Episode 13: The Body in the Woods: The Disappearance of Elaine O’Hara
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In August 2012, a Dublin woman drove to an isolated cemetery, parked her car, and seemingly vanished. Based on her complicated history, including time spent in psychiatric institutions, and the proximity to rocky cliffs that dropped dramatically into the Irish Sea, authorities believed that her disappearance may have been intentional. But nothing stays buried forever. The following year, evidence began to emerge to suggest that foul play was involved. As police closed in on a suspect, the salacious details of this case entranced the public. This is the story of the disappearance of Elaine O’Hara.
Day of Disappearance
The 22nd of August 2012 was a Wednesday. It was an overcast day in Dublin, with daytime temperatures ranging from 13 to 19 degrees. In Stepaside, south Dublin, 36-year-old Elaine O’Hara left her apartment, carrying her car keys and a mobile phone. She left her bag, wallet and iPhone in her apartment, got into the driver’s seat of her car, and drove to a familiar destination. She felt a sense of trepidation. She knew that she was going to be punished, and just hoped that the punishment would not be too severe. She still bore the scars of the last punishment her master had administered.
Elaine was in a consensual BDSM relationship with a married man, but lately she had grown afraid of him, as his behaviour, violence and obsession with blood escalated. Having been released from hospital where she had been receiving psychiatric treatment earlier that day, her master had told her that she would be punished for depriving him of access to her for the duration of her stay. He was particularly angry that she had attempted to take her own life without his explicit involvement.
Elaine drove to Shanganagh Cemetery near the south Dublin/Wicklow border and parked her car, following the instructions her master had given her. They were to meet at 5:30pm. She visited her mother’s grave, before walking into the adjacent park, crossing the railway bridge towards the cliffs, and walking down the steps to the sea. The final message she received on her secret phone instructed her to ‘Go down to the shore and wait’. She was never seen again.
Elaine O’Hara’s Background
Born on the 17th of March 1976, St. Patrick’s Day, Elaine O’Hara was the eldest of four children. Her parents, Frank and Eileen O’Hara, raised their family in Killiney, an affluent suburb in South County Dublin. Elaine attended a local secondary school in Killiney, St. Joseph of Cluny, but reportedly had difficulties there, and was often ostracised and bullied by her peer group.
In 2002, Elaine and her family were devastated by the death of the family matriarch, Eileen. This is a wound that it seems that Elaine would never fully recover from. In 2005, Elaine moved into a small flat in Blackrock, and rented several properties before eventually being offered affordable housing in nearby Stepaside. Both Blackrock and Stepaside are not too far away from Elaine’s native Killiney, so she was never too far from her support system.
At the time of her disappearance in August 2012, Elaine was 36 years old. She had been working multiple jobs, including part-time as a childcare worker, and also picked up shifts in a local newsagent’s shop. She was also studying at night to become a Montessori teacher. According to her father, Frank, Elaine battled mental illness throughout her adolescent and adult life.
Reported Missing
Elaine’s father, Frank, had an extremely close relationship with his daughter. He believed that he may have been the closest person in her life, and possibly even her ‘best friend’. All reports suggest that Elaine had a good relationship with her father’s new partner, Sheila Hawkins.
Elaine had booked time off work to volunteer at the Tall Ships Race, a racing festival that was running in Dublin city centre between Thursday and Sunday that week. She seemed excited about the prospect of this event and had even arranged for Sheila to drive her to the city centre for the first day of the race on Thursday the 23rd of August.
Thursday morning passed, and there was no sign of Elaine. She missed her prearranged lift and was also a no-show at the festival. Frank jokingly texted Elaine that evening, writing, ‘Are you alive?’, fully expecting a response, but none came. By Friday morning, Frank was sick with worry. He knew that it was completely out of character for Elaine to be out of contact for this long, and contacted An Garda Síochana, the Irish police force, to report her missing.
The Gardaí found Elaine’s car abandoned outside Shanganagh Cemetery and canvassed for witnesses. One lead confirmed that they had seen a woman matching Elaine’s description crying loudly over a gravestone on the day Elaine had gone missing. There was no trace of Elaine. Based on her psychiatric history and the location that they had found her car; the working assumption was that she had followed through with her suicidal ideation and jumped from the nearby cliffs.
Mental Health and Alternative Lifestyle
Elaine had a history of psychiatric issues. She was hospitalised for the first time in 1992, at the age of 16. This would be a regular occurrence, with Elaine spending large swathes of time as an in-patient at St. Edmundsbury, a psychiatric hospital located in Lucan in West Dublin. During her time here, she became particularly close to her consultant psychiatrist, Professor Anthony Clare, who diagnosed her with several conditions, such as depression and borderline personality disorder.
