Karen was born in 1991 to John and Marian Buckley, the youngest of four children and the only daughter. She grew up with three older brothers on the family farm at Mourneabbey, a quiet rural townland in north County Cork between Mallow and the village of Burnfort. Friends remembered the smile first - she was 'the girl with the smile,' as one Irish tribute put it later. Gaelic football for Mourneabbey filled her weekends. Nursing was her chosen profession; she completed her degree at Limerick and was already working clinically before she decided to specialise in occupational therapy, the discipline that helps people rebuild ordinary lives after illness or injury. Glasgow Caledonian University had a strong programme. She had been there only a few months when she went out with friends that Saturday night.

Karen's friends realised she had not made it home and contacted Police Scotland. Her parents flew over from Cork. Police Scotland released CCTV stills of Karen on Dumbarton Road in the early hours of 12 April, talking briefly to a man near a Ford Focus. The man's face was clear. The car was clear. The appeal was huge - Scottish newspapers, Irish media, social media, taxi drivers passing flyers along their ranks - because Karen's parents stood in front of cameras pleading for her return and a city responded. Within days, police identified the man as Alexander Pacteau, 21, a former courier-business operator from Bearsden. He was detained as a suspect. About an hour after his detainment, an acquaintance of his rang the police with information that led them to High Craigton Farm, just outside the city, where Pacteau had stored a steel barrel.

In November 2011, four years before Karen's death, Pacteau had approached another 24-year-old woman outside a Glasgow nightclub, persuaded her into a taxi search, and pushed her into an alley. Her screams brought two men from a nearby balcony running to her aid. Pacteau was charged but was acquitted at trial in 2013. After Karen's killing was solved, several other women came forward to Scottish media describing approaches Pacteau had made to them - women who had refused lifts, recognised something wrong, or escaped him by chance. The detective superintendent who led the investigation, Jim Kerr, said publicly that Pacteau had set out that night to find a victim and that any woman could have been the one. He said it because he wanted other young women to hear it. The women who reported Pacteau before and after Karen's death made the case stronger and the conviction safer.

Pacteau was charged with Karen's murder and changed his account several times during the investigation. He eventually pleaded guilty in August 2015. At the High Court in September that year, Judge Lady Rita Rae sentenced him to life imprisonment with a minimum tariff of twenty-three years before he could apply for parole. He had beaten Karen with a spanner. He had attempted to dispose of her body using caustic soda. The forensic effort to recover and identify her was extensive. Karen's parents released a statement after the sentencing thanking Police Scotland, the people of Glasgow, and the people of Scotland who had searched for their daughter, prayed for her return, and supported the family through the trial. In November 2016, John Buckley walked across the stage at Glasgow Caledonian University to collect his daughter's degree on her behalf. An observer reported that it was 'hard not to cry.'

Karen is remembered in her home parish of Mourneabbey, where she played the football matches that filled her teenage weekends. She is remembered at Glasgow Caledonian University, where she studied for a few short months. She is remembered in Glasgow itself, where strangers laid flowers in the spring of 2015 and stood at vigils to celebrate her life before her family carried her home to Cork to be buried. The case prompted Scottish conversation about taxi safety, about late-night transport for students, about the responsibility of bystanders. None of those conversations could give the Buckleys back their daughter, or restore the woman who had wanted to spend her professional life helping others rebuild theirs. Karen Buckley was, briefly, here. Her family asked, through their grief, that she be remembered for who she was. The least the world can do is remember her by name.