Hi, Crime Junkies, Britt here.
And before we jump into today's episode, I wanted to make sure you guys heard the news.
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So we hope to see you there.
But first, of course, here is your regularly scheduled Monday episode.
Hi, Crime Junkies. I'm Ashley Flowers, and I'm Brett.
And the story I have for you today might be new to a lot of you, but I know it's one that our Irish crime junkies would probably recognize from a mile away.
Because it is one of the most notorious and mysterious missing person cases in Irish history.
This is the story of Trevor Daley.
The evening of Thursday, December 7, 2000 is a dreadful one in Dublin, Ireland.
It's chilly and windy, and it is raining so hard that flood alerts are issued for the city's waterways.
It's the kind of weather that makes you want to cancel all your plans and curl up under a warm blanket.
Take a rain check, literally.
But for the employees of Bank of Ireland Asset Management, that's not really an option.
Tonight is the office holiday dinner, and not showing up would be a bad look.
And besides, they've been looking forward to it.
So there's this group that decides to make the most of the night, weather be damned, and they meet up at a bar before dinner for a pint or two.
Drinks are at a downtown Dublin bar called Copper Face Jax, a short 10-minute walk from the Hilton Hotel where the company party is.
And as much as I am sure, they would all love to avoid the terrible weather and catch a cab.
That's not going to happen, the taxi drivers of Dublin are on strike right now.
But weather aside, everyone is having a great time.
They're having drinks, they go to the company dinner, the party keeps going long after the dinner ends.
And at least some of them hang around the hotel until like 2-15 in the morning, and even then, some of what I can only imagine are the more youthful among them aren't ready to call it a night.
So they head to a club called Buck Whaleys for more drinks.
This is a Thursday night, do they not have to work in the morning?
No, they definitely do, but if I'm right about the group being on the younger side sleep is like, it's optional at that age.
And hangovers hit very different.
The older I get, the more it seems like it's like a superpower or something, like the way 20-somethings can just jump back.
I know I used to be able to do it at one point, I don't remember.
You guys gotta use your powers for good.
I know. Nothing positive ever comes from hitting up that one last bomb.
Yeah, youth is wasted on the young, you guys.
Nothing good happens after midnight.
Just go home, go to bed. Very, very true.
But anyways, so 3-30 approaches, and even the stragglers decide to call it a night, although decide, you know, might not be the right word.
I think it's probably last call by that point.
You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here.
You are aging. As half of our crime junkies don't know that that's a song from like, the best generation, the 90s, and it's whatever the reason.
They all say they're goodbyes.
They go their separate ways.
Hope to catch maybe a few hours of sleep before they have to work.
Literally a couple of hours.
So fast forward, those few short hours, when everyone rolls back into work, the IT team notices that they have a no-show.
22-year-old Trevor Dealy.
But you just heard about the night before, no one's especially concerned.
They're not even mad. Even his supervisor, Dar Tracey, is ready to give him a pass.
I mean, he wasn't even like the only no-show in the office that day, and it's safe to assume that even the people that made it to work are probably like, writing the struggle bus.
So Dar is like, listen, I'll have a chat with Trevor about it on Monday, but he's good, he's a reliable employee.
It's not like this is a pattern for him.
So the thought is, let's cut this kid a break, we'll start fresh on Monday.
But that's the thing. When Monday morning rolls around, Trevor's a no-show.
Again. And now they're worried.
Especially when Darah asks around and realizes that no one spoke to him all weekend.
The most concerning part is that a few of them had tried to reach him, but he didn't answer or return their calls.
So as word about Trevor makes its way around the office, a colleague from the IT department named Carl Pender says that he actually saw Trevor that Thursday night, or technically Friday morning, after everyone left the last bar.
You see, Carl hadn't participated in the holiday festivities because the IT department always kept at least one person working the overnight shift.
And that night, the lucky one was Carl.
According to reporting by Rosita Bowlin for the Irish Times, Carl was a little surprised when Trevor showed up at the office at around 3.30 a.m.
like soaking wet. And sure, Carl could tell that Trevor had enjoyed the evening, but he didn't seem like super drunk or anything.
According to a Bowlin told Irish Times, quote, "'I wouldn't consider him as drunk.
