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was always charming. And underneath it, he’s one of the most violent men I’ve ever encountered. And we definitely believe he has
     attacked women before.
    Within days of Nancy McCarrick arriving in Dublin in March 1993, her husband followed. Her brother, Tim Dungate, also travelled from New York, as did her brother-in-law John
Covell, who was married to Nancy’s sister Maureen. The four of them met gardaí to see how the investigation was going. Nancy remembers that they seemed at a loss to explain what might
have happened.
    It was just beyond their comprehension. Annie wasn’t the first woman to go missing in Ireland, but she was the first of a number of women to disappear over a short
     number of years. But back then the Gardaí just couldn’t explain it. It was new to them. I remember suggesting that Annie might have responded to a particular ad for someone to work
     with animals. The ad was in relation to a place on the way from Dublin to Enniskerry. I remember asking if they had questioned this man, and a garda said, ‘Oh, Mrs McCarrick, you
     don’t think Annie responded to the ad, and the man thought to himself that he’d keep her; no such thing could happen.’ It was just beyond their experience. Now it’s
     different, they know that there are people capable of these terrible deeds. Gardaí worked extremely hard on Annie’s case, but it was so new to them.
    Though the disappearance of Annie McCarrick is still officially classified as a missing person case, every detective who worked on it knows it is a murder inquiry, and was so
from very early on. As detectives began to consider where Annie’s body might have been buried, they were conscious of the unsolved murders of two women whose bodies had been left less than a
mile apart in the Dublin Mountains in 1987 and 1991.
    In July 1987, Antoinette Smith, a mother of two from Clondalkin, Dublin, was abducted and murdered. She had attended a David Bowie concert at Slane, Co. Meath, and was last seen getting a taxi
with two men in Westmorland Street, Dublin, to go to Rathfarnham. The taxi driver dropped his three passengers close to Rathfarnham in the early hours of the morning. Antoinette’s body was
found in April 1988 in a bog at the Feather Bed at Killakee in the Dublin Mountains. She had been strangled, and a plastic bag had been placed over her head. The Gardaí are satisfied that
she was murdered by two attackers. At Christmas 1991 Patricia Doherty, a prison officer and mother of two from Co. Kerry was abducted and murdered. She also was strangled. Her body was found in
June 1992 just three miles from her home in Tallaght at Glassamucky Borders, Killakee, less than a mile from where Antoinette Smith’s body had been found four years before. It was found by
ramblers after dry weather caused the turf bank where she was buried to subside. No-one has ever been charged in relation to these horrific murders, which have devastated two families. One
detective says that the Gardaí feared that Annie McCarrick had suffered a similar fate.
    If you look at the similarities in both those cases, both Antoinette Smith and Patricia Doherty were strangled and their bodies buried in relatively close proximity in the
     Dublin Mountains. We have particular information to suggest two men may be responsible for the murder of Antoinette Smith. Neither of those terrible murders has been solved as yet. So, the
     persons responsible for those separate murders are still out there—killers who know the Dublin Mountains; killers who knew where they could work undetected as they sought to hide their
     crimes by burying the bodies. In searching for Annie we were conscious of those murders; but it was only years later, when Operation Trace came on stream, that all these cases were really
     looked at for links. One thing that cannot be denied: whoever murdered Antoinette Smith is still out there, and whoever murdered Patricia Doherty is still out there. It’s often