The Irish Scissor Sisters

by Mick McCaffrey

  When she reached the house, she rang Kathleen. She told her that she had Farah’s head with her and was going to bury it in a safer place. Her mother didn’t want to know about Linda’s plans. The thirty-year-old went to the extension in the back garden of the empty house. She took a hammer out of the toolbox and put it in the schoolbag, beside the head. She was about to walk back out the door when she remembered there was a litre bottle of vodka in the kitchen press. She took this too and also put it in the bag.

  She walked in the direction of an area in Tallaght known as Killinarden Hill. It was about forty minutes’ walk from Kilclare Gardens and Linda knew the area well because she used to live close by. When she got to Killinarden Hill, she climbed over a locked gate into a large field with burnt-out cars dotted around it. She turned right and walked for about 300 feet to the back of the field, before sitting down on the grass close to a ditch.

  She took the bag off her shoulder and kissed it.

  ‘I’m sorry, Farah; I’m sorry,’ she said and sat for over an hour, thinking about just where her life had gone so badly wrong.

  She took out the bottle of vodka and drank it straight. It was empty before long. Linda was drunk and highly emotional by now and she started hitting the bag with the hammer. She smacked it dozens of times and could hear the skull shatter as the heavy tool repeatedly connected with the bones.

  She fell asleep for a few hours and woke up shivering. It was getting dark and she decided to re-bury what remained of the head. She walked towards the ditch and found an area of the field that was soggy and dug a small hole with her hands. She took the black plastic bag out of the schoolbag and tipped the fragments of the head and skull into the hole and covered it with the wet soil.

  ‘I’m sorry Farah. It should be me ma in there and not you,’ she whispered, as the last bit of muck filled the hole. She took a lighter out of her pocket and set fire to the plastic bag. It was soon consumed with flames and she put it on top of her child’s schoolbag and that went on fire as well.

  Linda waited until all that remained of the bag was ashes, and she threw them into the ditch. She got the hammer and threw it into the ditch and left the empty vodka bottle in the field. With that she ran across the field, jumped over the gate and ran all the way home to Kilclare Gardens, not stopping once. She thought she’d never get to her house and just wanted to be as far away as she could get from Farah Noor and his talking head.

  When she got home she didn’t say a word to anybody and went straight to bed. Farah didn’t come to see her in her dreams that night. She eventually went to the Heatons department store in the Square and bought two school bags for €20. Charlotte had already taken her other son’s bag and the two children had to go to school with their books in plastic bags for a few weeks.

  Linda’s mental health had not been helped by the fact that she’d had a pregnancy scare. She had met a man a few weeks before the murder and had been involved in a casual relationship with him. In early April she’d informed her mother and sister that she was pregnant and intended to go to England to have an abortion. The three of them met in Richmond Cottages and decided that they should all go to the UK for a while, to try to get over what they had done to Farah. They decided to get the ferry over four days later, after social welfare day. While they were waiting Linda went to see doctors in the Coombe Hospital and was told that her pregnancy scare was a false alarm. As she was no longer expecting a child, she decided not to go.

  Charlotte and Kathleen, however, were determined to go anyway and booked the ferry. They got the boat over to Holyhead, carrying changes of clothes in two schoolbags. They went on the Irish Ferries crossing and the weather was so bad they couldn’t go onto the top deck. When they got to Holyhead they stayed in a homeless hostel, which was a ninety-minute walk from the train station, for a night. They ended up sleeping rough in a park for two or three nights before going back to the hostel. They had enough money for the train fare to Manchester and when they arrived in the city, they went drinking.

  Charlotte met an Englishman named George Gray in a pub and they ended up staying in his room at the Grattan Arms hotel. She later said it was ‘not a proper relationship, just going for a few drinks, staying for a few days’. At the time she was going out with Dilmurat, her Russian boyfriend, but she never contacted him while she was away. Instead, Charlotte was happy to sleep with another man and let him pay for drinks for herself and her mother.