I'd probably say I'd seen him worse on other nights.'" Carl says that when he got there, Trevor jumped on his computer, probably to like check his email, although Carl couldn't say that for sure.
And then the two hung out for a little bit over some coffee and tea.
But Carl had to get back to work, so Trevor grabbed an umbrella and he was on his way by about 4 a.m.
And Carl says when he left everything seemed totally fine.
Trevor was his normal, cheerful self.
Which, like all this is good to know, but at this point, it's not making Trevor's boss feel much better.
So he sounds the alarm to HR, and between 10 and 10.30 that morning, they make a call to Trevor's mom Ann and tell her the words that every parent praised they never hear.
Her 22-year-old son, the youngest of four D.L.I.
siblings, is missing. Ann calls her husband Michael and tells him to drop whatever he's doing right now to go see what he can figure out at Trevor's apartment.
They're doing their best not to panic yet, but when Michael rings Trevor's doorbell and there's no response, all attempts to remain calm are out the window.
Michael doesn't have a key, so he can't let himself in, and he's quoted in the Irish Times saying, my head began to buzz eventually.
When it started to dawn on me, could he be missing?
I was getting more and more concerned thinking, is this going to be our situation?
Is Trevor a missing person now?
Ann before Michael calls Ann back to tell her what he's finding in Dublin.
Ann is already well on her way to panicking for her own reasons.
She's been calling Trevor's friends, but call by call none of them have talked to him in days.
Same goes for his older sister, Michelle, who says she actually tried to reach him all weekend.
She'd called multiple times and never got an answer or a call back, which was no big deal at the time like whose calls can you ignore if not your siblings, but in this new light it hits completely different.
Of course that was too many calls.
He would have answered, what if I had been more worried, what if I told mom and dad, what if, what if, what if?
Was his phone ringing through when Michelle called or was it going straight to voicemail?
So this is what's weird, so we know his phone dies at some point, but the reporting is super inconsistent on when exactly that happens.
It's reported as being anywhere from the same morning that he went missing to tenfold days later.
Now Michelle says that she thinks the phone rang all weekend, but she can't be sure.
And I think she's probably right because the co-workers who try and get a hold of him Monday morning don't say anything about his phone being dead or going straight to voicemail, or at least that part hasn't been reported like from his co-workers.
So at this point, everyone who knows Trevor is learning about his disappearance and they're all coming to help look for him.
His older brother Mark lives on the opposite coast in Casabar with his wife who's three months pregnant with their first child.
When Ann reaches out to him that morning he cancels his whole work day and starts driving never imagining that it'll be months before he returns home.
Trevor's childhood friends were also eager to do anything to help.
And actually one of them, a close friend named Glenn, has a little more to offer the dealies around Trevor's timeline that morning he went missing.
You see, he woke up on Friday morning to a voicemail from Trevor, which had been left at around 4.05 am.
So like right after Trevor would have left his office.
Glenn says that he had been out on the town Thursday night with another friend of theirs, and he and Trevor were kind of playing phone tag all night, never fully touching base.
And when Glenn got home he went to bed and he did something that would come to haunt him.
Instead of keeping his phone next to him on the nightstand while he slapped Ringer on, he left it charging in the kitchen.
And whatever happened to Trevor, how do it happened after 4.05 when he left that voicemail?
Because Glenn said the voicemail he got was so completely normal, just like a sorry I missed you kind of message.
And it was so normal that Glenn deleted it as soon as he heard it, having no idea at that point that anything was wrong.
And then there is just nothing after that.
They can't find anyone who saw or spoke to Trevor after he left the office, after he left that voicemail.
Trevor's brother Mark tries to retrace Trevor's steps, literally.
I mean he decides to walk the routes that Trevor might have taken that night, starting at Copperface Jax.
Finding a whole lot of nothing there, he sets off in the direction of Trevor's apartment.
He tells Rosita Bowlin that he's checking side streets and alleys, even dumpsters and trash cans.
And he said like there's this weird moment where like it didn't occur to him till way later that it was probably a body he was looking for that day.
But he wasn't going to find anything.
That's what a security guard posted out front of the American Embassy tells him as he's searching high and low.
This guy must have noticed how hard Mark was looking for something, not realizing he was looking for a some one.
But the guard tells him that he's wasting his time, anything findable has already been found.
