Each year, when the New Year's Eve fireworks light up the sea beside her home at Mijas Costas near Malaga, Spain, Dublin woman Audrey Fitzpatrick closes the curtains. The whitewashed streets in their adopted suburb of expats -- known as "Little England" to the locals -- are always thronged with people on that night, but Audrey just wants to sleep. She and her partner, Dave Mahon, never ring in the New Year any more. Their friends know not to contact them around this time.
"To be honest they're half-afraid. They know we don't do anything," she says, wiping away a tear. "We can't. I don't want to know when one year changes into the next. We don't do Christmas either, to be honest. If I celebrated I would just be thinking of her even more than I already am."
For Audrey and Dave, New Year's Eve will forever be an anniversary, not a celebration. It was on that night three years ago that Audrey's then 15-year-old daughter Amy went missing. They had been at a party organised by friends at a local Irish bar when Audrey took a call from Amy, who was babysitting at her friend Ashley's house. "I had a rule that we always called each other at midnight on New Year's. She was raising her voice over the fireworks. It was hard to hear, but I knew where she was because she was calling from the landline and I could see the number on the phone.That made me feel she was safe. She was wishing me a Happy New Year."
That was the last conversation Audrey ever had with her daughter. When Amy didn't come home the next night Audrey became worried. "I came in from work and there was no mess in the kitchen so I knew she hadn't been there. I was cursing her and worried about her. She had stayed out with friends before, but if she didn't ring me, the parents would always ring me. We had the usual mother-daughter rows, but nothing serious. I was still thinking she has to be at a friend's house somewhere."
Audrey rang around Amy's friends but none of them had seen her after she left Ashley's house. The walk from her friend's house to her home should have taken only 10 minutes. At that point it was clear that a police report would have to be filed, but even as she was doing this, Audrey felt sure that some mistake had been made. "I was still thinking she has to be at a friend's house somewhere. To be honest, as I was doing the formal report I was thinking to myself 'she is going to reappear now and make a big show of me'. And actually, as hard as it might be to understand, that was the best thing for me. I had to think, 'I am making this too big', or I wouldn't have been able to hold it together. It was only really when all the media came down and there were helicopters buzzing over the house that it began to hit home. There were sniffer dogs and reporters everywhere. I knew if she had been able to come home at that point she would have done so -- she would have seen the publicity and the media. That was when I really became scared and thought 'what is happening? Where is she?'"
What was unfolding was an international manhunt, which has lasted to this day and has pushed Amy's family, already cursed with multiple tragedies, almost to the brink of financial ruin.There would be widespread frustration at the slowness of the Spanish police's investigation. And as the search moved into private hands, and the months without Amy turned into years, her disappearance would lay bare old family wounds.
Audrey Fitzpatrick, who comes from Artane, in Dublin, split from Amy's father, Christopher, in the early part of the past decade. When their marriage broke down, Audrey moved with Amy and her older brother Dean from the Clare Hall area of Dublin over to Mijas Costas near Malaga, where the family lived in an apartment before moving to a nearby house. Audrey and Dave ran a local property business and, as more and more Irish purchased houses in Spain, business boomed and life was good. Amy attended the local school and acquired something of an English accent -- most of her classmates came from
Britain. Although an attractive girl, she didn't, according to those who knew her, have a boyfriend.
After Amy's disappearance there were those who said she ran wild in these years. It was claimed that in 2005 -- three years before the girl's disappearance -- a local woman, a "concerned mother," sent a "mercy letter" to the Irish embassy in Spain, highlighting concerns for Amy's safety and insisting she needed to get back to
Ireland. Other Spanish reports suggested that Amy had been sleeping rough on occasion, was frequently absent from school, and had not registered for the school year before she went missing.
"None of that is true at all," Audrey says. She [Amy] was registered for school, and of course, she never slept rough. In the months after Amy's disappearance two websites -- searchforamy.com and missingamy.net were set up, the former by Amy's aunt (and Christopher's sister), Christine, along with Irish private investigator
Liam Brady, and the latter by Audrey and Dave. Each website claimed to be the "offical" website to be contacted with leads as to Amy's whereabouts.
Meanwhile Spanish police were failing to come up with any substantial leads. The hard, bare facts of Amy's disappearance were never elaborated upon. The description of her clothes as she left Ashley's house -- crushed velvet tracksuit bottoms and a black T-shirt with the word "Diesel" -- was released, along with her age and height (5'5"). In other key respects, the police made their own job more difficult. Most child abduction experts recognise that the 24 hours after a child is reported missing is the most crucial time of all in the investigation. Errors committed then can rarely be rectified at a later stage.
As in the Madeleine McCann case, a key mistake seems to have been not sealing off the country's borders in the hours after Amy was reported missing. The border with Portugal is a mere line in the road -- even though the Irish girl was still on her mother's passport she could easily have been moved outside of Spain. Both sides in the family felt that the Department of Foreign Affairs did not do enough.
Throughout the aftermath of Amy's disappearance the Department of Foreign Affairs insisted that the Irish embassy was providing "full assistance" to the family. Audrey now says that the only help they gave related to fast-tracking her own passport.
