Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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The doorbell rings at a house in a quiet estate in Leekslip, County Kildare. Patrick Criagel rises from his chair in the back garden. The sun is shining. Opening the door, he sees a boy he doesn't recognise. The boy asks to see his daughter. Was she in? He has some news for her. Patrick calls his child. There's movement on the floor above. She's on her way.
He looks up and smiles as his beautiful daughter bounds down the stairs towards him. Are you sure it's for me? She asks with a perplexed look on her face. At 14 the girl is athletic and tall. Taller than Patrick even. And she is smiling. Someone has called over for her. Someone her own age wanting to chat to her. Someone at her door waiting for her. Patrick walks away.
He is happy to see his daughter so excited. She doesn't have many friends. She doesn't get many visitors. Whatever the boy says convinces her to head out for a while. Patrick can't tell what is said. She runs upstairs to grab her favourite black hoodie. As she returns, Patrick tells her to be back soon. She has exams to study for, he reminds her. I won't be long, she answers. The door shuts.
Patrick realises he didn't ask where she is going.
Thank you.
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Chapter 2: What events led to Ana Kriégel's disappearance?
Indeed, the family always celebrated two important dates in their calendar. Anna's birthday and her adoption date. but there were some teething issues. The toddler was late adopting English as her first language. It meant she was playing catch-up with children of the same age, and those language delays followed her into her early years of school.
There were also issues with her hearing, and she needed glasses for her eyesight. While Anna was incredibly good at sports like swimming and gymnastics, she didn't quite fit in socially. At primary school, she had a resource teacher. She was impulsive and energetic and perhaps tried too hard to make friends, a job made more difficult by her height.
Anna had uncomfortable growth spurts too, where her bones grew faster than her muscles. Anna felt left out. One time she told a teacher she was suicidal. After meeting with Pieta House, the suicide charity, it was determined that Anna was simply unhappy at school. She then attended counselling sessions locally and afterwards Patrick would be there to pick her up and bring her home safely.
Anna was afraid she would be targeted by bullies if she went home alone. And there was more. Anna was cyber-bullied. She was already active across platforms like YouTube, Snapchat and Instagram. For many a socially awkward teenager, posting online was a form of self-expression. I love to sing, dance, swim, family and friends, she wrote on her profile.
If you're a hater, then please leave my account. Stay strong. She signed off with a heart emoji. Not all of what she wrote was well received. Some comments taunted and teased the girl over her height and looks. Others went further.
One post said that she should go die.
Even more disturbing were the ages of some of her bullies. That summer, before she began her new secondary school at Clonfey Community College in Leekslip, some third-year students began threatening her, saying how they could have Anna executed. They made deeply personal and hurtful comments around her adoption and referred to her parents as a fake ma'am and dad.
When Geraldine and Patrick heard about this, they intervened. Some of the content was sexual too and it frightened them. They took screenshots and spoke to the school. Just before Anna started secondary school in September 2017, Geraldine got a call from Anna's old primary school resource teacher. She told Geraldine she was worried for Anna.
She was vulnerable and innocent, she said, and the other children might, as she put it, make a mockery out of her. One of Anna's first exercises at her new school was to write about her hopes for the future. My Hopes for the Future I hoped I would get into my secondary school, and I did. That is one goal down. My second hope is to go to Paris University like my dad, the hardest one to get into.
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Chapter 3: How did the community react to Ana's missing person case?
Didn't she remember, he asked. She told him no and asked an older son to show her a picture of Anna on Instagram. There were videos of the young girl singing, and the mother knew she had seen her around Leekslip Village before. She knew now she would be able to help Gardaí if she did spot her again. That night, Geraldine and Patrick felt a deep, cold fear. They knew Anna must be in danger.
They knew that someone or something had stopped her coming back to them. The search for Anna resumed the following morning. Gardaí called to the boy's house again. They wanted to know was there anything he could tell them. This time, the boy told Sergeant John Dunn something more. Someone else had also met Anna that day. He explained he had called to Anna's house because a friend asked him to.