How does he know that if he doesn't even know what Mark's looking for?
Well listen, I know the timing of this is a little wild because of what is currently happening on our side of the pond, but Dublin at the time is about to be graced with a visit from President Bill Clinton.
So the assumption is that if there was anything to be found between local police and the President's Secret Service that they would have been good enough to find it.
So wherever Trevor is in whatever condition, it's likely not in downtown Dublin.
Or by hour, the day passes without any sign of Trevor.
And as evening approaches, the dealies are forced to confront the awful reality.
This probably isn't just some terrible misunderstanding that they'll all be able to laugh about later.
So that's when his dad Michael goes to the Garda station in their town of Nase to report his son missing.
The Garda, by the way, are the Garda Shia Kanna, there are Ireland's national police force.
Now it's not clear what the Garda does that evening, but the next morning, the morning of December 12, they are out in force.
They've even got their sub-aquate, which is what they call their dive team there, searching the city's waterways.
Why the water? I don't think there's a specific reason related to Trevor, but I mean, it wouldn't be the first time something like that had happened there.
The Sunday Independent reports that just about a month earlier, there was a young man's body that was found in the water two days after he disappeared during a night out.
And unfortunately, we know that this is something that happens more often than you would expect or more often than people who aren't crime junkies might expect.
Right. I was going to say it happens often enough here that some people even attribute it to a potential serial killer, the Smiley Face Killer.
Right. Where young men are just, they go out, they show up in a waterway.
It turns out the UK has its own version of the Smiley Face Killer, who the people call the pusher.
So even though there's nothing, at least that they've said that specifically points them to the water, it's just like we should probably check, because we've seen this before.
Now, from what I can tell, there are three main bodies of water in and around Dublin that investigators think deserve special attention.
The River Daughter, the Grand Canal, and the Grand Canal Basin.
And while the River Daughter and the Grand Canal are easy searches, the Grand Canal Basin is a whole other story.
In the same reporting I mentioned earlier by Rosita Bolin, Detective Sergeant Michael Fitzgerald says quote, They can look at the Grand Canal Basin, but they can never drain it because the buildings around it would fall in.
Now none of this is to say that they're exclusively focusing on the water though.
Clinton's Secret Service aside, they still canvass the area, they still go house to house taking statements, looking for witnesses, but just based on how common that outcome seems to be, the possibility that Trevor somehow went into the water and drowned could be legit at this point.
Are these waterways like especially easy to fall into or something?
Well, this is where investigators start to lose me because there's only one place that it seems possible and the theory is that the wind had somehow lifted Trevor up by his umbrella and carried him over the bridge's barriers, which aren't particularly low by the way.
And listen, I get it, like the weather was wild that night.
I mean, Rosita Bolin said that the forecast said there was going to be super high winds in the area after midnight.
Okay, but they're saying that he got Mary Poppins into the water?
Yeah. And it's not even just like a few inches off the ground that he would need to go.
As the Sunday Independent reports quote, The footpath is so wide and the parapet is so high, it would be most unlikely that a young man of Trevor stature would be lifted up and thrown over.
End quote. Right. So like I'm thinking the wind, the umbrella, like being blown over into a ditch seems possible.
And also like I don't know what this steel umbrella is, but like if the wind is back, like my umbrella is just like folding on themselves.
Am I making that up? Yeah.
It feels so, I can't think of another word other than like cartoonish.
I know. Imagine this wind like blowing up the umbrella that like you said doesn't get destroyed by wind lifts up a human man across the street and over like a parapet, which sounds like a freaking bridge across the castle.
Yeah. I don't know. Yeah, I like it makes no sense to me, but I feel like I have to be missing something the way that they put this forward.
Like it's plausible. So again, this is where they lost me.
And not for nothing, but the fact that his phone was possibly still ringing days later, to me that puts a giant wrench into the Mary Poppins theory.
Because yeah, like wouldn't it have stopped ringing if it was in the water?
I had a cell phone, maybe not in 2000, but like early 2000s, the early odds, if you will.
Like those things would die at the thought of water.
You know what I mean? If you like cried too hard, they stopped working.
I have a little dramatic, but yes, I have cried too hard my phone and it was fine.
So are they even considering anything more nefarious than an accident?
Like what do they know at this point about Trevor's life?
