THE mother of the longest missing child’s case in Ireland has said she never knew the last time she cuddled her daughter would be the final time.
Mary Boyle was six when she disappeared from her grandparents home in Cashelard in Donegal on March 18, 1977.
Mary Boyle photographed one week before she went missingCredit: Collect
Mary Boyle (left), twin sister Ann and brother Paddy, a week before she disappearedCredit: Collect
Ann has been searching for answers about her missing daughter for nearly 50 yearsCredit: RTE
This means she has been missing for more than 46 years and eight months, the longest case of its kind here.
At the time, her parents, Ann and Charlie, and their three kids were visiting for a family celebration.
They all had dinner together at around 2.30 and while the rest of the children went to play, Mary stayed behind to help her mother wash the dishes.
Ann recalled: “Just before dinnertime, Mary said to me, ‘Mum I forgot to kiss you this morning.’ And she threw her arms around me and gave me a big kiss. Little did I know it was the last one.”
Ann said her daughter was a ‘carefree child’ and was a ‘kind, considerate little girl.’
After helping her mother, she said she was going to join her cousins and siblings and play outside, but when they were called in at 4pm and asked where Mary was, they hadn’t seen her.
Ann said: “My God the panic came on me right away because she wasn’t one for wandering off either.
“I was shouting her name and Daddy said ‘stop that Ann or the neighbours will hear you.’ I said ‘I don’t care as long as I find Mary.’”
Mary’s uncle Gerry Gallagher was at the house and said he had seen her an hour previous when she followed him through the fields as he went to a neighbouring farm to return a ladder.
But when she got halfway and saw water, he said she decided to turn back.
Ann ran to where he last saw her, which was in the direction of Loch Colmcille.
Two fishermen on the loch said they hadn’t seen her and she asked them to tell the Gardaí when they were going back towards down.
Her mother said: “At that time there was no mobile phones, there was no phones in houses.”
Gardai arrived around 6pm, with Mary last seen at around 3.30pm and the Defence Force soldiers from nearby Finner Camp and a helicopter assisted in the search.
Hundreds of people searched the rough countryside and sheds and huts in the area.
Over the coming weeks the Dog Unit was dispatched from Dublin and sub-aqua divers checked the local water.
All of this took its toll on Ann, as the stress of her lost daughter weighed on her.
“There was days I thought I wouldn’t be able to get up out of bed. But I did. It was overwhelming, the whole thing. As the days went on it got worse and worse.”
After eight weeks searching with no sightings or answers, the family returned to their own home in Kincasslagh.
Ann said: “I’ll never forget that journey down without her. It was shocking.”
Mary’s twin sister, also named Ann, added: “We knew Mary should have been with us. You’d lost a part of you. Thinking back it was a torture at the time.”
A few weeks later, Ann made her first Holy Communion, without her sister at her side.
Her parents struggled through what should have been a celebration.
“(Charlie) didn’t talk about Mary for years. He was a quiet man, kept a lot to himself . Back then there was no such thing as going to a therapist or anything- we didn’t know what to do because there was no other person going through what we were going through.”
Mary’s twin Ann added: “When I was seven I thought she was coming back but when you get to be an adult, you kind of realise, no, she’s not coming back. And it changed my thinking completely and it made me start to question.”
Years after Mary went missing, the conversation turned to the six-year-old being murdered and her mother said that “frightened me terribly.”
She told RTE’s Scannal: “Who’d want to murder my wee girl?I couldn’t understand that.”
Over the years, boglands, lakes and land have been searched again and again but there have been no leads.
Her sister said this would give them hope but it would ‘come crashing down again and again.’
There have been rumours and whispers in the area for years about what could have happened, from being snatched by a passing stranger to being taken in a paedophile ring.
Ann said she has her own theory about her sister’s disappearance: “I believe she was killed that day. I don’t think maybe the person set out to kill her but that’s what happened. I think.”
Child serial killer Robert Black was at one time linked to the case but was later ruled out by Gardaí.
Only one man has been arrested and charged in the case, but the file was dropped by the DPP due to a lack of evidence.
Convicted paedophile and former Irish Army soldier and amusement park owner Brian McMahon was at the barracks at Finner Camp at the time Mary went missing, but he has always denied any involvement.
McMahon was living at an address in Temple Street, Sligo when he was jailed for two years in 2013 for a string of sexual offences against young boys in the 60s and 70s in Ballyshannon in Donegal.
He said he knew Mary’s mother Ann and claimed he had “nothing to do” with Mary’s disappearance.
“I know I had nothing to do with the disappearance of that girl,” McMahon told the Sligo Champion.
Her sister doesn’t believe he is the one who took her.
To this day, the case remains unsolved and her mother has had to deal with people sending her hate mail thinking she had some involvement.
But for her, not a day goes by without thinking of her daughter.
The same goes for her sister: “In my head, I’m always talking to Mary. If I’m in trouble I am kind of asking her for help. Now to be fair she generally gets me out of bother. I always believe she’s looking out for me.”
Her twin sister Ann said she still talks to her sister everydayCredit: RTE
