RedHanded - Episode 80 - Ball Gags, BDSM & A Body in the Woods: The Murder of Elaine O'Hara

Episode Date: January 31, 2019

This week the girls head to Ireland to cover the "nearly perfect murder" of Elaine O'Hara. So called, because it was only a year after Elaine mysteriously vanished that police made a series of chance discoveries so unbelievable that they would make a CSI script writer squirm...  But these discoveries did go on to unmask a devious killer and rip him from his idyllic suburban life to pay for a brutal murder.    See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to Red Handed early and ad-free. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. They say Hollywood is where dreams are made. A seductive city where many flock to get rich, be adored, and capture America's heart. But when the spotlight turns off, fame, fortune, and lives can disappear in an instant. Follow Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Hannah. I'm Saruti. And welcome to Red Handed.

Ball gags, bones and batteries for you today in our first ever Irish case. Don't know why it's taken so long, but it has. Having said that, you haven't done an Indian one yet. I kind of did the Sharindavani one. Oh, that's true, actually. They were of Indian heritage. And I have tried to do some Indian cases, but it's just really hard to find any information on them. So I've struggled with that end of things. I don't know why you've taken so long to do an Irish one. Like somebody posted on the Facebook group that you pronounce Irish names fantastically.

Well, I bloody should. This has been a long time coming, Hannah. You're hiding your light under a bushel or whatever it is. Now you said that, I'm going to get every single one of them wrong. I'm actually quite scared about how to pronounce a lot of these words. Okay, I'll do my best. I've got to hold your hand. And our Irish story starts in a very Irish way with three fishermen, William Fagan, James Fagan and Mark Quinn who were all rather suspiciously I thought fishing in the night time. I think it's one of those things where if you see someone fishing at night they're probably doing something illegal. Oh I don't know I feel like you can only fish for squid at night. Oh really I didn't know that. I mean I'm sure someone will

correct me. I was told that when I went squid fishing at night that I could only do it then when did you go squid fishing when I was in Vietnam I went squid fishing I didn't catch it but other people did so they were definitely there oh I uh I got stung by a jellyfish in Vietnam oh had no idea it happened because I was absolutely wasted woke up in the morning and just had these like tentacle burns on my leg. And I was like, oh, okay, that happened. Cool. Oh my God, that's miserable. When I was in Belize, I saw this girl fall in the water and a Portuguese man I wore just enveloped her in its tentacles.

She leapt out of the water and I have never to this day heard anyone scream like that. And her body was just covered in these welts. I never saw her again after that but i'm sure she survived hopefully i hope she's bloody hell i know right anyway we're well off yeah already back to our nighttime fishermen this all happened on the 10th of september 2013 so our three nighttime fishermen met on the bridge at the vartri reservoir in county wicklow which is just under an hour's drive away from the centre of Dublin, but only half an hour from its southern suburbs.

2013 had been an unusually hot summer in Ireland, and this meant that when the night-time fishing happened, Vartri Reservoir, where the water was usually 20 feet deep, only had about 18 inches of water in it. William Fagan spent a lot of time at the reservoir fishing and he says stopping other people from fishing illegally. And that day he and his mates all noted how unusually low the water levels were. Fagan and his fishing pals noticed something shiny in the water.

At first they thought it may be a ring from a bull's nose but closer inspection proved them wrong. It was a pair of handcuffs. And that's not all they found. Fagin, other Fagin and Quinn fished a lot of other suspect items out of the low-level reservoir. They found a blue hoodie, a white vest, a blindfold, leg restraints and a ball gag. The three originally thought this was quite funny, so they had a bit of a laugh, left their findings on a wall, and went on their way.

I mean, you would, wouldn't you? Yeah. If you found all that, you'd just be like, what the fuck? Someone's had a good time. Laugh, laugh, laugh. I'm going to go home. Yeah.

So I don't blame them for that. I actually think what happens next is quite surprising. Because when he got home, William Fagan couldn't quite shake the feeling that something was wrong. So the next day, the 11th of September, he went back to the reservoir, collected the ball gag and all its friends, and took the lot to the nearby Roundwood police station. The Irish word for police is Gardaí, so they're the Irish police. So if you hear us say Garda or Gardaí, that's what we mean. Fagan's collection of fetish items fell into the hands of Garda James O'Donoghue,

who would lead the investigation. Two days later, 26 miles away at the foot of Killarkey Mountain, a dog trainer called Magalie Vernier was walking her dog. And if you've listened to literally any other episode of ours, you can probably tell where this is going. This is a pretty remote part of the Dublin mountains. Vernier was actually walking her dog Millie on private land. She had a set of keys to the gates and the landowner's permission to be there. They walked there often, but today Margulies' dog wouldn't come back when she called her.

Given that she was a dog trainer, you would assume that her own personal dog would be pretty obedient, so she thought something had to be wrong. She ventured a little further off her usual footpath and into the woods, where she saw her dog scratching at something. As she got closer, it was clear that her dog had found a collection of bones. Initially, this wasn't totally unusual. There were deer in the woods and her dog messed around with those bones all the time. But these ones were different. They were bigger and there was a totally intact rib cage lying next to the other bones. Chillingly, there were also a pair of tracksuit bottoms there. Now Margoly touched them, the tracksuit bottoms, with her foot and felt what

she assumed to be a shoe inside. Now she became more convinced than ever that these bones were not deer after all. I mean, how many deer do you see running around wearing tracksuit bottoms? It really reminds me of, you've seen all those pictures on the internet of like, if a dog wore trousers, how would this dog wear trousers? Would it be over like just the back two legs and the arse and the tail? Or would it be over like all four legs? I don't know. Tell us, how would a dog wear or how would a deer wear tracksuit bottoms? Assuming they are not a deer's tracksuit bottoms, Margulies did the right thing and called the landowner Frank Doyle and she told him what

