Maybe they’ll find Mary Boyle…

Mary Boyle is a famous Irish missing child: she vanished in 1977 at the age of six, while walking from her uncle’s farm to a neighbor’s home. We have a pretty good idea as to what she’d look like if she were still alive today, because she has an identical twin. However, Mary is presumed dead.

Well, the police — the New York City police at that — are now saying they know know who killed Mary and they know where her body is.

Me — well, I hope they’re right but I’m not holding my breath. I’ve seen a lot of “We’ve almost solved such-and-such ancient case!” things deflate and fade from the headlines.

News about the missing in Ireland

Ireland is very concerned about underaged, unaccompanied asylum seekers in their country, who are going missing at an alarming rate. Eleven disappeared last year, and according to the article: “A total of 512 unaccompanied children seeking asylum went missing from State care between 2000 and 2010. Just 72 of these children were subsequently found by the authorities.”

Some of them may have run away, particularly if they were afraid of being deported. Some of them may have gone, voluntarily or otherwise, with human traffickers. There doesn’t seem to be suspicion that the missing children are dead, but obviously there is a lot of concern for their safety. Many nationalities are affected. Another article from the same paper adds: “[C]hildren from Somalia have gone missing while living in the hostels. The list of missing children includes Chinese, Nigerian, Romanian, Moldovan, Afghans and Congolese.”

Both articles place some of the blame on the system that’s set up to care for these young asylum seekers. Many of them, despite being underaged and mostly unable to read or speak English, were sent to live in hostels without any supervision at all. Basically like sticking a kid in a hotel and leaving them there. That’s going to change. The Irish Health Service Executive has closed the last of those hostels and from now on, unaccompanied minors seeking asylum in Ireland are sent to live either in foster homes, children’s homes or “supported lodgings.” (Not sure what the last one is. Group homes?) Hopefully this will cut down on the number of disappearances.

I found this article about Annie McCarrick. She disappeared from Ireland in 1993 and is profiled on Charley due to her American citizenship. There’s a new theory that she didn’t just meet up with some random serial killer but instead went on a date with someone, a date she wanted to keep secret, and came to harm there. It could still be a serial killer, but the forensic psychologist who espouses the “secret date” theory thinks otherwise.

And, there has been yet another failed search for little Mary Boyle, who disappeared from Ireland in 1977 at the age of six. This search was prompted by a psychic who suggested that Mary’s body could be found in a swamp near where she went missing. (This seems like plain common sense to me.) The search has been called off due to “poor conditions,” presumably bad weather.