Imelda Keenan was last seen 30 years ago. Her family remain baffled by her disappearance
Imelda Keenan has been missing sunce 1994.
Unopened Christmas presents sitting under the tree in the flat in which Imelda Keenan lived in Waterford ity more 30 years ago are a sight that still rankles with her family.
As they prepare to mark the 30th anniversary of her disappearance on January 3, they wonder if their sister and aunt had been missing before the new year.
Not only were the unopened Christmas presents still in her home — so too was a wreath she had bought to place on her father Flor’s grave when she was due to return home to Mountmellick for a visit in January.
But instead of a joyful reunion with her mother Elizabeth and other members of the Keenan clan, her family unit was thrown into devastation when she was reported missing on January 3.
The last reported sighting of the 22-year-old was on Lombard St in Waterford City at around 1.30pm that day, after she crossed onto the street from William St.
She had been living in a flat on William St with her fiancé, Mark Wall.
She told him she was going to the post office when leaving their rented flat. This was despite January 3 being a bank holiday that year.
She took no belongings with her when she left the flat and her credit union account was left untouched after she disappeared.
According to gardaí, her PPS number has never been activated while she collected her last unemployment payment between December 20 and 24, 1993.
After the last sighting of her, searches of the river and local areas were conducted as part of the Garda investigation into her disappearance, but no clues showed up.
Gardaí also say they have liaised with the Welsh Police and Manchester Interpol in relation to DNA profiles and bodies recovered in Britain, but there is still no indication of what happened to Imelda.
Instead, the family only has a plaque which was erected on a bridge near the last place she was seen on January 3, 1994 as a place to go to remember her.
On this January 3, they will gather there to pray and lay flowers in her memory, against a backdrop of hope that her case will be upgraded from a missing person investigation to a murder probe.
Members of Imelda’s family, including her brother Gerry and niece Gina Kerry, will talk at the memorial event.
Gerry says: “It is going to be a very emotional day for us. Every year is difficult but the 30th anniversary will be especially difficult.
“Just before you rang, I was down at the plaque. I go down every day to the plaque. It is like going to a grave really. It is only a small little plaque at the side of a bridge and I stay there for about five minutes, say a few prayers and then I am gone again. I go back the following day and I do it all over again.
He says that each Christmas that comes brings another turn in the calendar into a new year but “we are no further on than we were 30 years ago”.
Gina says that unopened Christmas presents in the early days of the new year were unusual, especially as some were for two of her beloved nephews who lived near her in Waterford. They were sons of her brother Ned, the last member of her family to see her shortly before Christmas.
Gina says: “The presents were still there, it didn’t make sense.”
Gina also says that the family wonder where her diary went. She was an avid recorder of daily events and always kept a diary.
Gina recalls seeing a diary in her Waterford flat. However, there no was diary to be found after she disappeared, according to Gina.
Her family have always believed the diary could have been the key to finding out what happened to her.
Gina says: “Her diary would have had a lot of information in it. She always had one, even from a young age.”
She also left her cat behind, which the family also feel was out of character for her.
She also appeared to have not taken a change of clothes and very little money. She also did not touch her credit union account.
The Keenan family wonders if their beloved Imelda had disappeared before January 3.
However, gardaí believe the witness who told gardaí that the Laois woman had been seen on Lombard St on January 3 at around 1.30pm was credible.
The witness was a local doctor’s secretary who knew Imelda well. She told gardaí that she and a friend had seen Imelda crossing the road at the corner of the Tower Hotel and Lombard St. Imelda was subsequently reported missing by her brother Ned the following day.
Her family don’t understand why Imelda left her glasses and cigarettes behind and did not take any other valuables with her, and why she had not given out her Christmas gifts. They believe she was killed.
In October, members of the family met with gardaí in Waterford, accompanied by Sinn Fein councillor John Hearne. This was followed by another meeting in recent weeks. They want the investigation into her disappearance to be upgraded to a murder probe.
Gerry says: “We are trying to push this case over the line for a murder case. We always thought ourselves this was a murder case.”
He says that there is precedent for cases of missing people to be upgraded to murder probes even without a body, as in the cases of Jo Jo Dullard and Deirdre Jacob.
The then 21-year-old Jo Jo Dullard’s last contact was in a phone call she made to her friend at 11.37pm on November 9, 1995 from a phone box in Moone, Co Kildare.
The investigation into her disappearance was upgraded to murder in 2020, after the case was examined by An Garda Síochána’s Serious Crime Review Team.
In July 2018, following a full cold-case review, the case of Deirdre Jacob’s disappearance from near her home in 1998 was upgraded to a murder investigation. As with Imelda, the whereabouts of both women remain unknown.
Gerry believes there are people out there who can help bring Imelda’s family’s pain to an end and he is begging people for their assistance.
In 2009, the family offered a reward in return for information which would help to find Imelda but nothing of value came out of that.
In 2020, an age profile picture was compiled of Imelda, indicating what she may look like at 48 years of age. That too failed to yield any closure in the case.
Gerry hopes the passage of time will make it easier for people to come forward without fear of retribution.
He urges: “We want people to go back over things — people mellow when they get older and if they have a secret, they might say some little thing which might lead to something else that might open up a can of worms for us.
