True Crime Campfire - Cruelest Cut: The Murder of Elaine O'Hara

Episode Date: July 31, 2026

In August of 2012, the family of an Irish woman named Elaine O’Hara reported her missing. Investigators located her car near the seashore, but found no sign of Elaine herself. She had been struggling with her mental health for most of her life; in fact, the day she disappeared was the day she got home from a five-week stay in a psychiatric hospital. So after a brief investigation, everyone concluded that Elaine must have taken her own life. But Elaine had been living a secret life for the past year and half before she went missing—playing a dangerous game with a man obsessed with sexual violence. Every time she tried to escape his hold on her, he would draw her back in. Elaine’s loved ones knew nothing about her double life. And if it hadn’t been for a series of strange coincidences about a year after her disappearance, it would have stayed that way forever. But truth has a way of coming to the light—especially a truth as dark as this one. Visit quince.com/campfire for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Join us live at Wet Hot Bad Magic Summer Camp in Equinunk, PA, September 10-13th! Visit ⁠badmagicproductions.com⁠ for more info and to buy tickets.   Tickets are on sale now for CrimeWave 2.0! Visit crimewaveatsea.com/CAMPFIRE to get your discount code for $100 off your cabin and a private meet-and-greet with us! The cruise is Feb. 8-12, 2027. Sources: Almost the Perfect Murder, Paul Williams https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Elaine_O%27Hara ITV's "Secrets of a Psychopath" The Journal: https://www.thejournal.ie/graham-dwyer-timeline-1995085-Mar2015/ https://sk.sagepub.com/dict/edvol/the-concise-dictionary-of-crime-and-justice/chpt/piquerism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_imprisonment_in_Ireland Follow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfirehttps://www.truecrimecampfirepod.com/Facebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/truecrimecampfire/?hl=enEmail: [e-mail]! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Car shopping this Civic Holiday weekend, most car dealerships are closed and all you'll find are crickets. Not Performance Auto Group. They're open this Saturday and Holiday Monday for their annual Civic Holiday Sales event. Celebrate this long weekend with rates from 0%. They might be closed. Performance Auto Group is open to serve you. Join Performance Auto Group this Saturday or Civic Holiday Monday 9 to 5 for the best time to shop this summer. The 2006 Chevrolete Equinox Awarded the most dependable compact SUV in the U.S. by J.D. Power is designed for your everyday. And with available all-wheel drive, you can handle your to-do list with total confidence.

Start your build at chevrolet.ca. Details at J.D.Power.com. Hello, campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true. True Crime Campfire. In August of 2012, the family of an Irish woman named Elaine O'Hara reported her missing. Investigators located her car near the seashore but found no sign of Elaine herself.

She had been struggling with her mental health for most of her life. In fact, the day she disappeared was the day she got home from a five-week stay in a psychiatric hospital. So after a brief investigation, everyone concluded that Elaine must have taken her own life. But Elaine had been living a secret life for the past year and a half before she went missing, playing a dangerous game with a man obsessed with sexual violence. Every time she tried to escape his hold on her, he would draw her back in. Elaine's loved ones knew nothing about her double life, and if it hadn't been for a series of strange coincidences about a year after her disappearance, it would have stayed that way forever. But truth has a way of coming to the light, especially a truth as dark as this one.

This is Cruelist Cut, the murder of Elaine O'Hara. Just a heads up, this is one of the darkest stories we've covered so far. It deals with themes of mental illness, suicide, coercive control, abuse both emotional and sexual, and hardcore toxic BDSM. There's going to be a lot of talk about knives. If you are not in the right headspace for any of that, you might want to skip this episode. And I know we have some teenage fans, parents, this is probably not one. they should listen to. Take care of yourselves. So, campers, for this one, were in County Wicklow,

about an hour away from Dublin, Ireland, September 10, 2013. Three fishermen, Billy, his brother James, and their buddy Mark, were out at the Vartree Reservoir when they spotted a black and red backpack in the shallow water. It looked like a nice pack, and the guys thought it might belong to another fisherman. Maybe he dropped it by accident and it had floated there. Let's get it out, James said. If you'd given them a million years to guess what was going to be in that bag, they wouldn't have come up with the weird collection of things they pulled out of it. First, there were a few items of clothing, a vest, a blue shirt, there was a little hand towel, and then they pulled out a blindfold, a collar, a ball gag, leg shackles, and a pair of handcuffs.

Okay. It's probably a bunch of stuff from a stag night, one of them said. It seemed to make sense. a bunch of drunk dudes heading home after a night of drinking and sex jokes and strippers deciding they better not take any of this stuff home where their girlfriends might find it. The fishermen laid their strange find out on a rock wall near the water and just went on with their day. But that night at home, Billy couldn't stop thinking about what they'd found. There was something about it that just kept nagging at him, like a burr in his brain. So the next morning, he went back to the rock wall and gathered all the stuff into a bag.

then he drove to the Roundwood Police Station. A young officer took the bag from him and hung all the stuff up to dry out. Three days later, Friday, September 13th, Magali Vernier was walking her dog in the woods near Killikie in the Dublin Mountains about a 40-minute drive from the Vartree Reservoir. She was ready to head back to the car, but Millie wasn't. She ran off and disappeared into the trees, moving like a dog on a mission. Millie, come back, Magali shouted.

But Millie did not come back. Millie was a very good girl. She didn't usually ignore a call to come back to Mom. Magali went deeper into the woods to find her. And she did find her, hunched over on the ground, gnawing happily on something. When she saw what Millie was chewing on, Magali's blood ran cold. There were bones strewn all over the ground. That wasn't too unusual.

Anybody who walks in the woods a lot knows that you'll sometimes find animal remains, but one of these bones had a shoe on it, and the remnants of a pair of blue track suit bottoms. And not far from that were a human jawbone and teeth, and a rib cage. It's amazing what forensic anthropologists can figure out about a victim just from the skeleton they leave behind. In this case, a detailed examination of the remains revealed that the body had been that of a woman between the ages of 25 and 40,

who'd had extensive dental work done and was most likely heavyset, They could tell this last part from disc degeneration and compression in her spine. And it was clear that the victim had been dead for about a year. This narrowed the search quite a bit. There were several big unsolved missing persons cases in the area, but they all dated back much farther than one year. The only missing person who fit the forensic anthropologist findings was a 36-year-old woman named Elaine O'Hara.

