UK UK - Ellen Coss, 50, Manchester - Holyhead, Wales, 03 Nov 1999

[Al Ka]

Ellen Coss

• Age at disappearance: 50
• Missing Since: 03-Nov-1999
• Missing from: MANCHESTER, Greater Manchester
• Reference No: 99-001440
  
  Missing People profile - Help us find Ellen Coss
  
  Twitter profile - #FindEllenCoss tag on Twitter | Twipu
  

Name: Ellen Coss (nee Brown)
Date Missing: 03/11/1999
Gender: Female
Height: 5'3" - 1.60 cm
Build: Light build
Hair Colour: Long brown hair - going grey

Further Information:

Greater Manchester Police have requested the assistance of the Gardai in trying to establish the whereabouts of Ellen Coss (nee Brown) who has been missing since Wednesday 3rd November 1999. When last seen she was boarding a train at Manchester to take her to Holyhead. It is believed that she intended to travel from Holyhead to Dublin by boat.

Date of birth - 30/4/49. Ellen resides at Ballyfermot Avenue, Dublin and was visiting her sister in Manchester when she went missing.

She is 5 feet 3 inches tall, of light build with long brown hair (going grey).

Ellen Coss (nee Brown)

• Ellen disappeared on November 3rd 1999 in Hollyhead while returning from Manchester.
• Born: 30/4/49
• Age: 51
• Height: 5ft 3
• Hair: brown going grey and (tied back)
• Eye: blue/grey
• Build: Softly spoken, Slight build, Strong jaw line, Non-smoker/non-drinker

She took many jobs including hairdressing and house cleaning (so may be working in any of those jobs). Originally from Ballyfermot but living in Windy Arbour for the last 9 years.

Ellen disappeared on November 3rd 1999 in Hollyhead while returning from Manchester where she had recently visited her sister,Bertha Lee nee Brown.

She has been an active member of both AWARE and GINGERBREAD.
Ellen was separated for many years with an adult son Peter who is living in London.
She has not contacted her relatives.
Ellen was involved in the Windy Arbour/Dundrum community.
She had a love of traditional Irish music and walking.

After her disappearance there were a number of reported sightings of Ellen. But her family are satisfied that these sightings were of people who looked looked like her.

Her whole family are concerned about her whereabouts including her brothers Tom and James-William.

Ellen Coss Brown (Dublin)

 

[Al Ka]

December 20 2004
Heartbreak plea for missing sister

THE heartbroken family of a Dublin woman who disappeared five years ago after failing to take a scheduled ferry home from a holiday in the UK has made a Christmas appeal for information on her whereabouts.

Ellen Coss Brown (55) from Windy Arbour, Dublin, was due to take a ferry home from Holyhead on November 3, 1999, following a visit to Manchester to see her sister but the mother-of-one never returned to her home in Dublin. Ellen's disappearance devastated her sister Bertha as it came just months after the death of their mother.

Bertha, who lives in Middleton in Manchester, says she is concerned Ellen may be destitute on the streets - having lost her memory. "The worry is excruciating," she added.

Heartbreak plea for missing sister - Independent.ie

 

[Al Ka]

21 MAY 2002
Family waits to find out if body is missing sister

A LANGLEY woman, distraught at the possibility that her missing sister's body may have been recovered on a south coast beach, is asking for DNA results to verify who it is.

Mrs Bertha Lee, aged 55, of Talkin Drive, has endured three years of wondering what happened to her younger sister Ellen Coss since she waved goodbye to her at Manchester Piccadilly. Ellen boarded a train to Chester, and was to travel to Holyhead and on to her home in Dublin. That was in November 1999, and she has had no contact with her since.

The sisters' mother died in March of that year, and her death hit Ellen hard. Previously a teetotaller, Ellen began drinking cider and lager, and became lethargic and withdrawn. She also went missing for short periods, and was once picked up by the police and taken to the psychiatric ward at Crumpsall.

