Disappearance of Jo Jo Dullard

Josephine "Jo Jo" Dullard was 21 years old when she vanished on the night of 9 November 1995 while travelling home to Callan, County Kilkenny. Earlier that day she had gone to Dublin, and after socialising in the city she went to the bus station intending to catch the last service home. She missed it and instead boarded a bus to Naas, County Kildare, planning to hitchhike the remaining distance. She got one lift to Kilcullen and a second to the small village of Moone.

At 11:37 p.m. she stopped at a public telephone box in Moone and called a friend, Mary Cullinan, explaining that she had missed her bus and asking whether she could stay in Carlow. During the call she repeatedly stepped outside to flag down passing cars. At about 11:47 p.m. she briefly interrupted the conversation, then returned to say she had "just got a lift." She ended the call and was never seen or heard from again. The lift she stepped into has never been identified.

Her family reported her missing, and after a delay Gardaí searched the River Barrow and the road between Moone and Carlow. Lines of inquiry followed over the years, and in 1998 her case was folded into Operation Trace, an investigation into a cluster of disappearances of young women in the east of Ireland during the late 1980s and 1990s that became known as the "Vanishing Triangle." Her sister, Mary Phelan, campaigned publicly for decades to keep the case active and to press for answers.

On the 25th anniversary in November 2020, Gardaí reclassified the case from a missing-person inquiry to a murder investigation, stating they were satisfied that serious harm had come to her and that she had met her death through violent means. The reclassification was accompanied by fresh appeals for information.

In November 2024 a man was arrested on suspicion of murder, the first arrest in the case, and extensive searches and forensic excavations were carried out on nearby land. He was released without charge, and the searches did not lead to the recovery of her remains. Further searches connected to both her case and that of Deirdre Jacob, another young woman who disappeared in the 1990s, were carried out along the Wicklow–Kildare border in 2026.

More than thirty years after she disappeared, no one has been charged or convicted, and Jo Jo Dullard's body has never been found. The investigation remains open, and Gardaí continue to appeal for information from anyone who may know what happened on the road that night.