Like what was he into? Who was he involved with anything there?
Well, they're turning to the family to get all of that.
And there is something that stands out as kind of like an outlier in his life, something out of the normal from his usual routine.
That's always the stuff that you look at, right?
Well, apparently Trevor went on this international trip that he had just gotten back from a few days before he disappeared.
And this was a trip that he booked on an impulse and went on completely alone to a destination where he wasn't exactly welcome.
So at the time this is happening, Glenn, that friend of Trevor's who got the voice mother at night, they're pretty close and Glenn is a flight attendant, meaning that he could get flights on the cheap.
Starting for a few designated family members and friends and Trevor was one of them.
So when they were out one night, like random night, they were talking about this girl that Trevor had a crush on and Glenn was like, I bet you're too chicken to go see her in Anchorage, Alaska.
And I guess Trevor is basically like challenge accepted.
Right, like you're gonna help me pay for it with your sweet discount.
Yeah, I'll do it. Right, so Trevor met this girl over the summer when she was visiting Ireland.
They hit it off or at least Trevor thought that they hit it off and they exchanged contact info.
And then that was that she left whatever, but when her name came up and one boy dared another, Trevor booked a round trip flight to Alaska at the end of November.
Carpe Diem and all that jazz.
The problem is that it's not totally clear that the girl was on board for this.
In fact it kinda seems like she wasn't.
According to his dad Michael, when Trevor mentioned the idea to her in an email, she mostly had brushed him off.
Like, you know, I'm really busy studying for finals, like he shouldn't come.
And for all I know, all of that could have been true or it could have been her way of letting him down gently, but whatever it was, like he didn't take the hint and he booked this trip anyway.
Now what exactly happened when he got there is a little bit of a mystery.
There's not a ton of reporting around it.
But investigators kind of put forward this idea that maybe he got there and then he pissed off a boyfriend or an ex boyfriend or something.
And that person followed him back to Ireland?
Like why wouldn't they have just done something when he was there in Alaska?
I mean, yeah, that makes the most sense.
I think that investigators are just desperate for any kind of lead at this point.
I mean, they're so desperate that I know two investigators straight up fly out to Alaska to look into this.
And they're in good company because Trevor's sister goes out there too at some point.
Although I don't know the timing of that trip.
Either way, investigators interview the girl and then someone she had traveled with and determine that whatever may have happened to Trevor, it probably had nothing to do with him coming to Alaska or with this girl or anything related to that.
So now it's back to the drawing board and back to Ireland.
In the weeks following his disappearance, Trevor's friends and family just blanket Dublin with posters and flyers of Trevor.
They also conduct their own unofficial canvas visiting all of the establishments that he might have passed in the hope that someone, anyone knows something.
And this is wild to me, but it's actually one of these friends doing this who uncovers some of the most consequential evidence in this entire case.
And that friend is a guy named Conleth who works for a company that sells CCTV equipment.
And I don't think I have to explain that.
I think people are pretty familiar with CCTV now.
Yeah, close circuit television.
We're just talking about security cameras.
Right, you got it. Like, again, 2024, we all know.
That CCTV in Ireland in 2000 from what I'm gathering, this is kind of a novel concept at the time.
Definitely not something everyone is aware of or even understands, which is maybe why it falls to Conleth to go looking for it and not the police.
And he has to hurry because he knows enough about it to know that companies that use CCTV don't hang on to the footage forever, at least not at the turn of the millennium.
He explains to Rosita Bowlin that the footage is stored on VHS and it isn't kept long.
Some places delete it as quickly as 24 hours.
Right, which we know now, but like again, novelty then.
Right, and they still delete after 24 hours now.
Some of them have a cloud, but like, even though we have like almost the possibility for unlimited storage, like I feel like this stuff is still gone almost immediately.
Way too sooner at least.
Yeah. Now if all of the places they visit, only one place has footage of Trevor from that night.
And that's the Bank of Ireland at Baguette Street Bridge, which might be a little confusing since Trevor works for Bank of Ireland asset management, but they're not the same thing.
Best I can tell is Bank of Ireland at Baguette Street Bridge is like an actual bank branch wall where he worked Bank of Ireland asset management or BIAM is kind of the arm of the bank that manages investments.
Anyways, the wild part is just how close the footage came to being deleted by the time Conleth got there.
