The Discovery of Seamus Wright and Kevin McKee’s remains came about during a search for Joe Lynskey, turning an unsuccessful investigation into a discovery that answered one family’s question while deepening another’s uncertainty. In County Meath, investigators found two bodies buried together: Wright and McKee, whose remains had lain beneath the bones they first uncovered. The find confirmed that the men driven to their deaths by Dolours Price had been buried in the same grave, but Lynskey was still missing.

The search for Joe Lynskey

The search began after the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains received a tip in autumn 2014 indicating that Lynskey’s remains might be in a particular area of County Meath. The Boston College tapes scandal had made the commission’s work more difficult: commissioners felt they had to assure the public that people with information about the disappeared could still approach them in complete confidence.

A team led by retired Manchester detective Geoff Knupfer searched the indicated area with a sniffer dog and a forensic anthropologist. They also used ground-penetrating radar to identify anomalies in the earth. In December, Lynskey’s niece Maria expressed cautious hope that his remains would be found and that he could receive a proper burial. The months of digging that followed produced no discovery.

Two bodies in one grave

The search changed course one lunchtime the following summer, when someone called out that something had been found. Investigators set aside the mechanical excavators and crouched over the earth, carefully clearing it with trowels. They gradually exposed a set of bones. Knupfer, described as quiet and methodical, was excited by the find, though the discovery was necessarily bittersweet. Maria Lynskey was alerted and drove to the site.

The team was still working that evening. At about 8:30, investigators cried out from the grave: underneath the first bones lay a second set of human remains. The arrangement made the mistake in their search plain. They had come looking for Lynskey, but the two bodies were Wright and McKee, lying one above the other in a shared grave. The discovery identified them as the young triple agents whom Price had driven to their deaths.

A discovery without closure

Maria was devastated that the remains were not her uncle’s, but she was also glad for the families of Wright and McKee. The discovery thus carried two truths at once: it ended the uncertainty surrounding the whereabouts of Wright and McKee’s bodies, while leaving the search for Lynskey unfinished. The grave had answered a question the investigators had not come to ask.

At a requiem Mass for Wright, his sister, Breige, appealed for information about Lynskey and the other victims whose remains had yet to be found. Her plea placed the discovery within the continuing effort to locate the disappeared: finding two men did not bring that wider search to an end. In the book’s account, the unearthing is both a material recovery and a reversal of expectation, in which the ground yields an answer—but not the one the waiting family came to seek.