The Irish Scissor Sisters

by Mick McCaffrey

  The incident room at Fitzgibbon Street was manned by Detective Gardaí Daniel Kenna and Michael Quinn. They received literally hundreds of calls from helpful members of the public, offering leads and suggestions as to who the canal victim might be. All these suggestions, however unlikely, had to be checked out and investigated thoroughly.

  As the victim was a non-national, who might only have entered Ireland a short time before his death, gardaí had to liaise closely with their colleagues on the continent. Fingerprint and DNA databases were checked through Interpol, the worldwide policing agency. A description of the dead man was also issued and checked through Interpol. The gardaí also contacted police forces in the UK, Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa for help and assistance.

  Detectives attempted to establish the victim’s identity through isotope analysis, which was undertaken by a forensic scientist who was based in Belfast. Every garda station in Dublin collected a sample of water from their area and the investigation team forwarded the samples to the scientist for analysis. From examining the density of the victim’s bones and the minerals present, the scientist was able to determine, with near certainty, that the dead man had lived in the area covered by Fitzgibbon Street Garda Station for the last six months of his life. Gardaí did not take these results as definitive and kept an open mind, but the scientist would later prove to be accurate in his findings.

  The first breakthrough in the case came on 16 May, when a Somalian man living in Dublin, Mohamed Ali Abubakaar, made a statement to gardaí. He reported that his friend and fellow countryman, Farah Swalah Noor, had been missing for well over a month. Abubakaar and his girlfriend Deirdre Hyland went to Malahide Garda Station where they informed Inspector Eddie Hyland, Deirdre’s cousin, of their suspicion that Farah Noor could be the canal murder victim. Inspector Hyland passed this information on to the Fitzgibbon Street investigation team who interviewed the Somalian.

  Abubakaar told detectives that he had last seen Noor in the company of his girlfriend, a woman named Kathleen Mulhall, and two other women on O’Connell Street on Sunday 20 March. It was St Patrick’s weekend and Farah Noor had appeared very drunk to Abubakaar, while the other three also looked like they had been drinking heavily. He had known Noor from working with him on fishing boats in East Africa and was sure he had seen him at about 6 p.m. that Sunday. Abubakaar said that the group accompanying Farah had bags of cans and that his friend seemed very unsteady on his feet.

  He told gardaí, ‘I call him to talk to him because I know after a few drinks anything can happen to him.’ Kathleen Mulhall had intervened and told Abubakaar that Farah was fine and the group kept on walking. Ali knew Kathleen from his job in Dublin Bus. He was a driver there and operated the 77 route from the city centre to Tallaght. He’d met her two or three times on the bus and had been on nights out with the couple, including one night in Shooters bar on Parnell Street. Ali was certain that he’d run into the group on the Sunday of St Patrick’s weekend, because he and his girlfriend had been in town to visit a multi-cultural fair they were interested in that was being held on O’Connell Street. That was the last he saw of Noor.

  Ali explained that over the next few weeks he had tried to ring his friend but the phone was mostly switched off. It was answered by an Irish voice on one occasion but the caller said he had the wrong number. He also began asking mutual friends in the Irish Somalian community if they’d seen Farah, but nobody had. On 9 May 2005, just over a month after the remains were found, Abubakaar had seen an advert placed by gardaí in Metro Éireann, looking to identify a man whose body had been found in the Royal Canal. Abubakaar recognised the white Ireland-away jersey that was pictured in the advert as belonging to his friend. He also remembered that Noor had been wearing it on O’Connell Street the last time he had met him. He started to fear that the man found in the canal might be Farah. All the pieces of the jigsaw seemed to fit and when he told Deirdre she had advised him to contact the gardaí.

  Officers were initially sceptical that it was Farah Swaleh Noor who ended up in the canal, because he did not match the profile of the victim given in the post-mortem report. The post-mortem had determined that the man was in excess of 6 ft in height and aged between twenty and thirty years old. Farah Swaleh Noor was 5 ft 6" and was aged thirty-nine. Nevertheless, a post-mortem result is only an estimation, so Farah Swaleh Noor’s name was added to the list of possible victims.