Elaine's family had reported her missing about 13 months earlier in August of 2012. A brief investigation at the time had landed on the idea that Elaine had probably taken her own life by throwing herself into the sea. Clearly, that wasn't the case. Back at the police station in Roundwood, James O'Donohue was getting that same bad feeling about the weird bunch of stuff the fishermen had found in the reservoir. He kept staring at the handcuffs, the shackles, the ball gag. Something just felt off. And when he got off work, he went to the spot where the bag had been found. He peered into the shallow, murky water, then waded in and started feeling around with his hands,

and it didn't take long for him to hit Patered. He found more BDSM-type stuff, handcuffs, a knife, a leather mask, a chain with a ring on it, and he also found a couple of more everyday items, an asthma inhaler, and a set of keys with a grocery store loyalty card attached to it. He knew immediately that the grocery store card was a huge find. When he called the grocery store to ask if they could use the registration number on the card to look up the owner, the manager said, sure, just give me a second. The loyalty card belonged to Elaine O'Hara. And when O'Donohue put that name into the system, he was startled to learn that Elaine's skeletonized body had just been found a few days earlier, less than an hour's drive away. Before we go any further in this story, by the way, I have to comment on the unbelievable coincidence that put this case back on Detective's

radar. I know, right? The fishermen finding all this weird stuff in the reservoir, Miss Vernier and her her dog finding a human skeleton in the forest. All this happened in the span of about a week. Actually, it was like three days. That is bonkers. Over a year after Elaine O'Hara went missing. Yeah, it's just incredible. It makes you wonder if Elaine's spirit decided it had waited long enough for justice. For real. Yeah, there's some otherworldly stuff at work, I think. And we have to hand it to this police department, these guardy, as they call them in Ireland. They pulled out all the stops in this case. They brought in a behavioral scientist, experts in various forensic specialties, their best detectives, they consulted with Scotland Yard, all told they made a task force of 40,

all determined to get justice for a lane. The Garda water unit went back to the reservoir for a more involved search and found a ton more stuff. A pair of glasses, a pair of sunglasses, another backpack and most tantalizing of all two Nokia cell phones. They were sure these items belonged to their case because they traced the prescription glasses back to Elaine's ophthalmology records. It's just incredible. It's like they keep going back to the well

and keep pulling water. It's amazing. Yeah, several times. It was really wild. They had a nice cache of evidence to get started on, and as the forensic tech folks got started on the Nokia cell phones, the detectives got to work reviewing the initial investigation into Elaine's disappearance,

a year earlier. Sadly, it had been easy for Elaine's family and friends to believe that she'd taken her own life. Elaine had a long history of mental health issues, going all the way back to her preteen years when she started self-harming and made a suicide attempt that resulted in a stay at St. Edmundsbury Hospital. Things had gotten worse when her mother died in 2002, and she'd had another major setback when her long-term therapist died suddenly a few years later. Elaine had been hospitalized over a dozen times over the years. sometimes as a result of suicide attempts, and sometimes because she checked herself in voluntarily for support. At the time of her disappearance, she'd just been released from a stay at St. Edmundsbury,

and her family were optimistic about her future. She'd volunteered to help with the 2012 Tall Ships Races, and she was really excited about it. The organization that ran the races had made her a team leader, and she was really proud of that. She'd enrolled in night classes to study education so she could be a teacher. to her dad, Frank O'Hara and her siblings, she seemed more grounded than she'd been in a long time. But she was discharged from the hospital on the morning of August 22nd. After a quick visit where she brought a little gift for her two-year-old niece and she and Frank left flowers on her mother's grave, her family never saw her again. They figured they must have been wrong about her state of mind.

Supposedly, people often seem to be doing better right before they take their own lives. they feel some relief from their pain because they've made a decision to end it. Now, the family had to confront a new reality that their beloved daughter and sister and aunt had been murdered. During the initial investigation into Elaine's disappearance back in 2012, detectives had uncovered some disturbing information about her private life, and that information seemed to fit with some of the things that had been found in the reservoir, the leather mask, the handcuffs, the collar and chain, making the investigators feel like there was probably a connection.

Elaine's dad told them that in 2008, four years before she went missing, they'd been in the middle of an argument when Elaine suddenly blurted out that she'd been seeing a married man, an architect who liked to tie her up and hurt her in bed. She said she'd asked this man to kill her, but he refused to do it. And then she just stormed out of the house, leaving Frank O'Hara just completely stunned, and she'd never brought it up again. It wasn't uncommon for Elaine to say things for shock value sometimes in the middle of an argument, so her dad thought that was probably all this was, but she had told her therapist the same thing,

and several of her friends. In fact, Elaine had talked to her therapists about her fantasies starting all the way back to her teenage years. She had daydreams about being imprisoned, tied up, put in handcuffs or shackles. Several other people in Elaine's life had heard stories about her mystery man. One of the nurses at St. Edmundsbury told the police that the day before Elaine was discharged for the last time, which was also the day she went missing, she'd come into Elaine's room to find her in a bad mood. I'm pissed at this man I know, Elaine told her. He keeps calling me, texting me, trying to get me to act out bondage scenes with him. Violent stuff I don't want to do. The guy wouldn't leave her alone about it, she said, and he had a key to her place. Elaine seemed afraid of him. but she didn't want to go to the police about him.

He had kids. She didn't want to traumatize the kids. Elaine loved children. At the time of her murder, she was about to finish a degree in Montessori method teaching. She told her friend Edna about the married guy too. She said he liked to tie her up,

cut her with a knife, and masturbate over her. She showed her some long, angry-looking scars on her belly. Edna was just shocked. Elaine said she tried to break off the relationship before, but the guy always managed to get her to come back. You're playing a dangerous game here, Edna told her. If you're not going to stop seeing him, she said,

at least do me a favor and keep this guy's information somewhere, just in case. I have done that, Elaine said. I've got it all written down in a safe place. Elaine's dad had mostly kept her apartment the way she left it, which was great for the Gardy investigating her murder. On the day she went missing, Elaine had left behind her phone and her purse, and CCTV had shown her leaving her apartment building carrying a different phone than the one her family usually saw her with.

