Mary, McGinty and Mr Flanagan, following which "Mary went to bed in tears, telling her sisters she planned to end the relationship" with McGinty. Disappearance On the day of her disappearance she was due to attend her employer's New Year's Eve party, which was held annually in the Silvertown plant. The last known sighting of her was approaching West Ham tube station. The following day, her family realised she had not come home the preceding evening, and Mr and Mrs Flanagan visited the sugar refinery in search of information. In a curious twist, they were informed that she had actually been absent from work for the previous fortnight. For their part, Tate and Lyle had assumed that she was off sick at the time. A search of the local area was made by both locals and the police, and the local papers provided some publicity for the case; however, it is likely to have been seen as merely a "typical teenage runaway" of the time. Case re-opened, 2013 Police continued to check the National Insurance database, in 1983 and in subsequent years, but reported that her number has never been used for employment purposes since. In 2013, on her seventieth birthday, the Metropolitan Police and the local Missing Persons Unit in Newham re-opened her case for examination. The investigating officer described the case as a "complete one-off," and it has been used as an example of the changes that policing methods have undergone over subsequent years: from knocking on doors in the community in 1960s, to accessing Facebook profiles in the 2000s. Police particularly appealed for information on Tom McGinty. In January 2017, the charity Missing People commissioned a new age progressed image of Mary from UK forensic artist Tim Widden. See also List of people who disappeared Notes References Bibliography 1950s missing person cases 1959 in England London Irish Missing person cases in London Women in London People from West Ham December 1959 events in the United Kingdom 1959 in London