  Garda inquiries into Farah Noor revealed that he had arrived in Ireland from Somalia in late 1996 and had had a son with an Irish woman from South Dublin. On 20 May officers interviewed the woman who was the mother of Noor’s six-year-old child.

  This woman, called Paula to protect her identity, had ended her relationship with Noor in April 2001 because he was violent towards her. She hadn’t seen him since September 2002. Paula told the guards that Noor also used the name Sheilila Said Salim and post had arrived for him in that name. Four days later she gave permission for detectives to take buccal swabs from her son for DNA comparison, which would be tested against the remains. The results of the DNA tests would not be known for about six weeks and investigations into Noor continued.

  The investigating team discovered that the last known address of Farah Noor was 17 Richmond Cottages, Ballybough, where he shared a flat with his partner, Kathleen Mulhall. On 21 May Detective Inspector Christy Mangan and Detective Sergeant Colm Fox called to Richmond Cottages and spoke with Kathleen Mulhall and her flatmate, a twenty-four-year-old Russian named Alex Ibramimovich. Alex spoke no English but one of his friends confirmed that he had only been in the country for about four weeks and gave details of his whereabouts during that time. Kathleen told the two men she had only recently moved into Flat 4 in the building, having previously lived downstairs, in Flat 1. She was asked about her boyfriend Farah Swaleh Noor and said she didn’t want to talk about him in the flat. She said she would get dressed and call down to Fitzgibbon Street.

  Kathleen arrived at the station shortly afterwards and told Det Sgt Fox that she hadn’t seen Farah since February. She said that he came to her flat one night and took all his stuff and said he was leaving. Kathleen said she didn’t know where he was or who he was with and she’d had no contact with him at all since then.

  This struck gardaí as being very suspicious, considering that she told them that she had left her husband of twenty-nine years to be with Farah and had moved to Cork to live with him.

  Kathleen said she was happy to see him out of her life because she’d had enough of his violence and had ended up in hospital three times when they lived in Cork. The couple had had to move ‘a good few times in Cork because Farah caused trouble everywhere’. She said: ‘He was on heroin, grass, hash, crack cocaine, E. He had a bad habit. He did not get on with people when he had drink or drugs taken and would fight with anybody.’

  Gardaí already knew that Kathleen Mulhall did not tell her landlord that Noor had moved out of the flat until 25 March and her story did not make much sense. They took a statement from her and decided that her background deserved further scrutiny.

  On 26 May Detective Garda Geraldine Doherty accompanied Detective Sergeant Mick Macken, also from the Garda Technical Bureau, to Flat 1, 17 Richmond Cottages, Farah Noor’s last known address. They recorded that it was a two-roomed, ground-floor flat, consisting of a kitchen cum living room, a bedroom with shower and an en-suite toilet. In the bedroom the concrete floor was covered with pieces of carpet and rugs. It looked to the gardaí like the original carpet had recently been removed. The tenants in the flat, Caroline Hanley and her niece Martina Norton, gave their permission for the gardaí to carry out the technical examination. Eight swabs were taken from the dressing table and two swabs from the bunk beds. A further swab was taken from a stain on the edge of a mirror behind the bunk beds, which had originally been part of the dressing table unit. All the exhibits were handed over to the Forensic Science Laboratory for testing but it would be a number of weeks before the results were available.

 
Gardaí went to Dublin District Court and applied for permission to examine a bank account held under Farah Noor’s name at AIB in Southmall, Cork. The assistant manager at the branch, Catherine Lynch, subsequently gave the details to Garda Ian Brunton. The records revealed Noor’s financial transactions for the last four years. They were surprised to discover that Noor’s bank account had been used only twice in the last few months, the last time being on 30 March. If Noor was alive and well he wasn’t taking any money out of his bank account.

  Gardaí also determined Farah Noor’s mobile phone number and contacted Vodafone to check whether it had been used. The phone had not been used from the end of March up until June 2005. In early June it was used a total of eight times in the first few days of the month. Detectives tracked down the individual who was using the phone. It was not Farah Noor but a man named Florian Williams. At the end of May, Williams had bought a phone and SIM card in good faith from his work colleague, John Mulhall.

