The murder, The Irish Times reported, had seized "the imagination of the people of the country". Each day brought a new twist to the story as the Chief Commissioner of the police took personal charge of the case.
Journalists and photographers from England jostled for position with the local press to cover the court proceedings in which no fewer than 10 people stood accused of first-degree murder. At the end of January, 76 years ago, the whole of Ireland was talking about the missing postman.
In January 1930, the seven-year-old Irish Free State was a British dominion. Two-and-a-half years earlier, the 35-year-old Minister for Justice, Kevin O'Higgins, had been assassinated on his way home from Mass. The Commissioner in charge of the new Civic Guard was the obstreperously right-wing Gen Eoin O'Duffy, who was to go on to lead the Blueshirt movement and head a contingent of Irishmen in Spain fighting for Franco. O'Higgins's assassins had never been found and now the need for the new police force to confirm its authority must have been uppermost in O'Duffy's mind.
The details concerning the postman's disappearance were sketchy. His name was Laurence Griffin and on Christmas Day, 1929 he had (as was then the practice) collected the mail from Kilmacthomas post office in Co Waterford and set out on his 25-mile mail-round that terminated in the near-coastal village of Stradbally. That night, he failed to return home. On St Stephen's morning, a farmer on his way to the creamery found the postman's bicycle and cape on the open road two miles outside Stradbally. The matter was reported to the guards and a search party was organised.
Griffin, described by the press as a middle-aged man, had served with the British army in South Africa and in the first World War. He was married with three children. News of his disappearance did not appear in national newspapers until January 25th, when The Irish Times reported that two local men had been charged in Waterford with his murder. Two days later, as three further people were arrested and charged, the entire garrison of civic guards in Stradbally was transferred to other stations and replaced by men from Waterford city. By January
28th, The Irish Times was reporting that eight persons were in custody.
The search for the body, which concentrated on pumping out local copper mineshafts, drew crowds of thousands. A diver from Liverpool was lowered into one mineshaft, but found only dead animals. Gen O'Duffy declared, "The body must be found at all costs". The search area was widened to take in local bogs and cemeteries. And then sensationally, on February 4th, two civic guards were also charged with the murder.
Despite the undoubted tragedy of Griffin's disappearance, which had left his wife and family destitute, the subsequent court proceedings, which began on February 8th, bring to mind the novels of Flann O'Brien. The charges against the 10 accused - among them the local hotel proprietor, his wife, son and daughter - apart from those of murder and conspiracy, included "the larceny of a postman's cap and post bag, valued at £5, the property of the Free State Minister of Posts and Telegraphs". Gen O'Duffy himself set up headquarters in Waterford. A second man, James Fitzgerald, was dramatically reported missing, only to pop up in court as a State witness. In evidence, Fitzgerald claimed to have seen the postman in the kitchen of the hotel on Christmas evening, drinking with the hotel owner and a certain Mary Jack Hannigan. Amid much hilarity, District Justice McCabe asked, "Is Mary Jack Hannigan a man or a woman?" "A woman," replied the witness.
Fitzgerald subsequently withdrew all his evidence and said that everything he had told the guards had been lies. When asked by the judge why he had told such lies, Fitzgerald replied, "I could not help it, sir." The State's case was that the postman, together with the defendants, had been drinking on Christmas evening in the hotel - a day on which all licensed premises should have been closed. The postman had become involved in an altercation, fallen and struck his head on the kitchen stove. The defendants' sole concern had then been to dispose of the body, even though the postman was still alive. It was on this premise that the charge of murder rested.
The failure to find the postman fatally undermined the prosecution, and its case was not helped by the fact that none of the defendants broke down during questioning, despite being imprisoned for nearly five weeks and kept isolated from one another. No new witnesses came forward. A pact of silence seemed to have bound the people of Stradbally together against the outside world.
On March 7th, 1930, the State dropped its case and all the prisoners were released. Larry Griffin's body was never found and the pretty village of Stradbally slipped gratefully back into obscurity.
More than seven decades later visitors to the village enquiring after the missing postman have reported being met with stony gazes from the locals. The omerta surrounding the fate of Stradbally's missing postman has never been breached.