The twenty-two-year-old admitted that she had gone to see her brothers in Wheatfield during April and they had asked her how Kathleen was getting on. She didn’t tell them that their mother had split up with Farah and didn’t mention the small fact that he was beating her up because ‘it didn’t come up in conversation’. She didn’t like to talk about ‘other people’s problems’ on the visits because she didn’t want to upset John and James and there was nothing they could do about it anyway.
The fact that her two older brothers had contacted the guards and ratted on their whole family was also a topic of conversation during the interviews. Charlotte acted like she didn’t know what they were talking about and claimed not to know anything about Kathleen confessing about the murder to her sons. She said that she usually went to visit her brothers with her mother but there were times when Kathleen went on her own and she could have, in theory, told the two boys, but she did not think this was the case.
‘Well, how, apart from your brothers being psychic, which I take it they’re not, how on earth would they have known about all this?’ she was asked, but couldn’t offer an answer.
‘Your brothers rang us and told us that they’ve been told, so you see we’ve a serious problem here. Why did your brothers ring us up from prison to tell us what had happened? Why do you think that happened? Did they fall out with your mother or the rest of the family? Something happened, didn’t it, to change your brothers’ minds?’
Charlotte played dumb and insisted that she knew nothing about any murder.
Despite not revealing anything about the murder during her twelve hours of questioning, detectives were sure that she was lying. They were convinced that she was probably the main instigator of the murder. The guards felt that they would have a difficult job in getting her to come clean, however, and had to release her without charge – for the moment. When Charlie walked out of Mountjoy Garda Station she was nearly two months pregnant.
On 3 August forty-nine-year-old Kathleen Mulhall was staying at Ardfert House on Nelson Street in Dublin 7. At 10.15 a.m. she was arrested at Summerhill Parade by Detective Sergeant Gerry McDonnell, along with Detective Gardaí Terence McHugh, Pat Keegan and Garda Sheelagh Sheehan. She had been waiting outside the post office to collect her social welfare payment. She told the gardaí that there was no need to arrest her because she was on the way up to see them at the station anyway and she wasn’t going anywhere. She was taken to Mountjoy Garda Station for questioning. Detective Superintendent John Fitzpatrick of the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation gave permission for her to be photographed and finger and palm printed. Officers also took samples of her blood and hair.
The four officers who had arrested Kathleen, along with Garda Sean Earley, interviewed her on six occasions during the twelve hours that she was held in custody. She contacted her solicitor, Daragh Robinson from Garret Sheehan’s office, and spoke to him by phone and in person during the course of the day.
When gardaí asked if she was involved in her partner’s murder, she completely denied having any hand in Farah’s death, saying: ‘That my kids may die I did not hurt a hair on his head.’ She added, ‘Do you think if I did anything I would still be in the country? Why would I stay here? I have a passport. I could have left.’
When asked if she was upset that he was dead she replied: ‘Yes. I was waiting for him to come back to me. Three years of my life I gave to him.’ She said to the gardaí: ‘I can’t understand that you’d think I’d hurt him. Farah was harmed enough times and what did anyone do? Irish lads beat him and they [the gardaí] did nothing. He has enemies: his so-called friends who gave him drugs.’
Kathleen said that Farah was often violent towards her but she never contacted the police. She thought that he would be capable of murdering somebody and had made her life hell at times while they were together. She denied that she murdered him for revenge and said he didn’t deserve to die ‘with no head and his body cut up’.
She stated that she had no idea how he ended up mutilated in the canal and insisted: ‘I didn’t do nothing; I don’t know how he ended up there. I never murdered Farah; no one touched Farah, no one in my family. You’re looking in the wrong place.’
Kathleen claimed that she was seeing somebody else and didn’t even know that Farah was dead until the guards told her on the day of her arrest. She said their relationship was over when he died and she saw him ‘like a friend, a companion’. Kathleen claimed that Noor was staying with her for two nights a week over the two months before he died but she didn’t know where he was when he wasn’t at Richmond Cottages. She spoke with gardaí about Noor’s history of cruelty to women but she totally denied that he had ever raped her, saying: ‘He did get sex. He never forced me. He never raped me.’
