What Geoff Knupfer thought would be a two to three-year job in 2005 continued for 18 years until his retirement in March
Geoff Knupfer, former head of the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains, in the Wave Trauma Centre’s Garden of Remembrance in Belfast. Photograph: Arthur Allison/Pacemaker PressOn peat, they must use lightweight machines with wide tracks and, at the “business end”, a ditching bucket, which has a smooth-edged blade rather than teeth. From their vantage point two metres up, they watch intently as they slice through the bog.
“All we want,” she said, “is to bring Columba home. To have the wake. To bring him to the cemetery in Donaghmore and lay him to a final rest beside our mum and dad.” He was told: ‘Throw away the pointing trowels, you need buckets, spades, wheelbarrows. You’re not looking for archaeological exhibits, you’re looking for bodies.’
“We went back the next day and there was only one area where we could actually see the V that she described, and it was right and we found Pauline Reade a few days later.” As a detective, Knupfer learned to “compartmentalise stuff, leaving this stuff at work and going home”. When searching for the Disappeared, he says, “I’m simply thinking about resolving it for the families, the positive consequences rather than the negative”.
“It’s not for me to say whether it haunts them now, I don’t know, but certainly some were troubled by it.” He repeats a plea he has issued many times before. “Unless people come and tell us what they know, we will never find these outstanding cases.”