So close that when he talked to the bank manager, the bank manager tells him he's lucky he asked when he did because they keep theirs for more than 24 hours.
They keep it for 28 days, but day 28 was right around the corner.
Now here's the catch. She says she can't release the footage to him directly, but she is able to hold on to it for the garter.
And thank freaking God they do.
Because according to Bowens reporting, this is some of the only footage of Trevor that is ever recovered.
And they're lucky because it actually shows something interesting.
So is this the only CCTV footage they can find?
So no, so this is a little confusing too in the reporting.
But according to Anna Loughlin with the evening Harold, they do have some other footage from BIAM, the building of the bank where he works.
And maybe I'm reading too much into it.
I hope I'm reading too much into it, but it almost makes me wonder if Conleth gives them the idea to ask the bank at all.
I don't know if they already had that and then they just didn't think to go ask anyone else and he had to bring up that idea.
So like, I don't know. I'm a little confused about what timing of it feels a little bit side-eyed, but regardless we have it.
Right. And so basically we have two things.
And this is the only footage ever.
We have this footage from the BIAM.
There's two cameras that we get footage from.
And then we have the footage that Conleth helps get from that other bank branch.
And what it shows is talked about endlessly on the internet.
And I want you guys to go watch it for yourselves, but I want to do my best to break it down because this is the biggest clue we have in Trevor's disappearance.
We're going to link to it.
It's on YouTube, but Brad, I kind of want to do a play by play of this if we can.
Sure. Okay. So this first part of the video is from a sort of like elevated view.
We're looking down at like a little courtyard with a fence around it.
And I think this fence area is like the main focus for the camera we can see.
Like the fence is raw dye iron with these big like columns is what I would call them at like the post points, not just like a regular metal fence all the way around.
There's like these huge columns.
There's some sidewalk out front, a little bit of the street.
Now a guy in dark clothes and a hat just like walked into frame from across the street.
Time stamp is like 305 AM.
He's walking up onto the sidewalk.
And then it looks like he kind of like backs into a corner of this area in front of the building.
I mean, whether it's terrible, like you said, right?
So it looks like he maybe he's like getting tucked in there to protect himself from like the elements or something.
Yeah. And he's by the columns you're talking about.
And you call them like really big columns, but I mean, they're more to me decorative than anything.
When you, if it's raining and is windy as everyone has reported, it's not something that's going to provide you a ton of shelter, right?
Right. Like maybe some like brace from the wind.
Yeah. And then checking his phone.
Okay. And then basically the timestamps, it's like he's in this corner for a while because it skips forward like 28 minutes.
Okay. And he's stepping out now kind of like officially in like the sidewalk space.
It almost looks like he's like looking for someone or waiting on someone, checking maybe his watch or phone again.
Now I see this other guy walking by the sidewalk, like totally normal pace.
So that's Trevor. So the guy in the dark clothes, you're right.
He like steps out into the sidewalk.
He's looking down in the direction that this other guy comes and we know that that's Trevor.
Okay. And like Trevor's just walking down the street, totally normal on his way to whatever's next.
No real like evident acknowledgement or interaction with the guy in dark clothes.
Right. He's just standing there.
Okay. And now that dark clothes guy just like walked away in the same direction as Trevor who like just passed him.
If you like go a second by second, it's weird because like he literally like after Trevor walks by.
He waits a beat and then it's like his head turns around.
And so he could just be looking, but it's almost like, oh, was that the person I was waiting for?
Waiting for did that person call him or something because he turns around.
He like looks for a second.
And then he turns fully like his whole body around and he follows in that direction.
And we that's when we lose both of them out of frame of camera one.
Right. And now we cut to view two, which basically time stamps is just like seconds later.
And this is like through that fence and between some of those like columnish posts.
It kind of feels like it's like just around the corner from our last point of view.
Same fence, but this is shot from like directly inside the gate instead of above it.
And it's a different gate.
So okay. So the direction that Trevor was walking camera to picks up from behind a gate where he was walking.
And what's really interesting is I pulled up an all linked out to this.
I pulled up a picture on Google maps.
It's literally just around this little corner like almost as soon as he walked out of frame of camera one, he would have rounded the corner to camera two.
Okay. That's kind of how it felt because one because of the timestamps.
