Stepfather of missing teen Amy Fitzpatrick reveals he went to Gerry 'The Monk' Hutch for help in finding her
by Paul Healy · Irish MirrorThe stepfather of missing teen Amy Fitzpatrick has revealed he once asked Gerry ‘The Monk’ Hutch to help him find her.
Convicted killer Dave Mahon has revealed for the first time that he went to infamous crime figure Hutch and asked for his help in the early days - as he and wife Audrey desperately searched for 15-year-old Amy, who vanished from the Mijas Costa area of Spain on New Year's Day, 2008. In an exclusive interview, Mahon, who served five years in prison for the May 2013 manslaughter of Amy’s brother Dean, also told the Irish Mirror of his belief that his stepdaughter could one day be found “under a building”.
It had been reported that Mahon met with, and sought the help of mob boss Daniel Kinahan - as he and Audrey grew more frustrated with Spanish police efforts to find the teen. Today, Mahon for the first time, not only acknowledged meeting Kinahan - but also confirmed he met with ‘The Monk’ - in the years prior to the murderous Kinahan / Hutch feud. "Yes I did meet him (Hutch). He did try to help. I won’t go into the details but he did try to help. He was a lovely fella, yeah, a very nice fella,” Mahon added, saying he preferred not to say where and when he met The Monk.
Mahon said both Kinahan and Hutch were helpful and made efforts through their contacts to assist in the search for Amy - who had been staying with her friend Ashley Rose and was last seen leaving her pal’s home before she vanished.
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“They were very good to us and both of them tried to help us,” Mahon said of Kinahan and Hutch. We went to the underworld and we dealt with the very top. What did we know about the underworld? We were just a family getting on with life until this happened to us. But as I’ve often said, when you’re desperate you pray to God and you also pray to the devil.”
Over the years, Mahon says he and Amy’s mother Audrey exhausted all efforts to try and find her - and nowadays they don’t have the strength they once did to keep trying every day.
"There’s always something we can do. But we are not doing it all the time. We were doing it 24/7 and we burned ourselves out. I’m not saying I got cancer from it but it didn’t help. Audrey attempted suicide and was in hospital and she needed a new liver. So we tried our best and then some,” he said. Mahon says he and Audrey used to look at examples of other cases of missing children and noted how they found it remarkable how some families were still searching for answers over 10 years later.
Now, as the 17th anniversary of Amy’s disappearance approaches, Mahon says he often tells himself he may never know what truly happened to her. “You do think that pretty much every day - that you're never going to know but you never fully give up hope. You know someday they could knock down a building and Amy could be under it. But I’m hoping more so that some gobsh*te will open his mouth at a party or something.”
Now living in Carrick on Shannon and working as a car salesman, Mahon says he does his best to try and live a normal life, but it is never the same as it once was. He and Audrey, he says, have no longer celebrated Christmas since Amy’s disappearance - and when it comes to New Year's, they don’t even leave the house. "We don’t really celebrate Christmas. I don’t think we’ve put a tree up since Amy went missing,” he said.
“Come Christmas day, look, it's just really another day for us. Come New Year, that's when you don’t leave the house. You see people out enjoying themselves, and I don’t begrudge people doing that but we don’t celebrate it. It’s tough now, you know. It’s 17 years now.”
Mahon says his and Audrey’s health is not what it once was, and he believes the police investigation into Amy’s disappearance has gone cold. “The police in Ireland and Guardia in Spain. It's just a cold case and that’s it. We have a liaison officer here in Ireland. We’re told we have. I’ve no faith in the Irish authorities.
“In the early days, we had strength and we had our health. But we are tired now and it's just different. You have to spoon feed the cops. In the early days, the cops were getting phone calls from the Irish government and they thought, 'Jesus we better step this investigation up'. But that was then and this is now,” he said.
Last year, Mahon released a book titled How Much Pain Can Our Hearts Endure, in which he identifies four people he deems suspects in the disappearance of Amy. He now says he hopes that someday someone will investigate those four people and find out what really happened to her.
“I welcome any sort of investigation. Without trying to promote my book or anything, there are four suspects in that. I could be dead and buried but I hope to God someone says 'hold on a minute, let's investigate this book'. If it's not them then it's just an opportunist and I don’t believe it was an opportunist. There’s four people in that book. If the Guardia investigated them properly you know they might turn over something,” he said.
Amy was last seen walking from her friend Ashley Rose’s house at around 10pm on New Year's Day, 2008, walking in the direction of her home, where she lived with her mother and stepfather. Her mobile phone was subsequently discovered in her bedroom by her mother Audrey, who has repeatedly stated that she does not believe Amy went out with her phone before she vanished. She has previously told how Amy called her to wish her a Happy New Year and said it came from a landline number.
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