The original investigators had kept CCTV footage from the time around Elaine's disappearance, and the murder detectives would soon realize how lucky they were that they'd done that. When they went back and looked through the footage in the months leading up to the murder, one guy popped up several times. It struck them that the man always covered his hand when he chose his floor on the elevator to prevent the camera from catching the number. Oh, creepy. A couple of times they saw him with Elaine,

but they both seemed to be working hard to pretend they weren't together. Was this the mystery man? There were definite signs that Elaine had been deep into the BDSM scene. A friend who had gone with Frank to check Elaine's apartment, the day after she went missing,

spoke up about something she'd noticed that day. I found a latex body suit and a hamper that day, she said. I just didn't think it was my place to say anything. I mean, I was there with her dad. Totally get that. I probably wouldn't have said anything either. That's friend code, I think. Her dad doesn't know that. Yeah. And Elaine's MacBook would soon reveal several profiles on various kink sites like alt.com and fetlife. She presented herself as a submissive woman looking for

an experienced master to guide her. Elaine was into bondage and had done some research into slave contracts that would require her to live her whole life under a master's command. Her bed was still there in the apartment. One of the detectives lifted the blankets to look at the mattress underneath and found bloodstained holes that had clearly been made by a knife. Stab marks. This proved it to the detectives. Elaine had been involved with a man who liked to cut her during sex.

Maybe one of his games had gone too far. It was the best lead they had. Investigators usually hoped to find some useful evidence on people's hard drives and phones, but nothing could have prepared them for what they were about to find on Elaine O'Hara's MacBook. She backed up thousands of texts between herself and an unidentified number listed under the name David in her contacts. A little investigation told them that the unidentified phone was a burner, bought on March 25th

of 2011 under the name Garoon Case Home. There was nobody in the area with that name. I don't think there's anybody in the world with that name. Surprise, surprise. eyes, Garoon case. I think it's just typos. Like maybe they meant to say Gordon Chisholm. They looked into like,

if they could find a Gordon Chisholm. Like that's what they thought to. The records for that number made it clear that his owner had bought it for one purpose only to communicate with Elaine O'Hara. Elaine was referred to in the text as slave and Garoon was master or sir.

And Elaine had saved thousands on thousands of texts. going all the way back to a year and a half before her murder. The burner phone had been used for the last time in the summer of 2012, shortly before Elaine went missing. They also found a saved Google Maps image of Vartree Reservoir and Killa Key Wood. They knew they were on the right track. Now, these were homicide detectives.

They'd all seen some shit. But none of them had ever seen anything like this. And y'all, I'm going to give you a heads up for these next few minutes, really for the entire rest of the episode, because some of what I'm about to tell you is just nightmare fuel. I'm going to read you some excerpts from Elaine's text conversations with the man she called Master and Sir. From context clues, you can tell that Elaine had been involved with Sir years earlier, like 2008, 2009, and then the relationship had fizzled out when Elaine told him she wasn't up for knife play anymore.

But then out of the blue, in 2011, he reached out to her again. This is an old friend, he texted. We used to play together and I miss it terribly. Would love to catch up. I'm not into blood anymore, said Elaine. The text confirmed the story about Elaine asking her master to kill her, obviously during one of her suicidal periods and him refusing. But it was clear to detectives that he hadn't refused because he didn't want to do it

or because he cared about Elaine, he just didn't want to get caught. If he was going to kill her, he wanted time to prepare. He started in on her in that very first. first text in 2011. There's a girl in USA asked me to do something you asked me, he said, still have dark thoughts? I always have dark thoughts, but I'm able to cope with them now, said Elaine. I got this phone and SIM just in case, can't be traced. He told her he missed her, wanted to start up their relationship again, and eventually wheedled her into meeting up the next day. That first exchange ends with him asking, do you ever think about me?

Honestly, yes I do, Elaine texted back, but then I remember the blood. Elaine was reluctant to start things back up with this guy. That's very clear, but he obviously had a tight psychological grip on her. He knew she was a vulnerable person he could manipulate, and over the next 17 months he embarked on a relentless campaign to talk her into letting him and her life. Sir was a big fan of the Gorean approach to dominance and submission. Based on a series of horrific sci-fi books from the 60s, the Gorean philosophy is basically the change our boy Elliot Roger wanted to see in the world.

Women as sex slaves, basically, with no rights and no purpose other than to serve their sex-obsessed male masters. Ew. Y'all might remember this charming stuff from a case we covered a few years ago. Remember Master Bob Bischera? he was into that stuff too. So was John Edward Robinson the serial killer. And Cameron Hooker, a man who kidnapped a woman named Colleen Stan and kept her in a box for seven years. So yeah, I feel like this stuff is not exactly kind to women. Nor is it standard BDSM like by any means. We don't want to suggest that. Elaine really, really did not want knife play. She wanted a more standard dom sub dynamic. I think, and I don't know, I'm not part of that community. Okay. But I think she found some relief in the idea of somebody just telling her what to do in every aspect of her life. She'd always struggled so hard, you know, keeping jobs and making friends and dealing with social situations, just making decisions about her future.

And I think for Elaine, there was just a comforting simplicity in the idea of handing her life over to someone else. The war is over and both sides lost. Kingdoms were reduced to cinders and armies. scattered like bones in the dust. Now the survivors claw to what's left of a broken world, praying the darkness chooses someone else tonight. But in the shadow dark, the darkness always wins. This is old school adventuring at its most cruel.

Your torch ticks down in real time. And when that flame dies, something else rises to finish the job. This is a brutal rules-light nightmare with a story that emerges organically based on the decisions that the characters make. This is what it felt like to play RPGs in the 80s, and man, it is so good to be back. Join the Glass Cannon podcast as we plunge into the shadow dark every Thursday night at 8 p.m. Eastern on YouTube.com slash the Glass Cannon with the podcast version dropping the next day. See what everybody's talking about and join us in the dark. From the parents behind law and order comes a mystery the whole family can enjoy. Patrick

Picklebottom Everyday Mysteries. to the whimsical world of Patrick Pickle Bottom, a precocious 11-year-old with a love for reading and an uncanny ability to solve mysteries. Inspired by the beloved children's book of the same name, this podcast vividly brings Patrick's tales of deduction and everyday adventures to life as he unravels baffling enigmas and solves clever cases.

