In late August 1976, Elizabeth Plunkett left McDaniel's pub in Ringsend, Dublin, alone. The 23-year-old would never return home. She had been abducted by Geoffrey Evans and John Shaw, two English serial killers fleeing rape charges in the UK. What followed was a brutal murder that would remain unsolved for nearly five decades—until a groundbreaking RTÉ podcast brought new witnesses forward and forced authorities to confront a dark chapter in Irish criminal history.
Evans, born 12 June 1943, and Shaw, born 6 July 1945, were both from the north of England when they arrived in Ireland. On 28 August 1976, they abducted Plunkett after she left the pub. She was taken to Brittas Bay, County Wicklow, where she was raped and murdered. To dispose of her body, they tied it to a lawnmower and dumped it in the Irish Sea. On 28 September 1976, Plunkett's remains washed ashore at Duncormick beach in County Wexford, more than 110 kilometres away.
Just weeks later, the two men struck again. Mary Duffy, also 23 years old, was abducted while walking home from a cook shift in Castlebar. Shaw and Evans took her to Connemara, where over two days she was beaten and raped. She was then murdered. Her body was weighted down with a concrete block and sledgehammer before being dumped in Lough Inagh, County Galway.
The pair had planned far worse. According to police records, they had intended to rape and murder one woman per week—a chilling blueprint for systematic predation.
On 26 September 1976, Evans and Shaw were arrested. Both received life sentences. Yet despite their confessions to both murders, neither man was ever formally convicted of killing Plunkett or Duffy. The legal outcome remained a hollow victory: two serial killers imprisoned, but the actual murders of their victims never adjudicated in court.
Before coming to Ireland, the two had been detained in Cork for burglary and each served two-year sentences, being released after just 18 months. They became long-serving prisoners in the Irish penal system, spending decades behind bars.
The case might have remained a footnote in Irish criminal history had it not been for RTÉ's investigative podcast "Stolen Sister," which aired in May 2025. The series examined the murders and the failures of the justice system to fully account for what happened to Plunkett and Duffy. The podcast's impact was immediate and profound.
