How a Freak of Nature Led to Irish Killer Graham Dwyer’s Downfall

The murder of Elaine O’Hara remains one of the most notorious crimes in the State’s history. Now, a new documentary revisits how the Dubliner’s death came perilously close to being the perfect murder.

For 14 months after killing Ms O’Hara, Graham Dwyer may have believed he had successfully concealed his crime.

Then, during an unusually dry August in 2013, water levels at a reservoir in Roundwood, Co. Wicklow, dropped to exceptionally low levels.

As the water receded, the carefully constructed plan of the well-regarded Dublin architect, married father-of-three and seemingly settled family man began to fall apart.

A year after child minder Ms O’Hara disappeared in August 2012, several men noticed objects lying in the muddy reservoir bed, an area normally hidden beneath the water. Among the items were sex toys and clothing, which they brought to the nearest garda station.

Several days later, a local garda returned to the site to search more thoroughly. As he made his way down the bank, he spotted something shining in the mud: a set of keys.

He recovered the keys and brought them to the station, where they were sent for forensic examination. The supermarket loyalty tags attached to them eventually confirmed that they belonged to Ms O’Hara.

That discovery proved to be a crucial piece of the investigation. It would ultimately help lead to October 14, 2013, when gardaí arrived at Dwyer’s home and arrested him.

At that point, investigators had yet to grasp the full horror of what had happened. For many people involved in the case, the details would remain impossible to forget.

Several of the gardaí who worked on the investigation now speak about it in a new episode of RTÉ’s The Case I Can’t Forget.

In September 2013, a month after the keys were found but before they had been linked to Ms O’Hara, a dog walker made a disturbing discovery in woodland on Killakee Mountain in Wicklow: human remains scattered across the area.

The remains were soon identified as those of Ms O’Hara, a 36-year-old woman who had been missing since August 2012.

Because Ms O’Hara had experienced serious mental health difficulties for many years, her family had feared that she might have taken her own life at sea.

Her car had been located at Shanganagh Cemetery in south Dublin, where her much-loved mother was buried. Ms O’Hara had visited the cemetery with her father on the day she vanished.

With little forensic evidence available and no confirmed cause of death, investigators were forced to focus heavily on Ms O’Hara’s digital trail.

Detective Sergeant Grace O’Boyle worked through a vast collection of evidence, including CCTV footage, mobile-phone records, witness accounts and online activity. Her task was to build a timeline that could explain how Ms O’Hara’s remains came to be found on Killakee Mountain.

“A crime scene in a forest or wooded area is not an easy environment in which to conduct an investigation,” she tells the programme.

“There are no CCTV cameras and witnesses are rare. From the outset, the location creates significant challenges for investigators working in and around the scene.

“The evidence is also exposed to the elements. Animals can interfere with a scene, making it difficult to determine whether something is the result of natural activity or could be evidence connected to a crime.”

‘Sixty five per cent of the skeletal remains were recovered. It was a female, roughly between 35 and 40. Elaine appeared to have died where the body was discovered.’

The discovery of the corpse and the identification of the keys and phones nearly an hour away in Vartry Reservoir eventually led gardaí to conclude that, not only was she in a manipulative BDSM relationship with her killer, but also that she had met him on the day she disappeared.

As Detective Sergeant Kevin Duggan reconstructed Elaine’s final movements through detailed CCTV analysis and senior crime analyst Sarah Skedd examined phone records and text messages, one name emerged from the reams of data – Graham Dwyer.

From the outset Detective Duggan knew this case was different: ‘I said to myself this is going to be the most significant investigation that you will ever be involved in.’

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A further breakthrough came when the two phones taken from the reservoir bed were able to be reconstructed. 

They were both able to be switched on and all the text messages were readily available and investigating gardaí had the notorious ‘master’ and ‘slave” phones as they came to be known during the ensuing trial.

Detective Duggan described the discovery of the two mobile phones as ‘a miracle’.

Ms Skedd set to work on finding who owned the master phone: 

‘I started looking for unique journeys and I found there was a day when the ‘master; phone was used in the east of Galway city in the morning and had returned to using cells in the southeast of Dublin city early in the afternoon.

‘So the only realistic way of making the journey in that timeframe is to travel along the motorway network passing through the M6 Toll near Ballinasloe and then through the M4 toll near Enfield.

‘[Through CCTV] we found a vehicle that met those criteria that was registered with an owner at an address in south county Dublin.’

To this day, colleagues and former friends say they cannot believe they were duped by Dwyer.

‘He was the most vanilla person you could ever meet, he was so normal, even dull,’ one recalled.

The investigating team were hugely trepidatious coming up to the trial. For them, they hadn’t got Dwyer until the jury foreperson read out a guilty verdict.

‘I felt enormous pressure and anxiety coming up to this trial,’ Ms Sked recalled.

‘It was very important to me that the work that I had done with the investigation team, that it was, most importantly, a true and accurate reflection of what had happened.’

After an eight week trial in 2015, the jury found Dwyer guilty in a unanimous decision.

The year after he was caged, the arrogant killer boasted to a young female pen pal that he would be freed on appeal. 

He suggested that statements made by State Pathologist Marie Cassidy would help to secure his appeal.

The depraved south Dublin architect made the claims in a series of letters, in which he oozed confidence and repeatedly maintained his innocence, while admitting to ‘extreme sex’.

He wrote to the student at the time: ‘I will buy Dr Cassidy a pint and take you out to celebrate!! He he.’

He was referring to comments by the pathologist that she had believed a not-guilty verdict would be returned in his case due to a lack of physical evidence.

However, the Supreme Court would eventually reject his appeal when the judges ruled unanimously that evidence from mobile-phone data at his trial had been admissible.

Asked to analyse Dwyer’s letters to his young pen pal, American psychotherapist Dr Robi Ludwig previously told MoS: ‘He definitely has an agenda, his mindset is he is not guilty.

‘I don’t see any signs of depression. He’s focused on his goal, he’s on a mission, he’s feeling positive.’ 

She added that if you are wrongfully convicted ‘it’s not a happy place’. She said: ‘He’s taking action, he’s on a mission, he’s working with people, he’s flirting and you’re not depressed if you’re flirting. 

‘I think he loves the attention, and at another level, if you are into sadomasochism, for him this is the masochistic part, getting punished and waiting to get out.’