Patrick Picklebottom Everyday Mysteries is perfect for kids and is just as entertaining for grownups who love a good mystery. Whole family can listen now, wherever you get your podcasts. Over and over, she begged Sir to stop the cutting and stabbing and, above all, the talk of killing. But for months and months before her murder, he constantly brought Elaine back to the subject of suicide. Sir, please stop, she texted desperately one afternoon. Can't we just have a normal master slave relationship without this please, sir?

Sir wasn't having it. It's your fault I want to kill and you won't let me stab them. he wrote. His argument was that when she'd asked him to kill her back in 2008, a time in her life when she was in the depths of despair, she'd awakened this irresistible desire to kill. And now she was trying to deny him the pleasure of killing her. How dare she? He irritably agreed that he'd stopped pestering her about letting him kill her, but made her promise that the next time she felt depressed, she'd let him. Jesus, this guy is just, whew. He didn't keep that promise, by the way. He started harping on it again almost immediately.

It's genuinely sickening. And it's like shades darker than the guy that just won't leave you alone to sleep with him. But it's like worse than that. Yeah. The nightmare version of that. Yeah. And he seemed to be working on tearing down her self-esteem as much as possible, maybe hoping to send her back into the depths of depression so he could act out his fantasy. Elaine was already insecure about her looks and Sir seemed to love making it worse. He told her nobody was going to want her besides him. She was disobedient and needy, fat and ugly, and covered in old scars from her sessions. It amazes me when men do this.

Like, okay, well, if I'm so hideous, why are you always blowing up my phone asking for hookups? Shut the fuck up. And then he'd turn around an offer to give her a baby if she'd keep seeing him and letting him stab her. He had her on this nightmarish roller coaster of emotions. It was clear from these texts that stabbing was a straight-up obsession for this man. There's a term for this. It's called peakerism. And unsurprisingly, it's shown up in murder cases before. A lot of experts think Jack the Ripper had it,

and we know for sure that it was the obsession of mega-creep child killer Albert Fish. A few years ago, on the campus where I teach, there was a guy who was hiding under tables in the library and just stabbing women in the feet with an ice pick. Yeah, it's the thing. They never caught this guy, by the way. Like, that keeps me up at night sometimes. I think we're going to hear about him sometime for sure.

Oh, my God, absolutely. That's nightmare fuel. I have a recurring dream where you text me to say you have a present for me at your place, sir texted one day. And when I get there, it's a naked girl, gagged and bound, tied to a chair, and you have all my knives laid out. Not going to happen, sir. Elaine texted back. It's a nice dream, though. he said.

Oh, yes, nice. It's just the word I would have. Jesus, Murphy. One day, he texted her all excited about a new story he'd just watched. A woman had been stabbed while jogging in the park. She was alive, but in bad shape. And the guy who attacked her was still at large. Sir was just tickled pink about the whole thing.

I'm watching the case with interest, he texted Elaine. She's still alive. Big mistake leaving a witness. I would love to have been the one knifing her. Can you imagine the night? going in and out of her, all the blood, must have been a fantastic feeling for him, lucky guy. You are sick. V sick.

Elaine texted back. So are you, sir said. I know you wouldn't want me any other way. I'm going to do it, he said. You have to help me, or it will be you. Oh, no. Yeah. One of his tactics was to threaten to kill Elaine unless she helped him kidnap and murder someone

else. He had a specific woman in mind, a realtor named Rowena. We don't give her last name. We need to plan it, he texted Elaine. We need new untraceable pay as you go phone. You make appointment to see a state agent at remote cottage. Need fake names and just say we are teachers. He texted her Rowena's work number.

Elaine obviously did not want any part of this, and she tried to convince him it was too dangerous and they'd get caught immediately, which is true, I think. I think it will be okay, he said. Non-traceable phone, fake names, and off we go. Hammer her while her back is turned. Cover her head. Drag her into a back room. Gag, rape her, stab her over and over. Stomach, chest, side, tits. Turn her over and stab her back and slid her throat. Then go back to yours and celebrate. Knock you up. See, he's trying to convince her

that if she helps him do this, he'll get her pregnant. He went back and forth between threatening her and offering her this thing that she wanted more than anything else in the world, which was to have a child. unbelievable. And Elaine had actually told her therapist that she'd had a miscarriage in the summer of 2011, so it's about a year before her murder. She said she'd gotten pregnant after a one-night stand. Now, who knows if this was sir or someone else? Elaine did have other partners here and there, but obviously the miscarriage was hard for her, and this piece of shit knew that. He was trying his hardest to manipulate her. One time she texted him, did you know that I'm scared of you? You have this hold over me that terrifies me. That's good for you to feel owned and that your life is in my

hands every time you submit to me, sir said. I love that. Thank you. Do not fear death. Yeah, so it's not hard to figure out why Elaine checked herself back into St. Edmundsbury a month before her murder. This man was emotionally torturing her, physically torturing her too, for that matter. Yeah, absolutely. Her doctors felt like she improved quite a bit in the month or so she was in Edmundsbury. In the last couple of weeks of her stay, she was going back to work. She worked as a child care assistant and at a newsagents. And she was getting out a little bit during the weekend. And she was telling everybody how excited she was about the Tall Ships Festivals, where she was going to be head volunteer. But every time Elaine tried to reach for the light, there was always

Sir, there to drag her back down into darkness. When he found out, Sir was furious that she'd tried to kill herself without me and ended up in the psych hospital again out of his reach. She was going to need to be punished for that, he told her. Elaine tried to push back. No, she told him. She wasn't into that stuff anymore. She didn't want to be stabbed or cut again, ever. But the deep psychological holds sir had on her is crystal clear in their text exchanges.

This was a vulnerable woman, fresh off a major depressive episode and still and steady on her feet. punishment wasn't a new concept to a woman used to the BDSM scene. In Elaine's mind, at least, it was part of being a submissive. Elaine was reluctant, but she told Sir she understood she had to be punished. She was willing to play ball once she was discharged from the hospital on August 22nd, but there would be a few conditions. She'd let him go to town as long as he promised not to injure her where people could see, or to the point where she'd be too sore for her volunteer job the next day,

and she wanted him to stop talking about killing, for a while at least. Until I get back on my feet, she said. Sir was over the moon. He'd found a really remote area in the Dublin Mountains, he said. He'd give her directions to get there. No, please, Elaine said, not outside. What if we get caught? But he assured her they wouldn't.