she'd found. Frank got down there as soon as he could and together they found a jawbone. These remains were definitely human. So Frank called the guardaí who were on the scene quickly. Officers found a large knife stuck into the forest floor just moments away from the human bones. Doesn't that just make it seem almost like it's completely set up? Yeah, totally. Just a fucking knife stuck in the ground in the middle of the woods next to some bones in a tracksuit. And because it's private land, I think whoever it was

genuinely thought it wouldn't matter, no one was ever going to find them. But still, not even getting rid of the murder weapon is pretty lazy. Gardie asked Frank Doyle if he had seen anything else unusual recently on his land. And he answered that somewhere between September 2011 and January 2012, he'd been out hunting when he discovered some real Blair Witch shit. He'd gone off the track in the woods and found a large sheet of plastic, a bottle of Vaseline, tattered bits of plastic bags, string hanging from trees and a stick with a rusty nail sticking out of it. Absolutely not. Like just no. Even if that was my land i would never ever go back out onto that land ever

again it's the vaseline that really tops it off isn't it it's all doing a pretty good job of being fucking terrifying like what the fuck the plastic sheet just like rippling in the wind making crunchy noises oh my next to a bottle of vaseline and a stick with a rusty nail in it. It's all a bit Albert Fish, isn't it? Like a stick with a rusty nail in it. Oh my God. Back at the Roundwood Garda station, Garda O'Donoghue, such an Irish name, outstanding, decided that he needed to take a closer look

at where these mystery items had materialised from. So he went down to the Vartari Reservoir. But the first few times he tried, the weather was so awful that he couldn't see a thing. But it was third time lucky. And on the 16th of September 2013, the weather had cleared right up. And Gardo O'Donoghue saw another set of handcuffs in the water. And like a real super cop, he jumped in after them.

What the fuck? September in Ireland? Yeah, it's going to be fucking cold. He's just jumping into a reservoir. Honestly, we have to give the police in this case so much credit. It's cracking police work, actually. It really, really is. It is. So yeah, he jumps into the reservoir when he sees these pair of handcuffs to grab them.

And after a while of having his hands in the water, he also found a knife, an inhaler, a chain with a ring on it and a leather mask. I'm really not sure how he pulls this off because the reservoir is fucking massive. I know it's only got 18 inches of water in it, so maybe you would be able to see the bed. But even still, it's a lot. It's a big area to be covering on your own. It is. And 18 inches of water in a reservoir doesn't sound like a lot.

But 18 inches of water is still quite a lot of water to be digging around through across that surface area. So yeah, I mean, he's committed. He's committed to this. And it pays off because he finds all these things. O'Donoghue also fished out a set of keys and on them was a loyalty card for a Dublin supermarket called Dunn Stores. There you go.

Always have a loyalty card with your name on it on your keys. That's a good idea. I'm going to get one. I feel like I don't have a nectar card because I feel like that means they've got me. Like Chez and Peep. Like they haven't already with my iPhone and my Google account. They've already got everything. What are they going to realise about what you're buying in Sainsbury's?

They already know everything. You might as well just commit and collect those points. Yeah, I'm going to get one in case I go missing. So O'Donoghue, now that he has this loyalty card, he called the supermarket and gave them the serial number that was on the card. And he found out that it was registered to a Miss Elaine O'Hara. And guess what? She hadn't just lost her keys in this reservoir and living happily at home.

Because no, Elaine had been missing for over a year. She had last been seen alive on the 22nd of August 2012 and the keys were later found to be the ones for Elaine's flat, her dad's house and her car. Now although only 65% of the skeleton in Killer Key was recovered, the jawbone was conclusively proven to be Elaine O'Hara's. The reservoir was sealed off by the Gardaí as a crime scene and the underwater division was called in. They were able to retrieve even more. They found a pair of glasses, the frames and lenses of which were an exact match for those prescribed to Elaine O'Hara by a spec savers in Dublin. A red and grey rucksack, a pair of sunglasses and an apple green petrol station loyalty card, also registered to Elaine, were recovered as well. But the water had even more

to give. On the 7th of October 2013, the Gardie fished out two Nokia phones and their batteries, which although they had been on the floor of the reservoir for 13 months, would blow the case right open. Nokias are indestructible. I really don't understand why I moved on. That is unbelievable. Can you imagine? Literally, my phone, I was out last night. My phone, it is cold. It was a cold night. My phone was on 85%. It was just a bit cold out and it died. It's got rheumatism. It's got a sensitive, weather sensitive phone. My poor phone. It has. Maybe it has. I don't know. It's got like sensitive weather sensitive phone my poor phone it has maybe it has i don't know it's got like um what's that disease when you've got bad circulation i've forgotten never

mind it's fucking shit i had to ask the bar to charge it for me and they're not gonna steal it because look at it that's how i feel about my bike every time i'm a bit funny about leaving it somewhere i was like oh it's so it's literally older than i am it's my mom's i'm like nobody is going to steal this it's too heavy to run away with brilliant so on the 17th of September Gardie visited Elaine's father Frank O'Hara to tell him that they had found Elaine's body and because her belongings were found such a distance away from her remains they expected foul play I think that's something we can't stress enough. Elaine's body and all of the stuff that belongs to her are 26 miles apart and it's just absolute luck that the fisherman found the

things two days before her body was discovered. That's total chance. This news was a total shock to Frank. He had assumed that his daughter had taken her own life the summer before. Elaine was 36 when she went missing. Her life had been difficult. She struggled with dyslexia, diabetes and asthma. She was bullied at school and one of her close childhood friends died in a car accident when she was in her early teens. By the time she was 15, Elaine was chronically depressed and prone to spiralling out of control.

Elaine made the first attempt on her own life in 1992. Her mother Eileen had to break down the door after first attempt on her own life in 1992. Her mother Eileen had to break down the door after she slashed her wrists in the bath. The extreme lows of her self-esteem and mental health would follow Elaine through the rest of her life. She was constantly in and out of St Edmundsbury Hospital psychiatric unit, sometimes staying for weeks at a time. During her stints as an inpatient, Elaine was placed on such heavy tranquilizers that she would fall asleep at the dinner table when out with her parents.

