Ghost: The Disappearance of Sandra Collins (Episode 6)
6/15/202649 min
Retired garda detective Eddie Naughton spent the last 16 years of his career working on the Sandra Collins case. He remembers all the details and who was investigated. He recalls how few days after Sandra went missing, a local plasterer called Martin Earley dropped into the garda station to inquire how the search was going. Suspicions are raised about this married man and why he’s so interested in what has happened to a woman he claims to have only met in recent weeks. There is no sign of Sandra, her family cling on to hope that she has simply moved away. But in 2010 her case is finally upgraded to a murder inquiry.
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First 90 secondsNicola Tallant· Host0:01
It's obvious Eddie Naughton really loved being a guard. He almost made it to 40 years service and only retired when he absolutely had to, actually on the night before he turned the mandatory retirement age for An Garda Síochána. He's from Sligo and he still lives there just a few miles from the North Mayo border. This is a landscape he always knew intimately, and he knows it even better now because since he's finished at the guards, he got a job driving local school buses. He hates being idle and loves the daily interactions with the younger generations. During his long career, he investigated almost every kind of crime imaginable and was promoted into Ballina's detective unit in 1993. He knows a lot of people in this town and throughout the surrounding villages, including Killala. He reckons this large pocket of North Mayo is a quiet enough sort of area with the usual kind of social issues. And while sometimes folk will be reported missing, they generally turn up again pretty quickly. There's only one other local case he can think of that resulted in an unimaginable tragic ending for a family whose daughter didn't come home, 20-year-old Gillian Thornton, who was murdered after a disco in 1997. Considering how much time has passed, Eddie remembers the details of her death and the subsequent investigation very well. But then he knew the people involved and saw firsthand the devastation Gillian's