This place was in the middle of nowhere. Leave your iPhone at home, he told her. Just bring slave phone and keys. Elaine had that one last happy afternoon with her family, and then Sir took over again. He sent her detailed instructions to get to the spot he'd chosen for her to wait for him to pick her up. He'd take her to the punishment site from there. Later, a jogger reported talking to a woman in a blue track suit who'd asked him for directions to the shore. She was out of it, the jogger said, distant, preoccupied like she was in another world.

It's almost like a scene from a dark fairy tale, isn't it? What happened next? She went down to the seashore to wait for sir as he'd instructed, and he picked her up and led her into the deep, dark forest. He'd told Elaine in one of their last text exchanges that her punishment would be him pretending to do someone for real. He said, every time I stab or strangle you, I want you to think this is it.

evidence that the scene suggested he'd most likely tied Elaine to a tree before doing whatever he did to her. I'm assuming it was bloody and horrible. She didn't deserve it. This was the story told by the thousands of text messages Elaine and Sir had exchanged in the year and a half before her murder. What had happened to her was no longer a mystery. Now they had to find the man who was responsible. Sir had mentioned several things that the... investigators thought might point them to his real identity. He mentioned a newborn baby daughter,

horrifying, if you think about it. Oh, yeah. And more than once, he mentioned something about flying. One day, he texted, hi, was lying low and leaving phone off in case stabbing was investigated. It isn't. Animals have picked carcass clean. Yay. He said he'd been up flying Sunday and had a look. Skeleton rib cage where knife went in, he said, rest of sheep moved. no call to club or guardie from farmer. I want to do a woman next, he said. It was fantastic feeling the knife going and watching blood spurt out. So happy.

Oh, my God. And when I first read that, like, I was first reading that text, I was like, oh, my God, he killed somebody already. He killed his sheep. Like, that is just so sick. I can't even. And there's something so creepy and jarring about that cheerful little, yay, what is wrong with you?

Oh, my God. One day, he'd texted Elaine to complain about a shitty day he'd had. He'd had to take a pay cut at work, plus he'd come in fifth in a flying competition he'd entered. So the detectives went to work looking for a flying competition and pilots registered under any name that bore the slightest resemblance to Garoon Caseholm. But they didn't find anything. It was terribly disappointing until, in a stroke of genius, one of the investigators had a thought, what if the guy wasn't talking about flying real planes? What if he was into those little model planes?

And lo and behold, when they checked for model plane flying competitions around the date of that text, they found one. And they were able to quickly find who won fifth place that day. Can I just say how nerdy it is to call your model plane flying, flying, like you're an actual pilot. Like, it's so weird. It's so weird. I just, what a fucking loser. I love model planes. I think they're cool, but...

I went flying the other day. No. The owner of the master phone was a man named Graham Dwyer. And as soon as they started looking into him, they knew they had the right guy. Dwyer, it turns out, was a successful architect. He lived with his wife and two children in a beautiful house and a shishi part of town.

One of the children was a baby daughter, now a little over a year old. journalists would later comment on how Graham Dwyer wasn't what you picture when you think of a man like this. He was your basic standard-issue white guy, appearance-wise, common as dirt. Not handsome, not unattractive, not fat, not thin. He was short. I think that's worth noting just because it's a thing men tend to be insecure about, and it might explain a few things.

But he was, above all else, ordinary. I have a feeling a lot of you listening will agree with me that, Contrary to what the reporter said, he's exactly what you picture when you think of a man like Elaine's sir. That's the thing about psychopaths. They look like us. It's part of what makes him so scary. The task force put Dwyer under surveillance for a few weeks while they gathered information, and by all outward appearances, nothing was amiss.

Well-to-do guy, successful career, wife and kids, beautiful home. He was into model planes and expensive cars. Had a Porsche, he called his baby. Ew. But looking into his background, there had been signs of trouble going all the way back to childhood. Graham Dwyer was born in County Cork in 1972 and seems to have had an ordinary middle-class childhood with three siblings. He was a smart kid who wanted to be an architect early on, even went so far as to seek out drafting classes at another school when his own high school didn't offer them. People generally liked Graham, but every now and then he'd do something that hinted at a a dark side. When he was a kid, like elementary school or middle school age, I got the impression,

he tried to kill a younger kid by pushing him off a roof. The kid was hurt badly enough to spend some time in the hospital, and while he was in there recovering, Dwyer went to visit him and attacked him again. Later, all grown up now, this kid went to the police to tell him about it. He said he'd never forgotten the blank look in Dwyer's eyes as he pushed him off that building, just empty. He was cruel to animals too. He used to kick chickens to death and then brag to other kids about it. He thought it was funny. Despite this, teenage Graham was pretty well liked in town. He played bass in a band. He never had trouble find in a girlfriend. He was a popular kid. After high school, he went to Dublin and

enrolled at the Dublin Institute of Technology, and it was there where he met a young woman named Imer McShay, and they hit it off big. They hadn't been together long before Imer got pregnant and had a baby boy they named Senen. But the relationship didn't last. Years later, Imer would testify at Dwyer's trial about how he'd eventually confessed his stabbing fetish to her and started bringing a knife into the bedroom. At first, he'd just put it on the nightstand next to the bed, wouldn't touch it. But despite Imor's resistance, he kept pushing and pushing. Eventually, he started bringing the knife into bed with them during sex, pretending, realistically, to cut her. Scared the shit out. of her. By 1996, Imer had enough. They broke up, and I'm sure nobody's going to be surprised to

hear that Graham became a mostly absent father. About a year after he and Amor broke up, he met a fellow architecture student named Gemma Healy. Gemma was beautiful and intelligent from a strong and well-to-do family. I think he realized that somebody like him needed a normal family as cover, and I think he liked that Gemma came for money, too. Wanted to sponge up some of that status for. for himself. He and Gemma would be together for the next 16 years, having two children and living a life of apparent domestic tranquility. She would never know anything about his obsessions with rape and stabbing until his trial. I think he kept his predilections from her because he learned his lesson from sharing them with Emer. My main source for this episode was the book Almost the