Despite Ellen's mysterious disappearance being investigated by Interpol and featuring on a special internet site, Bertha received no news, other than a possible sighting by a former work colleague of Ellen's in Dublin. The sighting led to the Crimefile programme in Ireland airing a reconstruction of the case in the hope of finding her. Despite around 60 calls with possible information, the appeal failed.

In July this year, a policeman from Middleton visited Bertha to say a female body had been found washed up, face down, on a beach in Seaford, midway between Brighton and Eastbourne, and was now in the morgue at Eastbourne District General Hospital.

After travelling with Ellen's only son Peter to the south coast to identify the body, Bertha is sure it is Ellen, but the authorities cannot record a positive identification, as the decomposed body had altered after the time in the sea, and the nose was virtually destroyed.

Bertha remembers the smell when she walked in the room: "It was terrible, a really noxious smell. It hit you really hard and it stayed in my nostrils all day. I just had this unbelievable feeling that it was her though. I still picture that body clearly in my head."

Although Bertha is convinced that the remains were that of Ellen, Peter could not say that he was 100 per cent certain.

The coroner wanted to compare dental records to confirm that it was Ellen. Unfortunately, Ellen had not visited her dentist in Dublin since 1991, and as that was over eight years ago, her records had been deleted.

Further investigation by the coroner's office revealed a number of similarities between Ellen, who would now be 53, and the gruesome find. The mystery body had a scar on the chest, and Ellen also had one, from an operation countless years ago. Ellen had size five feet, and the dead body a size six. Ellen did not wear a bra, and the fully clothed body didn't either.

The only remaining way of proving the body's identity is through comparing the body's DNA to that of her sister and her son, and also making a tissue match against a sample taken from Ellen's ex-husband David.

Bertha now faces an agonising six-month wait for results of a DNA test, which will prove or disprove whether the body is that of her sister. The coroner explained DNA testing was subject to prioritising for urgent cases such as murder, and that her case would be given low priority.
---
Bertha contacted three private companies, in the hope that paying for the test would get them an earlier result. Each company was amazed that she was being made to wait six months for a conclusion.

All three quoted an average return of five to seven working days, with a month being the limit if any problems arose. Even if she was prepared to pay the hundreds of pounds required, the authorities in Eastbourne would not send Bertha any samples, saying that the pathologist would not be prepared to accept the findings of an outside body.

In the meantime, Bertha faces the prospect of a miserable Christmas, wondering if her sister is still alive. She said: "I was happier when she was missing, and I kept thinking she may still get in touch. To be honest, I'd rather not hear from her again than know that the remains in that morgue were hers.

Family waits to find out if body is missing sister

 

[Al Ka]

1 NOV 2011
Man’s final bid to find missing sister on Anglesey

THE brother of a woman who went missing in Holyhead 12 years ago is spending a week in the town in one final attempt to find out what happened to her.

Ellen Coss was aged 50 when she disappeared after boarding a train to Holyhead from Manchester on November 3, 1999. She was due to travel by ferry from Holyhead to Dublin to meet her family but never turned up in Ireland.

Ellen, from Dublin, had been visiting her sister in Manchester in the weeks before going missing. She had suffered with depression following the death of her mother.

After her disappearance, her brother Tom Brown launched a search to trace her – spending months in Holyhead and around Anglesey, convinced she was in this area.
Periodically over the years, he has returned as the family try and find out what happened to her.

Tom, from Dublin, who is now 53, is hoping to jog people’s memories on this visit.
He said: “I’m going to be in and around Holyhead until November 6. I will be walking around some places where there were sightings of her.

“I’ll be wearing a t-shirt with her picture, so that anyone who approaches me knows who I am. “I’m also going to try to meet with the police and MP Albert Owen, just to bring her back into people’s minds.

“She was spotted on Garreglwyd Road, and there is a suggestion that she could have been looking for a B&B, but I doubt this as she only left Manchester with £20.

“The landlord of the Boston Arms, near the port, said she came in with a group of travellers about 10 years ago.”

When asked if he thought she might have changed physically over the years, Tom thought that she would not have.

“It’s been 12 years. It’s hard to believe that she’d be 62 now.

