21 years on, missing man mystery endures

AT the age of 22, in the early hours of December 8, 2000, Trevor Deely vanished.

His disappearance in Dublin shortly before Christmas became the subject of possibly the highest-profile search for a missing person in recent years.

Yet, since the moment Trevor walked away from a CCTV camera on Haddington Road, near the Grand Canal in Dublin, nobody has been able to establish what happened to him. It remains a mystery to this day and his case still remains open.

The disappearance is revisited in Scannal on RTÉ1 on Tuesday, December 7, at 7pm,

Over the years, there have been some dramatic developments in the case. The use of enhanced technology revealed potential witnesses to Trevor’s disappearance, and also gave us a snapshot of an older Trevor.

Exhaustive poster and media campaigns have been launched over the years – mainly by Trevor’s family and friends. Extensive searches were carried out in the area around the canal where he was last seen.

And then, in 2017, when gardaí excavated a woodland site near Chapelizod in Dublin after receiving new information, there was the possibility of a potential solution to the mystery.

But, after what was six agonising weeks for the Deelys, the search unfortunately yielded nothing relevant to his case.

It seemed that the young man simply vanished without a trace, leaving no clues as to what might have happened to him.

As the 21st anniversary of his last sighting nears, Scannal looks at the circumstances surrounding his disappearance and at the campaign and extensive searches that were carried out over the years.

Trevor’s closest friend, Glen Cullen, the last person he phoned before his disappearance, reflects on the bonds between them. He thinks of him often and hopes one day he will see him again.

Mark Deely tells us the story of his brother’s disappearance from his own point of view and that of his family.

And, in a rare media interview, Trevor’s sister Pamela speaks about the close relationship she had with her younger brother and trying to cope with the everyday pain of the last 20 years.

She talks of the impact it has had on all her family, on those special milestones that her brother has missed. How her elderly parents need answers.

The Deely family still holds out hope that Trevor will one day walk back into their lives. But, most of all, they hope that someone, somewhere, will yet recall something about the early hours of that windy, rainy Friday night.