Perfect Murder by Paul Williams, and I would strongly suggest you read it. This could have easily, easily been a two-part episode because the police investigation was so intricate and because they found such a mountain of horrible stuff on Dwyer's computer, as we'll soon find out. I don't have time to get into how they got to the point where the prosecutors felt like they had enough to arrest and question Dwyer. Suffice it to say it was a lot of cell phone stuff and other strong circumstantial evidence. Yeah, if you like procedural stuff, definitely read the book. It is so fascinating. They were so good. I honestly, and maybe if you've read the book, you'll disagree with me, but I can usually find something, you know, and I can't fault this investigation. I really think they did a fantastic job. The two Nokia phones guard a water unit had found in the reservoir were unbelievably still functional after 13 months underwater.

Amazing, amazing testament to Nokia, if you ask me. Holy shit. Absolutely. God. Those bricks would survive a nuke to the screen, I swear. Seriously, good Lord. And like, looking back, I always thought, oh, those look, like when I was a kid and we were getting cell phones, I was like, oh, I don't like those. Those are ugly. And now I'm like, I should have had one. I should still have one. And to the surprise of no one, they turned out to be the burners that Elaine and Sir had used to communicate.

The phones had been given the usernames, master and slave. They found proof of Dwyer being the one who bought the burner phone and used to contact Elaine. Suffice it to say, after a few weeks of watching him from afar, they decided to put the Gramas on Graham Dwyer and see what he had to say for himself. He seemed completely shocked when they showed up at his house, early one morning, and hauled him in. At the firm where he worked, Graham's coworkers reacted in very different ways to his arrest. One co-worker was so outraged at the suggestion that Graham might be guilty of murder

that she actually rushed the cops, yelling at them to get out. Good Lord. Several others agreed that there was no way their friend and colleague could have done this. She had to have had a crush on or been banging him or something. Like that is the weirdest behavior. Good Lord. Russian the cops. Yeah.

Oh, yeah, ran at him. Get out. Get out. He would never. What is your problem? Lord, have mercy. But one female co-worker took one of the guardie aside and told him she'd been afraid of Graham Dwyer for some time.

She'd had some kind of relatively minor disagreement with him when they work together on a project, and his reaction scared her. Ever since then, she'd made sure not to be alone with him. Now, see Spider-Man. We're faced with a threat. That can be anyone. On the biggest screen possible. You gotta come with me.

I don't know if you're the real Spider-Man. I promised that I would keep you safe. Fine. Spider-Man, brand-new day. Now playing. Now streaming on Disney Plus, the Hulu original series Furious follows FBI agent Alice Black, played by Emmy Rossum, on the hunt for a mysterious and calculating serial killer.

Both walk their own paths toward justice. And as their lives start to intertwine, the line between right and wrong begins to blur. New episodes week over week. Watch the Hulu original series Furious, now streaming only on Hulu on Disney Plus. A search of Dwyer's computer turned up stuff out of your worst nightmares. He tried to destroy his hard drive,

but the forensic IT woman was able to recover the data on it. Yeah, she was a rock star in this case. Her name was Bridd. Oh, I can't remember her last name. But she was, I mean, most of the really compelling evidence was due to her. She had a lot of great skills and she used them. She got all that stuff off the Nokia phones and restored his damaged hard drive. I mean, got a wealth of evidence from it. So she was cool. Hell yeah. Hell yeah, Brid. Right on, Brid. Graham was apparently a big fan of snuff films, movies where somebody actually literally dies. One of his favorites was a film in which a woman was tied up and eviscerated. Oh my God. I knew videos like this existed before this case, but somehow hearing this one described in detail really hit me in the gut. It's just so awful. It's hard to wrap your head around it, that there are people whose reaction to a film like that would be arousal. Like, I can hardly think about that, much less force myself to watch it. And he's over here

getting off to it. It's unfathomable to most of us. Thank God. God. And Graham didn't just enjoy watching movies about women being cut and stabbed. He liked making them too. In his computer files, they found video after video of Dwyer cutting and stabbing, bound and gagged women during sex. In many cases, it was clear that this cutting was not consensual, and it was very clear that these women didn't know they were being filmed. The women were screaming in pain, the screams muffled against the gags they wore. These videos would leave lasting scars on the people who had to watch them during Dwyer's trial. One local journalist later said that she still hears the screaming sometimes in her head. One of these women, of course, was Elaine.

In one video, he drew a knife across one of her breasts and squeezed it to make it bleed more. In another, he stabbed her in the stomach and sides as he had sex with her and she cried out in pain. After he finished, he said, there now, was that so bad? There were also a couple of bizarre videos Dwyer had taken of himself. In one, he stood naked in front of the camera and used a retractable play knife to pretend to stab himself. He used ketchup to simulate blood dripping out of the wounds. This reminds me so much of the pictures and videos BTK and Colonel Russell Williams made of themselves dress rehearsals for what they really wanted to do. In another video, Graham talks about having just chloroformed himself, to test it out, I guess. He talked about using it on a

Elaine so she wouldn't have to feel the pain when he stabbed her during sex. I don't think he ever did, but obviously he managed to get his hands on some. Maybe he made it himself, I don't know. Also on Graham's hard drive, they found a vast collection of awful, violent pictures and videos from the kind of porn sites you probably have to be on the dark web to access, interspersed with sonogram pics and family portraits and videos of kids' birthday parties. Dwyer's two lives side by side. And possibly worst of all, they found his short stories. The title of the first one they opened was Jenny's first rape. It's pretty much what it sounds like, and it is god-awful.

I want you guys to know, I've really struggled with myself in this episode about how much of this stuff to include. I don't want to get too upsettingly graphic, but I also don't want to pull any punches about what a freaking monster this man is. He's eligible for parole, okay? we have to make sure people understand what he is. He is not just some run-of-the-mill Dom who fantasizes about controlling women and takes it all way too seriously and just ended up going too far one day. He is deeply irreparably disturbed and incredibly dangerous. And I think he always will be.

