Trevor Deely was 22, from Naas in County Kildare, and had worked since 1999 in the IT department of Bank of Ireland Asset Management in central Dublin. He shared a flat on Serpentine Avenue in Ballsbridge, On Thursday December 7, 2000 the firm held its Christmas party, which moved from the Hilton Hotel to Buck Whaley’s nightclub on Lower Leeson Street.
What happened
He left the club some time between 2:30 and 3:25 am on Friday December 8. It was a wild night, with heavy rain and strong gusts, and a taxi strike meant there were no cabs. Rather than walk straight home he went to his office on Fitzwilliam Place, arriving at about 3:35 am, and was let in by security through the rear gate on Wilton Terrace. He made a hot drink, chatted with a colleague on the night shift and checked his email, and left at about 4:00 am carrying a large dark-blue umbrella with white ACC Bank lettering.
At 4:14 am a camera at a Bank of Ireland cash machine on Haddington Road, just across the Grand Canal at Baggot Street Bridge, recorded him walking past under the umbrella. That is the last confirmed image of him. He was 6 feet 1 inch, slim, with short reddish-brown hair, and wore a mustard and brown checked shirt, beige corduroy flares, dark deck shoes and a green padded jacket. Because he had been at a party, nobody was alarmed when he did not appear on Friday; his flatmates were away for the weekend, and he was reported missing on the Monday after colleagues raised concerns.
The investigation
The three-day delay cost the investigation its best hours. His family printed thousands of leaflets and canvassed businesses along his route, and it was their own trawl that secured the CCTV tapes. Garda divers searched the River Dodder and the Grand Canal; the canal basin could not be drained because of the risk to nearby buildings. Two gardaí and Deely’s sisters traveled to Alaska to speak with a woman he had visited a fortnight before he vanished. Nothing came of any of it, and the case was re-appealed on RTÉ’s Crimecall in 2013.
A new investigation opened in December 2016. In April 2017 gardaí released digitally enhanced footage from the office gate showing a man in dark clothing who had waited there for about half an hour before Deely arrived, spoke briefly with him, and crossed the road. A second figure was recorded on Haddington Road 34 seconds after Deely, and investigators said at the time that they believed the two were the same person. An anonymous donor put up a reward of €100,000, and Detective Superintendent Peter O’Boyle appealed for the man to come forward.
That August gardaí received what they called credible information that Deely had been shot dead after a chance encounter with a well-known criminal and buried on wasteland in Chapelizod, about eight kilometers west of where he was last seen. From August 14 they sealed off three acres beside the River Liffey and dug for six weeks. They found a gun and a quantity of drugs, judged to be a gang’s stash and unconnected, but no trace of Trevor Deely. The search was called off in late September.
The explanations
The man-in-black theory lost some of its force in 2023, when a UK company further enhanced the Haddington Road footage and gardaí traced the figure walking behind Deely. They interviewed him and were satisfied there was nothing sinister in his movements. That left the man at the office gate, who has never been identified, and no explanation for why two of Deely’s colleagues stood outside the gate for a time after he went in. His brother Mark said the news put the family close to square one; the family has no theory and says it is as likely he will walk through the door as be found dead.
The alternatives are the usual ones in a case with no body: that he went into the canal or the Dodder on a stormy night and was never recovered, or that he chose to disappear. His sister recalled his phone ringing out when she called it that weekend, which a researcher noted would be unlikely for a phone of that era if it had been in water, but she was not certain. Nothing supports a voluntary departure; he had left a voicemail for a friend saying he was on his way home.
Where it stands
Gardaí renewed the appeal on the 24th anniversary in December 2024, again asking the man at the gate to identify himself. In June 2025 Garda headquarters confirmed that, following a review of long-running missing-person files, Deely’s case would stay a missing-person inquiry rather than be upgraded to murder unless new evidence emerged. The file is held at Pearse Street Garda Station, and the reward remains on offer.