Hopes and fears for families left in the dark as loved ones vanish
Ms Brown, who would now be 54, went missing four years ago as she returned from a trip to Manchester to see her sister.
Last March, near the south coast of England town of Eastbourne, a body washed ashore. Police in England started trawling a missing person’s list and by June believed it may be Ellen, from Dundrum in the south of the city.
Her sister Bertha travelled from Manchester to view the remains. She was certain, having been told of certain identifying remarks, it was Ellen, the mother of a 30-year-old son.
“My sister was convinced but I was not ready to accept it was her,” said brother Tom.
A laboratory backlog meant the family waited for months for the DNA results to confirm the identity. Those months were torturous for the family. Tom, who was always the closest to his sister, suffered from severe depression.
In November, the results came back. It was not Ellen. “There was a certain amount of relief but then the whole thing starts up again. If it’s not her, what’s happened to her,” said Tom.
Tom keeps on hoping she is alive but every time the family hear of a body found, they immediately think it might be Ellen.
The family of Rita Roche, from north Dublin, went through a remarkably similar experience. But in their case, a body washed up on Christmas Eve 2000 was that of the 45-year-old Dubliner.
She is thought to have fallen into the Tolka River on a stormy night a month earlier and her body washed in to Dublin Bay before being somehow swept the 200 miles to the west coast of Scotland. It took four months before the body was identified through DNA.
Most missing people do turn up. Over 2,000 people regarded as at risk - the young, the elderly, the mentally or physically ill - go missing every year. Most of them turn up alive and well in a few days.
But there are others who are missing for months and years. In 2001, over 60 were still missing at the end of the year.
Some of those are undoubtedly still alive. Fr Aquinas Duffy runs the best known website for the missing in Ireland. Over 70,000 visitors in its three years reveals its importance as a resource. Forty people featured on his website, most of them missing for some time, have turned up, 18 of them alive.
Fr Duffy recalls: “There have been cases where the initial signs would make it look like a suicide, a car near water and a sudden disappearance with no apparent signs of preparing to go away. In one such case, the person made contact from another country two years later.”
There was the story of Kevin Crennan, whose family dramatically heard he was alive after seven years without hearing a word from him. The 37-year-old was arrested in Colombia after he was found near an area controlled by the left-wing rebel group FARC.
It was August 2001, shortly after the arrest of three Irishman who have since been tried on charges of giving military support to FARC, and the Colombian authorities initially believed they had a fourth suspected IRA member.
His family were “over the moon” that he had turned up safe and well. He was less enthusiastic. “I think he was very annoyed about being classed as a missing person,” said Fr Duffy.
“But only for him being classed as a missing person, he would still be in jail. When he turned up, the Colombians thought he was the fourth IRA man but his family had got him listed with Interpol.”
All the signs would have suggested he was never going to turn up. His passport had expired and bank account was untouched.
James Patrick Byrne, a 33-year-old from Waterford, had been living in Spain and had lost contact with his family for many years. But they still wanted to get in touch and pleaded with him through Fr Duffy’s site to get in contact.
Mr Byrne did so after a friend showed him the site. But now his family have made a fresh appeal to get in contact again as there has been a death in the family. A simple safe and well message will do, they say.
While 18 of those featured on the site have turned up alive, 22 others have been found dead. They include tragic and high profile cases such as Kim O’Donovan, the teenager who died of a heroin overdose after running aware from care, and Deirdre Crowley, lost to her grieving mother for nearly two years only to have her life ended at the hands of her father.
David Linehan’s father Thomas went missing and his body was not found for four months. He has described how finding the body brings closure.
“We were heartbroken when his remains were found but we were glad to find out something. So many people go for years without knowing.”
