Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
- Hi everyone, and welcome back to "Binged." I'm Peyton Moreland, and this week's story is a listener suggested case, and it also continues last week's theme of sexualized stabbing, which is a thing. It's a thing both overtly and subconsciously. Subconsciously in that when a male stabs a woman during an act of sexual violence, the stabbing itself is an act of penetration,
more violent than the forcible sexual penetration of rape. And sometimes it's a substitute for sexual penetration. Like in last week's case, the killer initially wasn't able to achieve what he wanted and the frustration and insecurity and or shame, whatever he was feeling in his messed up brain turned to rage. And only after he stabbed his victim several times with a knife was he able to do initially what he had planned to do.
But this is true crime, and sometimes stabbing is a lot more patently sexual. Sometimes, and quite rarely, I would imagine stabbing is the fetish in itself, where one fantasizes about or is turned on by and gets off on the act of stabbing. And there's an element of this in today's story, so let's just jump right in.
Elaine O'Hara just wanted love. She wanted to feel desired. She wanted a man to look at her in the way they looked at other women, with the kind of attention other women received, but not her.
She didn't want to spend the rest of her life alone and childless, but she was fast approaching her late 30s and it felt like the clocks were all ticking away inside an otherwise empty room. Born in Dublin, Ireland on St. Patrick's Day, 1976, the first of three children born to Frank and Elaine O'Hara.
Elaine was one of those unlucky people who seemed destined for a life of misery from the very beginning. She struggled in school where her dyslexia held her back from high academic achievement and she was frequently bullied. And when she was 15, one of her close friends died in an automobile accident. In her teenage years, she began developing severe mental health issues.
She was often admitted to psychiatric hospitals and was diagnosed with clinical depression and borderline personality disorder. She also had asthma and diabetes, was overweight and chain smoked. She was someone who it seemed was doomed to a life of sadness. The joys and triumphs of being alive, the happiness she saw so many others experience were out of reach for her.
She found work as a childcare worker, but that work was inconsistent and she often had to supplement it with other part-time jobs. And when her mother Eileen died in 2002, it left her world almost totally dark. Except for her psychiatrist, the famed Anthony Clare, who took on an almost fatherly stature for O'Hara.
but claire himself fell into a serious depression and decline and when he died suddenly mere months away from his retirement from a heart attack in 2007 all the lights in elaine's world went out and in august of 2012 so would hers
It was first noticed that Elaine was missing on August 24th, 2012. Her father, Frank O'Hara, had been trying to call her, but he couldn't get a hold of her. She hadn't taken any of his calls since he'd last seen her Wednesday afternoon, two days earlier, shortly after she was discharged from a psychiatric hospital. Together, they went to the Chaganaugh Cemetery to place flowers on her mother's grave.
She seemed in good spirits and there seemed to be no explanation for her sudden loss of contact. So Frank O'Hara went to the police, to the Garda, which is the national police force in Ireland. He went to the Garda to report his daughter missing. He explained that Elaine had been due to begin volunteer work at the Tall Ships Festival in Dublin city center and it was something that meant a great deal to her.
Being appointed as a team leader at the festival boosted her confidence and self-esteem, and she regarded this appointment as an important achievement. In fact, when he last saw her late Wednesday afternoon, she told her father she wanted to head home early to get some rest so she'd be refreshed for her appointment bright and early the next morning. She drove away in her car toward what he presumed was her apartment.
Frank's partner, Sheila Hawkins, was supposed to give Elaine a ride to the city center Thursday morning, but Elaine never showed. Sheila, who lived directly across from Elaine's apartment, had noticed that Elaine's apartment was dark the previous evening as though no one was home. When she texted Elaine, see you at 7.15 a.m., she didn't receive a reply. So when she failed to show for her ride, Sheila went over to her apartment, rang the doorbell, and nothing.
She left a message on Elaine's answering machine and then called Frank, Elaine's father, who soon learned that his other daughter, Anne, had telephoned Elaine twice on Wednesday evening, but no one had picked up. Frank explained to the Garda that he then went by the apartment himself and let himself in, only to find his daughter's apartment empty with no signs of life.
Her iPhone, however, was still there and plugged into its charger. He concluded that she must have overslept and raced out without her phone and charger. He left and expected to hear from her by the end of the day. He waited till nearly midnight and yet nothing. He texted her, "Are you alive?"
