Tina Satchwell disappearance: The search for answers goes on
So many questions. So many theories. Almost one year on from the disappearance of Tina Satchwell, the focus has turned to a tranquil woodland area in East Cork which may hold dark and gruesome secrets.
Her husband, Richard, has spoken publicly several times since gardaí sealed off Mitchel’s Wood, in Castlemartyr, on Monday, for one of the largest garda search operations in recent years. But three TV interviews later, and five days into the search, the questions remains.
Why did Tina leave? How did she leave? Where did she go? Why did Richard wait four days to report his wife of 25 years missing? And crucially, where is Tina now?
The peace of the normally tranquil woodland was shattered last Monday morning as a fleet of trucks delivered diggers, generators, portable buildings, mobile toilets and lighting rigs to the 40-acre Coillte-managed forestry site on the main Castlemartyr to Garryvoe Rd, about 20km from where Tina and Richard lived in Youghal.
Once its roadside perimeter was sealed off with black plastic-clad fencing, and a garda incident command vehicle was positioned by the main pathway, it was clear that Mitchel’s Wood was to be the focus of a major search.
Confirmation came within three hours that the woods was to be searched for evidence in relation to the disappearance of Tina Satchwell, 45, last seen at home in Youghal almost a year ago.
The deployment soon afterwards of cadaver dogs, trained to locate buried human remains, meant the investigation was now exploring a potentially sinister avenue.
It also put an end to unfounded rumours that a body had been found — rumours driven by the presence of garda cars at the site last weekend and which sent armchair detectives and social media into overdrive.
What the public didn’t know was that gardaí investigating Tina’s disappearance had been planning a major search of the area for some time following the receipt several weeks earlier of what has been described as new information from a “credible source”.
The severe weather delayed the search start date from last Friday, and the garda units were deployed to ensure the wood wasn’t disturbed ahead of the search.
Garda search specialists have spent the last five days scouring the woods, grid-by-grid, for evidence.
They are being supported by the Defence Forces Engineer Specialist Search and Clearance Team, cadaver dog Ronnie from Search Dogs UK, a firm which has been involved in searches for the ‘Disappeared’ in Northern Ireland, and they have access to equipment which can detect if ground has been disturbed, and ground-penetrating radar.
A forensic archaeologist is on standby.
Despite all the signs that gardaí are looking for a body, Richard still clings to hope that she will return home safe.
He doesn’t talk to the print media, accusing some newspapers of twisting his words, preferring instead to talk to TV3’s Paul Byrne and RTÉ Prime Time’s Barry Cummins. He has also hinted that Tina may have been ‘troubled’ in the days before her disappearance.
But in his most revealing TV interview to date, he told TV3’s Ireland AM on Thursday that Tina was suffering from undiagnosed depression in the weeks before she disappeared and that they had had a long-running understanding that she would never go on anti-depressants.
He said Tina had experienced a number of personal and family-related upheavals in the previous years; he declined to speak publicly about the nature of those, but said he was too close to realise just how upset she was in the days before “she went away”.
“One of Tina’s biggest fears was ever ending up on anti-depressants. That was the one thing she made me promise I would never make her have. That was kind of from day one. Her best friend told me Monday that she did know that Tina was upset and depressed,” he said.
“We celebrated our 25th anniversary just before the Christmas and everything was good. People who looked at photographs of that Christmas day (before she went missing) who know her said you can see the upset in her eyes.
"When you are living so close to it you don’t see everything that is going on.
I didn’t have any sign. One week after she went away I went to a local car boot sale and a lot of the people from the car boot sale told me that she was going around the car boot sale on the Sunday (before she disappeared) saying ‘I love Richard I would never do anything to hurt him.’ That was the day before.
It is the most revealing insight we have into what life was like in the Satchwell home on the day she disappeared.
This missing persons case began like many such cases, with an email from the garda press office early on May 24, 2017, appealing for help from the public in tracing Tina’s whereabouts.
Despite a huge garda investigation, which has included over 220 separate lines of enquiry, including liaison with Interpol, numerous public appeals and several searches, there is still no sign of her.
