody looking for Liz. And immediately my ma's instinct, now that I look back on it, she walked out.
And I remember trying to wipe her hands with flour. And she walked out to the hall door. She walked out onto the footpaths and said, who was that? Who was that? She's away with her friends. Who was that? I said, I don't know, some girl. And... whoever it was, had disappeared up the top of the street. It later emerged it was Annette McLaughlin who knocked at the door.
When Annette, along with Elizabeth's group of friends, woke up in British Bay that Sunday morning and realised there was still no sign of Elizabeth, they all came back to Dublin, hoping they'd find her there. Damien was in a car up the top of the street and had sent this young one down to see had Elizabeth made it home.
She wasn't there, so he really, really, really, you know, got very anxious and very upset. At this stage, the Plunketts were totally oblivious to what was going on. That was a Sunday morning and we had our dinner and she wasn't due back home. I went to the CY or Bechtel, whatever disco was on, I went on the Sunday night. And Damien in the meantime was frantic. Where is she?
So the thoughts of him when eventually he did have to come to the house and say what had happened. The fear of Elizabeth being missing was beginning to mount. Elizabeth's big sister Joan lived nearby with her husband Jimmy and Damien had checked was Elizabeth there.
So I think they drove back up to Joan and Jimmy to say look Elizabeth's not in her mum's she's not with you we have a serious situation here. They both came down to the house and started to tell my mum and Damien came in he told her that they had a row and that Elizabeth said she was going home and we've searched for her and we cannot find her.
Kathleen came back from her disco to find a panicked scene. When I came home, the house was full. Joan and Jimmy were there. You could feel the tension in the house. But I remember, and I was saying, what's wrong? Elizabeth's gone missing. And I was like, what? And my mum being, I don't know whether it's mother instinct, but immediately...
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Chapter 5: How did Elizabeth's friends and family react to her disappearance?
So Bernie and Damon went to the nearest Garda station, Irish Town. There was one Garda there, but they said she was over 21. And it hadn't been 24 hours. And we said, no, but she would not do that. She would never do that. She would never stay out and have us worried like this. So they said, we'll come back. I think it was the following day before it would be official.
While the local Gardaí said they couldn't do much about the case, Bernie and Damien knew there was no way that they could just leave it at that. Damien was agitated. He couldn't have sat around. He couldn't have not gone back and see did she show up at the caravan or see did she show up at the pub.
So honestly, I'd say we were there till it started to get dark and then we would have come back to Dublin, back to the house. Some people were waiting for her to see would she show up. We waited up all night. The next morning was Monday, August 30th, 1976. Elizabeth had now been missing for about 36 hours.
The Monday came, that's the panic then and that's when Mam said, I'm going to look for my child. She did go with my dad. We went over the dunes, I could see her walking around the dunes and looking in the grass and looking for any sign of her. Elizabeth's two brothers, Eddie and Thomas, were living down in County Cork. My brother Thomas and I were lobster fishermen out of Cove.
That fateful phone call to say that Elizabeth is missing. Thomas and I jumped in the car, drove to Dublin. It was only then that we realised that the... chaos. Bernie told me that from the minute my mother got word she said problems. We didn't. We were going up to sort it out.
You felt you'd find her?
Yeah.
The glorious summer weather had turned and it was now raining. Down in Wicklow, local gardener Nicky Crennan had heard about some strange behaviour in British Bay. There was a phone call from a guy called Alex Stone. He was the owner of McDonagh's at that time and they also owned the caravan park opposite. He reported two guys down in the caravan park at an old dump.
There was an old marl hole in the middle of the field and we went out to check him out. The two men Garda Nicky Crennan was about to meet were John Shaw and Geoffrey Evans, less than 24 hours after they had murdered Elizabeth.
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Chapter 6: What actions did the Gardaí take after Elizabeth was reported missing?
But something didn't feel right about these two men. My colleague remarked to him when they told us they were John and Geoffrey Murphy, they were brothers. They were brothers. And he remarked to him, you don't look like brothers. And then he said, stepbrothers. Because one was small, and that was Evans. Small and, you know, a light little fella.
The other guy, Shaw, was a big, rougher type, and I suppose he could say shifty now. News of Elizabeth being officially missing hadn't yet emerged and Nicky Crennan and his colleague weren't too concerned about the two men. Sean Evans didn't leave immediately though.
We stayed around the caravan park until sometime late that night or Tuesday morning.
On that night, Monday, we broke into about five caravans in the next field.
We caught a television, one record player, transistor radio and a few shillings. We then returned to Fettered.
Sean Evans left the area and headed back to the house they had stayed in previously, their friend Cliff Outram's house in Tipperary, near where I grew up in Feathered. Back in Dublin, Elizabeth was officially becoming a missing person.
It wasn't taken that serious for a few days, I think, but the family were all concerned and her family were down here and her friends searching.
I think that was going on for three or four days.
For the first week, all the searches were done. The civil defence were there. Elizabeth's colleagues in work were there. Everyone that was so helpful. The neighbours from Wings End. Looking for evidence, looking for anything that would help us find Elizabeth. Elizabeth's family then got an appeal into the papers.
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Chapter 7: What items were found during the search for Elizabeth?
It was one of Elizabeth's friends, Joe McCoy, who made the discovery. There was a laneway leading from the roadway into the forest. While searching around the area, they saw a bra hanging on the briars and a scarf. Then another of the searchers found a shoe. They went back to Jo's girlfriend, Annette, to take a closer look at it. I looked at the shoe and said, that's Liz's shoe.
I had no doubt about it. Annette showed the shoe to Liz's good friend, Mella. God, I just held in my arms and I just said, oh, please, let her be alive or let her, you know, please let us find her. Everyone's heart sank. They knew this was not good and that most likely something bad had happened to Elizabeth.
I remember looking at the pair of shoes and the worst thing, and this is really difficult for me to talk about, is when she was being dragged, the dirt was on the back of the heels of the shoe.
By now, Elizabeth's disappearance had become national news on both RT TV and radio.
Gorthy at Wicklow, supported by detectives from Dublin Castle, have intensified their search for the Dublin girl Elizabeth Plunkett, who's been missing for 10 days. Clothing and shoes belonging to the girl were found about two miles from a public house outside Wicklow Town. Today, Gorthy are using tracker dogs in the search and are systematically combing woods and fields in the area.
Elizabeth's shoe, her underwear, a silver watch her father had given her for her 21st birthday were all found. But not Elizabeth. We never found her. By now, Gardaí were talking to local people and holidaymakers. And a picture was beginning to emerge.
I saw two people pass by. They had a dirty appearance and very suspicious.
I would describe one as stocky-billed, dirty appearance, overgrown black beard, wild.
I saw two men asleep near the dump in sleeping bags. When I pulled up alongside my caravan, I noticed a strange car was parked beside it.
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