book review

Title: 'Missing Presumed...' by Alan Bailey

The title is a little coy for me.
Plain speaking in these matters is always the best.
More respectful to the victims too.
Let me be clear.
The people missing in Ireland of whom Mr Bailey writes are missing presumed kidnapped, raped, tortured and slaughtered.
There is no other viable presumption about them.
So to the book itself.
I do not sense in Bailey's writing any of the campaigning style that I am looking for.
There's no urgent appeal to end the corrupt civil and judicial culture in Ireland whereby mafia judges and mafia cops conspire to set murderers at liberty.
There's no call for the reintroduction and carrying out of the death penalty.
There's no exposition at all of what we're dealing with in the collapse of law across our nation and the rise of the IRA and its parliamentary proxies in Sinn Fein as a murderous secret society wielding executive power in every town and village.
There's nothing here at all really.
Just a list of details about people who have gone missing.
I was left asking: What is this book meant to be?
An entertainment?
The blurb on the dust jacket informs us that the author led something called Operation Trace.
Operation Trace was an Irish police investigation which spent 13 years supposedly searching for missing persons without finding any of them, and without arresting any of the people who kidnapped, raped, tortured and murdered them,
They found no one.
They rescued no one.
They convicted no one.
It is an astonishing achievement.
And not to Detective Bailey's credit.
The only time I was aware of Operation Trace actually doing anything positive was when its members used the family of a missing person to silence my commentaries and media speculation about the release of a torturer and rapist called Larry Murphy from an Irish jail.
The police prevailed upon the family to appeal to media commentators to stop asserting that Larry Murphy had killed their family member and others.
Well out of respect for the family, this certainly stopped me.
Though the logic used by the police is again... not to their credit.
In my view the police inveigled that family to make their appeal, because the open expression of commentary about Larry Murphy and his associates' guilt in serial killing crimes in Ireland was starting to make the police look crassly incompetent,
Rapist kidnapper Larry Murphy had no concerns about the fairness of comments calling him a kidnapping torturing murdering rapist.
We know this because he didn't sue.
The improbable police excuse for their action in manipulating the family of a missing person to silence media commentary on Larry Murphy's release was that perhaps media commentary would discourage someone with information from coming forward,
This is the calibre of Detective Alan Bailey and his colleagues in Operation Trace and indeed it is the calibre of his book.
The book does contain confirmation of some salient details which I had personally sought to bring into the public domain about the known case involving Larry Murphy where his known victim having been kidnapped, terrorised, raped and tortured was rescued apparently by two hunters.
She was rescued as Larry Murphy tried to strangle her,
Bailey points out that Larry Murphy had for months stalked this victim like a hunter.
He also confirms that one of Larry Murphy's cousins has a conviction for murder.
He even shows quite precisely how Larry Murphy avoided answering questions in court by pleading guilty and how a liberal judge then gave him a pattycake sentence and how the prison service eventually let him out of jail years early for what they call good behaviour.
But Bailey has precious little original insight to offer in his writing or analysis.
I do not know him but I have no regard for him in his conduct of the investigations regarding the matters described in his book.
The dust jacket again tells us that he works as a volunteer in a Capuchin Day Care facility in Dublin which helps homeless people.
This does not impress me.
I've met gangland in prayer groups.
They seemed like very nice people.
It's very hard to discern what they really are.
This book by Alan Bailed left me wondering what Alan Bailey really is.
And what the Irish police force really is.
I say it again.
Operation Trace traced no one.
The IRA is known to have infiltrated the police and judiciary in Ireland.
Is it possible that IRA rat lines in the police and judiciary are preventing justice for the people kidnapped, raped, tortured and murdered by Larry Murphy and his ilk?
This is a postulation I call intersections of depravity.
We'll know one day.
There is nothing unknown that will not be known.
Alan Bailey does introduce an IRA theme in his writing about a missing person called Annie McCarrick.
But here the IRA theme reads like a red herring.
I thought it was irresponsible and inconsistent of Mr Bailey to assert what he asserted in regard to th fate of Annie McCarrick.
Consider this.
We know murderers sometimes run pass defence for each other.
In one case in Ireland recently a convicted murderer in jail confessed to the additional murder of missing woman Fiona Pender and to yet another additional murder of one of the girls whose family do not want me to comment on her case.
Fiona Pender's mother immediately spoke out stating: "I know who killed my daughter and it wasn't that man who claims to have done it."
Her statement ended the bullsh-t.
But it almost seemed at the time as though the police themselves would have been happy to accept the nonsense testimony of an imprisoned killer trying to derail two investigations on behalf of persons not all that unknown but simply uncaught and unconvicted by those same police.
So.
Yes.
I am likening this piece of attempted pass defence by a jailed murderer on behalf of other murderers, to the testimony Mr Baily claims he received from someone in the IRA about someone else in the IRA who Mr Bailey's supposed IRA source supposedly thinks may have killed Annie McCarrick.
Mr Bailey claims that the man he suspects of killing Annie is currently in the USA.
Oh yes?
And why haven't you extradited him?
Or launched a media or political campaign to bring him to justice?
What exactly is going on here Mr Bailey?
I'll leave the last word to retired police Detective Alan Bailey.
This week the Irish Independent newspaper claims retired police Detective Alan Bailey, former head of Operation Trace, told them that there were never any serial killers involved in the cases of women who went missing in Ireland in the 1990s and that the woman all knew their abductors.
I'll let his comment stand though I disagree with it profoundly.
It is a measure of the man.



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First published Summer 2015