Tina, originally from Fermoy, moved to England over 30 years ago. She was 17 when she met Richard in Leicester. He was 21.
He said he always knew he was going to marry her and the couple moved back to Ireland, setting up home first in Fermoy, before moving to the terraced home on Youghal’s Grattan St some years ago.
Richard proposed to her at Mount Pleasant, above the town, overlooking the sea, on October 1989, and they married a short time later.
Tina, who is five foot six inches tall, of medium build with blonde shoulder length hair and blue eyes, loved fashion, animals, swimming and walking, and was well-known for her personal sense of style. But as a couple, they didn’t mingle much with others, preferring their own company.
They have no children, with Tina lavishing love and attention on her parrot Pearl, and her dogs, Heidi and Ruby — they went everywhere together.
Richard said Tina was devastated when Pearl died in January 2017 and was upset for weeks afterwards. They even arranged for a postmortem on the bird, he said.
But within weeks, they had bought a new parrot online around Valentine’s Day, naming him Valentine.
The couple regularly attended car boot sales around Cork — Carrigtwohill, Castletownroche, Blarney and Rathcormac — a routine which seemed to be their main social outlet.
On March 19 last, they attended a car boot sale in Carrigtwohill. It was to be their last social outing together. Gardaí say they have spoken to people who were at the car boot sale and nothing out of the ordinary was reported.
The next morning, March 20, 2017, Richard said he was doing some DIY at home when Tina got up at around 9.10am, and asked him to pick up some groceries in Dungarvan.
Gardaí say he left the house at 10am and drove to Aldi in Dungarvan where he bought some items, and returned to Youghal around 2pm to find Tina’s keys on the floor, her mobile phone on a sitting room table, and crucially, her two dogs alone in the house.
Richard said a substantial quantity of cash, around €26,000, the proceeds of the sale of their previous home in Fermoy, was missing from a cash box, as well as two suitcases.
Four days later, during a visit to Fermoy for a medical appointment, he called members of Tina’s family there to ask if they had seen her.
They checked locally, and with family in England, and when it became apparent that no one had seen her, Richard raised the alarm with gardaí in the town, triggering the missing persons investigation.
Their house and car was forensically examined but nothing of interest was found. Gardaí say they have had numerous potential sightings of Tina at locations around Ireland, in the UK and further afield, all of which have been explored — with negative results.
The investigation team has harvested and viewed hours of CCTV but Tina has not been captured by any of the cameras.
While Tina didn’t own a passport, gardaí have checked ferry ports and airports — again, without success. They have searched the water at Youghal, a section of roadside ditch on the Golf Links Rd, two education centres and scrubland and waste ground close to the couples’ home — all without success.
As the months wore on, Richard denied several times in interviews with TV3 that he had any involvement in his wife’s disappearance, and last June, he made an emotional appeal on Crimecall.
He said:
There’s nobody mad at you. My arms are open. The pets are missing you. I just can’t go on not knowing. Even if you just ring the guards, let people know that you’re all right.
A month later, there was hope of a breakthrough when Richard contacted gardaí to say he had found two suitcases at a clothes bank in the Tesco carpark in Youghal, which looked like ones belonging to his wife.
However, forensic tests later ruled out any connection between the suitcases and Ms Satchwell or her disappearance.
In a bid to keep the public focus on his wife’s case, Richard featured in a Prime Time special in January, presented by Barry Cummins, who has a particular interest in cases of missing people.
Cummins spent several days over several months filming with Richard who told him that he believes his wife was troubled by something in the months before her disappearance.
“I have ideas, but that’s between me and her, there are reasons she was upset, external to the relationship. She was upset,” Richard said.
But he also revealed that both he and his wife had struggled with depression and that 10 years into their married life, he had left their home for the UK for almost a year when he “got down” but had remained in touch with his wife during this time.
Richard said he believes Tina planned to leave, and planned to leave on her own.
“She obviously felt she needed a break — to get her thoughts together, to get her head straight,” he said.
