She Vanished From Her Flat While Seven Months Pregnant: Where Is Fiona Pender?
During the summer of 1996, Fiona Pender vanished without a trace. She was 25 years old and seven months pregnant at the time. Irish police have now concluded search operations in the Slieve Bloom mountains in County Laois. They also reclassified her case from a missing persons investigation to a murder investigation.
Fiona went missing in County Offaly. She was last seen on August 23, 1996, at her flat on Church Street in Tullamore.
She was five feet and five inches tall, had long blonde hair, and was looking forward to the birth of her child. She was wearing white leggings and brightly colored clothing at the time of her disappearance.
She worked as a hairdresser and lived with her boyfriend in a flat on Church Street in her hometown. The day before she went missing, she was shopping for baby clothes with her mother, Josephine, in Tullamore.
After their shopping trip, she stayed at the family home for a few hours and chatted with her father, Sean, about the fishing trip he would be going on soon.
Josephine and Fiona’s brother, Mark, parted ways with her when they reached the entrance to her place. They made plans to meet up again the next day, on August 23.
That day, Fiona’s mother and father stopped by her flat at separate times. They both noticed that the blinds were closed and the lights were not on, so they assumed she was resting or out with friends. But when they hadn’t heard from her by Saturday afternoon, they decided to check up on her.
After knocking on the door and receiving no response, they called her boyfriend, John Thompson. The last time John saw Fiona was on Friday, August 22, when he left their flat to go to work on his family’s farm. He had spent the night on the farm and presumed that Fiona was with her parents.
On April 24, 1997, John, his father Archie, and his three sisters were arrested in relation to Fiona’s disappearance.
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However, they were released after 12 hours of questioning, as there was no evidence to link them to the crime. No further arrests were made.
The investigation into Fiona’s disappearance continued for 28 years without success. In 2000, nearly four years after Fiona went missing, her 50-year-old father was found dead in the family home.
His widow, Josephine, believed that he took his own life because he couldn’t bear to live without his children.
In May 2008, a hiker stumbled upon a makeshift cross that appeared to have been recently put up in the Monicknew Woods in the Slieve Bloom Mountains. The cross contained the words: “Fiona Pender. Buried here, August 22nd, 1996.”
The Irish police searched a two-acre site in the area, but there was no trace of her body. Fiona’s mother, Josephine, died in 2017 at the age of 68 without knowing what happened to her daughter and unborn grandchild.
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