From across the way, Sheila noticed the apartment was still dark, exactly as it had been the previous night. Sheila walked down to the underground parking area to see if Elaine's car was there, and it wasn't. So she assumed Elaine just got stuck working late at the festival. Everyone was hoping for the best at this point because they didn't want to acknowledge the fear that was nagging at them. That Elaine had done the thing she had long talked about doing, taken her own life.
The next morning, Sheila returned to Elaine's apartment to check if she was there. Again, she wasn't. She called Frank again, who came by and re-entered his daughter's apartment, which he found exactly as he had left it the previous afternoon. He phoned the psychiatric hospital where she'd just been discharged and spoke to her doctor, who told Frank that his daughter had not returned and he hadn't seen her since she was discharged on Wednesday morning.
He then contacted the Tall Ships Festival organizers to ask if Elaine had reported to work either day that she was supposed to, and they say she hadn't. And they added that they were surprised, too, because she'd seemed so excited about her role. It was at this point that Frank feared the worst, and after conferring with his other adult children, he decided to go to the Garda and report Elaine missing.
Frank acknowledged that Elaine had long engaged in self-harm by cutting and had also spoken of suicide often since all the way back in her teens. She had also told her psychiatrist back when she was a teenager about fantasies she had of hurting herself and of having harm inflicted upon her by other people. And in 2006, she was in a coma for a day after overdosing on prescription pills.
During the hospitalization that followed, she often expressed thoughts of self-harm, and doctors wrote in her notes that she appeared to have a death wish. She appeared at the time to have a paranoid persecution complex, and it was noted that she lived, quote, a very lonely life with no friends, and that she found it very difficult to trust people.
Shortly before his death, Dr. Anthony Clare wrote about her sexuality and characterized it as disturbed, masculinized even. And he wrote ominously, it is not going to be diabetes, I'm afraid, or even a straightforward depressive illness that determines the fate of Elaine. More recently, in 2012, a month earlier, Elaine had obtained a noose in order to hang herself, but she instead phoned hospital staff and she was readmitted.
Now, given everything Frank O'Hara had shared about his daughter, the guards first thought was that Elaine had taken her own life, perhaps by throwing herself off a cliff into the Irish Sea. Frank provided a detailed description of Elaine to the guards. Five foot four, stocky, shoulder length, brown hair and eyeglasses.
Joined by his other daughter, Anne, and her husband, Mark, in the search, Mark drove out to the cemetery where Elaine was last known to have been with her father. And there, he observed Elaine's car, a blue Fiat parked at the side of the road leading into the cemetery parking lot. Her car was locked. Mark summoned Elaine's brother, John, and they called roadside assistance to gain entry into her car.
Inside, they found Elaine's driver's license, two packs of cigarettes and her lighter, a GPS device and an Nokia phone charger, which it's not like that would have been hers because Elaine owned an iPhone. Learning of this discovery, Frank joined his family members at the cemetery. Their hearts collectively sank as they realized how much more likely it now seemed that Elaine had taken her own life.
A search team with heat-seeking cameras was sent out by the Garda to sweep the area, including the nearby cliffs and the Irish Sea below them. But as the coastal rains intensified, the Garda had to call back in the helicopters and call off the search as soon as the sun began setting. In the meantime, investigators paid a visit to Elaine's apartment with the hope of uncovering something useful that might point them in the direction of her whereabouts, whether dead or alive.
And what they found at Elaine's apartment shocked them and shifted the focus of the investigation into a completely new direction. Investigators found a locker that was inside Elaine's home. And when they opened it up, what they found inside was a window into a secret life. They found heavy metal chains, padlocks, a dress made of PVC, lubricant, rope, a gas mask, and a black latex bodysuit.
Her prescription medication bottles were unopened. They found computer printouts depicting hunting knives and Google Maps of rugged terrain in the foothills of the Dublin Mountains. In a notebook, there was a website address jotted down on one of the pages, www.fetlife.com, a BDSM website where investigators and Elaine's family soon learned she'd created an account under the username Chained Brunette.