So I hope I'm striking the right balance here. I left out a lot, believe me, like some just truly toe-curling stuff. But if it's too much for anybody, I, I apologize. I had to stop reading and go for a walk like several times when I was researching, so I understand. And it takes a lot to get to me, but this really did. One of the short stories they found on Dwyer's hard drive was one titled Killing Darcy. It described meeting a beautiful, suicidal young American woman online and flying her over to Ireland so he could kill her with her consent. In soupy, cliche prose, Dwyer wrote about giving her the best night of her life in preparation for

ending it. She got her favorite meal. They had emotional, tearful sex. They watched the sunset. She filmed a suicide note for her family. And I'll just read you a tiny bit. It was dark now, but there was complete silence, just the wind outside. Without speaking, she put on her iPod speakers, which was loaded with a playlist carefully chosen. And as she pressed play, I closed my eyes, knowing the sequence and at which song to start the final act. I can't. I can't. I can't. I Carefully undressed and moved my clothes to a clean place in a plastic bag. She did not need to see the shovel or bags of lime and bottles of bleach I had stored. I was trying to make it as perfect for her as I could.

She knew the cameras were on us, but I had moved them back so they wouldn't interfere with what was going to take place. The last time we embraced, we kissed passionately and made love in stark contrast to the brutal rape she would endure soon and worse. She was so beautiful, so perfect. She turned her back to me when we were finished, and I put on my mask and gloves. And then, ugh, the story gets absolutely brutal, just disgusting. He wrote about stabbing this girl beyond recognition, just tearing her up, and then having sex with her body. It's so gross, I can't even stand to think about it. At one point, he describes her body, quote, lying there all sexy and stabbed.

get help. Oh my God. Reading the stories he wrote really emphasizes what like an actual sick fuck he is and how much pleasure he got out of literal torture and rape. Like Whitney said, this guy deserves to be in a windowless concrete box under the prison forever. His grave should have the same kind of warnings we leave at nuclear testing sites. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. He should have to get a tattoo on his forehead. If they ever let this prick out, like he needs to be marked in some way so that women know to avoid him. Scary. Like one of the scariest people I think we've come across.

And the interesting thing is if you read this killing Darcy story in total and, you know, most of it's in the book that I read, he talks about it like he was giving her this great gift and she was so beautiful and he touched her face gently and, you know, and she gave him a thank you hug at the airport when he picked her up and stuff. And it's interesting to me because, A, it's in stark contrast to the. the text with Elaine where he was often really verbally abusive and mean. And it never seemed to me like he was doing any of this in like a loving or helpful way. It was like, it's your fault I want to kill. And you have to help me, you know, find somebody else if you're not going to let me do it to you.

But in the killing Darcy story, it's this like, sick, like romantic kind of vibe to it. And he talks about God at one point. Like there's a point in the story where he's like, she knew that he would be waiting for her, along with her grin and her old dog, like, what are you doing? I don't know if it was a way for him to justify it in his own head, and that's why he was looking for suicidal people, because he thought that made it okay. I am very certain that if he had not gotten caught, I feel sure in my bones that he would have dropped that. I think he would have just started stabbing people at night in dark alleys. You know, I don't think that that would have lasted. That was just his way of getting himself over the first hurdle, I think.

So the killing Darcy's story was so vivid, so specific, and so similar to what had actually happened to Elaine that the detectives felt that Darcy was probably a real person. And as it turned out, she was. I won't go into detail on how they found her read Paul Williams' book if you want more detail, but suffice it to say it was a combination of good forensic IT and good detective work. Her name was Darcy Day, and she lived all the way across the pond in the U.S. It's such an American name, too. It's so funny, like, you can tell when somebody's American versus...

Absolutely, Darcy Day. Darcy Day. She was willing to talk to them about her online relationship with Graham Dwyer, which she'd broken off once she started going to church and getting her mental health to a more positive place. And the more detectives learned about her, the more eerie similarities they found between her and Elaine O'Hara. Like, Elaine, Darcy had been in and out of her. of mental hospitals for years. Her childhood had been very traumatic, and she had severe PTSD and several other mental health diagnoses. She met Graham Dwyer on a website that was all about suicide.

Think about that. He was trawling these sites looking for vulnerable women who would let him kill her. Jesus Jones. And Graham ended up scrapping this plan, by the way, because he couldn't afford to fly Darcy over from the States. He was in a mountain of debt, like mountain of debt from his obsession with fancy cars and fancy stuff. Unsurprisingly, in the interrogation room, Dwyer denied murdering Elaine. At first, he tried to pretend he didn't even know who she was, but he quickly realized

that that wasn't going to fly. His argument was that they'd just met up for some BDSM scenes, and that was it. He downplayed his interest in BDSM, too, said he wasn't really that into it. Right. The detectives were interested to see that he was embarrassed that they knew about his fetishes.

Like, not just worried he was going to go down for murder. He was genuinely embarrassed, too, kept muttering about how this would damage his marriage and his job and his standing in the community. Aw, puppy, are creepy little chickens finally coming home to roost? Graham Dwyer had victimized women for years. Now, women would help bring him down. From the brilliant criminal profiler that Gardy had consulted on with this case, to the women who had actually been with Dwyer,

his ex-girlfriend, Emer, his now ex-wife Gemma, much to his annoyance, Darcy, from the USA. He'd tried to scare her off while he was in jail awaiting trial. Somehow he'd gotten her address in Maine to send her a cheerful little card

as if to say, hey, I know where you live. Darcy was scared to death of him, but she still showed up to testify via video, and she did a fantastic job. The trial wasn't necessarily going to be a slam dunk. the medical examiner had never been able to determine the cause of death.