She said that Noor was a heavy drinker who used to polish off two large bottles of vodka a day, and always went out drinking, even though Kathleen always pleaded with him to stay in. He would fall into deep comas when he drank heavily and wouldn’t be able to defend himself if anybody attacked him. The mother-of-six also alleged that Farah took drugs but did not sell them.
On the day of the murder Kathleen said that she was drinking with Noor and her two daughters. She said the four had been drinking heavily for the whole day and had also taken drugs, including ecstasy tablets. She said the two girls went home and that she and Farah parted at an off-licence on O’Connell Street that evening: ‘He went his way and I went my way.’ Her way was in the direction of Baggot Street, where she spent the evening working as a prostitute.
She claimed: ‘Farah went to see his other girlfriend, the Chink. He went to see the Chink; I was drinking, drinking vodka. I can’t remember. I was on the street that night, with a man that night. I was with a man, someone I went off with.’
Kathleen couldn’t remember who the client was, if he was Irish, where she stayed or what time she got home the following morning. She did say she hailed a taxi on the side of the road and arrived back very early but she couldn’t guess at what time. The guards asked her what she thought could have happened to Noor but she didn’t have any ideas, although she said, ‘He was so drunk with drugs and that when he was with Charlotte and Linda that he could fall asleep.’
The two of them often attended house parties with Noor’s friends throughout the city and she said it was possible that he’d gone off to one of these. He had a key to the flat and came and went as he pleased, as did she. They had the kind of relationship where they both came and went without telling each other.
During the interview she complained about having breathing problems and Dr Y M Fakih who practices at Whitehall was called to the station. Dr Fakih was the man who had pronounced Farah Swaleh Noor dead on the evening his body parts were pulled from the canal. Kathleen told him that she was suffering from asthma. She said she’d had chronic obstructive airways disease for several years and was using two inhalers. She told him she had lost one of them on the way to the Garda Station and had left the other one in her flat. She didn’t have any regular GP and couldn’t remember the name of the chemist where she got her inhalers. She did not have any specific medical complaint for the doctor and put simply, there was nothing wrong with her at all. Dr Fakih advised the gardaí to go to her flat and get her spare inhaler in case she needed it during questioning. They did this and resumed interviewing her.
After seeing the doctor the questioning continued and Kathleen admitted to buying bleach and bin bags in the Gala store the day after the killing. She said that the bleach was for cleaning a pair of white cords that Charlotte had given her. She said she spilled a glass of cranberry juice on them and used the bleach to try to clean them. She also agreed that she had bought black bin bags and aerosols for the flat after Noor was murdered, but said, ‘Everybody buys bin bags.’
Despite the fact that they had lived together for over three years and that countless witnesses had remembered seeing Farah Swaleh Noor in his Ireland jersey, Kathleen said she never saw him in the socc
er top: ‘I didn’t recognise the top he was wearing. I never washed the top. I wasn’t interested in what Farah was wearing.’
Kathleen couldn’t explain how blood splatters were under the bunk beds in her flat and on the bedroom floor and wardrobe. She commented: ‘I don’t know; I’m not going to tell you bullshit.’ She was surprised when she was told that blood found in her flat matched Farah’s and said that if he was murdered at Richmond Cottages, ‘it must have happened when I wasn’t there’.
She took a photograph of Farah in her hand and shouted: ‘I did nothing to that man. That man knows I didn’t kill him. I never hurt a hair on that man’s head.’
Kathleen was shown Farah’s mobile phone but did not recognise it and said she never saw him with it. She didn’t know anything about how one of her daughters had given it to her husband, who had then sold it on to a work colleague.