Elaine's family were completely shocked by these discoveries. They knew nothing of her sex life, her apparent taste for BDSM. The next morning, search teams returned to the coastal area around the cemetery where Elaine's mother was buried and where Elaine's car was last seen. The search spanned two days and uncovered absolutely nothing from a wide swath of water and coastal terrain.
Returning to Elaine's apartment with Elaine's father and brother, Garda investigators found even more windows into Elaine's double life. Fetish paraphernalia and BDSM documents, one of which was a primer into the Gorian lifestyle, which faithful bingers will remember me discussing all the way back in January 2020 in our very first episode covering the slave master murders. Check out that episode if you haven't already, but...
Gorean BDSM, if you don't remember, is a type of BDSM that pushes the boundaries farther out into the gray area between consent and non-consent.
essentially there are no safe words in gorean bdsm submissives agree to become their words slaves to their doms giving their again their words masters blanket consent to do just about anything consent to do that which may be non-consensual
The submissive or the slave is then placing absolute trust in their master to not cross the line into hurting or killing them. Police can't help but wonder, was it possible that Elaine had linked up with the wrong master, if you will?
This was an angle Garda investigators felt they needed to explore. Elaine's two laptops and her iPhones, her main iPhone and an old phone with a broken screen were sent to the Computer Crime Investigation Unit for analysis. Meanwhile, her apartment complex's CCTV surveillance footage was downloaded by investigators and reviewed. Elaine's activities on the afternoon of her disappearance suddenly became just a little bit clearer.
At 4.29 p.m., she can be seen entering her apartment alone. A little over half an hour later, at 5.02 p.m., she left, returned a few seconds later, and then left again at 5.05.
At the time she left, she was wearing a turquoise zip-up hoodie, navy tracksuit pants, and white runners, carrying in her hand a mobile phone. She's then seen walking to her car and driving away from her complex. And that's where her role in the videos ends. Investigators then contacted neighboring apartment complexes and establishments and obtained their CCTV footage.
footage taken from cameras at a nearby community center showed elaine's car at 5 12 p.m turning right onto hillcrest road at lambs cross and that's the last they were able to spot of her across all the footage they reviewed
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was the mobile phone Elaine was seen carrying on that video footage as she walked to her car. The iPhone she used, one that she used according to her family nearly all the time, was left behind at her apartment, if you remember. Why? And what phone was she carrying? Was it a burner phone? Irish guards returned to the area of the cemetery and began distributing leaflets with the hope someone would step forward with useful information.
They also began canvassing the area, including the nearby park, during the same hours as those in which Elaine was last seen. And their efforts paid off.
A music teacher named Connor had just finished jogging through the park when investigators stopped him to ask if he'd seen Elaine O'Hara in the area. They showed him a photo of her and he told the guards he recognized her from the previous Wednesday. He said it was around 6:10 p.m. when he began his usual nightly jog through the park.
The ground was wet and it was still sprinkling, so the area was sparsely populated, but he noticed a woman whom he now recognized to be Elaine who appeared to be lost. She approached him and asked if there was a railway bridge nearby, and he directed her toward the footbridge across the nearby rail track.
She then walked on without thanking him or even acknowledging his reply as though she was deep in thought or distracted. He saw the woman again a little while later as he jogged across that very footbridge. She was walking back his way and though they made eye contact, she seemingly looked right through him and kept on walking. It was insignificant, he said, but memorable because of the woman's strange behavior and lack of...
Well, her lack of manners. So now investigators had found someone who had displaced her father as the last person known to have seen Elaine alive. And based on that report, she seemed in what could be interpreted as a dazed or disoriented state.
That, together with what police learned when they interviewed Staff at the hospital from which she had been released that afternoon, namely that she had been considering suicide all the time she was admitted, it was still looking like Elaine ending her life was, unfortunately, still the most likely scenario explaining her disappearance. Upon being interviewed, Elaine's family and her co-workers...
And it's just heartbreaking the way that this is who my sources keep referring to. Just her family and coworkers. It's as if Elaine didn't have any real friends. Maybe she didn't, and I can't help but wonder how lonely that must have been. Upon being interviewed, Elaine's family and her coworkers were not aware of any boyfriends Elaine had ever had or anyone she may have dated casually.
But then her father, Frank, remembered something that she had blurted out to him one time. She said she was into bondage and was seeing a married man from Fox Rock. He shrugged it off as fantasy at the time.
