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 The people who make a difference in the Canary Islands Audrey Fitzpatrick, mother of Dublin-born teenager Amy, who went missing from her home in Mijas on New Year’s Day 2008 Amy’s Mum clings to hope The mother of a Dublin teenager who has not been seen for more than a year says that “nothing else matters in her life” at present except the hunt for her daughter.  If Bono were to call on people to find Amy, with a giant-screen photo in a concert maybe, it would be a great help Ithaisa Suárez, whose seven-year-old son Yeremi Vargas disappeared in broad daylight as he played just yards from his grandmother’s house in Vecindario in March 2007, and Nieves Hernández, the mother of Sara Morales, who has not been seen since July 2006 when she left her Las Palmas home to meet up with friends, were contacted by Audrey before Christmas with a view to launching a joint campaign to keep their children’s disappearances in the public spotlight. New posters featuring all three youngsters were printed and distributed at Vecindario’s weekly street market and the event drew massive interest from the public as well as from the regional and national media. In an exclusive interview with Island Connections, Audrey and Dave revealed the terrible toll the search for Amy has taken on them personally and on those around them. They believe the Vecindario campaign has been a major boost, particularly for Sara’s mother, who confessed to the Irish couple that coming together with Ithaisa and Audrey had given her ‘renewed strength to carry on’. “The campaign here was needed because many people in southern Spain know nothing about Yeremi and Sara’s cases, while people in the Canaries probably know just as little about Amy” explained Audrey, who has several other initiatives planned for the coming months to ensure the hunt remains uppermost in the public’s mind and also, hopefully, to jog the memories of anyone who might have seen her daughter. “The search is the only thing in our lives at present and we keep ourselves occupied day in day out exploring every possibility. We have to keep going otherwise we would collapse and wallow in self pity”, acknowledged the 40-year-old Dubliner. Audrey is far from convinced that her daughter, whose 17th birthday was on 7 February, is still in Spain but cannot rule out the possibility altogether, which is why she is seeking a meeting with Spanish PM José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero to raise the profile of the year-long hunt here. “She had no passport of her own because she was under 16 when she disappeared and was on my passport. But it is so easy to get out of the country by road, so she could be anywhere by now. When she disappeared she had absolutely nothing with her, not even make-up, and anyone who knows her will tell you she would not even go to the swimming pool without make-up!”, explained Audrey in one of the few lighter moments of our interview, which was interrupted briefly as pictures of the latest teenage girl to go missing in southern Spain (a 17-year-old from Seville) flashed up on a nearby TV screen, causing Audrey to stop mid-sentence and shake her head. “We simply cannot understand how Amy went missing. There has been a lot of speculation in the media, including hurtful comments about Dave, that she ran away from home but she had so much to look forward to: she had planned her 16th birthday in Ireland with her best friend for over a year and was really looking forward to going back. Yes, we had our clashes - who doesn’t with a teenage daughter - but we were very close and she would always ring me every day no matter where she was. The most puzzling thing about all this, and the most worrying, is that she has not been in touch with any of her friends on Facebook or Bebo or sent a single e-mail to anyone. She missed my 40th birthday, not to mention her Granny’s 80th and her brother Dean’s 18th as well. Not a single call to any of us in all this time” said Audrey. The search has clearly put a heavy strain on the couple in more ways than one, although Dave - who remains discreetly in the background while Audrey talks to people offering their support - insists they “are very strong and lean on each other all the time for support”. The financial cost is mounting by the day and they could soon lose the family home in Mijas and two other small properties they own at present if they do not keep up their mortgage payments: “We must have spent around 15,000 euros alone in phone calls in the past year. The costs of travelling the length and breadth of Spain and to other parts are crippling us and we will not be able to sustain this indefinitely. We asked the banks a few months ago to freeze our repayments for a while to allow us some breathing space but they have ignored us and we could be in deep trouble soon. We aren’t looking for charity or a cheque written out, just a bit of leeway to keep going. Losing the Mijas house would be a devastating blow because we have always promised each other that Amy will have her house, her same bedroom, to return to when she turns up”. Apart from a small number of fund-raising initiatives, such as the Amy Day organised by a Fuengirola bar on October 19 and a friend who raised sponsorship to run on their behalf in the Dublin Marathon, all the money has come from the couple’s personal savings. They have no income because Dave has not worked since his step-daughter disappeared, although he has tried unsuccessfully a couple of times to go back to running his estate agents business. “The company still exists but I will have to begin from scratch once all this ends” he admitted. The question of when it will all end is a delicate but inevitable one. “While on the BBC’s Missing programme last year we heard about a family who have been looking for their child for 14 years so we know what some are going through. A number of people, well-meaning it has to be said, ask us if we would