On the night of November 9, 1995, 21-year-old Josephine “Jo Jo” Dullard disappeared while trying to get home from Dublin. She was last seen in Moone, County Kildare, after hitchhiking her way back toward Kilkenny. What happened to her next has remained one of Ireland’s enduring mysteries.
Early Life in Kilkenny
Josephine Dullard was born on January 25, 1974, in Callan, County Kilkenny. She was the youngest of five children. Life wasn’t easy for her from the beginning. Her father died before she was even born and her mother passed away from cancer in 1983. By then, Jo Jo was still just a young girl.
Her siblings often described her as warm and bubbly, someone who could light up a room even though she carried a lot of loss so early in life. After finishing school, she moved to Dublin, where she worked for two years. She eventually came back to Kilkenny to train as a beautician, something she had a real passion for.
Family members remembered her long, carefully maintained fingernails. Later, her sister suggested that Jo Jo might have used them to fight back if she ever felt threatened.
Just days before she vanished, Jo Jo was getting ready to start a new full-time job as a waitress. Her plan was simple: work, save money and restart her life at home in Kilkenny.
The Last Night
That Thursday, Jo Jo took a bus to Dublin. She had to sign off social welfare payments since she was about to start her new job the following week. After running her errands, she decided to meet some friends at Bruxelles pub, right off Grafton Street.
By all accounts, she had a normal, fun evening. But when it came time to head home, things started to go wrong. She arrived at Busáras station around 10 p.m., hoping to catch a bus back to Callan. But she missed it, the BBC reports.
Instead of giving up, Jo Jo made a new plan. She hopped on a bus toward Kildare and got off at Naas around 10:50 p.m. From there, she stuck out her thumb and managed to hitch a ride to Kilcullen. At about 11:15 p.m., she got another lift, this time to the small town of Moone.
That driver was later identified as the son of Alan Gillis, then a Fine Gael Member of the European Parliament. He became the last officially confirmed person to see Jo Jo alive.
The Final Phone Call
When Jo Jo arrived in Moone, she stopped at a public phone box to call her friend Mary Cullinan. The time was about 11:37 p.m. During the call, Jo Jo explained that she had missed her bus and asked if she could stay in Carlow for the night.
As they were talking, Jo Jo told Mary that a car had pulled up and that she planned to take the lift. She ended the call and that was the last anyone heard from her.
Not long after, witnesses reported seeing a young woman who looked like Jo Jo leaning into the back door of a dark-colored Toyota Carina-type car. Another possible sighting came later, near Castledermot, just a few miles away. But none of those leads ever led to answers.
The next morning, on November 10, her sister Kathleen reported her missing to Gardaí. The search for Jo Jo officially began.
A Family’s Fight for the Truth
For years, Jo Jo’s disappearance remained unsolved. Gardaí carried out searches, interviewed witnesses and followed tips but progress was painfully slow.
On the 10th anniversary of her disappearance, in 2005, Jo Jo’s sister Mary Phelan gave a bombshell interview to the Irish Examiner. She claimed to know the identity of her sister’s killer and accused Gardaí of protecting him because of political ties.
Phelan also said that senior Gardaí told her in private that Jo Jo had been abducted, raped and murdered and that her body was buried and wrapped in plastic sheeting. She begged investigators to dig at a derelict cottage on a farm in County Wicklow but that search was never carried out, per Wikipedia.
According to her, the main suspect had a scar on his face, which she believed could have come from a struggle with Jo Jo. Their family lawyer, Gavin Booth, backed up this detail, pointing out that Jo Jo’s sharp nails might have left lasting marks if she had fought back.
New Searches and an Arrest
For almost 25 years, Jo Jo’s case was only seen as a missing person’s search. Then in 2020, cold case detectives looked at the evidence again. They said Jo Jo had likely “met her death through violent means.”
After that, Gardaí changed the case to a murder investigation. This was a big step and gave them more tools and new ways to keep looking for answers.
As part of the renewed investigation, Gardaí carried out major searches in Counties Wicklow and Kildare during 2024. These digs used advanced technology that wasn’t available back in the 1990s.
Although Gardaí didn’t release specific findings, they called the searches “helpful” and confirmed that Jo Jo’s family was being kept informed at every step.
Then, in November 2024, Gardaí arrested a 55-year-old man on suspicion of Jo Jo’s murder. The arrest was headline news across Ireland. For a family that had waited nearly 30 years, it felt like justice might finally be within reach, according to the Irish Independent.
But within days, the man was released without charge. Gardaí explained that the release was part of the legal process and that further inquiries were still ongoing. They thanked the public for its support and once again appealed for anyone with information to come forward.
Ongoing Mystery
Even now, almost three decades after that November night, the case remains unsolved. Gardaí are still asking the public for help and urging anyone with information about Jo Jo’s disappearance to come forward.
For Jo Jo’s family, every year that passes is another year without closure. Her sister Kathleen once said that not knowing is the hardest part: the silence, the lack of answers, the empty space where Jo Jo should be.
When she disappeared, Jo Jo was 21 years old. She was 5 feet 4 inches tall with a medium build and dark shoulder-length hair. She was described as fun, kind and hopeful about the future. She was just days away from starting a new chapter in her life.
Let’s dig into the legal side of forensic evidence.