A longtime therapist of Elaine's named Stuart told police that Elaine mentioned a BDSM affair she was having around the same time she told her father. Elaine said she had met a man through a bondage fetish website, a man who was married with a child. She further revealed to Stuart that the man would cut her and occasionally stab her with a small knife. And she would often show Stuart the cuts and marks on her arms and stomach.
She claimed that she had asked the man she was seeing to kill her, but the man refused. She stopped seeing him in 2009, and Stewart also noticed she stopped coming to his office with cuts and marks around that same time.
but then in 2011 she told him she was seeing that same man again he didn't know the man's name but investigators needed to find out the computer crime investigation unit returned a mountain of text messages downloaded from elaine's devices detectives tracked down eight men elaine had connected with through fetish websites but after interviewing each they realized she had only met with two of them
Both men admitted to having had sex with her multiple times, but they didn't continue their relationships with her. According to one of the men, he broke things off because Elaine was into stuff that was way more out there than what he was into. She was too extreme for him. After looking deeper into both men and their backgrounds and vetting their alibis for the day Elaine was last seen, neither of them became a suspect.
And nothing was coming to light during what was shaping into an exhaustive investigation that challenged the most logical conclusion, that Elaine had taken her own life. Slowly, the investigation began to wind down. The case file got stacked below other, more pressing crimes. They believed that if Elaine had died by leaping from a cliff into the Irish Sea, she would eventually surface or wash ashore.
A full year after Elaine went missing, a dog trainer named Magalie was preparing her dog, along with six dogs, for her daily dog walk through the forest in the foothills of the Dublin Mountains. The land was owned by a man named Frank Doyle. 50 acres of wilderness that was ideal for a hike or a dog walk, except it was private property.
But Magalie was acquainted with Doyle, the landowner, and had his permission to walk her dogs there. So on the morning of August 21st, 2013, she took her walk. And as she was loading the dogs in her Jeep to leave, her dog Millie ran into the woods and disappeared behind a stack of cinder blocks that the landowner Doyle had erected as a barrier.
Magalie called out for the dog and Millie came running back with the one thing that doggies love most, a bone.
And it was a long bone. Magalie took the bone from Millie and placed it on top of one of the cinder blocks. And over the next few weeks, when Magalie would walk the dogs on Frank Doyle's land, Millie just kept finding bones from the same area behind the cinder blocks and bringing them back to Magalie. And each time she would put the new bone on the cinder block stack with the growing collection of what Magalie assumed were animal bones.
About 20 miles away on the other side of the mountain, another odd but seemingly innocuous discovery was made by two fishermen standing on a bridge overlooking Vartri Reservoir. Floating the water below them, they noticed a red and black backpack.
It was a curious sight and they wanted to fish it out of the water and see what was inside of it. But they didn't have the right kind of fishing equipment and so they abandoned the idea. Nearly a week later, another set of fishermen named Billy and James and their friend Mick were near the same location when they too noticed a curious thing in the water below. It was a piece of yellow rope. And then he saw a shiny object glistening in the water near it.
From their vantage, it looked like the nose ring of a bull. The three men stood staring at the object, taking turns speculating on what it might be.
Finally, Mick offered to try and get whatever it was. Mick worked with granite and had a 20-foot tension strap in his car with a metal hook at the business end of it. It took several attempts. I can imagine it's like operating one of those claw machines at arcades. And Mick finally was able to hook whatever the thing was. And when he began reeling it in, what it was became apparent as it was pulled from the water and into the air.
It was a rusty pair of leg shackles with handcuffs attached. They could still see rope in the water along with other items that were now becoming visible. So Mick lowered his hook once again and he fished out a long tangled rope snagged inside of which were some intriguing finds.
a black blindfold with velcro straps, a bondage collar, a ball gag, a harness consisting of black straps with padded restraints and buckles. They lowered the hook once again and they pulled up even more items: a turquoise zip-up hoodie, a vest, and a tea towel. Like Magalie with the bones, they stacked these items on the wall of the bridge and dispersed.
but on the drive home and even lying in bed that night billy couldn't stop thinking about what they'd pulled from the reservoir earlier that evening it gnawed at him gave him an uneasy feeling the next morning he returned to the reservoir with a bag and found all the items right where they'd left them so he bagged them up and took them into the garda the guard on duty that day was james o'donohue
He looked at the waterlogged bondage paraphernalia and clothing, thanked Billy, and placed everything in evidence bags, except the clothing, which he hung up to dry. Now I can just see some jaded big city NYPD cop taking one look at a collection of junk like this and chucking it into the trash, never to give it a second thought.