not prefer closure on this as soon as possible. Closure means death and death is pretty final. We prefer the glimmer of hope that Amy is alive, regardless of the circumstances, than so-called closure,” insisted Dave as he watched Audrey and her two Gran Canaria counterparts go out live on Spanish TV’s Cuatro channel from the Vecindario market place. “My own mother died of cancer not so long ago but eventually you get over it. But Amy’s situation is a bereavement day in day out for us. It is the first thing we think of every morning and the last thing at night” particularly for Audrey, who admits to having sleep problems. The past 13 months have brought many low points for both mother and stepfather, including occasions when they literally fell to their knees in despair. The worst moments are etched in their minds. “One was when we received a call from the police to say human remains had been found in nearby Benalmadena. Word was already leaking out and we had the helicopters flying over the house immediately. Luckily a friendly policeman was on the phone soon after to tell us it wasn’t Amy. Those few moments were terrifying”. A second was even worse and lasted considerably longer. “We got a call from the police station a few months ago asking us to drive over and ask for Forensics. We had no idea what they wanted but the mention of forensics sent panic through us. Dave could not even drive he was shaking so much and had to use a taxi. It turned out to be a false alarm, however. What they wanted was for us to look at a TV commercial by the Corte Inglés department store because someone had contacted them to say one of three foreign models used in the ad looked very like Amy. Once we saw the ad we knew it wasn’t her”. Other scares have included the discovery of clothes on wasteground near the spot where Amy went missing and then several months later in hills well outside Malaga. “My DNA has been taken to check against any clothes found to see if they were worn by Amy but so far there have been no matches” said Audrey. The stress has taken its toll also on Amy’s elder brother Dean, now nearly 19, who has returned to Ireland to start a new life away from Mijas. According to his mother he could not cope with seeing the posters of his sister everywhere or even walking past her bedroom in the house. The family agreed with him that going back to Ireland was the best thing to do and he is now enrolled on an art and design course at college and shares his time between his father and his grandmother on Audrey’s side. Another person who is counting the cost of Amy’s disappearance is a close family friend, Englishman Richard O’Shea, whose old Ford Fiesta became the subject of a nationwide hunt after it was reported missing around the time the teenager disappeared. O’Shea came forward for questioning even though he knew he had an outstanding warrant for a drink-driving offence and he was immediately arrested, triggering frantic media speculation that he had something to do with her disappearance. He has since lost his licence and been fined for the offence. In terms of future plans, Audrey and Dave have a couple of ideas in mind to keep Amy’s case in the spotlight. After distributing over 10,000 posters in Puerto Rico, Mogán and Playa del Inglés during their trip to Gran Canaria, they flew to Dublin to meet with Irish government officials to discuss the search and hear from them first-hand about the latest developments. Then (36 hours later) it was back to the Costa del Sol for the monthly meeting with senior police officers to review the case. Audrey hopes to enlist the support of U2 lead singer Bono, also a Dubliner, to publicise the plight of her daughter. “Bono is huge in Spain and everywhere else. If he were to call on people to find Amy, with a giant-screen photo in a concert maybe, it would be a great help. It would be just five minutes of his life but it would mean the world to us. It’s not our photos that should be appearing in public, it should be Amy’s. If papers in tourist resorts inserted flyers or Amy cut-outs for people to carry around or take back home, it would spread her face around and make the chances of a sighting much higher”. Our interview with Audrey and Dave, now into its second hour and drawing to a close, turns to the inevitable question of what may have happened to the teenager. Audrey is convinced she is being held against her will. “I have to believe she will be found. I still think she was probably befriended by someone in the weeks beforehand and persuaded to go away. She herself may want to come back home but is being prevented from doing so. How else could you explain that she has not contacted all the people she used to chat to regularly on the Internet?” Websites are one of the few sources of comfort to Audrey, particularly the messages posted almost every day on the official Missing Amy site, which is run from home by Antoinette McLoughlin, also originally from Dublin and who Audrey describes as an ‘absolute treasure’ and lynchpin. “The website keeps me going, knowing that thousands of people are thinking and talking about her”. In the meantime she and her fiancé continue their crusade and will do so “for as long as it takes” until Amy turns up safe and sound. In the midst of their own personal tragedy, they have time to remember their fellow-sufferers Nieves (whose frail appearance reflects the heavy toll the search for Sara has taken on her health) and Ithaisa, who confided in Audrey that she bought Christmas presents for Yeremi to keep up the pretence that he will be back soon, for the sake of her other son aged three. The best present Audrey, Christmas or otherwise, would be to receive a call from Amy (her ‘Amy Lou’ or ‘Buntin’ as she is known affectionately in the inner family circle) or from someone with information on her whereabouts. Her phone, 617561319, is on all the time to receive that vital call. By Karl McLaughlin
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