Anna liked his friend, he said, but those feelings weren't reciprocated and the friend felt Anna needed to hear this. The boy told the sergeant that he and Anna had met their friend and after the other two spoke they had all gone their separate ways and he had returned home to finish his homework.
The sergeant returned to the park to look over the area once more. What had he missed?
Were there any clues along the route Anna and the boys had walked? He searched the railway line which ran alongside the park but found nothing. Sergeant Dunn and another colleague, Sergeant Angus Hussey, organised another walk of the route taken by the boys. This time both of the boys would join the Gardaí As they started to walk, Sergeant Dunn noticed something else.
The route the boys mentioned was wrong. It was different than the one the boy had initially said that they took. They continued for a bit before stopping near the BMX track in the park, and it was here something odd happened. The Gardaí noticed a look between the boys. It was fleeting, but there was something there. That quick look made the Gardaí wonder if the boys knew more.
The two boys were now key witnesses. They might be able to piece together Anna's last known movements. With their parents, the boys went to make statements about the previous day. Both were questioned separately about their routes through the park. The boy who had called for Anna told Gardaí she had been very chatty. He said Anna wanted to know why his friend wanted to meet her.
All three had met up and walked to a car park. The boy then left Anna and his friend to chat and that was all. He returned home and only heard about Anna's disappearance when Gardaí called to his house that night. The boy's friend told Gardaí that he met the other boy and Anna in the park that early evening. The boys chatted about video games and Anna looked at her phone.
At one point she asked him if he would go out with her. She had asked him before too and he had said no. That day however he didn't want to hurt her feelings. He was sorry he told her but he wasn't interested in her. Anna left. His friend left. And that was it. But he added more. He said after he left Anna he had been attacked by two men. He told Gardie they had grabbed and kicked him.
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Chapter 4: What details emerged about Ana's life before her disappearance?
As Garda shifted from a search for a missing child to a murder investigation, the work was just beginning for Garda technical and forensic teams. They had to piece together a picture of what had led to Anna's death in the most minute detail. They had to find and explain all that the naked eye couldn't make sense of. They identified and gathered as much evidence as they could.
Anna's iPhone had been smashed, but every piece was painstakingly searched for and retrieved. Experts laboured for four days and nights, recording every single item scattered around the room. They likened it to a skip. It was a house where every corner had been a place for late-night parties, drinking, drug-taking, illegal gatherings and general antisocial behaviour.
There were cigarette butts, broken bottles, discarded cans and rooms destroyed by fires. Decades of graffiti and neglect scarred the remaining walls. The technical bureau teams had to sift through it, searching for a needle in a haystack, with no idea if the needle existed. News quickly spread across the country of Anna's death.
Shock and disbelief spread through communities as more details of Anna's final moments came to light. The Leek Slip community was devastated. People questioned how such a crime could happen on their own doorsteps, in a public park like St Catherine's Park, where families brought their children, where locals felt safe.
On the 31st of May, the funeral of Anna Creagel took place at Newlands Cross Crematorium. Mourners wore bright clothes to celebrate the teenager, and gifts along with the Russian flag were draped across her coffin. Geraldine and Patrick Creagel couldn't speak that day. A pre-recorded poem called Love Never Disappears was played instead. Geraldine read the poem in English.
Patrick spoke the words in French. Behind the scenes, Gardie worked diligently to piece together their evidence. What had been gathered suggested the young girl had been beaten to the ground when she entered the room. Her clothes had been ripped off. The weapon used was most likely a heavy stick found close to her body. She had also been hit four times with a heavy object.
A breeze block was found lying beside her body.
The nine-inch concrete block had hair on it. Anna's hair. Then there was the struggle. It seemed Anna had been pulled towards what little light shone through the boarded-up windows. There, she was sexually assaulted. But Anna had fought back. Her false nails lay scattered around the room. She had fought fiercely to survive. What this meant was that her assailant would likely have injuries too.
Garda examined footage from the CCTV cameras around St Catherine's Park. Garda Seamus Timmons gathered 700 hours of footage taken from cameras in the park and nearby housing estates. As he began to view the tapes, he saw the two boys who Garda believed were possibly the last to see Anna alive.
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