The Vanishing Triangle: The Murdered Women Ireland Forgot by Claire McGowan

Author:Claire McGowan [McGowan, Claire]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little A
Published: 2022-04-30T23:00:00+00:00

The issue of false alibis comes up in a number of these cases. For example that of Patricia Furlong, who was strangled in a field in 1982. This was another case with an obvious suspect: a well-known DJ, Vincent Connell, was seen with her just before she died, but he managed to get his girlfriend at the time to give him a false alibi. She was too frightened to contradict him when he said, in front of police, that he’d been with her all night; he had a long history of hurting the women he dated, and after Patricia’s death he moved to South Africa, where the abuse continued. He left one woman chained to a radiator while he went to work, and choked another till she passed out. If a girlfriend ever found the courage to leave, he said he’d kill her family, and indeed he did set fire to the house of one ex’s parents, not once but twice. He’d even made plans to rape the same woman’s mother with a curling iron, allegedly paying someone two grand to do it, a huge amount of money in those days, but the man he paid said he couldn’t go through with it when he saw the lady at her door. Eventually, when Connell had returned to Ireland, his alibi fell apart after his former girlfriend told the truth, and he was convicted of killing Patricia. This was in 1991; however, he got out on appeal four years later. He died in 1998, meaning he would have been free for some of the triangle disappearances, though he always maintained he’d not harmed Patricia. At his appeal, the judge made a point of saying he was letting Vincent go in part because he spoke well and dressed nicely, he’d always worked hard and even raised money for charity, all of which seemed to count for more than the lives of the many women he’d terrorised, beaten and tortured. Perhaps he would have been convicted right away had his girlfriend not been so scared that she lied for him, or the police had better understood coercion and not interviewed them in the same room. If so, dozens of women would have been spared great pain.

In the case of John Crerar, who murdered Phyllis Murphy and got away with it for twenty years, an important factor in him not being caught sooner was that a colleague lied for him. This man said Crerar had been at work during the time Phyllis went missing, when in fact he’d been an hour late that day, and had then quickly left again and come back almost two hours after that. The man didn’t want to get Crerar into trouble – there was some suggestion he thought he was helping his colleague hide an affair. He’d lied even when he saw Crerar scrubbing out his car with boiling water that day, acting suspiciously and carrying kettle after kettle over to do it. He’d spilled some milk in there, Crerar said.

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