Woman appeals for return of sister’s body a decade after disappearance

THE sister of a carer who vanished after a trip to the chipper more than 10 years ago has made a fresh appeal for the return of her body.

Sandra Collins was just a few days short of her 30th birthday when she walked into the rural Mayo village of Killala for groceries for her disabled aunt at around 7.15pm on December 4, 2000 — but she never came home.

Just after 11pm that night she reappeared and ordered chips and a steak-and-kidney pie in the Country Kitchen takeaway in the village but the missing four hours between her two purchases have never been explained.

In the TV3 series, Ireland’s Missing Mums, her younger sister Bridie Conway makes a fresh appeal for information on her sister’s baffling case and said she is convinced a local person holds the key to her disappearance.

She said: “Ten years is an awful long time to be left wondering where she is and what happened. I will never give up looking and searching for her until I find her.

“We get by day by day and week by week. There isn’t a day that goes by that we don’t think of Sandra or talk about her. She was brilliant, lovely person; kind, warm and very generous and would do anything for anybody or give anybody anything.

“She looked after our aunt, who was disabled, in Killala for a number of years. She thought nothing of it and just loved her and loved looking after her and doing good. I think someone in the area definitely knows something because she wasn’t the type of a person that would go off with a stranger,” she added.

“She was with someone she knew and was comfortable with and was quite relaxed with. So why haven’t they come forward or told us or told the police? We don’t know.”

Her sister said the family were recovering from the death of her younger brother James in a work accident when Sandra vanished.

She said: “Our brother, James, died six months before Sandra went missing and we gave him a Christian burial with flowers and wreaths. If I need to be close to him or I want to talk to him I can go back to the graveyard and do it there. But not to have been allowed to do the same for her (Sandra) and to have that taken from her and to be left the way we have been has been terrible. I’d ask the person the one thing they can do is to grant us that wish and let us bring her home.”

In Ireland’s Missing Mums, to be shown on TV3 tonight at 9pm, Bridie reveals that her sister had given her baby girl up for adoption the year before she disappeared.

Sandra’s fleece jacket was found near Killala pier four days after she went missing.

* Anyone with information can ring the Garda Confidential line: 1800666111