On the 12th of December 1995, a man was walking along Ballinamona Beach, Kilmuckridge, Co Wexford in Ireland when he spotted something close by the water’s edge. A woman’s partially skeletonised remains had washed up on shore. Her remains, tangled with seaweed and washed ashore by the tide, were badly decomposed, indicating she had been in the water for a long time.
The Wexford coastline, where St George’s Channel and the Irish Sea meet, tends to be a hotspot where human remains are washed ashore or recovered by fisherman. The sad truth of the matter was, it wasn’t unusual.
After the gardai attended the scene, the woman’s remains were moved to Waterford County Hospital, where a post-mortem was conducted. The pathologist reported the remains to be those of a woman aged between 25 and 40 years, who was about 176cm or 5”7 in height and had undergone a lot of dental treatment, even having a brace fitted on her bottom teeth.
She was wearing a pair of Lee jeans with a diamond-shaped motif of a woman wearing sunglasses, size 33/31 and a pair of brown laced shoes (EU size 39( white socks. On the insole of the shoes was a four-star symbol and the wording, “Made in France”. It was established that the jeans were manufactured in Belgium in 1986-1987 under the fashion name ‘Rumour’. The jeans were never officially sold in Ireland.
She also had two Volkswagen keys in a pocket with a football keyring but no VW vehicle was found abandoned on the coast.
Then state pathologist Dr John Harbison found no evidence of foul play and determined drowning was the suspected cause of death. Although extensive enquiries were made with international police, including Interpol and missing persons organisations, her identity in early 1996 was undetermined.
In May 1996, she was buried in Crosstown Cemetery, Wexford, and nylon ropes were placed around the coffin before it was lowered in case she needed to be given to her family.
By 2007, a family of missing Irish woman Priscilla Clarke, advocated for the missing woman’s remains to be exhumed and a DNA sample taken. Once granted, a pathologist conducted another examination of her remains and they found that the skull was missing. It emerged that the mandible and her lower jaw bone were taken away for investigation in 1996 but were never returned.
Detective Gda Kealy, said he was struck by the woman’s teeth, referring to the previous examination photographs. Quote, “One of the very distinctive things was the braces on her lower teeth-train tracks. In 1995 it would have been most unusual for someone in the 20s or 30s to have braces, this was someone who was well looked after.
To compare the remains to missing Irish woman Priscilla Clarke, Kealy said he took two of the bones to the UK, put them in a steel case and took them to Birmingham to see if they could extract DNA from them. Eventually, the DNA extracted confirmed it was not Priscilla Clarke
Former detective Kealy said he then went to the Doe Network, an international database of missing and unidentified persons. He scoured thousands of profiles and found nothing.
The Ballinoma woman is now almost a postscript at the bottom of the tombstone marking the grave, in which also lie the remains of Bristol native Mark Dean Heardon who drowned off Hook Head on March 5, 1995, while sailing on his own from Waterford to Dublin.
They are buried in a so-called pauper’s grave in Grave 37, Section A at St Ibar’s cemetery, along with another man, Thomas Stafford, who died in 1951. While both men are named on the gravestone, there is just one line referencing the remains of “an unidentified female whose remains were washed ashore at Kilmuckridge 12th December 1995”.
There’s a haunting sadness in how some women are remembered—not by who they were, but by where they were found. The Ballinamona Woman. The Isdal Woman. The Lady of the Dunes. Their names lost to time, their stories reduced to a location, a piece of clothing, or a fragment of their remains. It speaks to something deeply unsettling: how easily some lives are erased, how some women are discarded without justice or even acknowledgment of their existence beyond the mystery of their deaths.
These women had histories, families, laughter, fears, and dreams. Yet, in death, they become a case file, a forensic puzzle, a whisper of tragedy washed ashore or left in an unmarked grave. Their identities should not be footnotes. They deserve names, stories, and remembrance—not just the cold descriptors of their final resting places.