It's again, like seconds later, but it does feel like a different area for some reason.
Obviously like the point of view is different, but it feels like yeah, he just popped around the corner and now he's at this gate.
Okay. But did you catch what was so weird about that?
So yes, it's a few seconds later, but it's like it picks up at the same time, but then you wait, wait, wait.
And then motion lights come on.
And then the guy in black comes into view first.
I cannot make that make sense.
He would have been behind Trevor based on like them going down those sidewalks seconds early.
Yes. Like two seconds behind him.
So and because there's this delay of when I mean you would expect to see Trevor almost immediately and I think about him like looking back, it almost feels like the two of them had to have like connected outside of the view of the camera.
And then the man comes walking first and then all that you pick up, Trevor's like right behind him.
Yeah. And they walk up to the fence.
It's like a gate section.
You can kind of see like a looped lock on it.
Trevor's going right up the lock kind of talking to the guy as he's like fiddling with unlocking the gate.
And only Trevor walks to the gate, shuts it behind him and kind of walks towards the camera and out of frame.
Right. And then we get a different point of view.
Yeah. So we don't get it picks up later with Trevor leaving.
So we see him. You know, this is after he goes in with his coworker.
He checks his email. They have coffee and tea.
He gets his umbrella. We end up taking our passes.
Yeah. But when the camera picks up and he's leaving with his umbrella, our guy in black is gone.
And as far as I can tell, they have never released any footage showing him leaving.
But when Trevor leaves, he doesn't like interact with it.
He looks like he's booking it and he's on his own.
Right. When he comes to the gate, like the guy in the dark clothes is kind of like off to the side, kind of behind a pillar or column or post or whatever.
And like in theory, he could be still back there.
He could be back there and walked off out of frame away the other direction, not through the camera's like viewpoint.
But it is weird that like it cuts forward and we never see him leave.
And like you said, Trevor doesn't interact with anybody in that corner when he goes to leave.
So you have to assume he's not there.
And the guy in the dark clothes is gone.
Right. And then the last viewpoint is from above looking at a sidewalk below.
And this would be the bank branch camera.
Yeah. And this is like, this isn't just around the corner.
I think this is a little ways away from what I understand.
And it's about 10 minutes later in the time stage.
So I would assume it's a bit of a walk.
And we see him under the umbrella walking down the street.
Pretty normal. Doesn't seem like hurry outside of the fact that it's raining on him.
And then oh, dark clothes guy is back coming down the sidewalk behind Trevor.
Yeah. And then that's it.
Like and the footage. That's it.
So after seeing this, what investigators are naturally wondering is, is it the same guy in both videos?
They think at this point that the answer is yes.
And I am going to call out that in the early days, this is a lot harder to view because it wasn't until 2017 that the guard sent the footage off to the UK to be enhanced.
And from what I can tell in the reporting, the footage from the very first camera might not have looked like much prior to 2017.
Like it took a lot of enhancing.
But based on camera two and camera three, they're thinking that they've got the same guy in black.
And so investigators go public with the footage in January of 2001.
The footage that they had unenhanced back then.
And they do this on an Irish show called Crime Line where they make this plea for this guy to identify himself.
And they don't know this yet, but this will be the first of many such requests because he doesn't come forward to ID himself and no one else IDs him either.
Which isn't to say that the decision to go on TV wasn't productive.
As many as 80 separate tips are called in because of the show, but none that get them any closer to finding Trevor or IDing that man.
When a seriously decomposed body washes up on shore near a city called Togeur in February, it's almost as though the entire country holds its breath, especially once the body is determined to belong to someone between the ages of 25 and 30.
Not exactly Trevor's demographic, but close enough.
And how close is it to Dublin?
I mean, it's a solid three hour drive south, but it is on the same coast.
And it seems like the guard believes that it would have been possible for a body that entered the water in Dublin to make its way to that area.
Neil Leslie reports in the Sunday World quote, detectives believe that the young computer workers body could have been washed out into the Irish Sea if it did end up in the canal.
End quote. But given the advanced state of decomposition, they're going to have to submit some DNA testing to confirm who this is.
And here's the thing I don't know if the remains are ever identified, but I do know that they confirm they aren't Trevor's.
So the investigation chugs along.
