39 years ago, Antoinette Smith went to Slane to see David Bowie and never came home. Her daughter Lisa reveals the callous way that investigating Gardai told her, then aged 7, that her mum was dead...

Published: 22:11, 17 July 2026 | Updated: 22:12, 17 July 2026 This weekend, the gates of Slane Castle will open and tens of thousands will make the pilgrimage to the renowned Meath venue to see American country singer Luke Combs, the first headline act to perform there since Harry Styles in 2023. It’s the latest chapter in a concert history stretching back more than four decades, one that has brought Bruce Springsteen, Queen, U2, The Rolling Stones and Oasis to the banks of the Boyne. For almost everyone there, it will be a day to remember – time spent with friends, songs sung at the tops of their voices, the chat-filled walk back through the darkness after the final encore. Thirty-nine years ago this week, Antoinette Smith made that same walk into Slane. She was 27, a young mother enjoying a rare night away from her children, excited to see David Bowie. She never came home. Her disappearance has become one of Ireland’s most enduring murder investigations, marked by missed opportunities, unanswered questions and decades of heartbreak for the family left behind. Nearly four decades on, her daughter Lisa is fighting to keep her mother’s story alive, and still demanding answers about the failures she believes let those responsible escape justice. Because while thousands will leave Slane this weekend with memories of the music, Lisa is living with the memory of the mother who went there one July day and never returned home. Now 46, she arrives at the Herbert Park Hotel in a plain white T-shirt and black jeans, her long golden-blonde curls loose around a lightly- freckled face. ‘My mum was big into music,’ she says simply. Lisa Smith wants to reignite awareness around her mother's murder Photo: Fran Veale Like many young Dublin women in the 1980s, Antoinette loved fashion and pop music. She had alopecia and had worn a wig since childhood. ‘You’d never have known,’ Lisa says. ‘She was so pretty.’ For much of her life, Lisa could not listen to Bowie. ‘Growing up, I always associated him with my mum’s death,’ she says. ‘Now that I’m older, I can tolerate it. It’s weird, it can bring a smile.’ The connection remains complicated in ways that are hard to untangle – when a child playing hide-and-seek in the Dublin mountains found Antoinette’s body, she was still wearing a David Bowie T-shirt. The trip to Slane came at the tail end of a marriage already unravelling. Antoinette and Carl Smith had two daughters, then seven-year-old Lisa and four-year-old Rachel, before separating amicably earlier that year. Carl moved out but stayed closely involved, often minding the girls so Antoinette could have the occasional night to herself. ‘She was a single mum, so getting a free night out at 27, that was a big deal,’ Lisa says. ‘Back then, going to a concert was a luxury.’ That luxury came on Saturday, July 11, 1987, when Bowie played Slane Castle. Antoinette and her friend Marie Cunningham decided almost on a whim to go, buying tickets and matching Bowie T-shirts in town before getting the bus out. There was no sense that the day would become anything more than what it promised: music, friends and a few stolen hours of freedom in the summer sun. Carl minded the girls while the two women headed to Meath. David Bowie performing at Slane in 1987. Photo: Jim O'Kelly/Getty Images By 11pm the concert was over and the crowd was swept back into Dublin city centre, spilling on to Parnell Street. Antoinette and Marie carried the night on to La Mirage nightclub, where they met two young men they knew. When the club closed around 2am, the group drifted towards O’Connell Street. Antoinette wasn’t ready for the night to end but Marie, exhausted, wanted her bed. A small disagreement followed and the two friends parted – but not before Marie pressed her spare house key into Antoinette’s hand. The men walked Marie to the taxi rank and saw her into a cab bound for Ballymun, leaving Antoinette alone on the street. She was last seen around 2.30am, walking towards O’Connell Bridge in her new T-shirt, carrying a Texaco holdall that has never been found. When she failed to collect her daughters the next day, Carl raised the alarm. Antoinette with her young daughters Rachel and Lisa What happened next still enrages Lisa nearly four decades on. Carl – frantic with worry – went to the Gardaí, only to be told to come back the following day with a photograph before they would even open a file. ‘They lost vital time,’ Lisa says. Suspicion then settled, absurdly, on Carl himself, with gardaí also floating the idea that Antoinette had simply run off with another man. ‘It was one more thing piled on top of everything else,’ Lisa says. ‘Two small children trying to understand why their mother hadn’t come home.’ For nine months, there was nothing. Then, on Easter Sunday, April 3, 1988, a family out walking near Glendoo in the Dublin mountains stopped for a picnic off the Old Military Road. Their children drifted into a game of hide-and-seek. A young boy climbed into a shallow trench to hide and his older sister, coming to find him, looked down and saw, protruding from the disturbed soil, a lower leg and a foot. It was not a Garda search team that found Antoinette Smith. It was children, playing. ‘That family have their own scars from it too,’ Lisa says. The body, badly decomposed, was found with two plastic bags placed over the head and secured with rope.  The state pathologist concluded Lisa had most likely died of asphyxiation, though it could not be established whether the bags were placed before or after death, nor whether she was killed at the scene or elsewhere. Nearby, gardaí recovered Marie’s spare house key, still in Antoinette’s possession. Several witnesses came forward with possible sightings and leads. None led anywhere. Then came the moment that has scarred Lisa most of all. Aged eight, and without an adult present, a garda delivered the news of her mother’s identification in these words: ‘We’ve got good news and we’ve got bad news. The good news is we found your mammy. The bad news is she’s dead.’ ‘I was eight years old,’ says Lisa incredulously. ‘How do you say that to a child? There was no compassion, no empathy.’ Worse followed at the funeral, where a photograph of eight- year-old Lisa staring into her mother’s open grave was taken and published. ‘It was republished a few years back, and I was – to put it mildly – furious,’ she says. ‘There was a grieving, traumatised family there.’ Even the burial gave little comfort. ‘We got to bury her, but I wouldn’t call it dignified, given what happened around it,’ she says. ‘It was a circus. It was torture.’ Lisa and Rachel in 2013 at an appeal for help to catch their mother's killer. Photo: Alamy The investigation was compromised almost from its first hours. In the very month Antoinette’s body was found, the Garda murder squad – the Investigation Unit – was disbanded in a reorganisation, scattering responsibility for cases like hers across local stations instead of dedicated detectives. Vital DNA evidence, the family were told, could not be recovered after nine months exposed to the elements in the mountains. Other evidence, Lisa says, was simply lost over the years that followed. Even the rope used to secure the bags over her mother’s head – one of the few physical exhibits still in existence – carries, as far as the family have ever been told, only Antoinette’s DNA, raising the obvious question of whether it has ever been retested using techniques unavailable in 1988. No suspect has ever been formally named or charged. The two men Antoinette and Marie met at the nightclub that night, who shared a taxi home to Ballymun, were interviewed and cleared by gardaí. ‘All we can do is take their word for it,’ Lisa says. Other leads – including two men gardaí traced to a flat near Rathfarnham, one of whom had been at the Bowie concert, and a report of a man behaving suspiciously in the Dublin mountains the following morning – were followed up but went nowhere The case was formally reopened for review by the cold case unit in 2007, after Lisa and her sister Rachel asked for it themselves, and remains, technically, open – ‘their favourite line to us’, Lisa says, whenever they ask why more can’t be shared. ‘The guards in Bray have the hard job of backtracking for the mistakes made at the time,’ she says. ‘I make no apologies for calling those original mistakes a disgrace.’ Requests to have the surviving evidence retested with modern DNA techniques have fallen, in her words, ‘on deaf ears’. A meeting last year with Justice Minister Jim O’Callaghan left her no less frustrated. A Garda spokesperson told the Irish Daily Mail: ‘An Garda Síochána continues to engage with and offer support to the family of Antoinette Smith through a designated family liaison officer. Any ongoing issues raised by the family can be addressed within this support structure.’ Lisa says Antoinette was a devoted single mother to her girls The family have also learned, only in the past year or two, that Antoinette was attacked three weeks before her murder while walking alone in the Phoenix Park – an assault gardaí never treated as connected to what came after. Lisa has asked, without success, whether the two might be linked. She is more guarded on whether her mother’s case belongs among those of the so-called Vanishing Triangle, the cluster of unsolved disappearances and murders of women across Leinster in the 1970s, 80s and 90s. ‘There’s nothing to say there are links, and nothing to say there aren’t,’ she says – the most diplomatic answer, she feels, she can give. What the sisters have, in place of official answers, is each other. Rachel has no memories of their mother and relies on what others have told her. No state support has been offered across 39 years. ‘We support each other,’ Lisa says, protective of her younger sister in a way that seems to have hardened into instinct long ago. Neither has married nor had children. Where most families mark one anniversary, they carry two – the July day their mother vanished, and the April day she was found. ‘It gets harder every year,’ Lisa says. ‘We’re not getting any younger.’ For Lisa, her mother has become known for the way she died rather than the way she lived, and that is the injustice she wants most to correct. ‘She was so much more than a tragic headline,’ she says. ‘She was a mother, a young woman, a friend, a sister, an aunt. She only had 27 years but there was nothing she wouldn’t have done for her children. ‘I remember being her shadow, Rachel was the same. She was a devoted single mother, completely committed to her girls. ‘We were a family destroyed – two young children who grew up without their mother. That still hurts as a 46-year-old.’ Lisa’s anger reaches beyond her own family’s loss to the wider question of women’s safety in Ireland. Eight women have been killed violently in the Republic so far this year, already exceeding the total recorded for all of last year, a figure the Taoiseach has acknowledged is ‘not going in the right direction’. ‘Take away the fact that I’m her daughter,’ Lisa says. ‘She was a 27-year-old woman who went to a concert with her friend and never made it home to her children. Thirty-nine years ago, that would have shocked the whole country to its core. Now people are desensitised to it.’ Asked what she would say if the person responsible were reading these words today, somewhere, living an ordinary life, Lisa falls silent for a moment. The anger gives way, briefly, to the hurt of the daughter who lost her mother as a child. Then she answers. ‘Why? Why?’ she pleads. ‘It’s sick. She was killed and buried somewhere she was never meant to be found. ‘It’s cruel, calculated, callous. We had our childhoods stolen.’ This weekend, thousands will pass through the gates of Slane Castle and on to the same sloping fields above the Boyne where Antoinette stood 39 years ago. The music will play, the crowds will sing, and for most it will be a day of memories made. For Lisa Smith, Slane will always hold the memory of the mother who was stolen from her and every July, she returns to the same unanswered questions, determined to keep asking them for as long as it takes. ‘I’ll keep shouting it from the rooftops until we get answers.’ Anyone with information is asked to contact the incident room at Bray Garda Station. Sorry we are not currently accepting comments on this article.