Whatever happened is something which would be considered very unlikely one way or the other under normal circumstances, and these were normal circumstances
A drunk driver retrieving a body from a road and disposing of it doesn’t seem a mundane or particularly plausible scenario. It doesn’t mean it’s impossible but it doesn’t seem particularly likely.
Falling into the Dodder is certainly plausible but no body ever being recovered or spotted still seems unlikely because of the populated nature of the river’s surrounds, though because of the proximity to the sea, not impossible. But my bet is that if somebody entered the river at Ballsbridge, there would be a good chance they would not wash into the sea, or it would take quite some time for them to wash into the sea. The Dodder even at its most angry is not exactly the Corrib.
I recall people saying that Nicola Bulley may have washed into the sea but she was found about one mile from where she disappeared. The distance from the Dodder bridge at Ballsbridge to the Liffey is about 2km.
But to get from the bridge at Baggot Street to the Dodder at Ballsbridge, you would expect there would be CCTV footage if somebody walked that way.
I don’t know about that. December 2000 was not some backward time. Plus the area between Baggot Street bridge and the Dodder Bridge at Ballsbridge would I imagine have been one of the most heavily CCTVed areas in Dublin, containing several pubs, office blocks, hotels and the American embassy and the Israeli embassy as well being one of the main traffic routes into Dublin from the southside.
I was working in the D4 area not far from there from 2001 and I can assure you that external CCTV on the likes of pubs and hotels and office blocks wasn’t that widespread, nowhere near what it would be now
I don’t think he withdrew any money, he just walked past it in the Northumberland Road direction; he wasn’t really going the right direction if he was heading home. I believe he lived somewhere near Serpentine Avenue
The Irish Times article quoted a few posts back goes into the whole thing in detail in terms of why he may have gone that way. You should read if to catch up on the case.
There’s a petrol station on Northumberland Road near big traffic junction near the Berkeley Court which is another possibility why you might walk that way if you wanted to buy a packet of Tayto or packet of smokes.
Foul play, that he was either followed by somebody dodgy or got into an argument on the street or got into a car with the wrong person definitely seems the most likely to me.