But Elaine did manage an independent life. Despite her intense struggles, she lived alone and had two jobs, one in Robertson Newsagent in Blackrock and the other as a childcare assistant in St John's School in Ballybrack. Elaine loved kids and she wanted to be a teacher just like her mum. And at the time of her disappearance kids and she wanted to be a teacher just like her mum.

And at the time of her disappearance, Elaine was training to be a Montessori teacher. I think Montessori's like a... It's just like a fancy playgroup, isn't it? It's non-conventional teaching, so it's like learning through constructive play. So yes, it's a fancy playgroup. Yeah, there's one down the road from me where I walk my dog.

And yeah, it's like, I don't want to sound super hacky, but it is. It's just like yummy mummies hanging around outside with their like Hugo and Otto and Rotto and Rosal and Flossie going into the Montessori. Are they their children or their dogs? They're the children. The dogs are called like...

Horatio. Othello, Horatio. They're all there, the whole clan. Just a fleet of Shakespearean dogs wearing ruffs. And then Blue who just like never lets me brush him so just looks like an absolute like monster of a dog.

I'm Jake Warren and in our first season of Finding I set out on a very personal quest to find the woman who saved my mum's life. You can listen to Finding Natasha right now exclusively on Wondery Plus. In season two I found myself caught up in a new journey to help someone I've never even met. But a couple of years ago I came across a social media post by a person named Loti. It read in part,

Three years ago today that I attempted to jump off this bridge but this wasn't my time to go. A gentleman named Andy saved my life. I still haven't found him. This is a story that I came across purely by chance, but it instantly moved me and it's taken me to a place where I've had to consider some deeper issues around mental health. This is season two of Finding, and this time, if all goes to plan, we'll be finding Andy. You can listen to Finding Andy and Finding Natasha exclusively and ad-free on Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. They say Hollywood is where dreams are made.

A seductive city where many flock to get rich, be adored, and capture America's heart. But when the spotlight turns off, fame, fortune, and lives can disappear in an instant. When TV producer Roy Radin was found dead in a canyon near L.A. in 1983, there were many questions surrounding his death. The last person seen with him was Lainey Jacobs, a seductive cocaine dealer who desperately wanted to be part of the Hollywood elite.

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This is The Harvard Plan, a special series from the Boston Globe and WNYC's On The Media. To listen, subscribe to On The Media wherever you get your podcasts. So in 2002, tragically, Elaine's mom died, which sent Elaine into a dark depression. And this episode saw her taken back to St. Edmundsbury, where she confessed to cutting herself and having suicidal thoughts. Perhaps the most unsettling thing that she told her psychiatrist is that she had a play running in her head all the time. And in that play, she is constantly being punished, humiliated and persecuted by those around her. Elaine told her psychiatrist, Professor Anthony Clare,

I wasn't born for life. No one likes me. I'm a bad person. She also revealed that ever since she was a child, as young as 12, that she'd had fantasies about being restrained and blindfolded. Elaine was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. But on her 29th birthday, things were looking up. Elaine had just bought her own flat thanks to a help to buy scheme and her family wanted to

celebrate. So her father threw her a party, but it didn't go to plan. It all ended in a massive argument and with Elaine leaving her dad's house in a rage. She took an overdose in her bathroom later that day and was taken back to St. Edmundsbury in an ambulance. But then after this incident, a few years of relative stability did follow, but it wouldn't last. By 2010, Elaine had accumulated over 10,000 euros in debt. Wow. So she's in this huge amount of debt. Her teaching exams are fast approaching. And you can imagine the huge amounts of debt her teaching exams are fast approaching and you can imagine the huge amounts of pressure that elaine must have been feeling and to make things worse elaine's flat flooded and that pushed her over the edge elaine made herself a noose but managed a call st edmundsbury just in time and she was once again taken into the care of the psychiatric ward

a important point to make like we're not just telling you all of these horrible things that happened to her for no reason, that she obviously was in a lot of trouble and was very close to the edge quite a lot of the time. I think that's a really important thing to understand about Elaine. And we're going through all of these suicide attempts to understand just how vulnerable Elaine was and just how sick you would have to be to take advantage of her. By 2012, Elaine had been admitted to St Edmundsbury 14 times. On the 22nd of August 2012, Elaine walked out of those hospital doors for the last time. She was in good spirits. She had saved herself from the edge once again, recognised the signs and got help before it was too late.

The Tall Ships Regatta was being held in Dublin the next day and Elaine had signed up as a volunteer tour guide. She couldn't stop talking about it. She's so excited. The Tall Ships Regatta race or festival, whatever you want to call it, was super exciting for Elaine. Basically what happens is there's all of these tall ships that come into the harbour and you can like go and have a look at them. Some of them you can go on. Have you ever been on a tall ship? It's a good day. What's a tall ship? Like the HMS Victory. Like an old fashioned pirate ship. No. I've seen the Cutty Sark.

Yeah, that's exactly it. Cutty Sark is a tour ship. Just seen it. Not been on it. We'll go. It's a good day. I was just going for a whack of mamas. I had to walk past it.