But not young guarder James O'Donohue. The same eerie feeling of unease that spurred Billy to return to the reservoir and bring that stuff in had now overtaken the young guard. He wanted to know why bondage gear and women's clothing had been dumped into the water reservoir at this particular spot and where it came from.
Meanwhile, it was Friday, September 13th, and Magalie, the dog trainer, was once again preparing to load her dogs into her Jeep following their walk around the sprawling Frank Doyle property. And once again, her dog Millie ran behind that pile of cinder blocks out of view. And like every time before, Magalie whistled and called for Millie to come, but this time Millie didn't come.
She called louder, but Millie was too preoccupied with whatever she could be heard digging and scraping at behind the block pile. So Magalie carefully stepped past the block pile barrier into the branch covered path to fetch Millie herself. And as she neared the sounds of her digging dog, her boots began to sink into the marshy ground still flooded from the recent rainfall.
She moved closer, finally coming upon a small clearing. And as she peered into the clearing, she saw more bones scattered in the grass. Among them were spinal vertebrae and a rib cage. She heard the sound of her dog gnawing on a bone somewhere, somewhere nearby. She called out as she pushed her way through the thick brush and tight tangle of trees and then nearly tripped over something that felt rubbery.
She looked down and saw a pair of navy tracksuit pants with a shoe knotted up inside one of the pant legs. A chill went up her spine. In a panic, she called out for Millie, finally saw the dog gnawing on a large bone that looked like a leg, and grabbed her and waded through the dense underbrush back to her Jeep. When she got home, she picked up the phone and called the landowner, Frank Doyle.
Which I might have been hesitant to do, honestly, because what if those human remains I found were a secret old Frank Doyle didn't want anyone to know about?
This is the part of the movie where Frank Doyle hears about the remains and then asks, have you told anyone about this? And then obviously, you know what comes next. But maybe Magalie hadn't seen a lot of movies like that or listened to a lot of true crime podcasts because she called Frank Doyle to tell him that there were bones and pants and her dog was probably chewing on a leg found on his property. He
He then invited her to meet him there and show him where she made this discovery. And okay, I really hope he didn't ask, have you told anyone about this? Because I would not be going. Aside from her dogs, Magalie was the only person who knew about it at this point. And now she was meeting Frank Doyle, the man who owned the property where she found this body. But when she got there, Frank wasn't alone. He was accompanied by his friend, Mick Tierney.
She led the two men with whom she was all alone in the forest to the bones and they looked them over and thought, nah, this has got to be some kind of animal. But then they stumbled upon a mandible with teeth intact. And it was obvious from just one look at this new find that the kind of animal this could be had now been narrowed down to one, a human being. I'm going to go back to the Jeep, Magalie told the two men as she hightailed it back to the safety of the main trail.
Neither of the two men could get cell service in the forest, so they joined Magalie and the three of them headed back to Frank's house, where the Guardia were summoned to the scene. By 8:00 PM, all of the bones had been collected, along with a rusty knife blade found on the ground nearby, and a full investigation was launched. Forensic examination of the bones revealed that they'd been at the site for some time and they'd been scattered by scavenging animals.
But because this seemed like a dump site and unlikely that the victim simply wandered to the spot and died, the case was classified as a homicide. The following Monday, the weather had calmed enough that Garda James O'Donohue ventured out to the spot where the men from earlier had reeled in that treasure trove of bondage gear.
He had been there a few days earlier and saw something glistening in the water, but the weather was too wet, the water too high to enter the water on that day. But on this day, conditions were ideal. O'Donohue climbed into his rubber boots and entered the water, carefully searching the spot where he had seen that glistening object on his first visit.
And after some persistence, his hands finally met with something unnatural. He pulled it out of the water and saw what it was. A bondage mask with zippers over the eye and mouth holes. Inside of the mask was a key ring full of keys and loyalty cards.