  John Mulhall was interviewed and told the officers that at the end of March he had been given the mobile phone by one of his daughters. He didn’t know who had previously owned the phone. Further detective work revealed that John Mulhall was the estranged husband of Kathleen Mulhall, Farah Swaleh Noor’s girlfriend. John Mulhall had somehow come into possession of the missing man’s mobile phone. Detectives immediately knew that something was out of place.

  In the meantime other friends and associates of Noor had also begun contacting the authorities, saying they had not seen him. Mohammed Ali Noor knew the Somalian and had last seen him on St Patrick’s Day. He’d meet Farah most days around town and had become very worried when he hadn’t encountered him over the previous few months. He told his friend Rashid Omar Ahmed of his concerns and asked Ahmed to make enquiries about Noor in Cork, where he had lived for over two years. Ahmed was close to a Somalian named Hamed Salim Miran who had moved into Noor’s old flat in Cork. Miran was in Dublin three weeks after the body was pulled from the canal and met Ahmed and Ali Noor. They began talking about the missing Farah and agreed that if any Somalians living in Ireland had seen Farah anywhere in the country they would have heard about it. They feared that it could have been Noor’s body that was pulled from the canal. Lots of Farah’s friends in Dublin were saying the same thing. Ahmed eventually contacted the guards with his suspicions.

  On 8 June, Sergeant John Malone was working in Abbeyleix, Co. Laois when he received a call about a suspicious car at the local petrol station. The blue Nissan Micra was listed as stolen and he stopped it at about 8 p.m. The three African men in the car agreed to go to Abbeyleix Garda Station. They told Sgt Malone that they’d bought the car in good faith. Their story checked out and while they were talking, the men said they knew the identity of the body that had been recovered in the canal in Dublin. They named the victim as a Somalian, Farah Swaleh Noor. The way Farah’s name kept coming up was beginning to intrigue the garda investigators.

  2005 the investigation into the torso in the canal murder, which had been ongoing with only limited success for 102 days, suddenly sprung to life and was effectively solved in four days. A combination of forensic science and family betrayal led to the confirmation that Farah Swaleh Noor was the man who had ended up with the waters of the Royal Canal as his final resting place. Gardaí were determined to establish who was responsible for putting him there.

  Garda Damien Duffy was on duty at the Communication Centre at Harcourt Square on 11 July when he received a call from the Dublin Emergency Exchange at 7.47 p.m. The male voice at the end of the line told the operator that he had information about the so-called ‘body in the canal’ case and wanted to talk with gardaí. He said his name was John Mulhall and he was serving a prison sentence in Wheatfield Prison with his brother James. He said he was in a position to name the victim of the canal murder. He claimed he could also identify who had carried out the crime and where it happened. When Garda Duffy finished talking with Mulhall he rang the Dublin emergency operator. The supervisor informed him that the 999 call had come from a mobile phone. He immediately entered the details of the conversation on the Garda Command and Control system.

  Both John and James Mulhall were well known to gardaí in Tallaght and had amassed a series of convictions. Thirty-four-year-old James first got into trouble in 1991. He had three convictions in as many years and was given the benefit of the Probation Act. He had largely remained clean until a road traffic accident in 2002.

  At the time of the murder investigation, James Mulhall was serving a three-year jail sentence for dangerous driving causing the death of a fellow motorist in January 2002. Mulhall had pleaded guilty to causing the death of fifty-two-year-old Tony O’Brien. He crashed Mr O’Brien’s BMW into the wall of a house on the South Circular Road, Dublin, in the early hours of the morning. The pair had been drinking in a city centre hotel and were going to drive home together, but after O’Brien could not turn off his car alarm he had agreed to let Mulhall drive them home. Following the fatal accident, James Mulhall fled the country and went on the run to England, which prolonged the torment for Mr O’Brien’s wife and family. The court heard evidence that there was a high level of alcohol in the dead man’s bloodstream and he was probably asleep in the back of the car when the accident happened. Garda Laurence Collins gave evidence that after arriving on the scene he realised that Tony O’Brien was dead in the back seat because the Dublin Fire Brigade crew were concentrating their efforts on the front. They were tending to Mulhall and his girlfriend, Tanya Whelan, who had been travelling in the front passenger seat.

