Annie McCarrick, the missing American in Ireland

By: JANE WALSHE | Published Friday, February 19, 2010, 4:01 PM | Updated Friday, February 19, 2010, 4:01 PM

Annie McCarrick was a 26-year-old from New York who returned to Ireland in 1993 after attending college there and falling in love with the place.  

She shared an apartment with two female roommates in Sandymount, Dublin, and  in March ,1993 she was excited as her mother was due to visit .

On Friday, March 26, just days before her mother was due to arrive, Annie did not pickup her paycheck and failed to show at a dinner party.

Annie's father, John McCarrick, said he knew immediately something was terribly wrong .

"She was always reaching out and touching someone . . . She would never have gone a day without talking to someone . . . We were very, very concerned," he said.

The McCarricks left immediately for Ireland to search for their only child, and the hunt for their daughter became a huge story. Investigator Brian McCarthy remembers those days .

"There were very difficult days, those days, to live with the McCarrick family and see day after day the anguish that they had, the terror of what they felt might have happened to their only child," McCarthy recalled.

The last thing anyone knows for sure about Annie McCarrick is that on the morning she disappeared, she'd run errands at the local bank and grocery store.

What happened after that is a mystery. One witness says she saw Annie later that day on a No. 44 city bus. The bus route ends in the pretty Irish small town of Enniskerry in nearby Wicklow where Annie often visited. It would later be known as the murder triangle where six young women went missing.

Witnesses say around 9 p.m. that night  Annie was at Johnny Fox's pub, three miles outside Enniskerry with an unidentified man. It is now known that suspected serial killer Larry Murphy lived nearby. She has never been seen again.