  After they’d been there for about a week, Linda agreed to go to England to meet up with them but she then changed her mind. She was supposed to bring them over money, as after their ten-day holiday the two Mulhalls had decided they’d had enough of England. They wanted to go home, but without Linda they had no cash. They contacted the social welfare who arranged tickets for the two of them to travel back to Ireland. When they returned, Kathleen told Donna Fitzsimons that she had been staying down the country with a friend.

  Each of the women had changed in their own way since Farah’s murder and they were all battling internal demons to one degree or another – Linda was on the brink of suicide, Kathleen was running away from her problems and Charlotte was in denial that anything was wrong at all.

  The two eldest Mulhall brothers, James and John, were both serving prison sentences in Wheatfield Prison, in Clondalkin. Kathleen, Linda and Charlotte paid them several visits in the three or four months after Farah’s murder. Both men were serving sentences for road traffic offences. Thirty-three-year-old James was in the middle of a three-year term for dangerous driving, causing the death of a fellow motorist in January 2002. John Mulhall Jnr, who was nearly five years younger than his brother, was on remand on two counts of being a passenger in a stolen car in Cork. An arrest warrant had been issued for him after he failed to appear in court. Charlotte went to see her brothers with Kathleen two or three times but Kathleen also went alone most weeks and was a regular visitor to the jail. Linda was especially close to James, as they were the two eldest in the family, and she saw him on several occasions. The brothers also had access to a mobile phone in prison and were probably in telephone contact as well.

  Some time between April and July 2005, Kathleen, Linda, and possibly Charlotte, confessed to John and James about the murder. Kathleen went to visit the pair one day and broke down. She told James that Linda and Charlotte had murdered her boyfriend after he made a move on Linda. She went into minute details about the murder and told him about the body being dumped in the canal and said that their father had come over in his van and removed bloody clothes from the flat.

  James Mulhall didn’t believe her and thought she was telling lies. Linda then went to see him and confirmed the story but did not go into any great detail. She asked him to look after her kids if anything happened to her.

  Charlotte hasn’t admitted telling her brothers anything but detectives believe that she could also have got the murder off her chest.

  The Mulhall women didn’t realise it at the time but opening up to John and James would prove to be a very costly mistake.

  on the evening of 30 March, senior gardaí attached to the Dublin Metropolitan Region (DMR) North Central Division had been informed of the discovery of the body. They converged on the scene to take control of the investigation. The headquarters of DMR North Central is Store Street Garda Station in central Dublin but the body was found in the area covered by Fitzgibbon Street Station, which meant that the investigation would operate from that station. The detective then in day-to-day charge at Fitzgibbon Street was Detective Inspector Christy Mangan. DI Mangan (now Detective Superintendent) is a highly experienced and respected officer who would go on to take charge of the investigation into the Dublin Riots in February 2006. When he arrived at the scene he saw the limbs floating in the canal and directed that a murder inquiry be commenced. He ordered that the area be preserved as a crime scene.

  Garda Ronan Hartnett is a member of the street crime unit at Fitzgibbon Street Garda Station and was on mobile patrol with Garda To
m O’Brien when they were called to assist at the scene. He spoke with Garda Kieran Brady and Fire Station Officer Frank Kiernan and was brought down to the water’s edge to examine what were now clearly human remains. The firemen were pointing lights and torches at the scene and Garda Hartnett observed two arms cut from the body at the shoulder, two parts of a lower leg cut from the body just above the knee, two thighs and a part of a pelvic area covered with white clothing. He noticed that the skin was very discoloured and it was hard to make out if the remains were those of a black or white person. All the body parts were lying submerged in the water close to the canal wall. A vest and pair of underwear were lying beside a torso that was covered with what appeared to be a white football jersey. The two legs had socks on the feet and all the body parts covered a distance of about ten feet. Garda Ronan Judge told him that they’d found another object around 150 feet up-water. Garda Hartnett could just barely see something visible protruding from the water further down the canal and went to check it out with fire fighter Pascal Proctor. They climbed down the ladder from the fire tender and onto the railway side of the canal. About sixty feet past the bridge a bag was visible in the neon light. Fifty-four-year-old Proctor had a drag tool with him. He slowly pulled the bag about five feet, towards himself and Garda Hartnett. Before the package reached dry land the contents spilled out and the fire fighter was horrified to see a torso floating on top of the water. He picked up the plastic bag and was struck by the terrible smell coming from it. He gave the bag to Garda Hartnett and they labelled it with yellow plastic markers and left the torso where it was. It was very discoloured and it was impossible to make out whether the victim was black or white.