Attached to the keyring were loyalty cards for Dunes Store, a retail chain, Apple Green, a gas station and convenience store chain, and Super Quinn, a supermarket chain. When he returned to the station, he phoned Dunes Store and identified himself and stated that he needed to know whom a particular loyalty card belonged to.
He read the Dunes employee the numbers on the card and after a moment, the employee had a name. The loyalty card belonged to a woman named Elaine O'Hara. O'Donohue thanked the store employee and after the call, he punched Elaine O'Hara's name into the database. Elaine O'Hara, he then learned, was a missing person.
And within a matter of days, the remains that were found in the forest on Frank Doyle's property were positively identified as Elaine O'Hara's using dental records. At this point, the long stalled investigation in Elaine O'Hara, believed to have been a suicide, was now priority number one.
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Let's get back into the episode. When reports of the discovery of Elaine's remains hit the local news, a woman named Edna Lillies recognized Elaine from when they were both inpatients at the psychiatric hospital six years earlier. They had, in fact, become friends while at the hospital and would occasionally meet for coffee.
The last time she'd met with Elaine was in late 2011 or early 2012. And during that meeting, Elaine told Edna something that now returned to haunt her. Elaine mentioned being involved with a man she'd met online, a married architect with children. But the relationship, she said, was purely physical and he would inflict physical pain on her by cutting her with a knife.
This is obviously sounding familiar. Elaine had shown her several cuts on her abdomen to illustrate. Edna remembered telling Elaine, you're playing a dangerous game and advising her to keep that man's details written down and stored somewhere safe.
Elaine promised to do this, but then she never heard from Edna again. She had surmised that Elaine recognized her disapproval of the relationship and because she chose to continue it, she didn't want to be met with Edna's disapproval again. So the friendship ended. Now seeing that Elaine was dead and probably murdered, Edna went straight to the Garda to tell them what she knew.
Interviews with more of Elaine's coworkers revealed more mentions of this mysterious married man she was involved with. And upon reviewing CCTV footage from the lobby of Elaine's building from the months leading up to her disappearance and murder, they noticed multiple visits by a mystery man who seemed to be aware he was being recorded as he kept his back to the camera and covered his hand when calling the elevator to conceal it from the camera.
Around this time, Gardner investigators dug back into Elaine's laptops and online activities. On her MacBook, there was a PDF of a book about serial killers and their signature characteristics, written by Robert D. Keppel, a noted American detective who worked on the Green River Killer and Ted Bundy investigations.
Inside the book were graphic crime scene photos and post-mortem images. And there was also a chapter on Jack the Ripper that honed in on what Keppel felt was his signature element, piqueurism, which is a sexual fetish in which pleasure is derived from penetrating another person's flesh with a sharp instrument, such as a knife.
Investigators also found stories Elaine wrote that depicted fantasies of abduction and torture and a slave contract. And the metadata on the slave contract revealed that it did not originate from Elaine's computer. According to the metadata, the author of the document was quote, "A and D Wedgert." A and D Wedgert. Police are like, "Who is this?"
It didn't take long to figure out that A&D Wedgert was A&D Wedgert and Partners Architects, an architectural firm based in Dublin, founded by Andre Wedgert and his wife.
But what were their connections to Elaine? Over 4,000 text messages were extracted from Elaine's MacBook and over half of those messages were between Elaine and an unidentified number that was saved to Elaine's contacts under the name David. Investigators determined that the phone to which this number was connected was a prepaid Nokia, a burner phone. This phone, they realized, was purchased for the sole purpose of communicating with Elaine O'Hara.
there was no other activity associated with the phone from the date it was purchased, which was March 26th, 2011, to the date it was last used, which was July 12th, 2012.
As investigators read through the thousands of messages exchanged between Elaine and the unknown man who owned the phone, they were shocked by the explicitness and depravity of what they were reading. It was very much master and slave terminology and relationship. And one of the running themes throughout their dialogues was the man's burning desire to stab Elaine to death, a wish he brought up many, many times.