As a teenager, Elaine began to openly discuss her fascination with bondage, subservience and sadomasochism. This is a preoccupation that grew as Elaine reached adulthood. Elaine frequently engaged in self-harm and had ongoing suicidal ideations. This was made worse after the sudden death of her mother, Eileen in 2002, and again with the death of her psychiatrist Professor Clare in 2007.
By 2007, Elaine had begun engaging in online fetish websites, and connecting with likeminded individuals. In 2007, she began speaking to a man with the username ‘architect72’, a married man, and began a BDSM relationship with him that spanned several years. It appears that this was an on-again/off-again relationship, and while they had sexual contact and engaged in BDSM fetish practices, they would not have sexual intercourse for several years.
The Discovery
On the 10th of September 2013, three anglers fishing in Vartry Reservoir, near Roundwood in County Wicklow saw a bag lying in the water. Inside the bag, they found some unusual items, including clothes, restraints, handcuffs and a ball gag. The trio stacked the items on a nearby wall and left.
One of the anglers, William Fegan, was troubled by what they had found and returned to the reservoir the next day to retrieve the items. He took them directly to Roundwood Garda Station. The officer on duty, Garda James O’Donoghue, agreed with William that there was indeed something unusual about the find. He didn’t know if the items were related to a crime or not but made the decision to bag them as evidence.
Garda O’Donoghue was equally perplexed by the items he had been presented with and travelled to Vartry Reservoir to further investigate. Water levels had risen since the previous day, and he couldn’t get a clear view of what lay beneath the water. On the 16th of September, he returned to the site again. He waded into the shallow water and retrieved the items one-by-one. He found a rusted knife, a leather mask, another set of handcuffs, an inhaler, fetish items, and a set of keys, with a supermarket loyalty card attached. This was traced to Elaine O’Hara, the woman who had at this stage been missing for almost thirteen months. Later searches by the Garda Water Unit uncovered several more items, including a rucksack, two Nokia mobile phones.
Separately, in Killakee, in the foothills of the Dublin Mountains, professional dog trainer, Magali Vergnet was about to make a gruesome discovery. Beginning in late August 2013, one of the dogs began to disappear into the woods and would triumphantly return with a bone in their mouth. Magali assumed it was an animal bone, likely from a deer carcass.
On the 13th of September, Magali became curious, and followed the dogs into the woods. There, she found scattered bones, including a protruding ribcage, alongside some human clothing and the unmistakable profile of a human jawbone. Authorities set up a cordon and began a forensic investigation of the crime scene. Dental records confirmed the identity of the remains. The body they had found was Elaine O’Hara, and this was now a homicide investigation.
Police Investigation
In the time since Elaine had disappeared, the bank had taken steps to repossess her apartment, had not yet proceeded with clearing the property. In September 2013, Gardaí searched Elaine’s apartment, confiscating a laptop and mobile devices. On the laptop, authorities found that Elaine had backed up all of the text messages from her mobile phone. They were processed for forensic examination and analysis. Blood evidence and knife marks were found on Elaine’s bedding.
Gardaí analysed CCTV from the lobby in Elaine’s apartment building and saw a man entering the building, obscuring his face. The same man was also seen accompanying Elaine on another occasion. Analysis of Elaine’s phone and laptop revealed more than 2600 text messages between Elaine and an unknown man.
Forensic examination of the two mobile phones that Gardaí retrieved from Vartry Reservoir each had a single phone number saved in them. One contact was saved as MSTR and the other as SLV, which authorities took to be shorthand for ‘Master’ and ‘Slave’. Potentially indication of the relationship between the previous owners of the devices. After comparing the data contained on the two mobile phones, along with the data collected from Elaine’s electronic devices, Gardaí became convinced that both devices had been used exclusively by Elaine O’Hara and her fetish partner, with Elaine taking on the submissive ‘slave’ role, and the unnamed man, occupying the dominant ‘master’ role.
Forensic analysts further drilled down the data for any potentially identifying information that may have accidently been shared between the two. They didn’t have to look for long. Soon, investigators found text messages that led them to Dublin-based architect, Graham Dwyer. They now had a tangible suspect to investigate.
