Fiona Pender's apartment

This is the apartment where Fiona Pender was last seen.

It is located at 11 Church Street in Tullamore, County Offaly.

The 25-year-old hairdresser lived in flat #1 with her boyfriend, John Thompson. At the time of her disappearance, she was seven months pregnant.

Pender and Thompson moved to London in November 1995. However, they returned to Offaly after Thompson reportedly became homesick.

They started renting a tiny bedsit at this house on Church Street in February 1996. Neighbors would later recall how the couple had several heated arguments.

Disappearance

Thompson said that he last saw his girlfriend when he was leaving for work at around 6 a.m. on Friday, August 23rd, 1996. At the time, she was reportedly asleep.

The hairdresser went clothes shopping for her unborn child the day before she disappeared. She had also made plans to meet with her mother the following day.

By all accounts, she was looking forward to giving birth.

Pender's mother visited the apartment on the day of her disappearance, only to find the curtains still closed. Believing that her daughter was sleeping, she decided to leave without knocking.

The following day, Pender's parents knocked on her apartment door. However, they received no response.

When they contacted Thompson, he said that he didn't know where she was because he had spent the previous night sleeping at his parents' farm.

That Saturday, Pender's parents, her younger brother, and Thompson got in a car and drove around Tullamore, visiting her friends and coworkers.

By 10 p.m., they had exhausted their search efforts. Consequently, her mother went to the local Garda station and reported her missing.

The Gardaí (Irish police) reacted slowly and did not visit Pender's apartment until the following Monday. By that point, the mother-to-be had been missing for nearly three days.

An examination of the apartment did not find any signs of foul play. Searches of nearby rivers and canals also failed to turn up anything of note.

Following a public appeal, one man came forward and said that he was walking home from a pub in the early hours of August 23rd when he saw two men lifting a bulky rug or carpet into the back of a vehicle on Church Street.

Pender's case is being treated as a murder investigation, as the Gardaí do not believe that she left on her own accord.

In 1997, they arrested Thompson, his father, Archie, and his three sisters. However, they were all eventually released without charge. Two searches of the family's farm in Killeigh, County Laois, also led to nothing.

Pender's disappearance devastated her family. In 2000, her father, Sean, committed suicide. Her mother, Josephine, passed away in 2017.

Wooden cross

In May 2008, a makeshift wooden cross was discovered in the Monicknew woods, near the Slieve Bloom mountains.

The person who erected the cross wrote the following words on it with a marker:

"Fiona Pender. Buried here, August 22nd, 1996."

Despite a thorough search of the area, no trace of Pender was found.

The identity of the person who erected the cross is still unknown. It is possible that someone placed it there as a prank. There is also the possibility that her killer purposely erected it in an attempt to mislead investigators.

Memorial

A memorial for Pender was erected at the entrance to the walkway beside the canal in Tullamore. It is situated at the eastern end of Convent View.

The sculpture was designed by her brother, John. The two circles represent Pender and her unborn child.

In 2014, the local council renamed the trail beside the canal "Fiona's Way."