‘I stopped hitchhiking not long after Jo Jo Dullard vanished’

There have been many changes to Irish society since 1995, when Jo Jo Dullard vanished in Moone, Co Kildare, while hitchhiking to her home in Callan, Co Kilkenny. A marked social change is the almost complete absence of people hitching lifts now, due both to the significant increase in car ownership and the expansion of public transport networks.
On that Thursday night of November 9th, 1995, Dullard missed her last bus home to Co Kilkenny from Dublin. She had come to the capital for the day and had no plans to stay overnight. She did not have a car, and that night, after missing the last bus that would have brought her directly home, she improvised her travel plans.
Hitchhiking was still routinely common in the 1990s: this reporter was one of the countless numbers of ephemeral travellers scattered all over the roads of Ireland back then, holding out a thumb, and depending on the kindness of strangers to get further along the road and safely home.
That November night in 1995, Dullard took a bus to Naas to start her out on the road, and then started hitching. She got one lift to Kilcullen, and then another to Moone. She was still 74km from home when she reached Moone and made a call from a public phone box at 11.37pm to a friend, Mary Cullinan, to let her know where she was. Cullinan later told gardaí that her friend cut the call short, telling her a car had stopped for her. This is the last confirmed piece of evidence of Jo Jo Dullard being alive. She was 21.
Dullard’s sinister disappearance while hitchhiking deeply troubled and grieved her female peers in Ireland. It is one of the many reasons her name has never been forgotten. Someone murdered this young woman in the midst of her attempts to hitchhike home, therefore the same fate could then theoretically have befallen any of us women who frequently hitched lifts from strangers on Irish roads.
I stopped hitchhiking not long after Dullard vanished. I didn’t want to stop: I loved hitching and talking to people, but the underlying sense of fear that someone might just drive off with me down a side road and do harm took over to the extent that I no longer felt safe thumbing lifts.
I wonder how many other women in Ireland at that time felt the same, and who also surrendered another element of their independence by stopping hitchhiking.
[ Search and excavation continuing as part of Jo Jo Dullard 1995 murder investigationOpens in new window ]
It was clear almost immediately in November 1995 that Dullard must have come to harm that night, or very soon afterwards. When her disappearance was finally classified as a murder inquiry in 2020, it only confirmed what her family and the public had known for decades must have been the outcome of her thwarted journey home.
In an analogue era, where her last known contact was via a public phone box on a main street, her family did all they could to publicise her disappearance: sisters Mary, Kathleen, Nora and brother Thomas. Both parents were already dead when their youngest child vanished, and her siblings experienced an additional media focus.
They circulated photographs of their sister, her lovely face framed with dark hair, one of which showed her in a blue dress at a wedding reception. Her sister Mary in particular represented the family for years, campaigning to keep Jo Jo’s name in the public realm, and trying to do whatever she could to push the cold case investigation forwards. Mary died in 2018, still not knowing what had become of her beloved little sister whose life stopped at age 21.
None of Dullard’s belongings that she was carrying with her that night has ever been found, and she herself has not yet been found. Her remains must lie somewhere, and the person or persons who put them there unequivocally know where they are. Her name is now part of a mantra of other young women who went missing in past decades, and whose bodies have never been found: Deirdre Jacob, Annie McCarrick, Fiona Pender, Ciara Breen, Imelda Keenan and Fiona Sinnott.
Every time any of these cases is raised in the media, the families of all the other missing women must experience pain.
This week, a man from the Kildare-Wicklow border area was arrested and questioned, and then released without charge the following day, This man, aged 55, who would have been 26 in 1995, has been questioned a number of times since Dullard went missing. It is the first time anyone has been arrested in connection with the case. Twenty-nine years after her disappearance, a search of land at two properties at Grangecon, Co Wicklow is ongoing.
The same photographs of Jo Jo Dullard have appeared again this week in the media. There will never be any new ones. She remains 21, and to all of those who grew up with this case, she looks heartbreakingly younger to us every year.