So Elaine had been trying really hard to get out there more on the advice of her therapist. And for someone with such low self-esteem, applying to be a volunteer tour guide was a huge step in the right direction. Her dad Frank picked her up from the hospital and took her back to her flat. It was agreed that his partner Sheila Hawkins would pick Elaine up from the bus stop outside her house at 7.15 the next morning and drop her off at the Tall Ships Festival on the way to work. Elaine told her dad that she wanted to get some rest before her big day with the Tall Ships, so he just left Elaine to it. But the next morning, Elaine didn't show up at the bus stop. Sheila went up to her flat to check if she was there, but no one answered the door, and Elaine

wasn't answering her phone either. Sheila wasn't too worried she thought that maybe Elaine had overslept and would make her own way to the festival when she woke up. So Sheila just went to work, hoping that Elaine wasn't going to miss the day she'd been so excited about. But when Sheila got back from work that evening, no one had heard anything from Elaine. At 11.30pm, Elaine's dad Frank sent his daughter a text that read, Are you alive? In the morning, there was still no news from Elaine. And starting to panic, Frank and Sheila used their spare key to get into Elaine's flat. Once inside the flat, their stomachs dropped. Elaine's handbag and iPhone were there, but Elaine was nowhere to be found. Frank knew that Elaine wouldn't have gone anywhere without

her phone or her bag. And whilst looking for clues, Sheila found an oily latex bodysuit, but no sign of where Elaine might be. That'd be quite the find it wouldn't it sheila in interviews with the press said i was just sort of looking for her passport or something that we could give to the police to try and help find her and i find this latex bodysuit like a full body latex suit and it's the description of it being oily well you've got to get it on haven't you i mean yeah i guess so so, now sufficiently worried, rang the Tall Ships festival coordinator who told him that Elaine had never shown up. But Elaine's green Fiat Punto wasn't parked to her flat, so she must have driven somewhere. The anniversary of Elaine's

mum's death was not too far off. So Frank decided to check the Shangana Cemetery where Eileen, Elaine's mum, was buried. And sure enough, there was Elaine's green Fiat Punto. And inside the car were cigarettes and a phone charger that was not for an iPhone. And Elaine had an iPhone, so that's weird. So Shangana Cemetery is in the south of County Dublin and it's also right on the coast. So when Elaine's car was discovered there, her father feared that she'd thrown herself into the sea. It's really close to where Elaine lived too. It's right off the coast. And it just makes sense, doesn't it? They knew that she was feeling very, very under stress and they find her car there, the cemetery where her mother's buried and then a big cliff.

It makes sense that that's the conclusion they come to. A missing persons report was filed and police conducted interviews in the local area. It was discovered that at 6.56pm on the 22nd in Shangana Park, which is next to the cemetery, Elaine stopped jogger Connor Guilfoy and asked him for directions to a railway bridge. Guilfoy told the Gardie that Elaine seemed preoccupied and a bit upset. Connor Guilfoy was the last person to see Elaine alive. The Gardie back at the Roundwood precinct were hard at work. The two indestructible Nokias that had been fished out of the Vartri reservoir were unbelievably starting to come back to life. Data from both phones was extracted by specialists

and over 2,600 messages were pulled from them. Each phone only had one number saved in its contacts address book. That is so sinister. Isn't it? You find a phone with just one contact in it, throw it away. Throw it back in the water. That phone is fucking haunted. You don't want anything to do with that phone. And it gets even worse because these are what the contacts were saved under. One was saved under capital SLV and the other was saved under capital M-S-T-R. And for anyone who is not very good at the last round of Only Connect, that's the words slave and master without the vowels. So the phones would be known as the slave phone and the master phone for the rest of the

investigation. I hate that. Yeah, me too. The phones were in almost exclusive contact with each other. They had been bought for a very specific purpose. Someone had something to hide. A further search of Elaine's flat was conducted by the guardee. Inspection of Elaine's mattress showed knife marks and semen, which was collected for testing. I mean, one of those, fair enough. The other one, what's going on? Which one, which one are you concerned about? Which one's the odd one out here, Hannah? The knife marks or the semen? I feel like most mattresses have got semen on them, to be honest. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. One of them is odd. One of these is not like the other.

Joke explanation, though. Sorry, been a long day. I know, me too, mate. Elaine O'Hara's laptop and iPhone were taken from her flat as well and they revealed even more than the master and slave phones. Elaine had been making regular visits to BDSM and fetish community website alt.com. In 2007, Elaine had been using the screen name HelpMeLearn36F. She clearly felt the need to act on the fantasies that she'd been having her entire adult life. And some people question this. Some people claim that Elaine wasn't really into the scene that much and she just wanted someone to look after her. And you know, you don't end up

on those websites by accident. But I don't think having an interest in BDSM and wanting someone to look after you are necessarily mutually exclusive. Like why does it have to be one or the other? Like it's probably completely true that she wanted someone to look after you are necessarily mutually exclusive. Like, why does it have to be one or the other? Like, it's probably completely true that she wanted someone to look after her and take care of her. But that doesn't exclude her from kinky shit as well, you know? Absolutely. I think the people that are doing that are trying to, through good intentions, they're trying to sort of shield Elaine away from what they clearly think of as being, like, quite a perverse thing. But it's not. I think Elaine, I think we can safely say Elaineaine was into this she was into bdsm and there's nothing wrong with that people who are into bdsm aren't into being horribly murdered so way back in 2007 elaine's

primary contact on alt.com was someone who very unimaginatively called themselves architect 72 the pair very quickly escalated from chatting about their darkest desires to swapping sex tapes that featured knives and stabbing very heavily. Elaine and Architect 72 kept in regular contact for most of 2007, but things seemed to have fizzled out by 2008, and things stayed quiet until 2011, when communication picked up again, significantly. Oh, you're pretty judgy about

Architect 72's name there. What would yours be? Oh am I? What would yours be if you were on a BDSM site? If you're on alt.com? Not my actual job title that's that's what I would not have. Theatre Administrator 76? I don't think so. Brand Director 69 over here. Hello. So the Gardie managed to track down where the phones had come from. They were bought on the 30th of November 2011 from an O2 shop on Grafton Street in Dublin. And as they were both prepaid phones, the buyer didn't need to provide any ID. So again, they're at a bit of a dead end. I don't know. Should we be like, this isn't okay? Like, do we feel like the people buying prepaid phones should have to offer ID because surely they're the ones we want to be keeping an eye on? I just think, I mean, maybe

in 2011, bit of a different ballgame. But I think these days, anyone who wants a phone, a sort of prepaid disposable phone, they're doing something untoward with it, I think. The tool of choice for nefarious use. Yeah, for sure. But the man who had bought the two prepaid phones had bought them under the name of Garoon Case Home. That Irish, I've never heard that before. No, it's a made up name. Garoon Case Home.