During the interview DS Gerry McDonnell asked Kathleen if he could examine her mobile phone and she agreed. He noticed that she had a missed call at 1.11 p.m. that day, from a number saved on her mobile as J. It was the same number as the mobile that had been used by her son John to contact gardaí from Wheatfield to tell them about Farah Noor’s murder. She initially said that the number belonged to a close friend but eventually, reluctantly, admitted it was her son’s number and said he used a phone from jail.
Detectives played the 999 call and Kathleen first denied it was her son’s voice. Then she said her two boys were telling lies: ‘I never told my sons anything. My sons know nothing about me. When I do see my sons I will tell them that my boyfriend Farah is dead, something I only found out today.’
Detectives said that the two Mulhalls had informed on their family because they were ‘genuinely horrified at what happened’.
‘Not as horrified as I am,’ she replied, before adding, ‘My sons told you nothing. They would tell you nothing because they don’t know anything.’ The only reason she could give as to why they would wrongly ring the guards with such an extraordinary story was that her sons must have been looking for a reward. As Kathleen had made no admissions while in custody, she was released without charge at 10.10 p.m., twelve hours after being arrested. She commented, ‘All I could do was wish to God that I could help you. I can’t help you.’
John Mulhall was fitting windows in Terenure College, when a car pulled up alongside him at about 10.55 a.m. Detective Inspector Christy Mangan got out of the unmarked garda car and told John Mulhall that the guards wanted to question him about the murder of Farah Swaleh Noor. Detective Gardaí Adrian Murray and Dave O’Brien were also present, as was Garda Ronan Hartnett. Det Gda Dave O’Brien arrested him and drove him back to Store Street Garda Station. He was processed and searched at 11.12 a.m., before being placed in a cell. He was taken to an interview room at 12.10 p.m. He was interviewed three times while in custody. He also declined to have a solicitor present.
When he was questioned, John Mulhall offered no information to the gardaí. He said that he had not had contact with his wife since she had walked out on him in 2002 to go and live with Farah Swaleh Noor. He did not know Noor and had no dealings with him. He said he did not feel anything for him either way, although it was sad that anybody would die in such a brutal fashion. The fifty-three-year-old denied ever threatening the African and blamed his wife for the break-up of their marriage, not Farah.
John Mulhall said he did not know what the detectives were talking about when they told him about his sons coming forward to claim that he had removed items from the house where Farah was murdered. He said he was never in Kathleen’s flat and that John Junior and James were mistaken.
When gardaí pointed out that a white Berlingo van, with the registration number 97 D 11647, had been filmed near Richmond Cottages on 21 March, he confirmed that he drove a van with that registration number. He said, however, that the van belonged to City Glass, the company he worked for, and a few other people had access to it. Over the next few days, investigators went to City Glass to get statements from all John Mulhall’s work colleagues to eliminate them as being the driver of the van that morning. It was subsequently determined that nobody else had been driving the vehicle that day.
John Mulhall did admit to detectives that he had sold a work colleague a Sagem mobile phone that turned out to belong to Farah Swaleh Noor. He said that either Charlie or Linda had given it to him. He had no idea that it had belonged to the dead man or how one of his daughters came to be in possession of it.
Of the four Mulhalls detained, gardaí had nothing on John and this didn’t change after his arrest. Where Linda, Charlotte and Kathleen came across as being very hard during their initial interviews, John Mulhall struck the guards as being different. He had not come to their attention over the years and seemed genuinely shocked that he was being caught up in a murder investigation. His two brothers had come to Store Street Garda Station looking for him and John Mulhall was released without charge, just after 9 p.m.
Life for the Mulhall family started to disintegrate following the arrests. Kathleen effectively disappeared and cut off all ties with her daughters and did not contact them at all. Charlotte continued to work as a prostitute, even though she was pregnant and spent weeks at a time away from home. Linda went off the rails and started drinking heavily and using heroin, while John struggled with the burden of holding everything together.
