Monster snatched my sister on Dublin street and murdered her… killer must be brought to justice so she can rest in peace

THE brother of a woman whose body was found four years after being kidnapped on a Dublin street will continue to make pilgrimages to the spot she was snatched until her killer is caught.

Dumitru Rostas was 15 when he watched his sister Marioara get into the car of a man she thought was a Good Samaritan and who’d buy her some food on January 6, 2008.

Instead, the 18-year-old — who had only been in ­Ireland three weeks — was taken to her evil killer’s lair, sexually assaulted, shot dead and later buried in the Dublin mountains.

The Romanian teen, who could easily have passed for a child of 13, is one of the few murdered missing women whose bodies have been found in Ireland.

Standing at the spot where he last saw his sister, on the junction of Lombard Street and Pearse Street almost 18 years ago, Dumitru told The Irish Sun on Sunday: “A man comes on the street and he takes the life of a teenager. She had all her life in front of her.

“She could have had children and we could have been happy as a family together. It never happened.

“I have nothing against the Irish people. What I have in my soul is only against that man. She hadn’t done anything to him.

“I hope that some day someone will bring justice to my sister so she can rest in peace.”

Dumitru, who lives and works in the capital, also said through an interpreter: “This is the street where my sister was seen for the last time. And as long as I’m going to be in Dublin I’m going to bring flowers and light a candle.

“That’s all that’s left for me now.”

The disappearance of Marioara, who was begging on the streets when she was kidnapped and later murdered, triggered an enormous Garda probe — one her killer might not have banked on.

Michael Cryan, a Detective Inspector at Pearse Street Garda Station at the time, told us: “She looked young. She would have looked maybe 12 or 13. Maybe the person thought she was a child.

“I would certainly say there was a thought process and somebody said, ‘Well, she’s a Romany beggar on the streets, nobody’s going to care. The guards aren’t going to look for her’.”

Marioara’s parents came to Dublin in late 2007. Her father, Dumitru Sr had lost his job in a furniture factory in Romania, where the family’s future was bleak.

He brought his wife — also called Marioara — and son Dumitru Jr, leaving 14 children aged between ten and 22 back home.

They never intended to stay long — just to make enough money to go home and start again.

Cryan, now a Det Supt in the Garda National Economic Crime Bureau, said: “They had one special needs son, they were getting a very paltry amount of money from the government, and they ended up begging on the streets here.”

The family settled into the most meagre of accommodation and worked the streets around Trinity College for around €10 a day.

First, they found a hostel in the city, where they stayed for two weeks at €12 a night.

When funds ran out, they spent three nights on the streets before joining two of Dumitru’s brothers in Portmarnock, north Dublin.

But it didn’t get much better for them there, as they ended up sleeping in tents near the train ­station for three weeks.

Some locals threatened to tear down the tents with mechanical diggers, so the family went off to the nearby suburb of Lusk.

They shared a four-bedroom house with 20 other Romanians, before moving to Donabate.

A home they shared with over a dozen others there was vacant and lacked electricity, heat and water.

Marioara then arrived into this environment in December 2008.

She quickly joined her family on the city’s streets — a 46km round trip commute from Donabate.

They went to the same spot every day, at the junction of Lombard Street, Pearse Street and Westland Row, and beside Trinity College, a stone’s throw from Government Buildings.

They came in by train, arriving before 10am. Marioara always stood outside the Bank of Ireland, approaching cars on the drivers’ side. The money was awful.

Dumitru said: “People treated us well. Some would give us money, others would give us food.”

Marioara was where she always was when a man in a Ford Mondeo pulled up on Sunday, January 6.

She had earned around €2 so far, and the man offered to take her to get some food.

He was skinny, older than 25, and his eyes were small and black.

He greeted her with a, ‘Ce faci’, or, ‘how are you’, in her native tongue before offering her a trip to McDonald’s.

He waved his hand at Dumitru Jr, gave him a tenner and told him where they were going.

Marioara sat in the front seat, charmed by the Good Samaritan.

Dumitru said: “I remember that man — or that monster, because it’s difficult for me to describe him any other way. He came and he said that he would take her to buy her food and he would bring her back.”

Det Supt Cryan added: “She was very childlike, very innocent. When somebody offered to buy her food, she only saw the good in it.

“There was no alarm bell. The person with her was only a child as well, they didn’t have the language skills. She would have been a very easy target for a predator, whoever kidnapped her and murdered her.”

It took three days for the ­Romanian family — with no English or understanding of the local area — to report the girl missing.

When they finally did, the Gardai quickly ruled out any alternative reasons for her disappearance, ­concluding this was no runaway or victim of human trafficking.

The day after she vanished, Marioara managed to get her captor’s phone and call the communal family mobile phone in Romania.

She begged her relatives to get her dad to come and save her, but was unable to say where she was.

Cryan said: “I always think when she rang the cousin in Romania, obviously the call just stopped abruptly, so she was caught on the phone, and the phone was snatched from her.

“The kidnapper, the murderer, had no idea what she had said, or no idea what information she had given to the cousin.

“In his head, (he’s thinking), ‘Oh, God, now he’s going to ring the police’ — she could have given the address away, she could have given anything away. Her death warrant was signed.”

Marioara was dead by January 8 — shot four times in the head with a .22 firearm.

Nobody knew that other than the killer, and while the Gardai still held out hope of finding her alive, all the resources of a murder investigation were given over to the case.

Eventually, the probe began to focus on one suspect — the owner of a Ford Mondeo, and a man named in a 999 call the following August as her killer.

He was a below-the-radar crim, and the caller said Marioara had been murdered in a house in Dublin’s south inner city, which was later destroyed by fire.

It provided the launchpad for the Garda probe, and an eventual breakthrough when a criminal associate of the suspect brought them to Marioara’s body almost four years after she vanished.

The tragic teenager had been wrapped in sheeting and buried in a shallow grave in the mountains.

Such victims are usually never found, but there are exceptions.

In April 1988, Gardai made a similar breakthrough when they found the remains of Antoinette Smith on Glendoo Mountain in Co Wicklow, nine months after the 27-year-old vanished following a David Bowie concert.

And on September 13, 2013, Elaine O’Hara’s remains were found at Killakee Mountain in Dublin, over a year after evil architect Graham Dwyer murdered her.