There just hadn't been enough left of Elaine's body. The prosecution worried that this might make the jury balk at convicting Dwyer. But there was a mountain of strong evidence. Cell phone data that showed the master phone near Elaine's apartment and heading out to the murder scene on the day she went missing. Data that showed the master phone pinging identically with Graham Dwyer's workphone, showing that they were in the same place at the same time. A spade found at the murder.

scene that according to Gemma was theirs and had gone missing at the time Elaine went missing. Proof that Dwyer had bought a big hunting knife the day before the murder. Man, is he bad at this or what? Oh, and they also had CCTV of Dwyer at Elaine's apartment building carrying that same black and red backpack the fisherman had pulled out of the reservoir at the very start of the story. Boom. From her testimony at her ex-husband's trial, it is clear to me that Gemma Dwyer hadn't known anything at all about Graham's knife obsession or his predilection for infidelity. He'd managed to keep that

completely separate from his family life. So this awful shit just came completely out of left field for her. Can you imagine? And they read some of his short stories at the trial. And one of them began with a cheerful little recollection of how he'd always, he started having fantasies about stabbing and raping and killing when he was a teenager. And he described how every time he has sex, he fantasizes about shoving a knife up there instead of his penis. And she had to sit there and listen to that. And she'd been with him for 16 years. There's not enough soap in the world.

I just feel so bad for this woman. And she held her own on the stand, man. She'd cut off contact with him pretty much the day he got arrested. And I'm sure just wanted to see him put away forever so she could move on with her children. Emer testified about how Dwyer kept insisting on bringing knives into bed when they were together and described him as abusive and controlling. He could have a scary temper. And Darcy, well, we know Darcy's story already. Worst of all for Dwyer, the judge allowed the prosecutors to play some of the horrific homemade sex videos they found on Dwyer's computer,

including, of course, the ones that featured Elaine. The whole time they were playing, Dwyer's face was bright red with anger and humiliating. He really hated having his awful short stories read out loud in court too. So, you know, suck on that, sir. We can see you, sir. Everybody knows what you are. Pitiful twat. It's so satisfying to see a loser like this who could only feel powerful when he was hurting people smaller and weaker than him, taken down and shown for what he really is. Like, genuinely, he should be humiliated, freak-ass bitch. Absolutely. And it was. It was a humiliation ritual for him. for him, and I'm thrilled about that. Graham Dwyer was found guilty of murdering Elaine O'Hara in 2015 and sentenced to life in prison, which isn't necessarily life in Ireland, but he has to serve a minimum of 12 years.

And he's likely to serve many more. In 2023 in Ireland, the average amount of time a person sentenced to life spent in prison before parole was 24 years. Hopefully, our guy will be there way longer than that. and I'm going to leave you with a couple things. First, in the killing Darcy story, Dwyer mentions taking a silver chain off his victim and storing it in a box, along with the memory cards from his cameras, quote, in a very special place. This caught the detective's attention. They've never found such a box in any of the searches of Dwyer's or Elaine's properties, but many of the detectives involved in this case firmly believed that Dwyer filmed himself killing Elaine.

Maybe one day a new owner of the Dwyer's old house will decide to do some HVAC work or knock down a wall and there it will be. I won't be surprised at all if that happens. And then there's this amazing little detail in a case full of amazing details. They found Elaine's body on Graham Dwyer's birthday. As CSIs were arriving on the mountain to examine and collect her bones, Graham was at a Mexican restaurant celebrating with his wife. No idea of the tsunami that was coming for him. Bon Anniversary, you sick fuck.

And rest in peace, Elaine. Now, before we go, don't forget, we've got live shows coming up. First, we've got summer camp, September 10th through 13th, an amazing four-day festival in Equinunk, Pennsylvania, hosted by Dan and Lindsay Cummins of Time Suck and Scared to Death, two of my favorite podcasts. We'll be performing live alongside them and the podcast, astonishing legends in addition to a roster of awesome stand-up comedians and local bands.

Go to Badmagic Productions.com for more info and to buy tickets. Then we've got our True Crime Cruise, Crime Wave 2.0, February 8 through 12th, 2027. If you want to come to the Bahamas with us and some of the biggest true crime and paranormal podcasts in the world, like Case File, True Crime Garage, last podcast on the left, Sinisterhood, here's what you got to do. Tickets are on sale now, but they're 90% sold out at this point. So if you want to go, make sure you get over to CrimeWaveatC.com slash campfire and book your cabin ASAP. You'll get $100 off, plus a private meet and greet with us. The great thing is you can pay all at once or set up a payment plan

and pay it off over time. So get on it, y'all. That's crimewaveatsc.com slash campfire. So I think calling that a wild one is a vast understatement. You know, we'll have another one for you next week. But for now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe until we get together again around the true crime campfire. And as always, we want to send a grateful shout out to a few of our lovely Patreon supporters. Thank you so much to Amy, Kit Kat, T.L. I might be saying that wrong, Peter and Sasha. We appreciate y'all to the moon and back. And if you're not yet a patron, you're missing out. Patrons of our show get every episode ad-free, at least a day early, sometimes more, plus tons of extra content, like patrons-only episodes and hilarious post-show discussions.

And once you join the $5 and up categories, you get even more cool stuff. A free sticker, a rad enamel pin or fridge magnet while supplies last virtual events with Katie and me, and we're always looking for new stuff to do for you. So if you can, come join us at patreon.com slash true crime campfire. The tutors were probably the most scandalous dynasty in British history. The season on vulgar history were spilling the tea on this messy, messed up family and the people who had to live through it all. And Berlin and the other wives of Henry VIII are known today from the musical

six, but who were they really? Did any of them actually want to marry him? Henry the 8th, the man who was literally the worst? How did two of them manage to escape with their heads intact? We'll also get into historical mysteries, like who really wrote Shakespeare's plays, who was the real Bloody Mary? What was happening elsewhere in the world while the tutors were trampling all over England, like the mysterious disappearance of the Roanoke colony and the true story of the girl known as Pocahontas? I'll be joined by tutor historians, experts, and a few of my friends who really hate Henry the 8th to learn all about the tutors this season on vulgar history

because it's fucking Henry the 8th all day, every day. Listen to vulgar history wherever you get podcasts. Do you love Disney? Do you love Top 10 lists? Then you are going to love our podcast Disney Countdown. Hi, I'm Megan the Magical Millennial. And Biscuits, I'm Jeremy, aka Jarendel, and we are the host of the hit Disney podcast Disney Countdown. On every episode of our fun and family-friendly show,

we countdown our top 10 lists of all things Disney, The parks, the movies, the music, the food, the lore, there is nothing we don't cover on our show, right, Jeremy? Ooh, girl, you know we are famous for rabbit holes, Disney-themed games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed, but you definitely need in your life. So if you are looking for a healthy dose of Disney Magic, check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts.