Murphy link as search for body begins
Forensic psychologist thinks isolated hunting lodge may be where Jo Jo Dullard was killed
The abandoned hunting lodgeJIM CUSACK – 15 January 2012
An unnamed man with qualifications in forensic psychology and offender profiling who spoke anonymously to a Sunday newspaper at the end of last year is apparently the cause of the latest search of lands at Kilranelagh in the west Wicklow mountains where he said he believed Jo Jo Dullard may have been taken and killed.
The man told senior gardai, after the publication of the article, that an abandoned hunting lodge near the spot where Larry Murphy was seen strangling a young woman he had abducted in Carlow town in February 2000 was, in his view, a "place of interest" to Murphy. By this, he apparently deduced, Murphy may have taken previous victims to the same place.
The expert, as he has been described, came to Ireland and walked the countryside around the mountain road where Murphy was seen by two huntsmen as he was in the process of strangling his naked victim with her bra. He had placed a plastic bag over her head. It was a complete fluke the two men came upon Murphy who they recognised as living only a few miles away in the direction of Baltinglass.
Murphy has since become the centre of a national nightmare as the prime suspect in the disappearance of Jo Jo and several other young women who vanished over a near 20-year period in the Leinster area. It is noted that since Murphy's arrest, the day after he was spotted by the huntsmen, no other young women have disappeared.
The link between Murphy and Jo Jo is tenuous but still interesting. She was last seen after having phoned her home from a coin box at Moone, Co Kildare, and seen leaning in the back door of a dark-coloured Toyota Carina-type car 16 years ago.
When Murphy kidnapped the young businesswoman in Carlow town, after stunning her with a punch to her jaw, he drove her to almost the exact spot where Jo Jo was last seen. There he drove his victim into a nearby field and raped her for the first time.
After that he bundled her into the boot of his car and drove eastwards up into the Wicklow hills to Kilranelagh where on a dipping curve on the rough road overhung by trees he pulled over and raped her again.
He spoke to her throughout her ordeal and gave her details of his life which could identify him. He did so in the belief that she would soon be dead and presumably buried secretly in the wild and heavily wooded countryside. At one point he even allowed her to run away but in the darkness she ran into a loose barbed wire fence and further injured herself. He dragged her back to the car and, using her bra, began strangling her.
The two huntsmen came upon them as they returned from an evening further up in the hills and caught the scene in the headlights of their Land Rover.
Murphy's actions as he attempted to murder the Carlow woman also harked back to a previous murder of a young woman in the mountains. Antoinette Smith, 27, disappeared after apparently taking a lift in a car from Dublin city centre in July 1987. Nine months later her body was found in undergrowth at Glendoo about 40 miles away from Kilranelagh in the Dublin Mountains. Antoinette had been strangled with her bra and there was a plastic bag over her head.
http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/murphy-link-as-search-for-body-begins-26811359.html
