THE SISTER OF Trevor Deely said that some media’s coverage of the renewed efforts to find her brother this year was “worse” than the initial search 17 years ago.
Trevor went missing after attending a Christmas party on 8 December 2000, and was last spotted on two sets of CCTV footage which showed him crossing Baggot Street Bridge and walking towards Haddington Road in the city centre.
Gardaí began a cold-case review in December, which involved swathes of evidence being gathered and witnesses re-interviewed. A dig began at a site in Chapelizod, but was called off after gardaí didn’t find anything that would assist them in locating Trevor.
Speaking on RTÉ’s Ray D’Arcy Show, Trevor’s brother Mark recounted the events of the night that Trevor disappeared – he was at an office party on a wet and windy night, and had left his colleagues at 3.30am. There was a taxi strike on that night.
CCTV footage showed that Trevor returned to the office and spent around half an hour there. The last footage of Trevor was of him crossing Haddington Road at 4.14am that night.
“That Friday morning, he didn’t turn up to work,” Mark said.
On Monday lunchtime I got a call from my mum, certainly not in hysterics but just, you got a sixth sense that something was wrong.
His sister Michele said that she had called Trevor a couple of times over that weekend to get his opinion of Christmas presents for their parents, but didn’t think anything of it that she didn’t get through to him.
Search efforts
The search began for Trevor after that, but it wasn’t a coordinated organised system, Mark said – but developed because of Trevor’s personality.
“It’s because of who he is – Trevor isn’t a messer like, there’s no trouble, no anything. He’d a normal life, everybody just rallied around and it morphed into what it did. We’d hundreds of people out at various stages.”
Michele described their younger brother as a quiet teenager who “wasn’t too sporty, or overly academic”.
And then he hit 20, 21 and kind of came into his own. He was becoming a mini Mark, you know? He had found a job that he loved, he had a great bunch of friends, he was living in town – he was having a great time.
Mark said that he walked the multiple routes Trevor could have taken back to his home in Ballsbridge. “I remember looking in skips – I don’t know what I was looking for.”
New search
Mark and Michele both spoke about how harrowing it had been for them to watch the Garda subaqua team search Dublin’s Grand Canal for Trevor seventeen years ago.
“I never thought we’d go through something as bad as that,” Michelle said.
But what was worse for the Deely family was the theories put forward in the media, which included one suggestion that his disappearance could be gangland-linked.
But that experience over August and September this year, it was incredibly difficult. We knew a dig had very serious connotations, and what may come from that, but to do it in such a glare of that type of headline… certainly for me I had never ever imagined that’s what happened to Trevor that night.
“And we know now that that was not true now.”
When asked at what point did the “hope turn into desperation, or something else”, Mark said he believes there’s still hope.
“There’s 17 years gone by now and there’s nothing we haven’t heard. Nothing. I mean every theory at the outset would have put up personal phone numbers because someone might not want to talk to , we’re heard aliens might have taken him.
I think the easiest attitude is to say ‘He’s gone’. Time has gone, but he deserves more than that now.
“I want to move him away from Haddington Road, it’s too long to be stuck in the one place.”
You can watch the full interview here on the RTÉ Player.
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