I mean, maybe it is a very obscure Irish name, but I've never heard of anyone called Garoon. And he gave a Tipperary address. Now, Tipperary is a good 117 miles from Dublin. So the Garda took the lead and searched for a man called Garoon Casehome. And surprisingly, they couldn't find anyone under that name. But they did find a man in a Tipperary address with a very similar name. His name was Gordon Chisholm. So they called Gordon Chisholm in for questioning. But it became very clear very quickly that he was not their man.

He knew nothing, absolutely nothing about BDSM. And what's more, he had a cast iron work alibi for the evening that Elaine went missing. So he was released after a few hours. So the Gardie decided to turn to the thousands of texts that they had recovered from the Nokia for clues. And we are going to tell you what the messages between the slave phone and the master phone said to each other, so don't worry. But first, we have to focus on one particular text. Because on the 13th of June 2011, the master phone sent a message to Elaine talking about a 15% pay cut at work and coming fifth in a flying competition. They are very specific things that

you're telling somebody. That's also weird. I mean, if you're in like a weird relationship like this, are you sharing your like work and losing flying competition woes with this person? Well, seems like it. Not what I expect. No, me either. It's kind of like, I kind of expected it all to be just like wall to wall kink, but like quite a lot of it is reasonably mundane. So now the officers have some clues. They started to look for a pilot. But this was another dead end until one bright spark in the homicide squad suggested that perhaps the text was referring to model aeroplanes rather than proper ones. I mean, that person is a genius.

They are, aren't they? Absolutely. What lateral thinking. Because this stroke of genius led the Gardie straight to the master. They researched flying competitions and found that there had indeed been a model flying competition in June 2011 on the East Coast. I reckon this person that came up with this is secretly into flying model aeroplanes and was at that competition. Possibly. It's not something you'd

necessarily bat around the office exactly i think they just don't want anyone to know but they're like shit i'm gonna have to bring this up i'll just give them a couple more days in case it is a pilot but those fucking guys that model flying competition show are just the kind of people that would be involved in a horrible murder right guys i've got a genius genius plan we need to check this out you know whatever this came from wherever the spark of inspiration struck this police officer, he was right. Because when they investigated, they found that the man who had come fifth was called Graham Dwyer. And looking on their internal system, Gardie discovered that they had heard from Graham Dwyer before. He had reported his bike stolen from outside his work on Bagot Street in Dublin. He worked at A&D Wedget and Partners because, as we alluded to before,

Graham Dwyer was an architect. And so probably Mr Architect 72. So after digging around Dwyer's work records for a bit, police officers also discovered that he had received ding ding ding ding ding a 15 pay cut around june the 11th it's all fitting model airplanes 15 pay cut architects and further inspection of elaine's laptop revealed that she had the master phone number saved under the name graham dwyer and she had tried to sort of cover it up as well. In her iPhone, the number's saved as David. But when they search it on her laptop, which I assume must be linked to her iPhone, it comes up as Graham Dwyer.

So she tried to conceal it, but not particularly well. He probably told her to. Yeah, for sure. Right? And she slipped up. But this is like, this little bit of investigative genius is like, if this was in a TV show, I mean, I'd lap it up. But I would be like, that would never happen.

Because it's TV. That would never, ever happen in real life. And it's the same thing with the loyalty card on her keys. Like that never happens. Separately from the model aeroplane investigation, Sarah Sked, a senior crime and policing analyst for the Gardie, had been doing her own rooting around in the recovered data from the Nokia slave and master phones. But rather than the content of the texts, Sked was much more concerned with where the texts had been sent from and which phone towers they had pinged. Sked found that a majority of the texts sent from the master phone had

pinged a phone tower in the south of County Dublin, very near where successful architect Graham Dwyer lived with his wife Gemma and their children in Foxrock, one of Dublin's most affluent suburbs. The other place the master phone was most active was on Bagot Street, which of course is where Dwyer's office building was. But there was one phone tower ping that didn't fit the pattern, one in Galway City on the 4th of July 2012. So in a swoop of absolutely stellar policing, Sked searched the toll booth records from that day and found that only one car had gone through toll booths on the M6 and the M4 within an hour of each other, registered to a South Dublin address. The car was a blue Audi TT and it was registered to one Mr Graham Dwyer. Using similar sleuthing, Sked was able to prove that every time

the master phone pinged a phone tower that was not in County Dublin, it matched Graham Dwyer's movements around the country. On top of this, Gardie reviewed the CCTV footage from outside Elaine O'Hara's apartment and they found that a man fitting Dwyer's description visited Elaine multiple times in the months running up to her disappearance. And even more important than that, the man in the CCTV footage had a red and grey rucksack that looked exactly like the one recovered from the reservoir, with all of the other incriminating evidence. To top things off, the semen sample taken from Elaine's mattress was a match for Dwyer as well.

The case against Graham Dwyer was certainly mounting. So let's get to know him a little bit better. Graham was a very successful man. He had a great job and an enviable family. He'd married fellow architecture student Gemma Healy in September of 2002. The pair were featured in the Irish Times and the Irish equivalent of Through the Keyhole called Behind the Hall Door. What a knockoff. That is such a terrible name. It sounds like some incredibly shit paperback you could buy at like the train station. And they

were featured on Behind the Hall Door because they had got like a clapped out cottage and they did it up together. So they're literally living the architecture couple dream. And Dwyer also had another son from a previous relationship with a woman called Ema McShay. But despite his squeaky clean appearance, there was a lot more to Graham Dwyer. I was always the ones though. The more polished the suit, the more depraved the mind. I reckon. put that on a t-shirt on a suit on a briefcase according to Ema McShay three years into their relationship Graham Dwyer started bringing a knife to bed with him and eventually this escalated in him