It was this TV appearance which is understood to have led to the emergence of significant information, which in turn, led to the search of Mitchel’s Wood.
Sources have suggested that a male caller who saw the programme, and who only then realised the significance of what he had seen almost a year ago, told gardaí that he had seen a woman matching Tina’s description at the wood, in the company of another person, in suspicious circumstances, around the time of her disappearance.
Reports this week also suggested that gardaí have been told recently that a woman matching Tina’s description was seen entering the wood with another person, again, around the same time as her disappearance, and that the second person emerged alone.
Det Insp Brian Goulding confirmed this week that gardaí are in receipt of new information, but Supt Colm Noonan, who is leading the investigation, has declined to comment in detail on what has led them to search the woods.
He said the search operation has been mounted as a result of their vast enquiries, but significantly, he has appealed to anyone who saw anything suspicious in the area last March to come forward.
In TV interviews with TV3 and Prime Time’s Cummins since Monday, Richard has repeated how he could never harm his wife. He said that neither he nor Tina had ever been in Mitchel’s Wood, and that Tina would never have gone there willingly either with someone or alone.
I know Tina, I can vouch for this, Tina would never go near woods on her own, or go in the company of anybody. She wouldn’t even go near a strange woods with me. I can 100% put that on the line.
He also said she would have put up a fight if she had been brought there under false pretences.
“If any harm has come to Tina in those woods someone would have seen somebody else severely damaged,” he said.
Tina’s cousin, Sarah Howard, has said it’s tearing them apart not knowing where she is.
“Loads of different thoughts go through your head. But I don’t know what’s happened, I don’t have the answers, everything has gone around in our head that it possibly mightn’t be a good result or good news that comes out of it. Somebody has to know something,” Ms Howard said.
Fr Aquinas Duffy, a parish priest in Cabinteely, Dublin, who set up the missing.ie website in 2000 when a close relative went missing and who helped establish the National Missing Persons Day, said people who choose not to share information on missing persons cases prolong the “misery and agony” for families caught up in these tragic circumstances.
His cousin, Aengus Shanahan, 20, hasn’t been seen since he went missing in Limerick on February 11, 2000. His family believe he was murdered.
Fr Duffy said: “It’s hard to understand how someone can remain silent when they know they have information that can put these families’ minds to rest. And it’s not just the person with information — it’s their partners, their friends — they too can choose to remain silent.
"It just prolongs the misery and agony of the families of missing people.”
He said Tina’s loved ones are in a kind of “no-man’s land” and probably greeted the news of the search operation with a sense of hope and dread.
“There is always a conflict inside. Yes, you hope your missing loved one is alive, but a time comes when you know in your heart the person isn’t,” he said. “You can feel guilt even thinking about looking for remains.
The worst part of this time, where you’re still waiting to find out what’s happened, especially in our case where you suspect foul play, is waiting to find the body, wanting to have a funeral. Until you have that, there is no closure.
"It’s 18 years since Aengus, the youngest of the family, disappeared, and Fr Duffy said it has “never left his family. It’s left a huge hole in their lives,” he said.
“But he has always been remembered at family events. His photograph was displayed on the altar during the wedding ceremonies of his two sisters and his brother. He was remembered at the funeral of his mother, Nancy, two years ago.
“His disappearance had a huge effect on her. She went to her grave without knowing. That caused huge heartbreak.”
Aengus’s father, Bob, still holds out hope of finding his son’s remains, and issues public appeals when he can, even as recently as last year.
Fr Duffy said he sincerely hopes the search of the woods in Castlemartyr will lead to a breakthrough which will bring closure to Tina’s family.
He also said he is convinced that there are people in Limerick and elsewhere who have information in relation to his cousin’s case.
Even with the passage of time, you can be amazed and someone can come forward. No matter how irrelevant it seems to someone, I would urge people to come forward.
“The recovery of remains is denied to so many people in Ireland. Once remains are recovered, at least they are no longer missing, and there is closure, a finality to it, he said.”