  Detective Sergeant Colm Fox from Mountjoy Garda Station rang Garda Control in Harcourt Square at 7.42 p.m. to inform them that the Garda Technical Bureau and Water Unit would be required at the Ballybough scene. A garda technical team arrived at 9.07 p.m. and at 9.55 p.m. Detective Gardaí Geraldine Doherty from the ballistics section of the Technical Bureau and Liam Lynam from ballistics and photography arrived. The two officers were shown around by Detective Sergeant Mick Macken from the fingerprints section. All three stayed to assess the crime scene and realised that they would need to return the next morning.

  Dr Y M Fakih, who has a doctor’s practice in Whitehall, received a call from Fitzgibbon Street requesting that he come to the canal to examine the remains and pronounce the victim dead. He was brought to Ballybough Bridge where he met with Detective Sergeant Gerry McDonnell. He was shown the mutilated limbs and pronounced the victim dead at 9.30 p.m.

  Three gardaí took it in turns to monitor the canal for any movement of the body parts while they waited for first light to come and a murder probe to begin. The locations where the eight body parts had been found were marked using white A4 sheets on the bank, in case any of them moved with the flow of water.

  Gardaí preserved four areas around the murder scene in the days following the discovery. Summerhill Parade/Ballybough Road, beside the canal bridge, was closed until the evening of 1 April. The bridge on the Croke Park side was closed until 2 April. The scene at the Royal Canal Bank was patrolled by uniformed gardaí until the beginning of April and Sackville Gardens, which overlooks the canal, was also preserved as a crime scene.

  Over the next few hours gardaí began the standard procedures that take place during all murder investigations. Everybody at the scene who witnessed anything was preliminarily interviewed and their names and address were noted so that they could be contacted about formal statements. Uniformed officers carried out house-to-house inquiries to see if local residents had noticed anything unusual in the last few days and weeks. The scene was also policed throughout the night to prevent anyone contaminating the crime scene.

  The two gardaí in overall charge of DMR North Central were Superintendent John Leahy and Detective Superintendent John McKeown, who were based at Fitzgibbon Street and Store Street respectively. At 10 p.m. on the night of the 30 March 2005, gardaí held the first of well over fifty conferences about the murder. The investigating team discussed the day’s events and decided on how the investigation should progress. All were in agreement that a lengthy and difficult inquiry lay ahead. They knew that the key to solving it was to find out the identity of the man who had met his grisly end in the lonely waters of a canal in the centre of Dublin.

  At 1 a.m. all the investigators went home for a night’s sleep and planned to reconvene at the scene at 8 a.m. the following morning.

  Although the remains of the man who would eventually be identified as Farah Swaleh Noor were not officially found until 30 March 2005, it later emerged that they could have been discovered many days before, because several, possibly even dozens, of people had inadvertently seen them.

  A local woman, forty-three-year-old Margaret Gannon, who lives near-by with her husband and three children, was bringing her seven-year-old son, Evan, to school at North William Street on Monday 21 March. She stopped at her sister’s house to collect her two nieces and was walking over Ballybough Bridge just before 9 a.m. when little Evan said, ‘Ma, look at that.’ Margaret looked into the water and saw a black bag with plastic and lots of brown tape wrapped around it. The bag was between two trees, close to the bank, and was resting against a grassy area towards the North Strand. Margaret immediately thought it looked like a body with no head. She was sure it wasn’t a dog drowned in a bag, something she often saw in the canal. Her niece, said, ‘Oh Margaret, is that another body?’ but she said it wasn’t and they continued on to school. She saw the bag again the following morning but the kids never mentioned it after that, so she forgot about it. She later remembered the date she had seen what could have been Noor’s body because it had been her husband’s birthday the day before. After she heard about the discovery of the dismembered body, Margaret contacted the gardaí and told them what she’d seen.