Graham Dwyer’s Background
Graham Dwyer was born on the 13th of September 1972 in Bandon, Cork to working-class parents Seán and Susan. In the early nineties, Dwyer moved from his native Cork to Dublin for university, and attended Dublin Institute of Technology, now Technological University Dublin, to study architecture. While attending a music festival in Tipperary in summer 1991, he met Donegal woman, Emer O’Shea, and the two began dating. Emer soon discovered she was pregnant, and gave birth to a son, Senan in October 1992.
By 1996, the couple had separated, and while custody was shared, the co-parents had a strained relationship. The following year, in 1997, Dwyer began a relationship with fellow architecture student, Gemma Healy. In July 2001, Dwyer secured a job with a prestigious architecture firm in Dublin’s city centre, and he and Gemma married in 2002. In 2007, the couple moved to the wealthy neighbourhood of Foxrock, in South County Dublin, that they shared with their two young children.
The 2008 housing crash and subsequent recession impacted the Dwyer family financially. Dwyer’s wife lost her job as a Project Director at another architecture firm, and all directors at Dwyer’s company were required to take several pay cuts over several years, resulting in a 50% drop in income. On top of this, the value of their home plummeted, and their debt skyrocketed.
The Darker Side Emerges
Colleagues and acquaintances described Dwyer as being quick to anger, and as having an obsession with how others perceived him. His wife Gemma, originally from County Sligo came from a well-to-do family of doctors and other respected professionals. It seems that while Dwyer had been elevated to middle class status through his profession, job title and marriage, he struggled to overcome feelings of inadequacy from his working-class roots.
There was evidence of the darker side of Dwyer’s nature throughout the years, but usually in isolated instances, with different people, so it wasn’t easy for someone to connect the dots, unless they were actively trying to. Ex-girlfriend and mother of his first child, Emer O’Shea had ended their relationship, as she became concerned about his knife fetish. He spoke about how he fantasised about stabbing a woman during sex and began to take a knife into the bedroom. This, coupled with his bad temper caused Emer to end the relationship, and move their son away from Dwyer, back to her native Donegal.
Those who knew Dwyer said that while he was confident with women, particularly when he had consumed alcohol, it was noticed that he would approach women who may not be conventionally attractive. One person said that he would target ‘easy prey’, which, according to the witness, often included overweight women or those who may have lower self-esteem.
Arrest & Interrogation
The Gardaí began a surveillance operation on Graham Dwyer. They researched his background and tried to connect the phone data they had gathered with incidents from Dwyer’s life. They were able to confirm the information they had garnered from phone data to events and dates that correlated with activities and events that had happened on the same dates in Dwyer’s personal life.
On the day that Elaine disappeared, geolocation showed that Dwyer switched his work phone off close to his office at 5pm, and switched it back on at 9pm, once he had returned home. The four hours between these times were unaccounted for.
Forensic analysts used phone data to triangulate phone locations at key times, including times when Dwyer’s work phone and ‘Master’ phone were in the same locations at the same time. Civilian crime and policing analyst Sarah Skedd discovered that both mobile devices passed through the same cell towers at the same time on several dates in July 2012. His car registration was also recorded passing through the toll booth within minutes of the mobile phones pinging off the cell towers.
With the evidence lining up, the Gardaí prepared for a dawn raid of the Foxrock home of the Dwyer family and brought Dwyer in for questioning. This was five weeks after the recovery of Elaine’s body. He denied all accusations and denied knowing Elaine O’Hara. He also disputed that he owned any of the mobile phones that had been recovered. By the fourth interrogation interview, when presented with a text message to Elaine O’Hara sent from his work phone, he could no longer deny a real-world connection to Elaine. He was arrested and charged with Elaine’s murder.
Trial & Sentencing
The trial took place in Court Room 13 in the Central Criminal Court in Dublin. Prosecutor Sean Guerin SC tried the case, with Remy Farrell acting as defence counsel. Mobile phone data was central to the prosecution’s case. Due to the length of time that Elaine’s remains had been exposed to the elements, a definitive cause of death could not be established. Instead, the prosecution built a case based on Dwyer’s own words that he had sent to Elaine and others. The defence argued that all of the evidence was circumstantial.
It emerged that Elaine had submitted to Dwyer’s extreme sexual fantasies with promises of future commitment to their relationship. For example, text messages between the two showed that Dwyer told Elaine that he would ‘give her a child’ if she helped him to find a victim. He referred to this arrangement in text as ‘a life for a life’.
He kept pushing the boundaries of this request, telling Elaine that she would actively be involved in sourcing a woman for him to abuse and kill, and would hold her down while he raped and stabbed her to death. Dwyer also attempted to coerce Elaine into taking her own life, but only if he could be involved in her death.