“I don’t think she would look that different to the way she was in the last few pictures we have of her. “The hair might have gone a bit white, but she looked like our Ma, so we think she would have aged in a similar way to her.”

Tom said the family have had to brace themselves for bad news in the past after a body was washed up at Eastbourne in 2002. Tom added: “My other sister Bertha had to go down and try and identify a body which washed up there.

“If she had fallen into the sea in Holyhead it’s possible that her body could have floated around the coast. “The body was the same size as Ellen but could not be identified, and DNA tests with her son and other members of the family were not a match.

Man’s final bid to find missing sister on Anglesey

 

[Al Ka]

27 NOV 2016
Brother of Irish woman missing for 17 years believes cops gave up searching for her because she was middle-aged

The brother of an Irish woman missing for 17 years believes police gave up searching for her because she was middle-aged.
---
She was last seen in the city’s Piccadilly Station on November 3 boarding a train to catch a ferry from Holyhead back home – but never made the boat.

The mother of one’s case fell between two jurisdictions and responsibility was never fully established by detectives.
---
Her brother Tom Brown told the Irish Sunday Mirror: “From day one, once they realised what age she was, one of them said to me, ‘Well a lot of these women decide to go missing, there’s nothing more we can do about it’.

“Ellen had lost it since our ma died in March 1999. She was mentally unwell, there is no way she would have willingly gone missing and left her son Peter.

“She was spotted in Holyhead drinking with a crowd of strangers and that would not have been her normal behaviour at all.”
---
Ellen, from Ballyfermot, had just £20 in her pocket and no passport when she vanished and Tom spent years travelling back and forth to Holyhead in the hope of finding her.

He added: “I remember the first time going over on the ferry with just the clothes I stood up in and a rucksack on my back to look for her.

“A woman at a restaurant in the centre of Holyhead told me a woman the exact size, description and with the same mannerisims as Ellen came in to get shelter from the rain and wind. “The member of staff said, ‘I will have to ask you to leave’ and Ellen – or the woman – replied in a soft, refined voice ‘sorry’.

“I never found her. I went over thinking Holyhead would be this small port town but it was a huge area. “There were many suspected sightings of my sister but nothing ever came of any of them.

“But I am sure Ellen got to Holyhead.
---
“The police spent eight days trawling the CCTV of people boarding the ferry or in the terminal and then said it was indiscernible.
---
Tom said at one point he called Manchester Police to ask if there was any news on Ellen but was told they had cut back the search as they were led to believe she was back in Dublin working as a childminder.

Former Garda diving squad chief and chairman of Searching For The Missing, Tosh Lavery, is on record as saying the probe could have suffered because it was a cross-border case.

He said: “I don’t think the family got a fair crack of the whip.”
---
Last year he penned a poem detailing the burden of not knowing what happened to her.

It read: “You’ve been missing since for ever or at least that’s how it seems and that’s what I feel like replying when someone asks when you were last seen. Instead I just the give the standard answer — to the best of my knowledge, last seen for definite on such a date, the date that has now replaced your birthday, your first day of school, your first romance, your first job has now become the date we live to hate.

“Sometimes I can almost convince myself that you either started a new life and are happy where you are, or that you just had a fall, took your own life and that some day your body will be found. For even when a body is found… you’re left with more questions than answers – like was it something I said or didn’t that made them decide to go away?’

Brother of Irish woman missing for 17 years on why he believes cops gave up

 

[CastlesBurning]

"Is she alive or dead? Either way I have lost my mother"

Ellen's brother posed as a rough sleeper to find her, her sister travelled hundreds of miles to identify a body that wasn't her. Now, the missing mum's son, Peter, has a new hope of finding the truth.

 

[elframo]

The Unseen podcast is featuring 12 cases throughout December ,the first being Ellen

Ellen Coss Brown

Day 1 of 12 days of missing people throughout December.<br>On the 3rd of November 1999, 51 year old Ellen Coss Brown headed to Manchester Piccadilly station from the area of Langley in Middleton. She had been staying with her sister and was on her way back to Holyhead then on to Dublin where she...

player.fm