![upload_2020-12-5_15-19-45.jpeg upload_2020-12-5_15-19-45.jpeg](https://www.websleuths.com/forums/data/attachments/247/247803-613e8ef57d48ba5b0eb9bb391f9051a9.jpg)
At around 2pm, a little girl was sitting by a fire in her grandparents’ house in rural Donegal just before lunch.
The lively six-year-old suddenly motioned her mother over to her.
“I forgot to give you a kiss this morning,” she told her. And with that, she threw her arms around her mother, and gave her a kiss. She then sat down for lunch at the small table which had been set up for her, her brother and twin sister and two of her cousins, beside the table where the adults sat.
The last time her mother would ever see her after that was as she walked out the door with the rest of the children.
Spotting her uncle on his way to drop a ladder off at a neighbouring house, the girl decided to follow him, clutching half a roll of sweets in her hand.
But at some stage she decided to turn back and, in an instant, Mary Boyle vanished straight into history, and Ireland’s longest-running missing child mystery.
The last marks she left were her small footprints and a discarded sweet wrapper in some briars on a remote road leading to the junction
To this day, her mother Ann still feels that blood-chilling moment when she discovered Mary was missing on March 18, 1977.
Spotlight: ‘We will never stop looking for our loved ones’