Other Targets
The jury heard evidence that Graham Dwyer was a sexual sadist, who had become obsessed with blood and fantasies of stabbing women to death for his own sexual gratification. At one point, it emerged that Dwyer had selected a target in the form of estate agent Rowena Quinn. He hatched a plan that he shared with Elaine to lure Ms. Quinn to a vacant house under the guise of viewing the property. He would then abduct, torture, rape and kill her. Thankfully, his plans in this situation were not followed through on.
Dwyer also began an online relationship in fetish chatrooms with an American woman, Darci Day, and also planned her death through stabbing. Darci Day, an American woman living in Maine testified that she had met Graham Dwyer through a fetish chatroom. She admitted to having a troubled upbringing, and of struggling with depression, self-harm and suicidal ideation since she was a young teenager. In her 20s, she began to explore BDSM. Later, she began to connect with people online with alias Cassie. This is where she virtually met Graham Dwyer. As Cassie, Day described fantasies of dying, while Dwyer revealed fantasies of stabbing a woman to death during sex. Day testified that Dwyer had mentioned Elaine O’Hara to her and said that she allowed him to cut her in the stomach area.
Darci spoke of detailed death plans Dwyer had made to end her life. He shared that he had researched potential disposal sites for bodies in her home state of Maine. In his plan, he and Darci would drive to a secluded area, where he would restrain her, have sex with her, and either stab her or slit her throat. Darci ended all contact with Dwyer and sought help. She said that her life had drastically improved since the period she had been in contact with Dwyer. Authorities found a fictional story about Darci Day on Dwyer’s computer, where she travelled to Ireland, and he took her to an isolated cabin and ultimately murdered her. Upon hearing this, many questioned whether there were aspects of this fictional story that mirrored what had happened to Elaine on that final day.
During the trial, jurors were shown several extreme pornographic recordings that Dwyer had made, including several with Elaine, where he stabbed her, while she was restrained. The prosecution told the jury that it was clear that Elaine was not enjoying the experience, but that Dwyer was deriving sexual gratification from it.
Seán Guerin SC for the prosecution told the jury the following in his closing statement: ‘Remarkably, when Graham Dwyer moved, these phones move with him. … wherever he goes, the phones go. They are stuck to him like a shadow’. He added that the texts held up a mirror to Graham Dwyer’s life, and that it was simply impossible for it to have been anyone else.
In March 2015, a jury of seven men and five women found Graham Dwyer guilty of the murder of Elaine O’Hara. On the 20th of April 2015, Graham Dwyer was sentenced to life imprisonment, to be reviewed after seven years. He is serving his sentence at Midlands Prison, alongside some of the most notorious prisoners in the country.
Legal Challenges
Part of Dwyer’s defence was that the reliance on mobile data to make the case against the defendant was invalid, due to the legislation in place at the time. This perspective was bolstered in 2021 by an advisor reviewing Dwyer’s case for the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), who stated that mobile phone metadata was ‘permitted only in the event of a threat to national security’.
This would mean that it could not legally be used during the investigation of other kinds of crimes. In April 2022, the CJEU ruled that the ‘indiscriminate retention of mobile phone metadata’ was inconsistent with EU law but deferred to the Irish Court of Appeal to make a final decision related to this case. This ruling, if upheld, would have massive implications for criminal investigations, not only in Ireland, but throughout the EU. Dwyer’s case was dismissed by the Court of Appeal in March 2023. Irish legislators have recognised a potential gap in the law covering the use of mobile metadata in criminal investigations, and at the time of this episode’s release are working on potential legislative solutions for this.
Summary
There was a great deal of planning and premeditation related to this crime. Elaine O'Hara was a gentle person with a kind heart. She was vulnerable to manipulation by those looking to abuse her. Whatever interest she may have had in the BDSM subculture, she was targeted, groomed, and broken down by a level of sadism that is rare, even in this scene.
Elaine just wanted to be loved and find acceptance. While her relationship with Dwyer may have begun as a consensual one, it is clear from the documented messages logged as evidence that her boundaries had been eroded. She was afraid and had nowhere to escape. He had a key to her apartment and was forcing her into practices that she was not a willing participant in.
Her fragile mental state and suicidal ideation were used as fodder to fuel Dwyer's depraved sexual fantasies. His looming shadow was always there. Always watching. Always controlling. He had it all planned out. Elaine O’Hara deserved better. She just wanted to be happy. She may not have had peace when she was alive, but in death, she finally has justice.
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