A Garda review into the disappearance of Imelda Keenan in Waterford City in January 1994 has concluded without an upgrade, leaving her family frustrated and heartbroken.
Imelda, originally from Mountmellick, County Laois, was 22 when she was last seen on Lombard Street. She had moved to Waterford and was living with her boyfriend at the time. Despite extensive searches and decades of campaigning by her family, no trace of her has ever been found.
Speaking after a recent meeting with Gardaí, Gerry Keenan, Imelda’s brother, described the family’s devastation – when speaking to Deise Today on WLR:
“We were told up in Ballybricken Garda Station by a member of the investigation team, the crime bureau team and An Garda Síochána, that unfortunately without sufficient evidence this case can’t go any further and Imelda will still be classed as missing. That’s not good enough for the Keenan family.”
Speaking on the efforts of the review team into the disappearance of Imelda Keenan – Gerry said he’s not exactly sure what they did.
“Seriously, we don’t really know what they’ve done. We just don’t know. They took all the information away, they promised us, they promised us that they would look into Imelda’s case from the beginning right up to today. They would go down every rabbit hole, leave no stone unturned, and they would come back to us as soon as possible with information.”
Following a fruitless decades-long campaign, the news left Gerry emotionally overwhelmed: “It’s in my heart, it’s in my mind 24-7. I’ll never let it go away. I have a hole in my heart since we had the last meeting with Gardaí. I don’t want to face people, I just want to shut everything away. The family are completely devastated with the bad news that we received last Thursday.”
The family compared their experience with other missing-person cases that were reclassified as murder investigations.
“The painful thing is that when I hear of other people, when they get over the line as a murder case, and there’s a case here – Annie McCarrick, and I don’t like mentioning anybody’s name. Annie McCarrick’s father was in Ireland once, Annie McCarrick’s mother was never in Ireland. She made a phone call to Dublin, and with the tick of a pen, it was upgraded to a murder case.”
Gerry added: “We are local people, we are Irish people, we lived here all our life, we pay our taxes. We think that we got treated so badly by the system, it’s just devastating.”
The disappearance of Imelda Keenan remains a mystery more than 31 years later. Her family have long believed she was murdered and have campaigned for the case to be reclassified from a missing person investigation to a murder inquiry.
Despite the review concluding with no upgrade, Gerry vowed that the family will not give up their fight for answers: “I’ll never let it go away… we will continue to fight for her. Somebody knows something. We just need that person to come forward.”
Anyone with information about Imelda Keenan’s disappearance is urged to contact Waterford Garda Station on (051) 305 300, the Garda Confidential Line on 1800 666 111, or any Garda station.
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