And by July of 2001, investigators are considering four main theories.
The evening-hearled reports that they are accidental drowning, a violent assault, suicide, and a voluntary disappearance.
Now the last two are essentially dismissed.
Nothing in the source material suggests a history of mental health struggles or any reason that Trevor might have wanted to start over somewhere else.
Rather everything reports the opposite.
Trevor's is happy dude with a positive attitude, lots of friends and family who adore him, a promising future.
Now as far as foul play, it seems unlikely to investigators that they wouldn't have heard anything about that if that's what happened.
So they're really doubling down on him being Mary Poppins into the canal.
Pretty much. Joanne Heggardy writes in the evening-hearled quote, Some officers believe the 22-year-old computer analyst who is carrying a large umbrella when he disappeared by the early hours of December 8 last was blown into the river by a gust of wind.
But only some officers believe this.
Yes, some. Because when five more years go by and there is still no single sign of Trevor washing up in any water or any sign of his umbrella by the way or his phone or his other possessions, they pretty much rule out the drowning theory.
But ruling that out doesn't tell them what did happen and the years keep passing one by one and little progress is made in that time.
There's a recent aged enhanced picture of Trevor in 2010, but still no word.
Which an aged enhanced image is great, but it's only going to help if he is alive, which feels kind of unlikely to me.
It does, though the dealies are clinging on to hope.
Even questioning whether he could be suffering from amnesia somewhere, which again feels unlikely.
But they're just not ready to give up on Trevor.
But when so much of his disappearance remains a mystery.
Around September of 2016, the case receives a boost when it is handed over to the guard as Sirius crime review team for a cold case review.
But I'm going to have you read a quote from Michael in reporting by Nick Bramhill for the Irish Independent.
It's a little long, fair warning.
Okay, the quote is, I'm delighted that Trevor's case is being looked into again.
There's a team of five or six guard-eye that have been appointed to reinvestigate Trevor's case, and I met with them a couple weeks ago.
There's no body or no scene for them to go on, so they're prioritizing the CCTV footage of him, which has been taken to the UK where they have more advanced methods of examining it than we do here in Ireland.
I'm very pleased that there will be some fresh eyes looking into this, and it has certainly given me and my family a big boost.
I don't want to raise my hopes too much at this stage, but at the same time, I feel far more hopeful than I have in years.
There is a part later in that same piece where he says, quote, it's still our belief that Trevor is alive, and I'll carry on believing that until it is proved otherwise.
Now, this whole process is a little bit of a hurry-up-and-wait kind of thing with this cold case review, but in spring of 2017, Kiran Darcy and Connor Lally report in the Irish Times that the UK team has made incredible progress enhancing the CCTV footage, calling it a quote-unquote significant development.
And again, that's the footage that we got to see just now.
And when they do enhance it, they don't keep it under wraps.
In April, they release it for the public to see, and they do this very intentionally.
Their hope is that someone who knows someone might see the footage and be overcome with guilt.
Not necessarily even the perp, even just a witness with critical information.
Someone who recognizes the way someone walks, whatever.
Darcy and Lally quote an anonymous investigator in that Irish Times piece who says, quote, that's a long shot, but a lot of time has passed since then, and people's circumstances and loyalties change.
Somebody who may have known something then, but was protecting a loved one or was in fear may not now be in that position.
End quote. And then in reporting by Michelle Hennessy for the journal, one of the detectives working the case.
Detective Superintendent O'Boyle says, quote, the actions of this individual, I suppose, would have to be regarded as being suspicious.
By the way, he's talking about the man in the dark clothing.
The quote goes on, he's standing outside of the bank center for approximately a half an hour before Trevor D.
Lee arrives. End quote.
And I think that's an important thing, like you mentioned, but we didn't really hone in on.
Like it is windy, it is cold, it is raining.
He is standing there, presumably for a half hour.
Our footage skips forward, but he's in the same position.
They haven't said if he moves or does anything in that time.
It seems very intentional that he only moves when Trevor walks by and he follows Trevor.
Right. So yet again, they request for this man to come forward and identify himself, which he doesn't.
But John Mooney reports in the Sunday Times that investigators receive quote unquote credible intelligence indicating that Trevor may have been the victim of a robbery and an assault eventually being shoved into a body of water.
