Disappearance of Trevor Deely

Trevor Deely was born on 15 August 1978 in Naas, County Kildare, Ireland, the youngest of four children of Michael and Ann Deely. He studied business at the Waterford Institute of Technology but left before completing the course, then trained in computing in Dublin. From May 1999 he worked in the IT department of Bank of Ireland Asset Management on Leeson Street. In late November 2000, using a discounted ticket arranged by a friend, he flew to Alaska to visit a woman he had met in Dublin earlier that year.

On the night of 7 December 2000, Deely attended his office Christmas party, which moved from Copper Face Jacks and the Hilton Hotel to Buck Whaley's nightclub on Lower Leeson Street. He left the nightclub at about 3:25 am into a severe storm, with a citywide taxi strike also underway, and set out on foot for his flat in the Renoir complex on Serpentine Avenue, Ballsbridge. He first stopped at his office, where he made tea, spoke with a colleague on the night shift, checked his email, and left again at 4:03 am carrying an umbrella. Around this time he left a voicemail for a friend saying he was on his way home; the friend later deleted the message without realizing its significance, and it was never recovered. CCTV footage showed an unidentified man dressed in black waiting outside a bank near Deely's office for roughly half an hour before Deely arrived; the two had a brief conversation. At 4:14 am, camera footage captured Deely walking past a bank at the corner of Baggot Street Bridge and Haddington Road — the last confirmed sighting of him. About 30 seconds later a man dressed in black also passed the camera; Gardaí have since interviewed that man and said his movements were not suspicious and that he was not the same person seen speaking with Deely outside the office.

Deely's absence went unnoticed that weekend because his flatmates were also away, and his family reported him missing only after he failed to appear at work the following Monday, a delay that cost investigators time. His family and friends distributed posters and leaflets and made door-to-door appeals; Garda divers searched the River Dodder and the Grand Canal without result, and the Grand Canal Basin could not be drained without risking the structural integrity of nearby buildings. Two Gardaí and, separately, Deely's sisters traveled to Alaska to interview the woman he had gone to visit, without producing leads.

The case featured in a 2015 TV3 documentary hosted by Donal MacIntyre. Gardaí opened a new investigation in December 2016, and in April 2017 released digitally enhanced CCTV footage and offered a €100,000 reward for information. In August 2017, acting on an informant's allegation that Deely had been killed in a chance encounter with a Crumlin-based criminal, Gardaí searched a three-acre site in Chapelizod; a gun and drugs were recovered but assessed as unrelated, and the search was called off in September without new evidence. In December 2023, Deely's brother Mark said further digital enhancement had cleared the man seen walking about 30 seconds behind Deely on the Haddington Road footage, while the man who waited outside the bank beforehand remains unidentified. Gardaí renewed their appeal for information in December 2024, and in June 2025 confirmed the case is still classified as a missing-person investigation rather than a murder inquiry. Trevor Deely has never been found.