Local officials in the area in which Amy went missing also refused family requests to allow empty billboards to be used to display her image. The Irish media were more helpful in keeping the case alive, the family say, and in May of 2008, Audrey appeared on The Late Late Show to make an impassioned plea for information on her daughter's disappearance. The haunting images of a child on the verge of womanhood, pouting playfully, were emblazoned across our newspapers. The memory of Madeleine McCann -- who went missing the summer before -- was still fresh. We wondered if the intricacies of the Spanish legal system would be as difficult to navigate.
Unfortunately, all of the publicity brought out the worst in some people. The family were the victims of a number of cruel hoaxes. People would text the information line that they had set up claiming they were Amy and asking credit to be put on the number of a phone. "That someone would use our situation just to get €20 credit is unbelievable," says Audrey, "but that happened."
Another man, with an African accent, called and said he had Amy in
Madrid and that the police were not be involved. He was to call back and Audrey waited by the phone "with my heart in my mouth". He eventually did call back and asked for €500,000 in cash to be brought to Madrid, at which point it became another suspected hoax. The number from which the man was calling turned out to be a ready-to-go-type number and police were unable to trace the owner.
As the first summer dragged on without Amy, events took an even more sinister turn. In August 2008, the home of Dave and Audrey's lawyer in Riviera del Sol, near Fuengirola, was broken into and a laptop that was used in the search for Amy was stolen, as well as her old Nokia mobile phone. The 32-year-old lawyer, Juan de la Fuente, said the burglars got in to his property by forcing a locked garden gate. He said: "The stolen documents included confidential police reports about Amy's disappearance. I believe the burglary was related to Amy's disappearance. It makes no sense that they took documents which financially are worthless, and left behind all my expensive valuables like TVs, computers and music equipment."
While publicly fighting to have the search continued, Audrey struggled with her own private pain at what had happened. After Amy's disappearance, well-meaning friends had come into the house and had cleaned up the Irish girl's room. "I took things back out of the wardrobe and threw them on the bed the way she would have them. It just didn't feel like her spirit was there, with things all perfectly tidy."
Audrey's family was faced with further grief the year after Amy's disappearance as the teenager's cousin, Irish pop starlet Beverly O'Sullivan, was killed in a car crash in
India. Beverly had toured with Westlife before her death.
The song that plays when the website missingamy.net is opened was written and performed by O'Sullivan to raise awareness of her cousin's plight. Beverly and Amy had been close to each other growing up in Clare Hall in Dublin, before Amy moved to Spain.
Thanks to her family's efforts, Amy's disappearance remained on the political agenda in Spain throughout 2009. The Spanish prime minister pledged his country's full commitment to finding the Irish teenager. In a letter to then-Taoiseach
Brian Cowen, released on the eve of Amy's 17th birthday,
Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero wrote: " I would like to assure you and Amy's family that the Spanish police and the relevant services are carrying out their investigation with the utmost diligence. I understand, Taoiseach, the despair and anguish of Amy's family and I would like to ask you to convey to them my solidarity and the firm commitment of the Spanish authorities to advance in the investigation in order to clarify her disappearance."
If Zapatero was committed, his countrymen in the police force had not moved any closer to finding Amy. Frustrated by the lack of progress, Audrey and Dave last year decided to take matters into their own hands. In April a €1m reward was offered for information leading to Amy's discovery -- dead or alive.
Audrey told a press conference in Malaga that four friends in Ireland had put up €250,000 each. The reward was only valid for a month, but it succeeded in putting Amy's name back in the headlines and keeping the search for her alive.
The quest to find their daughter exacted a financial toll on Dave and Audrey and combined with the ongoing economic situation in Spain they were soon in dire straits. By late 2009 they were reportedly €38,000 behind on their mortgage payments and there was a chance they would be evicted from their house.
Audrey said she was in a state of "panic" because there would be no one at home when her daughter, whom she is convinced is still alive, returns. Since then the financial ship has been steadied somewhat but staying solvent while all of their emotional energy is taken up with searching for Amy remains a struggle. "None of this is about money," Audrey says. "We've seen that a million euro won't even bring her back, necessarily. What we really need is information."
As more and more time passes the statistical odds of finding Amy alive have diminished greatly. One source close to the case expresses extreme scepticism that she will ever be found. "It would take a miracle at this stage. I don't expect we will see her alive again."
Audrey and Dave cannot allow themselves the luxury of such morbid pessimism. Against all the odds they continue to hold out hope. Amy wanted to be a vet, Audrey says, and maybe one day she will be able to fulfil that ambition.
They have their own theories on what may have happened to her and where she might be: "I do think that she may be in England, that she may have been brainwashed by an older man," Audrey says. "It's just one of the things we've picked up from speaking to her friends and making our own inquiries. Our topic of conversation is Amy 24/7, Dave and myself are like a debate team, trying to come up with new ways to find her."
It has now been more than three years since the Irish teenager went missing. She would have been 19 on February 7, just gone by. The Spanish police have kept the file open and re-interviewed certain witnesses. For the family the waiting continues. They plan to blanket Spanish towns with flyers and posters of Amy.
Her brother, Dean, now 21, has moved from Spain back to Ireland but, Audrey and Dave will not move. In a room overlooking the sea there will always be a light on for one Dublin girl.
"There's nothing really left for me in Ireland," Audrey says, the tears falling again. "This was home for Amy and I want to stay here in case she ever comes home."
- Donal Lynch
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