So we've ruled out Johnning, but are back at him being in the water?
Yeah, it's enough to give you whiplash, but at least this one kind of makes sense to me.
Yeah. Though you would think they would have potentially found him.
But by the summer of 2017, the foul play theory has evolved more because that's when a confidential informant says that he knows exactly where Trevor's body is buried.
According to the CI, it's on a three-acre plot of wasteland in Chapel-Izod, and the killer might be a career criminal known to the guard for his drug smuggling connections.
So this makes investigators wonder if Trevor was killed in some sort of drug deal that went bad.
But then they also consider that maybe it was just like a chance meeting or maybe he saw something or who- I mean, they don't know at this point, but either way, this is the best thing they've had a long time, and so they begin an exhaustive search of that property in Chapel-Izod.
When they locate a buried firearm, it seems like it all might be coming together, especially considering that their CI had claimed Trevor was killed with a gun.
But obviously, without Trevor, we don't know if it is this gun.
Now in August, Ken Foy and Robin Schiller report in the Irish Independent that they've received intel suggesting that Trevor's killer was a member of a well-known crime family from a place called Crumlin, which is a suburb of Dublin.
This is a development in the theory they're already pursuing in Chapel-Izod, or is this an entirely new theory?
I think it's the same theory.
It's not super clear, because it's all again based on tips from this anonymous CI.
So I can't tell if it's the same CI or if this is a new informant.
I feel like it's gotta be the same one, right?
I would think I've been wrong before, so I don't know.
Either way, another dive team is brought in in late August early September, this time to search the River Liffey, which runs through the Chapel-Izod property.
But on September 21st, Sean Dunn reports in the Irish Times that the search has ended with no further clues about Trevor's fate.
The weather of the CI was lying, or was wrong, I don't know.
But it is worth noting that the CI said that he wanted no part of the $100,000 reward that was being offered in Trevor's case.
So why else come forward?
Right. Investigators did make one final discovery before the search in Chapel-Izod was abandoned.
It was a drugstash worth more than $80,000 euro, which would have equaled a little over $95,000 at the time.
And there's one more big development that I want to end on.
In just December of 2023, one of the central mysteries of this case, or at least half of it, gets solved.
So the man's seeing following Trevor on the CCTV footage from Camera 3, that other bank, not the one that Trevor worked at, that man is found and cleared of any involvement in Trevor's disappearance.
It turns out, apparently investigators had interviewed this guy before, like way in the early days of the investigation.
So he could have been I did and ruled out in a matter of no time.
It reminds me a lot of like the Delphi where they had talked to this person.
He was there all along. I mean granted in this case, this guy's not even considered a suspect.
He was just someone like hustling out of the rain and wearing dark clothing, you know.
It's pretty common. It's like if two more dots were connected, we wouldn't have this question mark, right?
Like we wouldn't have this question mark for two decades longer than we then we needed to essentially.
Yeah. And we wouldn't wonder if it was the same guy following him, but there are still questions that remain.
I don't know that it answers all the questions or takes them all away because they're very clear to say that he is not the guy from the BIAM footage from Camera 1 and 2.
And we're not totally out of shadowy figures in this case.
And that guy has never come forward.
And I'm most interested in that guy, the one that sat out there waiting for 30 minutes.
The one that followed Trevor potentially had some interaction with him before they're seen on Camera 2 and then definitely was talking to him on camera.
Camera 2. Who is that guy?
Where is that guy and why is he not coming forward?
Because that's where things stand today.
Camera's disappearance is as much of a mystery today as it was at the beginning of the new millennium.
So please, if you have any information about the disappearance of Trevor Dele the morning of December 8, 2000, contact the authorities.
I'm especially talking to you Irish crime junkies.
You can reach the Garda at 016669000.
Crime stoppers continues to offer a reward of 100,000 euro to anyone with information that significantly assists in this investigation.
But the real reward is the piece you can bring to the Dele family.
And that is priceless. You can find all the source material for this episode on our website, crimejunkiepodcast.com.
And you can follow us on Instagram at crimejunkiepodcast.
I'll see you next week for a brand new episode.
But don't forget, we'll be back this Thursday with a special fan club episode from the Vald that you won't when you miss.
Crimejunkie is an audio track production.
So what do you think, Chuck?
You approve?