"The not knowing from day to day, from year to year, of what is going to come around the corner — we always hope that tomorrow is better than today but we are living every day as we can and we are getting on with it.”
He said as a family "we have to keep going. Sitting down all the time doing nothing and letting this go over our head would not be an option. We have to keep it out there in the hope that somebody might come forward with some bit of news for us.”
He is urging anyone with information to come forward, even if they think they do not have anything relevant to the case.
He explains: “They might have seen something a day or two earlier, or something around that area. They don’t have to give us their name, they don’t have to give us their address. Just pick up the phone and let someone know. Hiding the information would not be good for their health either. Some bit of information might help our pain to go away.”
And he says: “If someone pointed out an area where Imelda was buried in a shallow grave, if there were bones there, DNA’d and somebody could say that was Imelda, I would love to bring her home and bury her with my own parents and give her a good Christian burial and leave everyone know that the Keenan family have been reunited after so many years. That is all I want. Revenge does not come into it.”
For Gina, the joy of the Christmas season is overshadowed every year by the loss of her beloved aunt, to whom she was very close.
“Christmas comes and with small kids in the house, you do it, but when it starts coming closer to January, we start getting very deflated. We start wondering where is Imelda," Gina says.
"My mother, her sister Mary, keeps saying she would give anything to get her back, her youngest sister.”
She adds: “We just have to keep pushing forward for a breakthrough.”
Imelda was just 15 when she moved to Waterford and went to school there for a while before leaving it without doing her Leaving Certificate.
She lived with her brothers Gerry and Ned for different periods, before moving in with her boyfriend.
Gerry says: “I came to Waterford when I was 16 and I am coming up on 50 years here now. I was working here in Irish Rail and my brother Ned came after me. Imelda came down on holidays as a child when she was eight or 10 — she came down with my mother. I brought her to Tramore and Dunmore and the seaside places. She absolutely fell in love.”
He remembers her telling him that she planned to move there to live, which she did.
Gerry says: “This [Waterford] is where it all started and ended for her so quickly. She was down here going to school for the last year of her education in the Presentation school in Waterford.”
Unemployed at the time of her disappearance, she was undertaking a computer course at the CTI, Parnell St.
Gerry remembers now that she had Mickey Mouse posters on her wall in the flat she was living in, even though she was 22 years old at the time.
He recalls: “She loved going out and she loved music. Her favourite group was the Bangles.
"Songs like 'Walk Like an Egyptian' bring a tear to my eye now.
"Anybody who has anybody who has passed away will remember them when they hear a song. I might be sitting in the pub having a drink and minding my own business and I just hear 'Walk Like an Egyptian' or 'Manic Monday' coming on. I go to the toilet and I have a good cry.”
Three decades on, the pain is still raw and his mind is full of unanswered questions.
He says: “I am in my early 60s now. When Imelda went missing, I was only a young man, I was only in my early 30s then. The pain has never went away and as I get a little bit older it is getting worse I think.
"I saw my mother going to the grave and my two brothers – they went with broken hearts and well I know it.”
He continues: “Where did that time go? What would Imelda be like at 52? Would Imelda have kids? Would I have little nieces and nephews that I would be delighted to see? Where would she be living now? What would Imelda look like now? I could not imagine Imelda at 52. I can only imagine her at 22. That is hard.”
She was 14 years younger than Gerry: “She was the baby girl – the youngest girl in our family. She was very pretty.”
Even now, 30 years after the last reported sighting of his younger sister, he sometimes gets a jolt when walking along the street of his – and her – adopted city.
He says that sometimes he sees young women who remind him of Imelda. For a few moments, he waits to see their faces in the hope that it is Imelda, sometimes walking quickly to see her.
The last family occasion she attended was her brother Donal’s wedding, recalls Gina.
She says: “She is missed at everything, she is always talked about and we all have her picture hanging in our houses. She is missed all the time.”
While Gina says she appreciates that people do choose to disappear from the lives of their family, she does not believed this to have been the case with Imelda.
“Thirty years of putting her family through torture when she can just pick up the phone and end it in a second? She would not put her family through that.”
Imelda was one of nine siblings and five of her brothers and sisters are still alive, wondering what has happened to her.
Gina says: “They believe that if Imelda was alive today and with the power of social media, she would not watch online and see her brother crying about her, and see the pain it has been causing for 30 years. We don’t think she would allow that pain to carry on. I think she would have reached out by now.”
Gina, who was 15 when her aunt disappeared, described Imelda as “very innocent at heart, a lovely soul inside and out, a person who loved to dance and sing, and was really happy”.
She recalls her being excited about moving to Waterford, following in the footsteps of Gerry and Ned.
Gina’s memory of her after she moved to Waterford was that she was “more reserved”.
She regularly travelled home to Mountmellick from Waterford and Gina can still remember the joy those visits brought.
Gina says: “My family can’t move on. We are still stuck in the year she went missing and still haunted.”
Gardaí say they are continuing to investigate the circumstances surrounding the disappearance of Imelda.
They said that they renewed their appeal to the public earlier this year, following the 29th anniversary of her disappearance.
Gardaí would encourage anyone with information on Imelda, to come forward.
Gardaí can be contacted at Waterford Garda Station on (051) 305300, the Garda Confidential Line on 1800 666 111, or any Garda station.
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