Elizabeth Plunkett was 23 years old when she left McDaniel's pub in Brittas Bay on a Saturday night in August 1976. She never came home. One month later, her body washed up on a beach in County Wexford—a discovery that would expose one of Ireland's most disturbing criminal cases and raise uncomfortable questions about how justice system failures allowed two dangerous men to operate with impunity.
The night Elizabeth disappeared, friends and family launched a desperate search. They scoured Brittas Bay on foot and by car, but the trail went cold. Local witnesses reported seeing two suspicious men lurking in the area that night. Those men—John Shaw and Geoffrey Evans—would vanish themselves before authorities could question them.
What emerged during the subsequent nationwide manhunt was chilling. Shaw and Evans were Ireland's first identified serial killers, recently released from prison when they encountered Elizabeth. After abducting her from the pub, they subjected her to repeated rape before strangling her to death in nearby woods. They placed her naked body in the trunk of their car, then tied it to a stolen lawnmower using rope from a clothesline. In a grotesque final act, they rowed her body out to sea in a stolen 12-foot dinghy named "The Skipper" and dumped it overboard, abandoning the boat two miles along the shoreline.
But Elizabeth was not their only victim. Before her murder, Shaw and Evans approached another unidentified woman in Brittas Bay who managed to escape—a woman the Gardaí, despite their efforts, were unable to locate. After Elizabeth's death and before their arrest, they murdered 23-year-old Mary Duffy.
When finally arrested, both men confessed to Elizabeth's murder. Both were convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for their crimes. Yet in a stunning revelation that emerged in 2022—nearly half a century later—the Plunkett family discovered that despite the confessions and convictions, no one was ever formally convicted specifically for Elizabeth's murder. The oversight had gone unnoticed for decades.
Elizabeth's sisters—Bernie, Kathleen, and Joan—have carried this burden for nearly 50 years. Joan spoke publicly about her sister's case for the first time in almost five decades during the production of "Stolen Sister," a six-episode RTÉ Documentary on One podcast series hosted by Roz Purcell, released in 2025. The family's decision to break their silence after nearly a generation of quiet grief reflects both their pain and their determination to secure formal justice.