  Twenty-four-year-old Paul Kearney, a local man, was cycling along the canal from Jones Road towards Ballybough at around midday on Good Friday, 25 March. As he approached the bridge, he saw what he thought was a right arm in the canal. When he stopped to take a closer look, he saw other body parts, including a leg. The arm was sticking out of the top of the water and he could see fingers and nails on the clenched fist, but it was the same whitish colour all over so he thought it was a dummy. He rang his dad, Paul Snr, who was sitting at home, and said: ‘Da, you’re not going to believe me. I was walking along the canal when I saw part of a body.’ He told his dad he was worried, but his father thought he was joking and started laughing, telling him to ‘go away out of that’. Paul hung up the phone but a few times over the next week thought about his find. He contacted Fitzgibbon Street when the body was eventually discovered.

  On the day that the remains were finally uncovered, fourteen-year-old Christopher Leech was fishing in the canal with his pal Sean Tighe. The teenagers were on their Easter holidays and were sitting on the bank of the canal beside Ballybough Bridge. At about 2.30 p.m. Christopher saw a black bag with see-through Sellotape around it, floating down from the Croke Park side of the canal. The closed bag wasn’t moving very quickly and was being carried back and forth around a small area by the current. Christopher later told detectives that half the bag was under the water, with the other half floating on top, near the bank. He was looking in the water for pike but didn’t see any fish and didn’t notice any body parts either. The boys thought nothing more of what they’d seen and continued fishing for another hour or so. Then they went back to Christopher’s house, which was across from Ballybough Bridge. When they looked out his window later in the evening they saw a large crowd at the bridge, with police cars and fire engines.

  At about 4 p.m. that same afternoon Ballybough man David O’Connor was out for a walk on the canal with his two daughters. His girls were looking at a football that three or four kids had just kicked into the water. David was on the Williams Street side of the canal and saw a bag lying on the bottom of the water, under Ballybough Brid
ge. It was white and medium-sized like a plastic shopping bag, with something in it that looked round. He didn’t pay much attention to it and his daughters never saw it at all. They continued on home and David only thought about the incident when a garda called to his home later.

  At the same time Linda Staunton from Ballybough was returning from dropping old clothes to a recycling centre near Westwood Gym in Clontarf. She sat down on the bench nearest Ballybough Bridge to have a cigarette. She stayed there for about five minutes with her two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Jade, who was asleep in her buggy. She saw Christopher Leech and Sean Tighe fishing and also saw three other youngsters throwing rubbish into the water. She noticed a black plastic bag floating on the canal at the bridge and assumed that the children had thrown it in. She paid no more attention to it.

  Linda also told gardaí that on or around St Patrick’s Day she had seen a group of young people in their early twenties around the canal. She described how they ‘looked like college students – they were respectable’. There were two males and two females in the group and one of the girls was trying to remove a big plastic bag that looked ‘packed out’ from the middle of the water. Linda went home without seeing anymore but the incident stuck in her mind because ‘you don’t normally see college students along the canal but they had an interest in the bag’.

  At 8 a.m. the following morning, Det Gda Geraldine Doherty arrived back to Ballybough Bridge to carry out a technical examination of the scene. Before she met the dive team that was en route from Athlone, she collected a number of samples and packaged and numbered them. As gardaí did not have any idea of the victim’s identity she was very thorough in collecting and bagging anything that might potentially be of evidential value. She took samples of paper that lay beside faeces under the bridge, three swabs from the faeces, as well as collecting cigarette butts and chewing gum. These would all be tested for DNA to hopefully identify the victim.