After the four Mulhalls were released, gardaí met at a late-night conference to review the progress of the investigation. None of the prisoners had made any admissions while in custody and the gardaí were not in a position to prepare any files for the Director of Public Prosecutions. Nevertheless they had gained some valuable information that could be investigated further. They had also developed new insights into the demeanour of the family while they were being held. The detectives working the body in the canal case were all experienced investigators and, after reviewing the records of the interviews, agreed that Linda Mulhall was a potential weak link. She had gotten very emotional when they had mentioned the discovery of the body under Ballybough Bridge and she was clearly not being forthcoming with the truth. Kathleen and Charlotte were both cold fishes, who would lie through their teeth and probably believe they were telling you the truth. John Mulhall seemed like a decent man and it was also decided that they should keep on top of him, in the hope that he would crack.
All the investigators were aware that something significant would have to happen if they were to break this case quickly.
In the meantime the detectives continued to work any leads they had. Det Sgt Gerry McDonnell had been assigned to liaise with the African authorities and members of Farah’s family after he was identified through the DNA of his Irish son. The guards wanted to find out as much as possible about Noor and his background. Det Sgt McDonnell discovered that Noor had made an Irish asylum application in 1997. Through further investigation he also learned that Farah’s wife, who according to the application had supposedly been executed during the civil war, was in fact alive and well, living in Mombasa in Kenya. Farah’s three children, who he had claimed were missing, were also in good health – they were being cared for by their ‘dead’ mother.
On 12 September 2005 Det Sgt McDonnell spoke to Farah’s former wife, Husna Mohamed Said. Husna logged onto the garda website and identified Farah Swaleh Noor’s photograph as being that of her husband Sheilila Said Salim. She faxed the detective a copy of her late husband’s birth certificate. The Kenyan birth cert showed that Salim was born on 7 July 1965 in the Lamh District in the Coast Province. His mother was listed as Somoe Abubakar and his father’s name was Seyyid Salim. Farah Noor was not Somalian at all, as he had claimed to everybody he’d met in Ireland over the last eight years.
Farah had kept in constant touch with his ‘dead’ wife Husna since his arrival in Ireland in 1997 and they spoke regularly. Husna faxed the detective a letter that her husband had sent her on 6 November 1999. It had an address in the south of the city and was written in Bajun. Farah signed t
he letter as Sheilila S Salim and in it told his wife about his new partner and even sent her pictures of his Irish son. Husna was not bitter about this and was on good terms with Farah.
It was apparent to Det Sgt Gerry McDonnell that Farah Swaleh Noor and Sheilila Said Salim were in fact the same person. Farah Swaleh Noor was an assumed name Salim had used to get into Ireland under false pretences.
His wife would also later fax gardaí a copy of another letter Farah had sent to her, signed with his real name and dated 26 July 1995. He noted his address as 43 Eversleigh Road, East Ham, London E06 1HG. The letter begins in English before changing to Bajun. It reads: ‘To the one I love Husna Mohamed Said. I want to tell you that me I’m well but I miss you for long time you and my babies. How are you, me I am fine.’
It is thought that Noor may have lived in London for a number of years prior to arriving in Ireland and had a job as a butcher, but this theory has never been verified.
It later emerged that Noor also maintained regular contact with his family and phoned his mother almost every week. He also sent home money to his wife and, although he did as he pleased in Ireland, he made sure his children had food at home. His family relied on the small sums that he sent to them.
Det Sgt McDonnell contacted Interpol and asked them to run the names Farah Swaleh Noor and Sheilia Said Salim through their immigration records. They came back negative for both names. Interpol’s Dublin office then contacted their counterparts in London to see if Noor or Salim had any previous convictions. They subsequently received an email with the following message: ‘Please be advised that checks on Farah Swaleh Noor on our criminal, intelligence and immigration databases has also been negative. Lastly, all of the above subjects have been circulated to the PSNI for checks. These checks have also returned negative results.’
Despite these findings, which make it unclear if Farah had ever actually lived in London, it was obvious to Det Sgt McDonnell and the entire investigation team that Farah Swaleh Noor was not what he seemed. It was clear that the history of the victim deserved closer scrutiny.
The Irish Scissor Sisters Page 12