The Importance of Forensic Advances in Historical Investigations
Forensic science has always been about one thing — finding the truth when the truth seems buried. A hundred years ago, detectives leaned mostly on confessions, eyewitnesses and a lot of gut feeling.
Sometimes that worked. Other times it led to the wrong person being punished or the real suspect slipping away. But as the years went on, science slowly crept into police work and it completely changed how justice is done.
Today, cold cases that sat untouched for decades are being reopened because a single hair, fingerprint or scrap of DNA suddenly has something new to say.
“The advancements in forensic techniques have transformed how law enforcement agencies gather, analyze and use scientific evidence,” explains UniversalClass.
That’s a fancy way of saying science has given investigators second chances — and in some cases, saved innocent lives.
How Forensics Took Off in the U.S.
In America, forensic science really began to get noticed in the early 20th century. Before that, police might save evidence but they didn’t have reliable ways to test it. Things shifted in 1923 when the Los Angeles Police Department opened one of the first forensic labs in the country.
It happened because a case had fallen apart after evidence wasn’t properly analyzed. As RAIS Conference Proceedings points out, that failure showed just how badly police needed labs.
By 1932, the FBI had stepped in with its own lab, making forensic work part of national investigations. Around the same time, fingerprints became the star of the show. They’d been used before but the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis put them in the spotlight.
Scotland Yard’s system from England was introduced to U.S. cops and suddenly fingerprinting wasn’t just a trick — it was the backbone of criminal ID. This advancement allowed for rapid identification and linking of suspects to crimes.
Imagine being a detective back then: no DNA tests, no computers, no CSI. A smudge of a fingerprint could mean the difference between guessing and proving.
Blood, DNA and the Game-Changer
By the middle of the 1900s, blood testing started to give investigators another way in. Just knowing a blood type at a scene could narrow things down. But the real breakthrough came in 1953, when James Watson and Francis Crick uncovered the double-helix structure of DNA.
At the time, no one thought about solving crimes with it. But decades later, DNA would turn into the single most powerful forensic tool in history.
Methods like RFLP and PCR — basically ways of reading and copying DNA — meant investigators could pull a genetic fingerprint from a tiny sample. By the 1980s, DNA fingerprinting was showing up in courtrooms. That’s when cases that had gone cold for years were suddenly blown wide open.
The introduction of DNA fingerprinting in the 1980s and early 1990s provided courts with indisputable scientific evidence. In plain words, DNA was proof. If your DNA was at the scene, you couldn’t explain it away. And if it wasn’t, you had a shot at freedom, even if you’d already been convicted.
Courts, Rules and Databases
Science might be convincing but courts needed to set boundaries. In 1975, the U.S. Supreme Court rolled out the Federal Rules of Evidence which made it clear that only relevant and non-prejudicial science could be used in trials. That helped build public trust in forensic work.
Then came technology. In 1977, the FBI introduced AFIS (Automated Fingerprint Identification System). Before AFIS, fingerprints were compared by hand. It was slow, exhausting and mistakes were easy.
AFIS changed the game by scanning and matching fingerprints against millions of others in minutes. Later, similar systems showed up for ballistics, toxicology and even shoe prints.
Detectives still knocked on doors and followed leads but now they had machines and science backing them up.
Tools That Changed Crime Scenes
Forensics isn’t just DNA and fingerprints. The toolkit is wide and it keeps growing.
- Luminol: Spray it in a dark room and invisible blood glows blue, even after cleaning, stains leave a chemical trace.
- Ballistics: Modern databases match unique bullet striations to the exact gun that fired them.
- Toxicology: Tests can find poisons, alcohol or drugs in the body. Solving mysteries about how people really died.
- Digital Forensics: Phones, laptops and cloud data are now goldmines of evidence.
Each of these tools has reopened old cases that once seemed impossible to solve. Evidence that sat in boxes for years can now be reexamined with technology that didn’t exist at the time.
Teamwork Between Science and Cops
Forensic scientists and law enforcement don’t work in separate worlds anymore. They rely on each other. Detectives might gather the evidence but it’s scientists who can decode it.
In trials, forensic experts now explain their findings to juries, breaking down DNA matches or chemical results in a way regular people can understand.
Agencies like the National Institute of Justice put money into research to keep this progress going, that means police departments are constantly updating their methods with the latest science. And the impact is huge: fewer wrongful convictions, stronger evidence and a much better shot at finally closing cold cases.
Real Life Case
- Kirk Bloodsworth Exoneration: In 1993, Bloodsworth walked free after DNA evidence proved he wasn’t guilty. He became the first U.S. death row inmate cleared by science.
- Colin Pitchfork Conviction: In the 1980s, over 5,000 men in England were tested in the world’s first mass DNA screening. It led to the arrest of Colin Pitchfork, proving DNA could catch killers.
- Dr. Joseph Warren Identification: After the Revolutionary War, Paul Revere’s handcrafted denture was used to identify Dr. Joseph Warren — one of the earliest forensic IDs in America.
Why It Still Matters
Forensics isn’t just about closing files. It’s about giving families answers they’ve waited decades for, it’s about freeing the innocent and making sure the guilty don’t get away. Most importantly it proves that even when years have passed, the smallest piece of evidence can still tell the truth.
One fingerprint, a little drop of blood or even a weird bite mark—stuff that looks super small or random—can actually be huge in a case. With the right science those tiny things can be the key to justice.
And that’s why forensic science matters because it makes sure history doesn’t stay silent.