pretending to stab Ema while they had sex these two were together in their very early 20s, so clearly these desires had been present in Dwyer for quite some time. On the 17th of October 2013, time was up for Graham Dwyer's idyllic suburban life. At 7.06am, Detective Sergeant Peter Woods knocked on the door of his Fox Rock home with a warrant for his arrest. Dwyer's house was searched, his computer and phone was seized, and he was placed under arrest on the suspicion of the murder of Elena Hara over a year after she had disappeared. And I think, yeah, he is exactly the kind of person, he's done this all pretty shitly, but I bet you he thought he'd gotten away with it. Oh, I absolutely think he got away with it. I think he was probably nervous for the first

two months, and after that he was like, yeah, I he got away with it. I think he was probably nervous for the first two months. And after that, he was like, yeah, I've got away with this. I mean, a year, over a year after she disappeared, he thinks he's out of the woods. But not at all out of the woods. Because Graham Dwyer's computer revealed even more shocking evidence against him. There were 30 extremely graphic sex tapes on it. Some of them featured Dwyer and up to four women, all engaging in violent sexual acts. The woman who featured the most prominently in all the videos

was, you guessed it, Elena O'Hara. Can you imagine being his wife at this point? I mean, fuck in hell. You never really know someone. Until you have a root around their laptop, apparently. This is the other thing she says like newspapers and stuff she says oh yeah he was a real genius with the computer he could have done anything with the computer all he'd done is given himself a separate login to their shared PC that's literally all he'd done and she was like he's

a genius. Graham Dwyer is not a genius he thinks he is but he's not because of how easily the police link everything back to him. So Dwyer had also been keeping himself quite busy, apparently, by writing short stories about his twisted secrets. Just couldn't make it up, could you? Of course he's writing. Of course he's creatively writing about this. I bet he didn't even really want to be an architect. He wanted to be like a playwright or something. And he just became an architect to keep his parents happy. But secretly, he just wanted to write his novellas. And that that just ended up leading him to a dark place in which he has to brutally murder a woman and then write stories about it.

These stories that he wrote, one particularly brutal one featured the rape and murder of a young American woman who Dwyer was in regular contact with called Darcy Day. This really reminds me of like, what's that guy's name? Valet, the cannibal cop. Yeah, I thought that too. If you haven't watched that documentary, it's called Thought Crimes, The Case of the Cannibal Cop. Go watch it. It's so good.

I think I might have recommended it before. But yeah, this really reminds me of it. And there was another story that he'd written entitled Jenny's First Rape, which features Dwyer suffocating an English woman with a plastic bag. What fucking difference does it make if they're... I know the American woman was one he knew, but I love how there's like such nuance in the stories he's telling. They're all from different places, all of these exotic women that he kills. Oh, God.

So when he was taken down to the Blackrock Garda station at 7.41am, Dwyer demanded to know what evidence officers had against him. But Peter Woods, not being a total fucking idiot, didn't tell him anything. Like, obviously they're not going to tell you what they've got on you, Graham. Jesus. Now, originally Dwyer claimed that he had been in contact with Elaine O'Hara, but it had only ever been online. And he said that he had assumed that she had killed herself the year before, just like everybody else. Which I feel like is a weird thing

to say, because if you only know her online, how do you know that she lives locally and everybody knows her and she killed herself? How do you know that if you're just chatting online on a BDSM forum? Graham. Exactly. Now, after further pressing, Dwyer admitted that he was interested in BDSM. Yeah, not a big leap for you to admit that after everything they found. But he tells them that it had never extended beyond fantasy for him. And he claimed that he had never actually cut anyone. He had to quickly backtrack on this claim, though, when he was presented with a video of him cutting Elaine O'Hara during sex. Literally throughout his whole interrogation he'll say something and the police be like well that's not true is it because of this very specific

piece of evidence that I'm about to show you. Dwyer also vehemently denied being the owner of the master phone but had no explanation of why it seemed to follow him around the country. Dwyer also accidentally revealed during his first 24-hour interrogation that the Tipperary address he had given when buying the master and slave phones was almost identical to his sister's. So what he's done is he's gone into this O2 shop in Dublin and he's given a name that's quite close to someone he knows and almost given his sister's exact address.

He can't think that far outside of the box. He just has to embellish on things he already knows. I really hope it was just like one number difference in her house number or something like that. I think it was really close. Like when you fake number someone? Yes. Tell me about that. How does that work when you fake? And not that I've ever done it myself. We'll keep that one offline. It's not very imaginative for a creative writer. What, for Architect 72? No.

No, for someone who claims to, well, not claims, who writes creatively in their spare time. Think of better lies. So Graham Dwyer, after all of this, really didn't have anywhere to hide. But he's committed. He keeps his denial up, even when the police could present a perfect timeline of what happened the day Elaine O'Hara was last seen alive. So thanks to the data recovered from the master and slave phones, the texts and the locations they were sent from, we can paint a really clear picture of what happened the day Elaine disappeared. And I also think we can

conclusively agree at this point that Graham Dwyer was the owner of the master phone and he sent all of the texts to Elaine. I really don't think there's much argument there at this point. So here we go. The moment you've all been waiting for. This is what happened. On the 20th of August, two days before she went missing, Elaine woke up in St. Edmundsbury Hospital and she received a text that read, Morning slave, looking forward to seeing you on Wednesday. Wednesday being the 22nd of August, the day she went missing. That is a shit text to send somebody when you are... When they've just tried to kill themselves and they've been in hospital for a couple of weeks.

And also when you're in like some weird kinky roleplay as like BDSM. Morning, look forward to seeing you on Wednesday. Kiss, kiss, kiss. We're just dropping the slave in just to make sure they know what's up it only gets worse another text read you must be punished for trying to kill yourself without me all you have to do is tell me you want out and then go to bed and wait max 12 hours fucking hell dwyer told o'hara that he wanted to meet her on the 22nd in the open air and that she would be bound gag gagged, tied to a tree and that he had a

really remote spot all picked out. Elaine told him that she was frightened but Dwyer didn't stop. And as we move through the text that was sent the day before she went missing and the day of, Elaine protests a lot and she calls Dwyer sir all the time. But the relationship between these two has been going on for years and it's really hard to tell whether Elaine was actually scared or just playing along. Yeah, it's hard to know. I kind of feel like she's playing along. I think to a certain extent she is, yeah. Now on the 21st of August, Graham Dwyer had a hunting knife delivered to his work. He's shameless. His place of work. Are you fucking stupid? Yes. He is fucking stupid? Yes.