  James Mulhall had no tax or insurance and caused significant damage to the passenger side of the car and also demolished a garden wall. Judge Frank O’Donnell said he ‘must have been driving at considerable speed to have lost control’. The judge took into account Mulhall’s previous convictions, which included assault causing harm and a string of other road traffic offences. Judge O’Donnell jailed James Mulhall for three years and banned him from driving for twenty-five years, saying that James had a ‘disregard for the structures of road traffic legislation’. James began his prison sentence on 12 November 2003.

  Twenty-eight-year-old John Mulhall had over twenty convictions for a huge variety of offences, including assault and theft. In early 2005 he was given a two-year suspended sentence for assaulting a man on a bus in Tallaght in April 2004. John was a regular heroin user and often spent hundreds of euro a day on his addiction. He moved between various addresses and stayed at Kilclare Gardens for long periods.

  John Mulhall was in Wheatfield Prison as a result of his failure to appear in court in Co. Cork. He was due to appear before a judge on 29 November 2004 because of an incident involving a stolen car. When he failed to show, a bench warrant was issued. He was arrested in Dublin on the same day but was subsequently bailed. He was back in prison on remand on 4 March 2005, two weeks before the murder took place. He was then sentenced to eight months’ imprisonment on 30 May 2005, on conviction of two counts of being a passenger in a stolen car

  On the morning following the mobile phone call, two uniformed gardaí, Sergeant Bobby Cooper and Garda Kevin O’Connell, went to Wheatfield Prison in Clondalkin and spoke with the two Mulhall men. The pair claimed that their mother and two sisters had murdered their mam’s boyfriend, an African by the name of Farah, and had cut his body up and dumped it in the canal.

  Gardaí at the Fitzgibbon Street murder headquarters were immediately informed and Detective Sergeant Colm Fox and Detective Garda Terry McHugh went to the prison, where they met with Sergeant Cooper and Garda O’Connell. The uniformed men told the two detectives that the prisoners had potentially vital information about the canal case.

  John and James Mulhall were taken from their cells to an interview room where they were introduced to Det Sgt Fox and Det Gda McHugh. The brothers told the detectives that their mother, Kathleen Mulhall, and their sisters, Linda and Charlotte, had murdered Kathleen’s boyfriend at her flat in Ballybough. They had then cut u
p the body, before dumping it in the Royal Canal. The pair said that their mother had come to them in jail a few weeks after the murder and confessed that she had spiked Farah’s drink with ecstasy and that her daughters were forced to kill him, after he made a pass at Linda. They claimed Kathleen could not keep the killing a secret from them. She had broken down and said she had to tell them what happened. The brothers said that it was Kathleen who had planned the murder and she had got her daughters drunk and given them drugs so that they’d be willing to kill her boyfriend. Kathleen told her sons that Linda rang their father, John, after the murder and that he went ‘ballistic’ when he found out what had happened. He still drove his work van to his ex-wife’s flat, however, and took carpet and towels away to dump so that the gardaí would not find them. The pair claimed their father also took bedspreads, clothes and other items away from the murder scene. The prisoners said that it took the three women hours to clean up the flat and that they were now pretending that Farah was still alive but that he’d left Kathleen for another woman. They stated that Kathleen had bought new carpet for the flat and redecorated it so that the bloodstains would not be obvious.

  John and James told the detectives that they were ‘disgusted’ by what their family had done. The brothers said they wanted to get the truth about what happened to Farah off their chests. James said it was Charlotte who cut off the head, so Farah couldn’t be identified, and that Linda had chopped off his penis, as punishment for raping Kathleen.

  Det Sgt Fox and Det Gda McHugh interviewed the two prisoners for about half an hour. After they had finished, the investigators immediately went back to Fitzgibbon Street, where a case conference was held to dissect the spectacular information. The following day, the two detectives went back to meet the Mulhall brothers at 2.45 p.m. and they had a forty-five-minute conversation. Det Gda McHugh transcribed what was said into his official notebook. The brothers repeated the allegations about their family’s involvement in the murder. At 8.29 p.m. the same day, Det Sgt Colm Fox received another call on his mobile phone from John Mulhall. He told the detective that he and his brother had discussed going on the Witness Protection Programme but had opted against it and instead wanted a transfer to another prison. The Mulhalls were worried about their safety. Det Sgt Fox told John that he had been looking into getting the pair moved to another prison so they would be secure.