"I want to stick my knife in flesh while I am sexually aroused," he wrote in a text message. "Blood turns me on and I'd like to stab a girl to death sometime." Now, Elaine wasn't going along with this. She...
expressed a dislike for the mysterious man's knife play she said i'm not giving blood sir for anything he said i might just snap and stick you anyway against your will she said every time you come near me that scares me she wrote forget it in later exchanges the mysterious man talked about watching news reports on a woman stabbing and wishing he'd been the guy that had done it he
He asked Elaine when she would be ready for it. She said, I don't know, hopefully never, but that will change. Meanwhile, as Elaine's text exchanges were being reviewed, the guardia returned to the reservoir where those items were previously recovered, this time with a water search unit.
And they found more items. Two Nokia phones, two sets of handcuffs, two knives, a leather collar, a pair of sex toys, a pair of eyeglasses, and a red and black backpack. A serial number on the eyeglasses confirmed they belonged to Elaine O'Hara. They also conducted a more thorough search of the woods on Frank Doyle's property where Elaine's remains were found and they found more bondage related items there.
hacksaw blades, insulation tape, twine, cable ties, and harnesses. They also found a shovel leading them to theorize that her killer may have intended to bury her but gave up after the underbrush proved too difficult to cut through.
They needed to find out who this man was, the man behind the text. While combing through messages, they discovered that the mysterious man had explained that he had come in fifth place during a flying event. Police looked for piloting events. They looked for fly fishing events, but eventually discovered that on that specific weekend of the messages, there were people flying model airplanes in an event. And so they went back through records to try to discover who had come in fifth place.
In the report on the final results of the competition, the fifth place finisher was a man named Graham Dyer. Graham Dyer was 39 years old and had a wife and children, much like the man Elaine mentioned she'd been involved with. And he also lived in Fox Rock, consistent with the married man she had talked about. Furthermore, references to a Graham appeared in some of Elaine's diary entries and Graham Dyer's name and number were in her address book.
And Graham worked as an architect and had been a director at the architectural firm A&D Wedgert, which had appeared as the author of several files on Elaine's MacBook. And Graham Dyer also appeared to be the man seen on the CCTV footage of visiting Elaine's apartment on numerous occasions while keeping his back to the camera.
So now they had a prime suspect in Elaine's murder. And for the time being, they wanted to keep their eye on Graham without him being tipped off that he was a suspect. And they were also still making their way through the thousands of text messages exchanged between Elaine and the man, the man they now suspected was Graham.
In August 2011, Graham had told Elaine that he'd found someone to kill, a real estate agent that he'd selected at random after spotting her on the street. He told Elaine that they were going to plan the murder together and she would need a non-traceable burner phone to communicate from, here on out of course, to contact the real estate agent and set her up by pretending to be prospective clients.
Elaine replied that this sounded way too dangerous and she didn't want to get caught and it seemed to take the wind out of his cells about attacking the estate agent.
But it seemed Graham really did purchase the burner phones because when the Nokia devices recovered from the reservoir were examined at the forensic science laboratory, it was determined that both were purchased on November 30th, 2011 at the same store for the sole purpose of communicating with the other, which would explain the Nokia charger found in Elaine's car.
One of the phone numbers had been recorded in Elaine's iPhone contacts as David S2 phone R. And close to 1,500 text messages were exchanged between the two devices all the way up to the day Elaine disappeared. It was also learned that Graham had a hunting knife delivered to his office in a package marked private and confidential only days before Elaine's murder.
On October 17th, 2013, Graham Dyer was arrested on suspicion of murder. The Fox Rock home he shared with his wife and two young children was searched, and a number of incriminating items were found, including sex videos in which Dyer appeared to non-fatally stab and cut bound women during intercourse.
In another video, Dyer knocks himself unconscious with chloroform and when he comes to, he addresses the camera and reports, "I'm very disoriented, I'm dizzy, and I have very little recollection of what happened." He was clearly experimenting and rehearsing to chloroform another person. When investigators began questioning Graham, he denied knowing Elaine. When confronted with the CCTV footage that proved he visited her and semen in her bed that had already been matched to him by DNA,
He admitted knowing her, but denied having killed her. He pled not guilty and his trial began on January 22nd, 2015.
The trial lasted for two months and it ended with the jury returning a unanimous verdict of guilty. He was sentenced to life in prison and Graham filed an appeal in 2021, but it was ultimately dismissed by Ireland's Court of Appeal. And that's it for this week's case. Next week, we return with a brand new episode and a brand new theme. So I'll see you then.