He is very stupid, yeah. Now, Elaine was still in hospital on the night of the 21st, and most staff recorded her as being cheerful and calm. But one nurse, Rosetta Callan, wasn't so sure. Elaine had told her that she was worried about a man who had keys to her flat. Elaine left it at that. She didn't give anything else away. But it left Rosetta

feeling uneasy and perhaps this is evidence that Elaine was actually afraid and not just playing the game with Dwyer. Now the next morning on August 22nd Elaine texted Dwyer saying that she didn't like hospital but at least she knew that she was safe there. She texted him saying I'm scared of you. You have this hold on me that terrifies me. Then she asked him to stop talking about killing. Dwyer responded saying, but tonight's punishment will be like me pretending to do someone for real, okay? And he carries on. Every time I stab and strangle you, I want you to think this is it. And every time I let you live, you owe me your life.

And you're grateful and you worship me. Kiss. Nice touch, isn't it? Now, when Elaine got home from the ward, she asked Wya if he had any instructions for her. He replied, quote, no underwear, not even a bra, loose clothes and footwear fit for mud. Make sure you're fed and take a painkiller at 5pm. I hate that. But then as I was reading that aloud, I was like, they are almost identical instructions I give myself before I go to get a wax. So he carries on the texting and says, I want you to park at Shangana Cemetery at 5.30pm. Leave iPhone at home. Just bring slave phone and keys. You will get further

instructions there. Do you think he knew her mum was buried there? Or is that just a coincidence? I think so. And also, like, I think it's the only cemetery kicking around. So even if she hadn't explicitly told him where her mum was buried, it wouldn't have been difficult for him to guess that she was in Shangana. Now at this point, Elaine again texts him saying that she was scared. And Dwyer replied, just empty yourself and become nothing. You are properly a piece of slave meat. Your only job is to serve. Oh, he's so disgusting. And this is fine. Like if this is your kink, like that's of course, that's absolutely fine. Whatever do you. But she's telling him she's scared she tells him to stop talking about the whole killing thing and he just carries on but

maybe that's part of it that's the thing that's difficult to know yeah but then he does kill her so that's very true that's an excellent point at 4 50 p.m elaine asked if she was allowed to bring her inhaler and what time she would be back at home. Dwyer told her that she would be back by her car at 8pm. At 5.05pm, Elaine left her house wearing the tracksuit bottoms that would be discovered by a dog over a year later. She was at Shangana Cemetery at 5.20pm. She text Dwyer that a lot of the children who she worked with lived in the area. At 5.39pm, Dwyer told Elaine to cross the railway bridge into the park near the cliffs, and this is when Elaine asked Connor Guilfoy for directions to the bridge. At 6pm,

Dwyer sent the last text that Elaine O'Hara would ever receive. All it said was, go down to the shore and wait. Dwyer's phone was using a mast in Shank Hill, so he was very close by. What happened next is anybody's guess. There are no witnesses, and by the time Elaine's body was found, it was so decomposed that any forensic testing would have been totally futile. But what we can do is make an educated guess. The most logical explanation has to be this. Dwyer picked up Elaine from the Shangana shore and drove her the 20 or so minutes to kill a key.

There, he tortured her and stabbed her to death. We can't imagine what he did to her and we'll never know. Perhaps he killed her by accident. Perhaps she went willingly to start off with. But I'm pretty sure that Graham Dwyer woke up that morning knowing he was going to kill Elaine O'Hara. After Elaine died, he disposed of her body on the mountain and came back down it alone. We can't say whether he immediately drove to Wicklow

to throw everything into the reservoir. Maybe he did it the next day, or even a few days later. But what we do know is that on the day Elaine died, he turned his work phone off at 6pm and didn't turn it on again until 9.15pm. So perhaps that's how long it took him to get up the mountain kill elaine and come back down it's hard to say i think the actual details of her death i mean we'll never know because he'll never admit it and no one was there and there's no

forensic evidence so you could argue that he did kill her accidentally maybe it started off as a game and it went too far and then he panicked and got rid of her. But I don't think so. I think because it was this big plan and he told her to leave her iPhone at home. I think he asked her to leave the car at the cemetery because he knew that people would just assume she'd gone to see her mum one last time and then jumped into the sea. Yeah, true.

So Dwyer's trial started in January 2015 and on the first day, prosecutor Sean Guerin described the crime as, quote, very nearly the perfect murder. Because if it wasn't for the low reservoir water level and a curious dog, Elaine's keys would never have been found. Her body would never have been identified and Graham Dwyer would still be a free man. Everyone would have just continued to assume that mentally unstable Elaine had taken her own life. It took the prosecution team 37 days, 194 witnesses and 320 pieces of evidence

to make their case. And one of those witnesses was Darcy Day, the very same from Graham Dwyer's creative writing fiction horror jaunt. She gave testimony all the way from her home in Maine. They Skyped her in and she told the courtroom how Graham Dwyer had told her at length and in detail how he would like to kill her. The defence team led by Remy Farrow made theirs in just over 30 minutes. That is shocking to me. Yes, the case against Graham Dwyer is rock solid, in my opinion.

Everywhere the defence would have tried to go, they would have been cut off by the prosecution. But the fact, the disparity between the amount of effort that the prosecution had put in versus the amount of time the defence is willing to put in is pretty shocking. And he's got money. It wouldn't have been like, it wouldn't have been a public defender, but they've just been, I'm sorry, mate, I can't help you. You are totally fucked. That's nuts. Your client is on trial for murder.

