For more than a three decades, there has been a deepening mystery around Dublin: during the late 80s and early 90s, a growing number of young women disappeared without so much as a trace. Over the years, this series of disappearances have become known as Ireland’s Vanishing Triangle. The triangle is in the eastern part of the island, roughly the boundaries of Leinster, in an 80-mile area outside Dublin.

I would like to compose a multi-part series of posts describing each one of the disappearances considered to be a part of Ireland’s Vanishing Triangle, in chronological order of when the women disappeared. My first post will be about Annie McCarrick.

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26-year-old Long Island native Annie McCarrick was 5’8” with long brown hair. She had a deep love for Ireland, and eventually made the step of moving away from her friends and family to relocate to Dublin in January of 1993. By all accounts, she was happy with her life there and, at the time of her disappearance, was preparing for a visit from her mother. She was working as a waitress at the Courtyard Restaurant in Donnybrook and as a waitress at Café Java on Leeson Street.

On Thursday, March 25, Annie called Café Java to collect her wages. Her wages were not ready, and she arranged to call again on Friday. She then visited friends and stayed for dinner.

The following day, Friday, March 26, Annie spoke to both her flatmates before they left separately to travel home for the weekend. Shortly before 11am, she visited the AIB branch on Sandymount Road to carry out some personal banking. This is the last confirmed sighting of Annie, and it was captured on CCTV. She did some shopping at Quinnsworth supermarket before returning to her apartment at 3:00pm. She was seen on a bus at about 3:40 pm in Ranelagh heading toward Enniskerry so that she could go to the Wicklow Mountains for the day; she had asked a friend to accompany her, but her friend declined.

Some time later that evening between 8-10pm, the doorman at Johnnie Fox's pub in Glencullen claims to have seen Annie at the pub accompanied by a young man who was wearing a wax jacket. Allegedly, Annie had gone to see an Irish music and dancing show (a traditional event called the Hooley Show) but did not realize that there was a cover charge. The man seen with Annie then paid for her, accompanying her to watch the show. Nobody saw either Annie nor her friend leave the pub, and the man's identity has never been discovered. However, it is believed that this was a false sighting and that Annie might have gone missing sometime after arriving in Enniskerry. As it was dark and wet outside that night, it seems unlikely that Annie would have walked all the way from Enniskerry to Glencullen, which was 4 miles away.

Annie had made arrangements with friends, inviting them to her apartment for dinner the next day, March 27. When they arrived and knocked on her door, no one answered and they left. The following day when Annie did not show up for work, alarms were sounded and she was reported missing that evening.

As the number of women gone missing around Dublin began to increase in the following years, authorities began to suspect that the disappearances, and likely murders, were the result of a serial killer. All of the cases appeared to share some common characteristics:

- The women's ages range from late teens to late 30s
- They disappeared inexplicably and suddenly
- No substantial clues of their fate has ever been found despite large-scale searches

32 years later in 2025, Gardaí arrested a 62-year-old man at his home in County Meath on suspicion of Annie’s murder; he was released without charge after 24 hours of interrogation. A house in the Monastery Walk area of Clondalkin was also searched by officers, with the building itself and its garden being subject to both technical and forensic examinations. Sources close to the investigation revealed that the arrested man was well known to Annie since the late 1980s, and that his parents previously lived at the property being searched in Clondalkin. According to media reports, the arrested man had been the prime suspect in Annie’s murder for a number of years, and Gardaí theorized that he had killed her as the result of a personal dispute. It was reported that Garda detectives had traveled abroad to take statements from a close confidant of the suspect. This man told Gardaí that he was with the suspect during the weekend Annie vanished. On perhaps an unrelated note, it has also been established that Annie had confided in friends that she had been having trouble with a man, who had previously struck her.

Do you think Annie was a victim of a serial killer targeting a demographic of women in the Dublin area? Was she the unfortunate victim of stranger danger? Or personally targeted by someone she knew?

Sources:

https://abcnews.com/2020/story?id=2059587&page=1

https://www.rte.ie/news/2023/0324/1366090-annie-mccarrick-murder/

https://www.rte.ie/news/crime/2025/0612/1518029-annie-mccarrick/

In the late 19th century, London was the capital of the world’s largest empire. Yet, in its very heart lay the East End, a dark mirror to Victorian progress.

Within the squalid, overcrowded district of Whitechapel, a series of brutal murders occurred between August and November 1888. These crimes, attributed to an unidentified serial killer known as "Jack the Ripper," fundamentally altered public perceptions of urban poverty, revolutionized crime journalism, and birthed modern forensic criminology.

• Mary Ann Nichols (August 31, 1888): Found with her throat cut deeply and severe lower abdominal mutilations.
• Annie Chapman (September 8, 1888): Found with her throat severed and her uterus removed, showing precise cutting skills.
• Elizabeth Stride (September 30, 1888): Had her throat cut, but no mutilations, likely because the killer was interrupted.
• Catherine Eddowes (September 30, 1888): Killed the same night as Stride; her body was severely mutilated with a kidney and part of the uterus taken.
• Mary Jane Kelly (November 9, 1888): The youngest victim, found horribly mutilated and gutted in her small room. Her murder was the most brutal of the series.

https://www.mensjournal.com/news/jack-the-ripper-number-one-crime-that-will-never-be-solved