The Disappearance of Jo Jo Dullard

A young woman from Callan

Josephine Dullard, known to family and friends as Jo Jo, was born on 25 January 1974 and grew up in Callan, Co. Kilkenny. She was 21 in the autumn of 1995 and, according to gardaí, was about to start a new job. On the morning of 9 November that year she took a bus from Callan to Dublin to collect a final social welfare payment at the post office in Harold's Cross before the new position began.

She spent the afternoon with friends in the Grafton Street area, including time at Bruxelles bar just off Grafton Street. Her family, among them her sisters, have spent the three decades since then appealing for anyone with knowledge of what happened that night to come forward.

A missed bus and a journey home

At around 10pm Jo Jo made her way to Busáras, Dublin's central bus station, but missed the service that would have taken her to Callan. Instead she boarded a bus to Kildare and got off in Naas at roughly 10.50pm, planning to hitch the rest of the way home. A motorist drove her from Naas to the edge of the motorway at Kilcullen, and a little after 11pm a second driver picked her up there and left her in the village of Moone, Co. Kildare.

From a public phone box in Moone she called a friend, explaining that she had missed her bus and was hitching. During the call she said that a car had stopped and she was going to take the lift. Garda material puts her arrival in Moone at about 11.35pm, and later reports give the time of the call as 11.37pm. She has not been seen since, and that call remains the last confirmed contact anyone had with her.

From missing person to murder inquiry

For a quarter of a century the case was treated as a missing person investigation. On 19 October 2020 gardaí announced that it had been upgraded to a murder inquiry, stating that they believed serious harm had come to her; some reports date the reclassification to November 2020. The investigation team, based in Kildare, works under ongoing review by the Serious Crime Review Team of the Garda National Bureau of Criminal Investigation.

Detectives have repeatedly asked to hear from people who gave lifts to hitchhikers around Moone in late 1995. They have also appealed for help tracing a Sanyo personal stereo cassette player she had with her, noting that offenders sometimes keep or fail to dispose of a victim's belongings.

Searches and an arrest

In the early 2020s, a large search of woodland at Usk Little on the Kildare–Wicklow boundary was carried out over about three weeks following fresh information. In November 2024 gardaí arrested a man in his 50s on suspicion of murder. He was questioned over two days and released without charge, with a file to be prepared for the Director of Public Prosecutions. He has not been charged and is presumed innocent. At the same time, agricultural land at Ballyhook, Grangecon, Co. Wicklow, about 11km from Moone, was excavated for several weeks in search of remains or any of her possessions. Nothing was reported found.

Developments in 2025 and 2026

Gardaí say they remain resolute in their determination to find answers, and in January 2026 her sister Kathleen Bergin renewed the family's plea for information, however small. In February 2026 investigators began a new excavation near the Wicklow–Kildare border, this time examining the disappearances of both Jo Jo Dullard and Deirdre Jacob, an 18-year-old student teacher who vanished near her home in Newbridge, Co. Kildare, in July 1998. A second dig began on 15 June 2026 in a different part of a disused quarry at Castleruddery Upper. Gardaí confirmed by early July that the search had concluded, but declined to publish the results for operational reasons, saying only that both families had been updated.

The Vanishing Triangle and its lessons

Jo Jo Dullard is one of a group of women who disappeared or were murdered in Leinster during the 1990s, a pattern the media came to call the "Vanishing Triangle". Eight such cases remain unsolved, and six of the women, including Jo Jo, have never been found. Authorities have never established that one offender was responsible. In 2024 detectives said they did not believe they were dealing with a serial killer, although the 2026 quarry searches indicate investigators are examining whether the Dullard and Jacob cases could be connected.

The case has also shaped debate about how Ireland handles long-term disappearances. Reclassifying old missing person files as murders has let the Serious Crime Review Team apply fresh resources and forensic methods decades later, while reporting in 2026 highlighted that An Garda Síochána still has no cadaver dog of its own and borrows one from the Police Service of Northern Ireland. For the Dullard family, the central aim is unchanged: to bring Jo Jo home.