And that's, you've just got 30 minutes. But I guess with the absolute mountains of evidence against Wyatt, it can, I guess it's difficult to imagine what kind of case they could have made. But maybe just one that lasted more than 30 minutes. Give it a tight 45. Exactly. At least. Minimum. that's how we run this podcast right minimum 45 minutes 45 but they gave it a go this is basically what they say in those 30 minutes basically all they have to say is due to the lack of forensic evidence it is impossible to prove that Dwyer actually killed Elaine O'Hara that is not going to induce in me reasonable doubt.

No. That's all you've got. They also made a little bit of a song and dance about how the police thought Elaine had killed herself, but then swept the idea under the carpet once Dwyer was a suspect. Which, that's just how an investigation develops. Come on, like...

Exactly. That argument, at its absolute very best, is piss poor, honestly honestly how can you go into a court of law and be like well you used to think she killed herself so why have you changed your mind oh i don't know maybe the 320 articles of evidence that we've just presented perhaps exactly like well she used to be alive it's all very convenient that she's now suddenly dead and my client is on trial for her murder it's all a bit suspect if you ask me. Oh, shut up.

What the hell is this? I don't know. Like, did he cheap out on a defence lawyer? This is where you want to not be stingy, I'm going to say. He doesn't seem like the type of guy to do that. I don't know what's going on. Very weird. And he does this other thing where he makes his defence lawyer write a letter to the judge

saying that his conditions in prison are completely unacceptable and he hasn't got a pillow and there's a blue light that wakes him up every hour and there's absolutely no way he can undergo the court proceedings under this awful strain of just being in prison because you murdered somebody. Mate. And they had to move him to a different part of the prison. Fuck you. Wait till you're convicted and you're in proper prison. Dwyer, not unsurprisingly, pleaded not guilty. But it took the jury just three days to send him down. In March, two months after the conclusion of the trial, Dwyer was sentenced to life in prison by Justice Tony Hunt, who noted that Dwyer was an extremely unlucky man.

But being in prison hasn't stopped Dwyer. He's attempting to appeal his conviction on the basis that the phone data that sent him away was extracted from the master and slave phones without a warrant. But you don't need one. It's not, that's not the law. In what world? Who is this lawyer that's like, yeah, all right, let's try this as an appeal. And the thing is, without the text, there really isn't that much evidence against him.

Some semen on a mattress. That's it, basically. I don't see him getting out on that, though. I would be shocked and horrified if that appeal overturns this case. But saying that, in 2018, the High Court did find that Irish legislation which allows data from phones to be retained and accessed breaches EU law and the European Convention on Human Rights because everyone's data is being retained all the time and no court or authority review access requests. So his argument is basically that the data that put him away was obtained illegally by an Irish legislation that breaches EU law and that's what he's fighting. It's the classic case of technology outgrowing the law but just because the High Court ruled in favour of Dwyer this doesn't mean that his conviction

will be vacated. There won't be any kind of mass release of people who were convicted on extracted phone evidence. Everything will be done on a case-by-case basis and no date for Dwyer's appeal has even been set yet. But Justice Tony O'Connor argued that even the objective of fighting serious crime could not justify such an indiscriminate regime of retaining data. I have so many feelings about this. They already have everything. Everyone already has everything. Facebook has mined everything out of everyone. Did you even see that thing that somebody posted? They were like, if you want to start an algorithm to do facial detection what's the best thing you can do star hashtag 10 years challenge i already posted us i'm sorry we're in the system i'm already so in the system because it is a very similar deal

here in the uk everyone's data is kept and the police can request to access it or they can just get an extractor machine and take it straight from the phone. Currently, police don't need a warrant to do this. There's no limits on the amount of data that can be collected and no guidelines on when it needs to be destroyed. Former Chief Constable of the Manchester Police, Sir Peter Fahey, said that getting a warrant for every phone the police need to look at is, quote, just not practical. And his basic argument is that police need quick access to phone data to fight crime and a warrant process would undeniably slow this down. But he would say that, wouldn't he?

The issue is not that, well, obviously the issue is that everything's being collected. It's the police access to it that people have a problem with. And current police processes are being called into review. And the classic thing that I keep thinking is, if you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to worry about. But the problem with that argument is that what if you genuinely haven't done anything wrong, but the data collected makes it look as if you have? I'm fully for that. You know, I always find myself saying, if you've done nothing wrong, then it doesn't matter. But that also implies a huge amount of trust that we have to place in our institutions, that they're not totally corrupt and there's all sorts of

fuckery going on. We know that that's not the case from the cases we've covered. And that's exactly what MP Naz Shah stated. They say that the police can download every single aspect of your life, but you have no idea what they're going to do with it. And current legislation just isn't fit for purpose. Privacy is a human right. Fine. But how far are we really entitled to it? How much privacy do we really have? I don't know. Police practices are under review, but I really wouldn't hold your breath.

There's no way they're going to pass that you need a warrant to check people's phone data. No way. No, they will just immediately say counterterrorism. You cannot put a limit on things like that. They do need to be able to access that information. We don't even know how many plots they foil daily because of their ability to access that amount of data. And I don't begrudge them that. They do that to keep us safe. You know, I'm not totally conspiracy-minded that they're just here to, like, steal all this data and then do whatever with it. But I do think in cases like this, it should be considered on a case-by-case basis oh for sure graham dwyer

like even if anything gets looked at and in an appeal i would be horrified and shocked if his ruling was overturned i i honestly don't think it will be because what even would be the case it would forget all of the texts that were in the previous trial no one can do that of course they can't but if anything happens with graham dwyer's trial we will absolutely let with his appeal we'll we'll let you know yeah so that is the case of elena hara thanks for listening thanks for listening and we will see you next week follow us on the social medias at red handed the pod and go on the facebook group there's a picture of me in a communion dress and a bob a really strong bob it's a good bob it is a communion dress and a bob, a really strong bob. It's a good bob. It is a good bob.

It was a terrible bob. We all rocked the bob at that age. She's got so much hair. And we'll see you guys next week. See you next week. Bye. Bye. Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of Wondery Show American Scandal.

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